2012-07-03
Squarespace for Dummies
2012-06-12
Vacation Over! (I thought)
2012-04-22
Puns (from an internet email)
When chemists die, they barium.
Jokes about German sausage are the wurst kind.
I know a guy who's addicted to brake fluid. He says he can stop any time.
How does Moses make his tea? Hebrews it.
I stayed up all night to see where the sun went. Then it dawned on me.
This girl said she recognized me from the vegetarian club, but I'd never met herbivore.
I'm reading a book about anti-gravity. I just can't put it down.
I did a theatrical performance about puns. It was a play on words.
They told me I had type-A blood, but it was a type-O.
PMS jokes aren't funny. Period.
We are going on a class trip to the Coca-Cola factory. I hope there's no pop quiz.
I didn't like my beard at first. Then it grew on me.
Did you hear about the cross-eyed teacher who lost her job because she couldn't control her pupils?
When you get a bladder infection, urine trouble.
Broken pencils are really pointless.
I tried to catch some fog, but I mist.
What do you call a dinosaur with an extensive vocabulary? The saurus.
England has no kidney bank, but it does have a Liverpool.
I used to be a banker, but then I lost interest.
I dropped out of Communism class because of lousy Marx.
All the toilets in New York's police stations have been stolen. The police have nothing to go on.
I got a job at a bakery because I kneaded dough.
Haunted French pancakes give me the crepes.
A cartoonist was found dead in his home. Details are sketchy.
Venison for dinner again? Oh deer!
The earthquake in Washington was obviously the government's fault.
Be kind to your dentist. He has fillings, too.
Velcro. What a rip off!
2011-11-26
Vacation Time!
So, thanks to everyone who has visited and TTFN!
(Note: during the week of 2011 November 26th we had our 100,000th visitor!)
Most popular videos of 2010:
| Hits | Link |
| 3,143 | Deer Chaser (really!?) |
| 1,345 | Fantasmic Part 3 |
Most popular music of 2010:
| Hits | Link |
| 863 | Spawn the Dragon (Matthew Moore) |
| 470 | Jingle Bell Rag (Stephen Clarke-Willson) |
Most popular photos of 2010:
Most popular photos of 2009:
(Oh ... and don't forget to buy Nano-Plasm in paperback or for Kindle.)
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© 2005-2010 Stephen Clarke-Willson, Ph.D. - All Rights Reserved.
2011-07-11
/dance
Slash dance
last dance for love
yes, it's my last chance
for romance tonight
I need you, virtually,
beside me, to guide me,
to sync me, to scold me,
'cause when I'm bad
I'm so, so bad
So let's dance, the slash dance
let's dance, the slash dance
let's dance, online tonight
Slash dance, last dance for love
yes, it's my last chance
for romance tonight
Oh, I need you, by me,
beside me, to guide me,
to sync me, to scold me,
'cause when I'm bad
I'm so, so bad
So let's dance, the last dance
let's dance, the last dance
let's dance, an online dance tonight
Yeah, will you be my Mr. Right?
can you fill my appetite
I can't be sure
that you're the one for me
but all that I ask
is that you dance with me
dance with me, dance with me, yeah
Oh I need you, by me,
beside me, to guide me,
to sync me, to scold me,
'cause when I'm bad
I'm so, so bad
So let's dance, a slash dance
let's dance, this last dance
let's dance, an online dance tonight
Oh I need you, by me,
to beside, to guide me,
to sync me, to scold me,
'cause when I'm bad
I'm so, so bad
So, come on baby, sync slash dance
come on baby, dance that dance
come on baby, let's dance online...
2010-06-17
Bjarne Stroustrup says
Bjarne Stroustrup says in his FAQ:
"I also worry about a phenomenon I have repeatedly observed in honest attempts at language comparisons. The authors try hard to be impartial, but are hopelessly biased by focusing on a single application, a single style of programming, or a single culture among programmers. Worse, when one language is significantly better known than others, a subtle shift in perspective occurs: Flaws in the well-known language are deemed minor and simple workarounds are presented, whereas similar flaws in other languages are deemed fundamental. Often, the workarounds commonly used in the less-well-known languages are simply unknown to the people doing the comparison or deemed unsatisfactory because they would be unworkable in the more familiar language."
2010-01-08
Symp
I recently sent off some nine-track tapes to a fellow named Bob Chicko who had a tape reader and could recover some of the data. These tapes are old and contain some archives from my college days.
I found this email hilarious in its obscurity:2009-12-20
Jingle Bell Rag
Happy Holidays from Above the Garage Productions
It's Jingle Bells played ragtime style and very fast, performed by yours truly.
Woot!
© 2005 Stephen Clarke-Willson - All Rights Reserved.
2009-12-17
Nano-Plasm FTW
Be the first on your block to find out what those spirographs are all about!
(More blog posts about Nano-Plasm...)
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© 2005-2009 Stephen Clarke-Willson, Ph.D. - All Rights Reserved.
2009-12-13
Paul A. Samuelson, Who Reshaped Economics, Dies at 94 - Obituary (Obit) - NYTimes.com
Paul A. Samuelson, Who Reshaped Economics, Dies at 94 - Obituary (Obit) - NYTimes.com: "The textbook introduced generations of students to the revolutionary ideas of John Maynard Keynes, the British economist who in the 1930s developed the theory that modern market economies could become trapped in depression and would then need a strong push from government spending or tax cuts, in addition to lenient monetary policy, to restore them. Many economics students would never again rest comfortably with the 19th-century view that private markets would cure unemployment without need of government intervention."Too bad this guy died. I wish he had lived another 10 years so he could see just how wrong he truly was. But I don't think even directly experiencing how poorly his ideas worked would have convinced him. Japan has been following this nonsensical teaching for the last 20 years (pushing 30 years now) and all they have to show for it is increased debt and stagflation. So even in the face of evidence that government can not spend its way out of a recession Dr. Samuelson would still have been a believer.
If you read the whole article you'll see that Dr. Samuelson advised President Kennedy to cut taxes to get out of a recession. No doubt, leaving money in the economy, even at some cost to the government in terms of interest payments, might actually help, as the economy grows enough to cover the additional interest payments.
But just because it works once in a while and at a small scale does not mean that a government like ours with tens of trillions of dollars in public debt with a constituency with another tens of trillions in private debt can spend its way out of the sinkhole of debt that has been created. Japan, which 20 years ago had a huge surplus, and was therefore in a much stronger position to potentially stimulate their own economy, has utterly failed at the task.
The reason is simple - governments don't create productivity. Governments can spend money and governments and print money but governments don't generally create much of anything except paperwork.
Unfortunately the die is already cast. When the stock market crashes again and everyone once again panics we'll be told that we have a liquidity crisis and only intervention by the central banks can save us. They will print another couple of trillion dollars and give it to the banks who will use it once again to buy their own stock offerings. More savings by the middle class will be wiped out and another 10 million people will be out of work. In the meantime, useless politicians will tool around in limousines and pat themselves on the back for the important work they are doing. Ugh.
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© 2005-2009 Stephen Clarke-Willson, Ph.D. - All Rights Reserved.
2009-12-12
Obama Lincoln
Obama's Big Sellout : Rolling Stone: "What's taken place in the year since Obama won the presidency has turned out to be one of the most dramatic political about-faces in our history. Elected in the midst of a crushing economic crisis brought on by a decade of orgiastic deregulation and unchecked greed, Obama had a clear mandate to rein in Wall Street and remake the entire structure of the American economy. What he did instead was ship even his most marginally progressive campaign advisers off to various bureaucratic Siberias, while packing the key economic positions in his White House with the very people who caused the crisis in the first place. This new team of bubble-fattened ex-bankers and laissez-faire intellectuals then proceeded to sell us all out, instituting a massive, trickle-up bailout and systematically gutting regulatory reform from the inside."*Sigh*.
Obama says he admires Abraham Lincoln and that Team of Rivals was a huge influence.
I guess he paid particular attention to the part where Lincoln and his Secretary of the Treasury discovered a clever way to pay for the Civil War: print money.
I guess The Peace President needs to print a lot of money because we have a number of wars going: The War on Drugs; The War on Poverty; The War in Iraq; The War In Afghanistan; The War against THE CLIMATE; and I'm sure there are more.
Taken together, the rash of appointments with ties to Bob Rubin may well represent the most sweeping influence by a single Wall Street insider in the history of government. "Rather than having a team of rivals, they've got a team of Rubins," says Steven Clemons, director of the American Strategy Program at the New America Foundation. "You see that in policy choices that have resuscitated — but not reformed — Wall Street."In fact, Obama is doing what Lincoln did - appointing insiders. The so-called "Team of Rivals" was Lincoln's cabinet. It's "ex post facto" storytelling by Doris Kearns Goodwin that Lincoln hired his team because he wanted alternative views. In fact he wanted insiders to balance his own outsider status ... and if they had conflicts with each other then he resolved them - but Ms. Goodwin gets the cart before the horse.
It's the same for Obama. He's the outsider but 100% of the people around him are Washington insiders.
Our presidential elections are a no-win situation. The president is a figure head. Washington is run by the insiders who have formed a bureaucratic cesspool of toxic insider deals. I guess as figure-heads go Obama is doing a fine job - he just got the Nobel Peace Prize for not being George Bush.
Today, the great enabler, of course, is the Federal Reserve, working jointly with the banks and the politicians to ensure both groups have plenty of scratch. Lincoln was on top of the situation in that regard as well, as he created a central bank that printed money to fund the war. Luckily that bank eventually failed just as the Federal Reserve will. All paper money eventually fails just as all Ponzi schemes eventually fail. Figuring out the timing is pretty tricky but one day the people in Bernie Madoff's fund were millionaires and then five minutes later they were completely broke. When it happens, it happens fast. Anyone with something called a dollar is a participant in the Federal Reserve Ponzi scheme and when it collapses it will happen very quickly.
It's best to be prepared. If you can figure out how, that is. I leave that as an exercise for the reader.
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© 2005-2009 Stephen Clarke-Willson, Ph.D. - All Rights Reserved.
2009-12-09
Stephen Colbert on the Federal Reserve
| The Colbert Report | Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c | |||
| Fed's Dead | ||||
| ||||
Apparently there are parts of the media that are not under the control of the monetary elite!
(Click on "Fed's Dead" title in case the movie won't play.)
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© 2005-2009 Stephen Clarke-Willson, Ph.D. - All Rights Reserved.
Elizabeth Warren on TARP
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© 2005-2009 Stephen Clarke-Willson, Ph.D. - All Rights Reserved.
2009-12-07
Tivoli One
I've always wanted to listen to a Tivoli One and last weekend I got to do it in a decent, quiet listening environment. (That really is one, isn't it? Don't tell me it's a knock-off ... I couldn't stand the truth! I can't find that exact model online.)
.. and indeed ... it sounded wonderful.
(And that's not my book: the spouse was reading it.)
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© 2005-2009 Stephen Clarke-Willson, Ph.D. - All Rights Reserved.
Winter Sunset
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Overnight case
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© 2005-2009 Stephen Clarke-Willson, Ph.D. - All Rights Reserved.
The W Seattle
The W in Seattle has very dark hallways with multicolored lighting.
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© 2005-2009 Stephen Clarke-Willson, Ph.D. - All Rights Reserved.
2009-11-30
Sarah Palin
And yet ... I have no pictures of her!
Shocking.
(Okay, there are links to a couple of funny videos.)
My wife and I went on a cruise to Alaska last summer and we visited the Governor's Mansion in Juneau. When I tell the story I mention that Sarah Palin would come out and model a new outfit every day at 2:30 p.m. for about a half hour and ... many people buy it!
Instead of adding a picture of Sarah Palin to the blog I thought I'd give you a Google Image Search of Sarah Vowell, who is a true super hero.
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© 2005-2009 Stephen Clarke-Willson, Ph.D. - All Rights Reserved.
Bernanke - too painful for Nassim Taleb
Nassim Nicholas Taleb: Good Bye! The Reappointment Of Bernanke Is Too Much To Bear: "What I am seeing and hearing on the news -- the reappointment of Bernanke -- is too hard for me to bear. I cannot believe that we, in the 21st century, can accept living in such a society. I am not blaming Bernanke (he doesn't even know he doesn't understand how things work or that the tools he uses are not empirical); it is the Senators appointing him who are totally irresponsible -- as if we promoted every doctor who caused malpractice. The world has never, never been as fragile. Economics make homeopath and alternative healers look empirical and scientific."Wouldn't be awesome if Obama read the writing on the (Great) wall (of China) and fired the whole bunch of misfits he has in charge of our economy?
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© 2005-2009 Stephen Clarke-Willson, Ph.D. - All Rights Reserved.