Fish for Friday

Not Carlos; some other idiot

Got this from a Costa Rica magazine. I thought I had done dumb things.....
    "Costa Rica Chicken Farmer Dies in Crocodile-Infested River after Amateur Bungee Jumping Stunt Goes Tragically Wrong":

After fastening a cord to his parked car on a bridge on Saturday morning and then tying it to his waist and feet, 33-year-old Carlos Luis Abarca Valverde is presumed to be dead after the cord snapped....

    If you are coming to Costa Rica to engage in "adventure tourism," I encourage you to not try to do bungee jumping by yourself and only deal with proven tour operators who will hopefully have your safety as their primary concern.

Vladimier Dimitrov Maistora

I thought you might find interesting these blogs of mine: "Bulgarian Literature: A blog for everybody interested in English translations of Bulgarian Literature; find links to translations, and comments about Bulgarian Literature" and "Bulgarian Art Gallery: Paintings of Old Bulgarian Masters."
    They are not intended to give a comprehensive view on their respective subjects, I just hope that they might be useful to people interested in Bulgarian Culture.

Promotional poster for the movie The Help

Morris, I just read about why you retired when you did ["To the three white ladies, I was a colored maid"]. It is shameful that you had to experience such behavior.
    Unfortunately, your story is very familiar to many. Our office “leader” (bureaucratic term not to be confused with leadership) is also a “white lady.” Fortunately, my many years of experience in the higher education bureaucracy has taught me how to fly under the radar. Consequently, I have (so far) been largely unscathed—others in our office have and continue to suffer greatly.

Tesla’s Model S luxury sports sedan

Staying with their mission to roll North Carolina politics back to the 1930s, or the 1830s if they think they can get away with it, NC legislators are trying to pass a law to ban the sale of the highly acclaimed Tesla sedan within the state's borders: "Here’s Why North Carolina Wants Tesla Out." The car received a record 99 out of 100 score by Consumer Reports, and is the Motor Trend car of the year' for 2013, but that matters not to legislators trying to ban online car sales by businesses that are not licensed car dealerships. Various talking heads have opined this is a consumer protection issue, but we are betting it has a lot more to do with where automobile mega-dealerships spent their money in the 2012 elections.

Not sure this goes, but the
box does say "police"

People who think tyranny will arrive behind pointed guns should think again. While they're looking at the sky for black helicopters, tyranny is being constructed all around them in the form of surveillance cameras and email catchers. Orwell saw it all—or most of it.

I had something curious happen with a guy who came into the antique shop one day and just out of the blue started spouting southern Baptist literal rhetoric. Curious, I started to lay out some logical questions about what he was saying, but apparently he found them threatening or insulting. For a while I thought I was going to have to take the baseball bat to him, but he unfortunately calmed down and left before I had that opportunity.
    On the literalism/creationism topic, have you ever come across this: "American Fundamentalism and the Creationist Museum"?

What kind of vicious prank would result in: "Students suspended for biking to school"? They were forced to miss exams essential to their graduation and banned from the traditional senior walk to receive their diplomas. Perhaps they blew up something important, like maybe part of their school? Or they doctored the yearbook and umpteen hundred copies of it came out laced with profanity? No, this group of students was much more clever and fiendish than that...they simply got together and rode their bicycles to school. Seriously.

We don't think these are the actual bicycles the students rode

    A pressing unanswered question in all this is, Was the principal merely fired, or—for the safety of all—was she also committed to an institution?

We don't think these lovelies were the ones executed

I have no words for this: "Cop Shot Litter of Kittens in Front of Screaming Children: Nonetheless, the police department chief says this cop did nothing wrong."
    Follow-up: "My 6 y.o. was crying, ‘Mommy, mommy, he shot the kitty’."

A grass-free lawn is a concept that even the Brits are willing to try: "Grass-free lawn opens in London park." Won't you consider it?

Seven years ago, I was honored to have my presentation on climate change turned into a movie called An Inconvenient Truth. To this day, I am consistently gratified when people tell me that the film opened their eyes to the climate crisis, and that it has encouraged and inspired acts of leadership, big and small, around the world.
    As part of the anniversary celebration, The Climate Reality Project has helped put together this list of ten actions you can take right now on climate change. I hope that you'll visit the site, share it with your friends, and get inspired!

You'll want to see this: "Islam and the Misuses of Ecstasy." E.g., "Despite my antipathy for the doctrine of Islam, I think the Muslim call to prayer is one of the most beautiful sounds on earth. Take a moment to listen:

I find this ritual deeply moving—and I am prepared to say that if you don’t, you are missing something. At a minimum, you are failing to understand how devout Muslims feel when they hear this. I think everything about the call to prayer is glorious—apart from the fact that, judging by the contents of the Koran, the God we are being asked to supplicate is evil and almost surely fictional. Nevertheless, if this same mode of worship were directed at the beauty of the cosmos and the mystery of consciousness, few things would please me more than a minaret at dawn."

Here's some stuff about Your Brain on Music, by neuropsychologists. It might be of interest to Geoff, for instance. "Why Music Makes Our Brain Sing," "Intensely pleasurable responses to music correlate with activity in brain regions implicated in reward and emotion," and "Anatomically distinct dopamine release during anticipation and experience of peak emotion to music."

This is one of the strangest novelty numbers I've ever encountered (from Broadway Rhythm 1944):


Sometimes "just think about it" may actually be a better slogan to live by than "just do it." In the case of "The Pursuit of Happiness" self-help couple who helped each other to an early death, a little more knowledge and less imagination might also have been a good thing, Albert Einstein's perspective non-withstanding: "Self-help couple commits suicide, authorities confirm."
    Do you have a friend in trouble? "8 Signs Someone Is at Risk of Suicide"

In an announcement that was as much of a surprise as Lance Armstrong was cheating when he zoomed past all those other cheaters, "Pope confirms 'gay lobby' at work at Vatican." Really, a gay lobby, in an organization that does all it can to keep women out? Who would have imagined? The only shock here is that the pope actually admitted it, and someone messed up and printed it.

Two images:

Yes, no mistake, that's the "Holy Cube"

Limerick of the Week:

Our fish come from trawlers around and all over,
From Wrightsville beach to the chalky cliffs of Dover,
    But no one I know can trawl
    Half as wide a path as Paul,
Who wades marshes and inlets like a wild island rover.

_______________
Copyright © 2013 by Morris Dean

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