W00t Lothlórien

Lothlórien: oooooooooooooooh, pretty! But I don't get this tradition of souvenir ropes. I already have bungees. But never offend the locals, so I'm all "Uh... okay... sure, fine. Thanks for the, um, rope!"

Somewhere along the way, I made some math errors. Probably a few times along the way. These are corrections. The error rate is small but nonzero. Of course, these ignore all the Murknorth to Murksouth biking runs that I made and logged as eight miles (estimate) vs. the actual ten (gmapPed). I don't feel like going back and adding all of that in. ^_^

Tuesday's miles: 11.9
Wednesday's miles: 11.8
Miles out of Hobbiton: 936.6 (was 942.8 as of today, error +0.7%)
Miles out of Rivendell: 478.6 (was 463.7 as of today, error -3%)
Miles out of Lothlórien: 16.6
Miles to Rauros Falls: 372.4

Distances:
Hobbiton to Rivendell. (458 miles)
Rivendell to Lothlorien. (462 miles)
Lothlórien to Rauros Falls (389 Miles)

Stupid Hobbits are in boats. Sure, laugh it up, fuzzy feets and your zililions of miles per day. We'll see how much you laugh when we hit the rapids and my HYBRID BIKE OF DOOM doesn't even slow down and you're all carrying canoes over your heads on rocks! So there.

Also, I really need to get my bike into the shop for general service this fall. I think the chain may be a bit stretched.

bad books, cooked books, good books, and 'splodies

My chem study guide book is so far a complete waste of time and money. If the first couple of chapters are any indication, the only people who actually need this thing are those who aren't very good at reading the main text for content. So there's $30 I didn't need to spend. Still, I'm afraid to return it, because I might end up being wrong later.

The green light has been given for massive bookkeeping fraud in the name of national security. Watch your IRAs and 401Ks, people; this could get a couple of hundred kinds of ugly.

I had to return The Omnivore's Dilemma as it was due today; unfortunately, I hadn't started reading it until last weekend (bad library patron!) and then didn't read very quickly of because of distractions. But I still got most of the way through; the part I skipped was entirely at the end where I was already getting annoyed at the switch from information- and analysis- driven chapters to his personal thoughts on the nature and philosophy of food, and I didn't honestly feel that much like reading through him helping hunt a pig and him helping gather mushrooms and zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz. But I'd definitely consider the main parts worthwhile. I've already been kind of a local-foods person - note my excitement about the local farmer's market I can walk to - but now I'm kind of moreso, now that I know more about industrial organic food production. (picoreview: better than standard, but not as much as you think.) So I recommend the first two-thirds of the book, which are really solid; after that, it starts to decline; the last quarter of it you can read if you find it interesting rather than self-indulgent. It's pretty good despite that, though.

Before the library stop, Chem included fun tricks with liquid nitrogen. Recommended! Plus: bonus small accidental explosion. Yay! But we're already kind of falling behind the lesson plan. I also figured out that I'm going to have to be really careful with the clicker; one of today's in-class questions tapdanced all over my mild dyslexia and even after I noticed and adjusted for it I still had a really hard time keeping track of the right answer. The buttons are labelled alphabetically and sequentially; there were four statements given; you were supposed to figure out which were true and which weren't; the set of answers were noted as A, B, C, and D; the correct answer was that item nr. 3 was the correct one, but that option was response D; I pressed C at first, and it took me several seconds to realise that was wrong. Pleasantly, you have a 90-second window and can change your answer. But it was actually kinda difficult to figure out whether to press "3" (a.k.a. button "C," also labelled "3") or "D" (also labelled "4"), the correct button to push to record an answer of three. I hate that shit.

Hopefully that won't be a big factor, but I have a history of occasional left-right issues on multiple choice questions. I was failing econ briefly because of a/c and b/d swaps on multiple-choice tests until the teacher started making multiple choice tests optional and offering (theoretically more difficult) long-form tests as an alternative, which I aced routinely and thus salvaged my average in the class.

There WILL BE a Cultural Warfare Update tonight. Promise! Meanwhile, have a flower. It's a little fuzzy but I still like the picture.

Raspberry Red (*No Actual Raspberries In Product)

Overheard...

...at the North Seattle Costco:

First shopper, peering down an aisle: "This appears to be cracker land."
Second shopper, passing by: "Truer words never spoken."

Today's Cultural Warfare Update

Things are really pretty quiet. Given that this is a Wednesday and that the previous Monday and Friday editions got skipped with the start of school, this is really a very small number of articles. I imagine - well, more, I just hope - that the summer will be light before the grueling haul coming in the leadup to this fall's election campaign. Strangely, there has been no push to go at the House in preparation for their utterly pointless vote on the anti-marriage Federal amendment.

And now, today's news.

Reuters: New US church leader says homosexuality no sin; included here as a contrast for a Focus on the Family article below;

Focus on the Family pushes Sen. Brownback's effort to keep Bush administration limits on embryonic stem-cell research; includes ACTION ITEM to oppose Federal bill overturning the Bush administration's stem-cell-line limits;

FotF claim: NEA withdraws GBLT unions comment after the Traditional Values Coalition complains;

More graduation-speech hijinks; Focus on the Family says a valedictorian's speech was "edited" by the administration; when she reverted to her original draft (with what the school described as proselytizing), the high school pulled the microphone;

Here's the AP's version with the "proselytizing" description;

Meanwhile, Focus on the Family is freaked out by the Episcopalian Church's presiding bishop saying being gay isn't a sin;

FotF's Boundless magazine condemns the X-Men series as twisting good values into bad by applying them to queers;

Focus on the Family pushes an older (2004) article by an "ex-gay" religious convert, "demystifying" gay issues;

Faith and Freedom Network unidles, condemns Washington State Supreme Court for not issuing a DOMA ruling; says now they don't expect one until after the November elections; promises to help their readers "make constructive changes in the makeup of the Washington Supreme Court" in the upcoming elections;

Focus on the Family's "True U." pushes "Intelligent Design" by "clarif[ying] terms";

Concerned Women for America President Wendy Wright named "one of the 100 Most Powerful Women" in DC;

CWA cheers anti-marriage amendment progress in two states;

CWA condemns new group formed by ex-ex-gay people who say that the whole ex-gay thing is a crock;

CWA supports Virginia anti-marriage, anti-civil-unions amendment which would ban any form of any right granted by state law to married couples to be extended to queer couples;

Family Research Council ACTION ITEM to demand Pennsylvania anti-marriage amendment also ban Civil Unions and domestic partnerships;

American Family Association ACTION ITEM against the National Education Association for reported GBLT marriage rights support;

Phyllis Schlafly attacks Supreme Court Justice Roberts for not being doctrinaire enough, says he should be dictating a "strong message" instead of building consensus and unanimity on the Court;

AFA: Harry Potter "objectionable," "occult"; supports "Christian mom"'s effort to ban it from schools in Georgia;

FoxNews: Pentagon lists homosexuality as a mental disorder;

Canada Family Action Coalition: "Justice Minister caves to homosexual whiners," says teaching lesbian and gay couples are equivalent to heterosexual couples is a lie and "should be illegal."

( Articles and excerpts below )