Friday, April 24, 2009

a boy, the Protector

Tämä minun kirjoittaminen on nyt vain lukemieni pätkien näpyttelyä tänne blogiin. Mutta, jotenkin nämä ovat hyviä pätkiä, ja niissä on tunteita tai ajatuksia joita haluaisin ilmaista. Kuten nyt tämä Tom Wolfen romaanista Bonfire of Vanities.

And in that moment Sherman made the terrible discovery that men make about their fathers sooner or later. For the first time he realised that the man before him was not an aging father but a boy, a boy much like himself, a boy who grew up and had a child of his own and, as best he could, out of a sense of duty and, perhaps, love, adopted a role called Being a Father so that his child would have something mythical and infinitely important: a Protector, who would keep a lid on all the chaotic and catastrophic possibilities of life. And now that boy, that good actor, had grown old and fragile and tired, wearier than ever at the thought of trying to hoist the Protector's armor back onto his shoulders again, now so far down the line.

Tuesday, April 21, 2009

Pöpökammoa

Nyt lainaan häiritsevän kappaleen ja linkitän häiritsevään videoon pöpökammoisuutta lisätäkseni. Voi aiheuttaa ruokahalun menetystä.  Ensin video Sneezing  ultra slow motion
ja sitten teksti:
But the diarrhea also may benefit the Shigella by facilitating transmission. To envision this benefit, I encourage you to conduct a simple experiment that I have run repeatedly. The next time you visit an institutional toilet, sacrifice a few feet of the paper roll, placing it evenly on the sitting surface. Then flush. Notice the numerous droplets that appear on the paper. Then think of the millions of bacteria in each milliliter of fecal material. If the person before you had a fluid case of diarrhea, a billion bacteria may have been evenly distributed in the basin, just before the flush before last. At flush-time thousands of bacteria may have catapulted onto the seat, and ingestion of less than 200 can cause disease. How careful were you to avoid touching the toilet seat with your hands or to avoid touching the parts of you that touched the seat? You may smugly think that you have outsmarted the bacteria by washing your hands carefully before you left, but you had to touch the faucet after you washed your hands. Think about the previous visitor. Before the fingers of that visitor touched the faucet, they were on the other side of porous toilet paper - hardly a comforting thought, especially considering the quality of institutional toilet paper. 
-from Evolution of Infectious Disease by Paul W. Ewald



Lisää tuloja valtiolta

Demareiden kansanedustaja Tuula Väätäinen kirjoittaa blogissaan

Pekkarin haluaa rikkaille kovampaa verotusta, se on aivan oikein. Katainen puolustelee vielä kuilun partaallakin sitä, miten parempiosaisten on saatava lisää tuloja valtiolta, maksamalla vähemmän veroja.[sic]
Minä olin saanut valtiolta kaksikymppisen käteistä kukkarooni, kun valtio ei sitä ollut yön aikana käynyt verottamassa itselleen. Armollinen valtio antaa minulle osan siitä mitä olen kerännyt.