rebootied

I eat KFC here in Japan about once a year, just to remind myself why I don't eat it more frequently. Today was that day.

Yuck. Crazy, mind-boggling amounts of grease. And Japanese KFC doesn't even have the "potatoes and gravy" side order, and the biscuits are wretched.

KFC, I'll see you again next year, when my memory has again been sufficiently dulled.

Gotta say, I am loving the Savage Lovecast, the podcast version of Dan Savage's weekly sex advice column, Savage Love. Here's the main page at The Stranger (Seattle, represent!) and an iTMS link for subscription.

Now if there was only a freakin' podcast for Dr. Drew and Adam's Loveline, I'd be vicariously stoked for quite a while.

Californio - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia:

The Californios were Spanish-speaking inhabitants of Alta California, first a part of New Spain, later of Mexico. This area was later annexed in 1848 by the United States following the Mexican-American War.

Californios included both the descendants of European settlers from Spain and Mexico, and also included other European settlers, Mestizos, and local Native Americans who adopted Spanish culture and converted to Christianity. Some white Americans (Yankees), who settled in California, spoke Spanish, and lived as Mexicans, are also considered Californios.

At first, Spanish and later Mexican officials encouraged people from the northern and western provinces of Mexico—as well as people from other parts of Latin America, most notably Peru and Chile—to settle in California. The United States government did not continue this practice.

Much of Californio society lived at or near the many Missions, which were established in the 18th and 19th centuries. There were 21 Missions under the Roman Catholic church along the fabled route, El Camino Real.

Some Americans became honorary Californios due to their early arrival, marriage to Californios, and their adoption of, and adaptation to, Spanish culture and religion. Some wealthy Californio nobles intermarried with the settlers; thus a few prominent families in California may have Spanish or Mexican ancestors.

I was just over to Utilikilts; I was thinking of picking one up.

The damned things are US$155. I will be sticking with cargo shorts.

Radio Free Mike: California Fires from the Space Shuttle:

Powell's Books - The Terror Dream: Fear and Fantasy in Post-9/11 America by Susan Faludi, reviewed by Chicago Tribune:

"The entire edifice of American security had failed to provide a shield," Faludi observes in the introduction to The Terror Dream, and in "the all the disparate nightmares of men and women after 9/11, what accompanied the sundering of our myth of indomitability was not just rage but shock at that revelation, and, with the shock, fear, ignominy, shame." The media spit out mantras like "Everything has changed" and spoke of "the death of irony," an environment in which a "cacophony of chanted verities induced a kind of cultural hypnosis."

The mystery, suggests Faludi, is that the United States, "the last remaining superpower, a nation attacked precisely because of its imperial preeminence, responded by fixating on its weakness and ineffectuality." To state what is a sweeping and nuanced argument by her loosely and reductively here, it is that after 9/11 we have been re-enacting a 1950s Western, John Wayne-style, "cocooning ourselves in the celluloid chrysalis of the baby boom's childhood" while trying to evade the terrifying knowledge of our own vulnerability. [emphasis mine, full text at Review-a-Day]

Media: To Kill A (Possible) Predator?:
On a fall day in 2006, a small-town Texas county prosecutor named Bill Conradt raised a loaded Browning .380 handgun to his temple, pulled the trigger, and ended his life at 56 years. Before him stood a SWAT team from a local police department that had just barged into his home after he did not answer several knocks at his door. Outside the home, film crews from NBC Dateline's controversial To Catch A Predator program were waiting, hoping to get the arrest on tape and allow host Chris Hansen the chance to grill Conradt about explicit online chats he is said to have had with a decoy posing as a teenage boy. Instead they soon found out that Conradt had taken his own life. There would be no chance to grill him. [full article]

Was this big news in the USA? I'd not heard about it until this Fast Company blog entry. It sounds like incredibly irresponsible journalism, as well as bringing vigilantism and "news creation" to a horrifying new level. A new low level, as it were.

As a father, child pornographers and pedophiles occupy a special, frightening hell in a dark corner of my heart. As mentioned in the article, maybe this guy was guilty, maybe he wasn't - he'll never have a chance to recover, and I'm not particularly interested in helping pedophiles "get better." I want them off the streets. However this guy didn't even show up for the entrapment/sting meeting, but they still went after him. Maybe he decided it wasn't a good idea, or maybe he sensed a trap. Then he looked out his window and saw that he was about to face a violent takedown by law enforcement on national TV. How does ANYBODY face that kind of scenario? I think it'd be easy to make very bad decisions then.

And whatever happened to "innocent until proven guilty"?

I dislike the phrase "white trash" intensely. It's racist and manages to get classism in at the same time.

Back from the U.S., and spreading HIV in Mexico - International Herald Tribune:

But AIDS is spreading quickly in rural Mexican states with the highest migration rates to the United States, researchers say. The greatest risk of contracting AIDS that rural Mexican women face is in having sex with their migrant husbands, a new study found, a problem that is compounded by the women's inability to insist that their husbands use condoms.
One of the women in the emergency room at the hospital, a 25-year-old mother who did not want to be identified, described how her husband had infected her after returning from a long stay as a migrant worker in Washington State.

(...) She found out she carried the virus only after giving birth to a baby girl who was born with HIV and died. An older daughter also has the virus. She and her husband have since separated.

"We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to prevent the use of creationist and other pseudo-scientific propaganda in Government-funded schools."

UK government's petition response: The Government is aware that a number of concerns have been raised in the media and elsewhere as to whether creationism and intelligent design have a place in science lessons. The Government is clear that creationism and intelligent design are not part of the science National Curriculum programmes of study and should not be taught as science. The science programmes of study set out the legal requirements of the science National Curriculum. They focus on the nature of science as a subject discipline, including what constitutes scientific evidence and how this is established. Students learn about scientific theories as established bodies of scientific knowledge with extensive supporting evidence, and how evidence can form the basis for experimentation to test hypotheses. In this context, the Government would expect teachers to answer pupils' questions about creationism, intelligent design, and other religious beliefs within this scientific framework. (emphasis mine) [TheRegister.co.uk, Slashdot]

My favorite /. Comment:

It's not really religion either.
God demands faith. God does not provide proof, because proof kills faith. If you see something that you think is proof of God's existence, you're wrong. He's ineffable. That means you can't effing figure him out.