Fish for Friday (Tank # 2)

Edited by Morris Dean

[Anonymous selections from recent correspondence]

Limerick #2 of the Week:

So many fish this week! What can we do?
How would it like to go down with you
    if we broke them out
    into bass and trout
and presented them in Tanks 1 and 2?

A Pope with common sense is hard to find; a once-in-a-lifetime thing: "Pope Francis Is Person Of The Year, 'Time' Says."
    Interesting, from the “Throne of St. Peter” to the throne of “Saint Henry (Luce),” an honor shared by John XII and John Paul II.
    But also shared by Charles Lindberg (the first Time's Man of the Year in 1927), Hitler, Stalin, “Tricky Dick,” “Ronnie Ray-gun,” “W,” The Computer (1982), and “You” on the Intertubes (//www....).
    Still, perhaps this will be a more comfortable seat than the one in the Vatican, which has been occupied by relatives of the Borgias, patrons of various Renaissance ceiling painters, and a member of Die Hitlerjugend.
    Francis so far seems on a path to emulate John XII, a nice change after five decades of the Vatican bureaucracy's running as far away from Vatican II as possible. So this may be one of Time's less ironic choices (“Henry the K,” “Barack the Hopeless,” Chaing Kai-shek). As Zhou Enlai observed of the French Revolution, “It's too early to tell.”
    Or [as another correspondent put it]: Let's see how many right-wing priests embrace this new enlightenment.

Infinito Gold, a Canadian mining company, just slapped Costa Rica with a $1 billion lawsuit because the nation decided to protect its rainforests rather than host an open-pit gold mine: "Protect Costa Rica's rainforests from Infinito Gold."
    This has been going on for a long time. Under the last president they gave these people the right to strip-mine for gold. There was no study about what the impact would be, until this president. The study showed it was a horrible idea.
    There are so many layers of government in Costa Rica that things get passed by the left hand but the right hand has no idea what happened. A case in point, Costa Rica just paid $45 million to a company they contracted with to widen the road from San Jose to San Ramon, but without first asking the people how they felt about paying $18.00 round trip to use the highway. So much hell was raised that Costa Rica had to back out of the deal. But you need to ask: Why had they agreed to something like that in the first place?

The second Hobbit movie, The Desolation of Smaug, opens in theaters today. The Guardian's reviewer this week liked it a lot. Excerpt: "Finally I get it! The fuss isn't just about Tolkien, it's about Peter Jackson and Tolkien – and they are hugely enjoyable together." [Editor's note: Don't miss Eric Meub's column this coming Monday ("Third Monday Musing") about an overlooked character in Tolkien.]

A modern-day legend, and pretty damn funny: "Etok is One Bad-Ass Eskimo." Excerpt: "In the Old Days, as today, the peoples on the edge of the Arctic Sea killed whales. It’s just what they do. It’s what they eat. But the Green People didn’t like that, and so the Green People set out one day in their fancy-ass black powerboat to stop the people of the Arctic Sea from doing their whale killing thing...."

Is homeschooling a cult? Read some of the stories on Homeschoolers Anonymous and see what you think.

We're still shaking our heads in bewilderment: "VIDEO: New Study Shows Close to 200 Children Have Been Shot Dead in the Year Since Newtown Massacre."

In 1969, most people didn't want the government controlling the pot, which at the time was very cheap. The fear was that the government would treat it like they do cigarettes and tax the hell out of it. So that vote in 1969 did not reflect the true feeling of the voters: "Poll: Most Californians Want Pot Legalized."

Some components of our broken food system:

I finished reading the book The Help for the second time, a really good book! And movie! I know that you like them both too, and even made use of the metaphor of "white ladies" treating people "like colored maids" to describe how you, a white male, were treated in your last employment by your female supervisor and her female boss and a woman in HR. [In our back pages: "To the three white ladies, I was a colored maid"].

I have to change my password every 90 days and they are becoming more militant about the strength of the passwords.

Please enter your new password:
    "cabbage"
    Sorry, the password must be more than eight characters.
    "boiled cabbage"
    Sorry, the password must contain one numerical character.
    "1 boiled cabbage"
    Sorry, the password cannot have blank spaces.
    "50effingboiledcabbages"
    Sorry, the password must contain at least one uppercase character.
    "50EFFINGboiledcabbages"
    Sorry, the password cannot use more than one uppercase character consecutively.
    "50EffingBoiledCabbagesShovedUpYourYouKnowWhat, IfYouDon'tGiveMeAccessImmediately"
    Sorry, the password cannot contain punctuation.
     "NowIAmGettingReallyTickedOff50EffingBoiled CabbagesShovedUpYourYouKnowWhat IfYouDontGiveMeAccessImmediately"
    Sorry, that password is already in use.

Mount Kilimanjaro from above

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Copyright © 2013 by Morris Dean

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