Derek Scruggs

These guys know how to make failure have consequences. Must be something about the Samurai tradition… Here’s another one.

Today is my 38th birthday, but that’s not so important. This is:

Our dear Worldly Friends, 27 years passed form the Islamic revolution in Iran. It is 27 years now that the execution of homosexuals in Iran has been legal. It is 27 years now that women in Iran have been considered secondary citizens. It is 27 years now that the basic rights of students, workers, ethnic and religious minorities in Iran have been denied from them. It is 27 years now that in Iran oppositions and thinkers has been oppressed. For 27 years now the storm of censor has been affecting thinkers and intellectuals and our writers and journalists have been arrested, jailed or lost their right to publish their thoughts and ideas. Because of their ideas millions of Iranians left Iran and emigrate from their homeland. The Islamic Republic has isolated Iran and insulted our people’s intelligence, pride and honor. They have driven our country toward international crises, sanctions and war.  Despite all this it has been 27 years that the struggle for peace, freedom, human rights and equality continues. It has been 27 years that we have tried to form various social and political parties and different organizations in order to recognize the rights of minority and stand against execution of children and homosexuals.

(Emphasis added. More here.) The Iranian regime is odious, but it also IMO is what you should expect when fundamentalists come to power. Unable to cope with the reality that not all people people believe as they do, the attempt to eliminate them. 

I support gay marriage (or, if you prefer, civil unions) and hope whoever reads this will join me in voting against whatever variation of the Karl Rovian “get-out-the-base” anti-gay-marriage amendment might be on the ballot in your neck of the woods this November.

Tomorrow is my birthday. So just now I received a couple of e-cards from people I’ve never met and whose names I don’t recognize. The source? Plaxo. Some people hate Plaxo. I don’t have a problem with it and find it reasonably useful for keeping my address book up to date. But the whole faux-networking birthday card thing is so phony. Every now and then I find some unknown-to-me person’s birthday in my calendar. I just delete it.

From China?

Nanjing [Automobile Group], which purchased the assets of the bankrupt MG Rover Group last year, aims to be the first Chinese carmaker to open a factory in the United States. The company has scheduled a news conference for Wednesday in Oklahoma to announce plans to build a newly designed MG TF Coupe there, starting in 2008. It said the coupe would compete with cars like the Mazda Miata, which sells for $20,000 to $25,000.

Also, I don’t have independent confirmation, but my mom tells me my hometown in Georgia recently reached an agreement with a Chinese company to build a factory there. Next thing you know the godless Manchurian commies will  buy Rockefeller Center, or maybe a baseball team. Or, since they seem to be favoring the South, perhaps NASCAR.

China’s Xinhua news agency has reported the breathtaking news that a Johns Hopkins researcher has found that consuming certain types of mushrooms can alter your consciousness. Ho hum. Like all Northwestern alums, I learned this my freshmen year at my first Dillo Day.

I was playing around with Google’s new mapping features and realized they now have maps of New Zealand, including Lake Tekapo, where I got married. Here is more information about Lake Tekapo. It is the most beautiful place I have ever seen up close. The water is an almost surreal shade of blue, supposedly colored by a special type of rock that a nearby glacier has been grinding for millenia. I remember as we walked around it that I couldn’t take my eyes off it.

And here are a few photos of our wedding, which consisted of the two of us, a witness, the minister and a photographer.

I remember reading this funny Point/Counterpoint in the Onion right before the Iraq War. The funny part is not the paragraph below, which is the setup for the joke. However, it’s amazing how accurate this joke turned out to be.

This war will not put an end to anti-Americanism; it will fan the flames of hatred even higher. It will not end the threat of weapons of mass destruction; it will make possible their further proliferation. And it will not lay the groundwork for the flourishing of democracy throughout the Mideast; it will harden the resolve of Arab states to drive out all Western (i.e. U.S.) influence.

 If you click through to see the Counterpoint response, you’ll see the joke. If only I’d paid more attention. I was a reluctant supporter of the war. Shame on me for believing Bush’s arguments, which basically amounted to that Counterpoint. Sigh…

I just came across Visited Countries, which generates a map showing what countries you’ve visited. Mine is below (I’ve visited the ones highlighted in red.)

There are so many places I want to go and looking at this makes me feel like I haven’t even begun. The big block of red for the US and Canada is misleading – I’ve been to maybe 20 of the 50 states if you count drive-throughs, half that if you define it as staying for at least one night. I did see several major cities in Canada, but despite its vastness Canada is really kinda “small” in terms of likely destinations (unless you’re an adventure traveller). In China I saw Beijing, Shanghai and Zhengzhou (a “small” city of 6–7 million).

create your own visited countries map or vertaling Duits Nederlands

Ted Stevens, Republican Senator from Alaska who was previously most well known for the “bridge to nowhere”, enlightens supporters of Net Neutrality on how those Internet thingies really work:

There’s one company now you can sign up and you can get a movie delivered to your house daily by delivery service. Okay. And currently it comes to your house, it gets put in the mail box when you get home and you change your order but you pay for that, right.

But this service isn’t going to go through the Internet and what you do is you just go to a place on the Internet and you order your movie and guess what you can order ten of them delivered to you and the delivery charge is free.

Ten of them streaming across that Internet and what happens to your own personal Internet?

I just the other day got, an Internet was sent by my staff at 10 o’clock in the morning on Friday and I just got it yesterday. Why?

Because it got tangled up with all these things going on the Internet commercially.

“…an Internet was sent by my staff…” WTF!?

Can you believe this idiot said this, and that now it’s part of in the Congressional Record? Can you believe this idiot got elected in the first place?

More at Wired.