Absolutely legendary

So, back in the 50s, there was a mad dash to build personal nuclear shelters in the event of a nuclear attack from the Soviet Union. People built them to stay for months or years as the radioactivity outside would dissipate.

In 1957 in Tulsa, OK, a Plymouth Belvedere was buried in one of these shelters (well, a concrete sarcophagus that can withstand such attack), as a time capsule to the future. Included in the car was a 5 gallon can of leaded gasoline (a lotta good that does now), rusted cans of Schlitz beer, and the “typical” contents of a woman’s handbag.

Long story short, they pulled the vehicle from the shelter to find that the shelter had been long since flooded; the car was a rusted hulk.

Now, if only they had buried it in Cheyenne Mountain or something 😛

The Smashing Pumpkins’ version of Landslide out-does Fleetwood Mac’s any day of the millennium 😛

CatCam

So, my folks and I went to a Cubs/Braves game in Atlanta this weekend. The game was alright, though the poor Cubbies got smacked 9-5. It was fun, anyway, especially since there were a great number of Cubs fans there.

After the game, we started back to the hotel–we actually left early in the 8th, so that we’d miss some of the traffic. We were able to park just outside of Turner Field. It was a real rip-off, IMHO, for $30. The bigger rip-off was how some glass ripped off the tire on the way out–fragments of a beer bottle were apparently in our path. When we got to the road, people were pointing out we had a leak. You could hear the air, screaming to get out of the tire.

For an hour-and-a-half, we waited for traffic to die down and for the Atlanta police to open the road back up so that AAA could finally get there. In the meantime, some of the parking attendants helped to put a spare on. I think we finally got back to the hotel shortly after midnight.

Now, I guess we have to get a new tire. Fat chance in the South on a Sunday, even if it is Atlanta. I’m pessimistic about the chances 😛

I had a really weird dream last night that the Galactica of old met the Galactica of new. It began out in a big nebula full of a bunch of newborn stars & planets. The Galactica (new) ran into some Cylon (old) ships. There was a battle, and they were able to defeat the Cylons with no real big problems at all. They moved on from there to explore the nebula a bit, to see if there was anything useful there. Eventually, they find a Viper that’s been tailing them. It looks like a Viper, but has some very stark differences. They get a voice comm asking for permission to land. The Viper touches down, and Apollo goes out to meet whomever is flying.

So, Apollo meets Apollo. Apollo (old) tells them of his Galactica, and they all decide to meet up–better to have two Battlestars than one. So, there’s a duplicate of nearly every crew member. Lorne Greene is dead, and I think I realized this while I was dreaming it, so it turned out that he was long since dead from some Cylon attack. So, every duplicate crew member got together to compare notes, so to speak. The funniest one was Starbuck; I don’t know why but they were both amputees, having lost the exact same appendages. The only duplicate I don’t remember seeing was one for Helo (makes sense, since there was no Helo in the original, of course)…oh, and the Chief, Cally, Tory, Anders, Zarek, Cottle and all of those peoples who weren’t in the original.

It was a very entertaining, and actually quite coherent dream–which is interesting, given that most of my dreams that I remember are full of disjointed plots & seemingly disparate events. lol.

In the beginning, there were dinosaurs and people…

…and then Kevin voiced his long-winded opinion…

Immigration Bill Shelved

All rendered via the Sims engine (with some SimCity mixed in, I think)

Male Restroom Etiquette

So, there’s this big hoopla that’s been brewing on LJ. Many are calling the event Strikethrough ’07.

I don’t necessarily see it as a question of censorship. The thing with sites like LJ or MySpace is that there is truly no way of obtaining age verification on the Internet. If you’re talking to an anonymous person, the only real way you can tell if they’re who they say they are is if they have a webcam and they hold up today’s paper–that has its own problems, of course, but you get my point…age verification is a profoundly difficult task at this point.

Freedom of speech is very important, particularly in the political arena. But, freedom doesn’t mean limitless; if we were to post journal entries about assassinating the president (no matter whom he or she is), then we’re going to be called on it. We’d be scrutinized because of the dangerous nature of the content.

On the social front, because of the inability for true age verification, is it truly appropriate for a child to see age-inappropriate pictures, posts & stories? We make such a big deal out of physical child sexual molestation. Then we turn around and we shove all of that crappy content out there for anyone to see, all in the name of “freedom of speech”.

Mind you, politics and social issues tend to intertwine themselves with each other; it’s the nature of the beast. Nevertheless, the nature of that content has to have limits. Do people really want children to see pictures, stories and posts of sexuality? Shouldn’t it be up to parents as to when children are first exposed to such things?

LJ stepped on a number of peoples’ toes. Given what they were trying to do, that was profoundly inevitable–13+ million journals out there with perhaps billions of entries make it an exceedingly difficult task of filtration. And the way they handled it on the public affairs front was awful. I think what they’re trying to do, though, is genuine and certainly needed, particularly given that you have lots of clueless people out there who think only of themselves and their own gratifications.

The thing is that LJ is not a public service–it’s not a power that’s elected, it’s not out there for political gain or loss. It’s powered and maintained by a private organization, who can set whatever rules it sees fit to employ. And, if we don’t like it, we can go elsewhere; they just won’t get our moola. They are bound by Constitutional principles, really only as they want to be. They can censor and slash however they see fit; it’s their playground. If we don’t like it, all of the protest in the world will mean jack–particularly if we don’t have paid accounts.

Until a solid means of age authentication is found, this problem is going to recur. We’re going to revisit it again and again. It’s going to become a broken record of the 21st century.