But very funny if you have issues with spellcheckers.
Sorry for not posting in a while. Posting a video is a lame excuse for a blog update, but it’ll have to do for now.
Jan9
Dec29
A Day in Manhattan
So. . .four Moms and six teenage friends get up at the crack of dawn and drive to the PATH station at Newport Center for a day of wandering and shopping. Everyone is tired and sore, but it was definitely a trip we’ll do again (only with more time sitting on the subway. . .even the kids were worn out from walking!)
The original plan was to hit Madame Tussaud’s, then head downtown to the Village/Soho and general vicinity. We had gathered up discount tickets, because the place is pricey, but AAA offers a 15% discount, Entertainment books have coupons (some printable extras for people who bought books, too) and I found a site with a nice assortment of discount coupons just by googling, too.
I also went searching for the location of a clothes store called Uniqlo, because some friends had recommended it as a place the girls might enjoy (more on this later) and it led me to a very useful site called yelp. Woohoo! Rather than have to do an advanced search, you can go from general to specific, and navigating around was incredibly easy. I would ask for clothes, select women’s, and then specify the neighborhood by clicking on a navbar that stayed up all the time – no going back each time to pick a different area. Some things weren’t categorized 100%, not all of the stores/restaurants had all information, but there were addresses, phone numbers, map locations, and reviews from people who had actually been to the places. I printed up a bunch of pages of ideas. (one caveat – if you select the printable version of a business’ page, and don’t specify how many pages, you can print all the pages and pages and pages of reviews as well. Oops!)
Anyway. The PATH let us off at the World Trade Center Station. When I lived up North, I had seen it only from the vantage points of Eagle Rock Reservation and the Circle Line. Before that, I had seen and been in the towers pre-9/11 many times. The first look was. . .well, I won’t say a shock, because it’s not something fresh in my mind anymore. . .humbling. If the towers were impressively huge when they were standing, their absence is equally impressively huge.
Dec27
Looking in the Mirror
Hmmm. As a person who’s spent a good deal of time trying to get her head on straight, I’ve done plenty of introspection, spent way too much time self-flagellating, and come a long way in self-improvement (but still have a ways to go, no question!) What brought this into the forefront of my brain this morning was this post on Pharyngula about Bill Dembski asking his lawyer to make the mean people go away. Specifically, he’s been caught using a video about evolution that was produced by Harvard in his Intelligent Design presentations – by dubbing over the soundtrack with ID-friendly language and eliminating the credits so his fraudulent use would be harder to detect. Dembski has a history of doing things that turn out to be illegal, embarrassing, or both, then being surprised at the negative consequences. He is a public figure because he has made himself so, but he never seems to expect anyone to see through his pseudonyms and make it public that he was behind the fart video, or the public posting of peoples’ addresses for the purpose of harassment, or fan messages to himself on various review sites. He also hasn’t glommed onto the fact that anything that goes on the internet easily becomes public, and that goes for the letters he’s been ccing to other parties who are less than sympathetic towards him. So I said:
I’ve always lived with the attitude that you shouldn’t say anything you’d be embarrassed to say in public, or to the face of a person you say it about. That goes even more for anything written or sent over the internet. Never, ever assume that it won’t be passed along somehow, or that you’ll never be held accountable for it. (I also believe that there’s nothing wrong with apologizing, or admitting you were wrong, so that helps.)
Unfortunately for Dembski, he regularly says and does things without giving weight to the potential consequences, and never apologizes when he’s called on it. His lawyer, no matter how well-trained or well-connected, can’t protect him from himself. Better that he should be a little more contemplative than outspoken, but it’s hard to teach an old dog new tricks.