Okay, I’m making this post now (before we leave) so I don’t have to worry about it later tonight. Unfortunately, nothing much has happened for me to talk about. Just some chores and a NewsRadio episode. I’ll see what I can dig up though — I keep a notebook of stuff I need to remember and topics I might want to blog about. Ah, here we go:

I was reading up on lobotomies last week and saw that Rosemary Kennedy, JFK’s sister, had one. (Hers was done with Dr. Freeman’s “icepick” method, wherein an instrument is hammered through the thin bone inside the eye socket, then wiggled back and forth to damage the brain. Only takes about ten minutes.) The whole story is really horrific — check out this Wikipedia excerpt:

Rosemary Kennedy … was given a lobotomy when her father complained to doctors about the 23-year-old’s moodiness and growing interest in men. … Instead of producing the desired result, however, the lobotomy reduced Rosemary to an infantile mentality that left her incontinent and staring blankly at walls for hours. Her verbal skills were reduced to unintelligible babble. To avoid political scandal, the nature of Rosemary’s affliction was hidden by her father for years, described to the public as the result of mental retardation.

The scariest part of all this is that there’s credible speculation that Rosemary’s IQ was around 90 — she probably wasn’t even mentally ill. (I’ve seen excerpts from the diary she kept when she was in her late teens; they’re pretty articulate.) But most of her family had IQs around 130, so she seemed especially slow by comparison. What a monster Joe Kennedy, Sr. must’ve been! I can almost understand an average family in the 40s resorting to lobotomy to correct a troubled child’s behavior, but for someone with his incredible resources its absolutely unthinkable. He was a millionaire, for Pete’s sake… He could have had her sequestered on some private, remote estate and treated by the best mental health professionals.

I know the 40s was “a different time” and all, but how could any educated person think poking holes in people’s skulls and scrambling parts of the brain was an acceptable solution for anything?

Okay, I gotta get ready; need to clean out my car and call my sister.

Have you tried SimpsonizeMe.com? I gave it a shot back when I first heard about it on Digg (by way of the PopURLs aggregator), but their site was always too slashdotted to work right. But a 4chan post I saw yesterday reminded me about it, so I tried again and actually got results. I don’t think it looks much like me, but it’s pretty cool that it was able to match my hair and shirt color from the photo I uploaded.

(Tangent: Boy, PopURLs looks way better with the white-background option enabled. They must have added the feature months ago but for some reason I never noticed it till now.)

It’s kinda weird how, just as I’m building and collapsing hundreds of bridges in BCS, a real one falls down in Minneapolis. As with the V-Tech massacre, the relevant Wikipedia page is incredibly handy. (Longest span is only 140 m? This thing would be a cinch to build in BCS…)

I saw the Modern Marvels episode about the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island today. It had a couple bits of trivia that I found pretty interesting: Did you know the ethnic slurs “kike” and “wop” originated on Ellis Island? Apparently officials there would identify immigrants’ religion with a particular symbol at the top of their papers — a cross for Christians, a circle for Jews. Well, the Yiddish word for circle is “kykle” (sp?). You can see how it’d be shortened and used as a group identifier. Likewise, “WOP” was originally just an acronym for WithOut Papers. When a large group of undocumented Italians arrived, it was used a lot and eventually became associated with that nationality in particular. Isn’t it strange how benign terms like this eventually become terrible insults?

If you get a kick out of etymology like I do (esp. where blue language is concerned), you might be interested in Cecil Adams’s thoughts on the origin of “honky.”

I’ll be in Spokane tomorrow — Brett’s got a couple days off and his parents offered to buy us dinner in honor of his birthday if we came up. We’re spending the night at their place before heading back Saturday so I might have to blog from a Starbucks or something.

Huh… I was just about to start writing on my Slashdot backup blog when I noticed the IMBC site was working. See, I was having some kind of DNS trouble that kept me from accessing my site directly. I could get to it through a proxy just fine, but I don’t trust the free ones enough to login to things through them. I blame Time Warner. Anyway, it seems to be resolved now.

I’ve been reading Accelerando. It’s pretty dense, like David Marusek’s Counting Heads. But this one focusses more on current world IT/digital rights issues than the bleeding-edge traditionally current (does that make sense?) sci fi trope (in-your-face transhumanism, nanotech, etc.). The layers of internet culture references are almost overwhelming. There’s a lot of economics stuff in there too… Some of it I don’t really grok — he keeps talking about eliminating the “economics of scarcity” in the near term before people are getting uploaded (i.e., when it would actually become possible). As long as resources are finite and humans have desires, there will be scarcity, right?

It turns out I already read the first chapter of this book (”Lobsters”) in one of the Year’s Best Science Fiction collections. I was a little annoyed at having to re-read it; I remembered it well enough that there weren’t any great surprises, but not well enough that I could skip it and still be able to fully appreciate the subsequent material.

Hrmm. What else? I made burritos for dinner last night. They woulda been better with chicken in ‘em, but I was too impatient to defrost anything. Still, they were okay. Bacon, rice, white beans, sour cream, etc.

I ordered some more TPBs off Amazon. Arriving in approximately 12 days: Powers: The Definitive Hardcover Collection, vol. 1 (456 pages!), 100 Bullets Vol. 1: First Shot, The Authority Vol. 1: Relentless, and a Hot Fuzz widescreen DVD. Originally, I only planned to buy the DVD. But their “free shipping on orders over $25″ thing got me. Really clever marketing tactic, that. Can you imagine how bad it’d be if I had Prime?

And so concludes IMBC ‘07 entry #123. Yet another testament to my ability to ramble on for three hundred words nightly.