Not, that’s not an insult from a tribe of nomadic Central Asian shepherds, or a song from the late night Cable TV edition of Sesame Street. It’s a genuine medical fact, courtesy of WebMD, and is #3 in a charming article entitled 5 Things You Didn’t Know About Your Penis. #1 is of course “Your Penis Does Have a Mind of Its Own”. As if we didn’t know that already.
Your tax dollars at work (from Ars Technica):
(The) Camera Phone Predator Alert Act (H.R. 414), introduced into Congress this month by Representative Peter King, Republican of New York. The bill’s text says that Congress has found that “children and adolescents have been exploited by photographs taken in dressing rooms and public places with the use of a camera phone.”
What’s King’s solution? One year after the passage of the Alert Act, all mobiles with cameras made in the United States must emit a “tone or other sound audible within a reasonable radius of the phone.” And the legislation would forbid manufacturers to program an option that would allow consumers to disable the noise.
If King’s proposal was actually enacted into law and signed by the President, it would be enforced by the Consumer Product Safety Commission, whose staff would have to figure out what kind of “tone or other sound” to force manufacturers to hotwire into their devices. The CPSC would also have to determine the aforementioned “reasonable radius.”
This isn’t a unique idea. There’s also been some discussion of requiring electric cars to produce a sound like an internal combustion engine in order to alert pedestrians- particularly blind pedestrians. The camera idea is, however, distinguished by being especially stupid.
Somehow I missed this great story from Discovery:
Nearly two pounds of still-green plant material found in a 2,700-year-old grave in the Gobi Desert has just been identified as the world’s oldest marijuana stash, according to a paper in the latest issue of the Journal of Experimental Botany.
A barrage of tests proves the marijuana possessed potent psychoactive properties and casts doubt on the theory that the ancients only grew the plant for hemp in order to make clothing, rope and other objects.
I was hoping there’d be something in the story about the 7th Century BC being the period when takeout food was invented in China, but no such luck. “Egg rolls… oh, yeah. Two of those. No, a dozen. And a bag of those dumplings…”
My favorite quote from the article:
Scientists are unsure if the marijuana was grown for more spiritual or medical purposes, but it’s evident that the man was buried with a lot of it.
Listening to Elizabeth Alexander read her poetry at the inauguration, I couldn’t held but think that the new President has yet to learn a lesson that I learned many years ago: Don’t hire someone just because you went to school with them. Not that much modern poetry is all that good, or even all that tolerable. Most seems to be really boring prose, broken up into irregular line lengths, with the odd colorful word thrown in for effect:
I went
to the bathroom
this morning
after
a night of drinking
and it was there
that I
polychromatically
decorated
the bowl
If you think writing this kind of bad poetry is easy, you should try it. I find I have to keep stopping myself from writing rhyming stanzas or being too clear. Granted, it flows easily from the pens of some- like our new President, whose undergraduate poetic stylings were featured in the New York Times:
Under water grottos, caverns
Filled with apes
That eat figs.
Stepping on the figs
That the apes
Eat, they crunch.
The apes howl, bare
Their fangs, dance,
Tumble in the
Rushing water,
Musty, wet pelts
Glistening in the blue.
The Times article notes that the poem above was featured in the Spring 1981 issue of “Feast,” a 51-page student literary journal that described itself as “a semi-annual journal of short poetry and fiction collected from the Occidental College community.” The Times article then adds that “The journal is no longer published”, to which I would add “to no one’s surprise.” Luckily for the rest of us, the President decided his core competencies lay in other directions.