Drunken Pumpkin

“We do not want America to represent torture. We urge you to do all in your power to stop violations of the human rights of detainees, to cease illegal renditions, and to apply the Geneva Convention to all detainees, including those designated enemy combatants,” the letter said.

The above is excerpted from an article that can be found at MSNBC.MSN.com

We are confronted with insurmountable opportunities.

I remember the first time I met Jeff. We were in some college class I generally try to block out of my mind, as the instructor contrived to make mythology boring. How the hell do you make dragons and sea monsters and trips into hell boring? I’m pretty sure that I couldn’t do it, but this lady had a knack.

Anyway, she was at the front of a giant lecture hall talking about the Greek conception of original man or some such nonsense, but illustrating it with two little Amish ragdolls. Seriously.

It was about this time that the room started to get a little bit dark. I noticed that my fellow students now all had glowing pumpkins instead of heads, and our professor had also acquired a gourd for a melon. It was during this revelation about the true nature of being that I saw I was destined for Greatness. (I mean, how can you eat that many pumpkins and not put on some pounds?) But violent, and slightly cannibalistic, fantasies aside, that’s when I met Jeff.

You see, it turns out that I was talking out loud through the bulk of the professor’s lecture, thus distracting nearly everyone around me. In retrospect it’s a bit of a shock that the professor didn’t hear me. Or maybe that was why she was giving me such dirty looks as she made her little Amish ragdolls perform a function they were never meant for. I mean, the Amish would be really upset if they knew their likenesses were in a college classroom. Plus the sexual connotations were a little creepy.

We ended up doing group work in that class, and Jeff got saddled with the crazy talking guy and some Hispanic chick. Now that I think about it, he was probably only worried about the crazy guy. The first thing I asked was if either of them noticed the professor looked a little like a pumpkin. And if they noticed that she often slurred a little like she was drunk. Like some kind of Alcoholic Jack-o-lantern. And thus a seed was planted.

To be continued…

Drinking when we are not thirsty and making love at all seasons, madam: that is all there is to distinguish us from other animals.

June 22,2007 | SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico — An Army officer with a key role in the U.S. military hearings at Guantanamo Bay says they relied on vague and incomplete intelligence and were pressured to declare detainees “enemy combatants,” often without any specific evidence.

His affidavit, released Friday, is the first criticism by a member of the military panels that determine whether detainees will continue to be held.

Lt. Col. Stephen Abraham, a 26-year veteran of military intelligence who is an Army reserve officer and a California lawyer, said military prosecutors were provided with only “generic” material that didn’t hold up to the most basic legal challenges.

Abraham was asked to serve on one of the panels, and he said its members felt strong pressure to find against the detainee, saying there was “intensive scrutiny” when they declared a prisoner not to be an enemy combatant. When his panel decided the detainee wasn’t an “enemy combatant,” they were ordered to reconvene to hear more evidence, he said.

Ultimately, his panel held its ground, and he was never asked to participate in another tribunal, he said.

The above is an excerpt of an Associated Press article, found at Salon.com

As promised, a little rant on Ethanol.

I’m all for renewable resources. The latest Senate bill concerning renewable resources has me a little worried. The goal of producing 36 billion gallons of Ethanl by 2022 sounds like a nice idea, but it has some problems.

According to David Pimentel a professor from Cornell (quoted here) it take about an acre to produce 328 gallons of ethanol. Which, after you do the math ends up requiring 170,454 square miles of corn to produce the proposed amount of ethanol. Now, that is roughly the area of Iowa, Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio put together. I’m not talking about the farmland in those states, I’m talking about the entire state, cities and all. And, of course, that is just to produce corn for ethanol, not feed grain or the wonderful stuff we get in cans.

Looks like the new Slogan for Indiana Beach will have to be, “There’s just Corn in Indiana, find another beach.” But at least the crows will be happy.

I think converting the entirety of those four states into one big farm might be a hoot. Can you imagine the corn maze you could build there for Halloween? And it isn’t like there’s really anything of interest in those states anyway. We could just transplant Chicago to one of the coasts and it would fit right in, no one would even be the wiser, especially if you did it at night. Those city dwellers are used to sleeping through loud noises.

Well, that’s about all from the future Corntopia, tune in tomorrow when Jeff talks about stirling engines and their application for perpetual motion.

The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not ‘Eureka!’ but ‘That’s funny…’