Andymatic

The scientist really does call this The Sneaky Fucker Strategy:

Among deer, for example, the studly stags customarily fight among themselves, establishing a brutal pecking order that, it had been assumed, meant dominant males got to mate with the most attractive young does. However, thanks to techniques such as genetic fingerprinting of herd bloodlines, it has been shown that while the Monarch of the Glen is off crossing antlers with Dasher and Dancer and Comet and Cupid, the Percy pants Rudolphs are lolling around, having sex to their heart’s content with the bored females and getting them pregnant.

I’d put this at the bottom of my newsletter yesterday and realized I hadn’t blogged it: (before the election results came out)

Condolences to the Obama family with the passing of Barack’s grandmother. Some of are blessed with bonus moms in our lives. Grandmothers are magical, tenacious, steel-reinforced, iron-clad angels. Toots was a wonder - as was Agnes (my mom’s side) and Flora and Musa Belle O’Bryan (my dad’s side(s)).

(yesterday morning)

It is Saturday and I can hear the delivery trucks humming through the streets. Or it could be the mail trucks. We live right next to a central post office distribution center with dozens of mail trucks. Nope it is the dumpster trucks that look like they’d be fun to joust with.

Astro on patrol. Downy has been sleeping on my suitcase for about five days now and I can hear him snoring lightly from the next room.

I had some sort of Half-Life 2 dream where an unmanned drone mini-plane was flying through the streets and shot somebody. I woke up at the sound of the gunshot.

My neck seems to be in a permanent crick. I think it is from doing shoulder exercises or shrugs and sticking my neck out like you aren’t supposed to do.

Ron called from the Philippines last night at about 3am my time and it sounded like he was having a great time. He said they’ve been eating constantly and one of his great uncles is a Freemason and that they start the trip from the province to Manila tomorrow, then they stay a night there and then to Hong Kong and then San Francisco. Then his mom stays with us a few days (and I think she’ll be here when we move to the new unit) and then she goes back to Milwaukee. Ron said he’s never seen her have so much energy. For me, this is the culmination of the journey that started with her kidney transplant last year. She couldn’t do long trips because of weekly dialysis and the low energy that caused - and she wanted to visit her father back home (he’s 86). But ever since she woke up from surgery and the kidney started working she’s been a whole new woman. I’m glad Ron was able to get home. I’m sometimes jealous of his culture and background. Yes, I have a heritage from growing up in a German-Irish Catholic midwestern household headed by two public school teachers in Southern Indiana. But he has a much more coherent national identity - granted it is steeped in much tulmult. His mom had talked about going to college back when anti-Marcos groups would bomb public buildings.

Considering getting a new hard drive for this Sony laptop. I think I can change in a new hard drive - or maybe even a solid state flash drive - and get another 3 years out of the thing. It is already five years old. I will at least re-install WinXP since it is starting to get a bit crufty.

I don’t feel like I can really blog much about work. People in Silicon Valley read eachother’s stuff too much and I don’t want to be communicating things that need to stay inside the castle walls.

I think that I might need to blackout some domain names in my router. Namely Metafilter, Reddit, RealJock, Flickr, Salon, TechMeme, Memeorandum, HuffingtonPost and TechCrunch (summary: politics, technology and pics of hot guys). I check those sites way too often every day.

I’m sure Obama is going to get the most votes for the Presidency. I’m just scared that they aren’t going to be counted. I just don’t think you can relax until January 21st. I do think that as bad as things are right now that if they had Osama Bin Laden in captivity they’d roll him out on the third. People that I mention this too don’t think it would make any difference. But I think there will be one final surprise to all of this crazyness.

The one thing I would like Obama to do is to empty Abu Gharib prison and then bring together the Iraqi citizens that were tortured there under Saddam, the American soldiers imprisoned there during the first Iraq war and the Iraqi citizens that were imprisoned there without cause. Bring the entire international press. Read out a decree that the Red Cross will be touring all publicly known and black ops prisons and have full reign to release their reports publicly. Then together everyone presses a big red button and the whole nightmare goes up in flames.

Then do the same with Gitmo except don’t blow it up. Have a handover ceremony to give that land back to Cuba and immediately put all prisoners in a public justice system. Publicly apologize for all the lives and families we’ve destroyed.

I think these kind of large acts can be both symbolic and actually meaningful at the same time.

I wish the Iraqi government would just tell the Americans to fuck off, bring in contractors, pay for it all with oil, and tell us to get the hell out.

I wish someone would ask the Department of Defense what we’re doing differently in Afghanistan that will cause success even though every invading force to ever come into that part of the world has failed. As Michael Moore said, ‘I’ve got Gorbachev’s phone number - he might have some tips.’

But part of me thinks Obama is going to play it safe. He’s going to act like this 8-year nightmare never happened. That we didn’t just have a proto-fascist government in place that stomped on human rights, the rule of law and wiped its ass with the Bill of Rights.

It is hard to type with a cat sitting on my hands and jamming it’s nose against my wrist.

It will be interesting to see how quickly or slowly people forgive John McCain for becoming what he became in the past two years. Sarah Palin will be seen as one of the biggest factors to his campaign’s collapse. I think they should have gone with Romney or Huckabee. Huckabee is like Satan with a lot of charm - he has such a pleasant demeanor and then the black bile spills off his lips.

(Sunday)

Cats have been stomping on my face since 4am. I finally relented and got up and fed them.

The weather the past three days has been overcast and rainy and really the first not-pleasant weather we’ve had since I moved here.

The alarms in the postal distribution center next door are going off and strobes on top of the roof are flashing. I don’t smell smoke yet.

I need to do some cleaning before Ron and his mom get in. Do some laundry so she has some fresh bedding. I predict he’ll be bouncing off the walls when he gets back. Visiting home always helps me ‘reset.’ I feel like I want to ‘do good by the people I come from.’

John McCain did a good job on Saturday Night Live and the MCCain Fine Gold reference was fantastic - especially having everybody’s favorite wife-droid Cindy playing Vanna.

Okay it is now about 7:11. I’ve been up a long time. I thought it was at least 9am by now.

As Dr. Laura says ‘Now go take on the day.’

DoD proposal: Develop a software and sensor package to enable a team of robots to search for and detect human presence in an indoor environment.

From New Scientist.

WaPo:

The troubled insurance giant American International Group already has consumed three-quarters of a federal $123 billion rescue loan, a little more than a month after the government stepped in to save the company from bankruptcy. AIG has borrowed $90.3 billion from the Federal Reserve’s credit line as of yesterday, the bulk of it to pay off bad bets the company made in guaranteeing other firms’ risky mortgage investments. That’s up from roughly $83 billion AIG had borrowed a week ago, and the $68 billion level it reached a week before that. The news comes as the company’s new chief executive warned Wednesday that the government’s financial lifeline may not be enough to keep AIG afloat.

Counterpunch looks at a quote from Biden:

I can give you at least four or five scenarios from where it might originate,” Biden went on. He mentioned the Middle East and Russia. “And he’s gonna need help. And the kind of help he’s gonna need is, he’s gonna need you - not financially to help him - we’re gonna need you to use your influence, your influence within the community, to stand with him. Because it’s not gonna be apparent initially, it’s not gonna be apparent that we’re right.

That makes me feel so warm and toasty.

He’s awfully grabby:

Bloomberg, a former Wall Street trader and self-made billionaire who was elected in 2001 and again in 2005, wants to run again on grounds that his financial experience will be valuable in guiding the city through lean fiscal times ahead. The 51-member council voted 29 to 22 to approve the measure. In 1993 and 1996, New Yorkers voted to limit the mayor and other city officials to two four-year terms. A Quinnipiac University poll on Tuesday found 89 percent of voters say a referendum, not a council vote, should decide the issue.

“Werner von Braun shows how they are designing a rocket for near earth travel. Rare Walt Disney Space series from 1955, speculating about going into Space. Remember, more than 50 years ago, Sputnik hadn’t even gone up yet!”

On the morning of Oct. 8, Fitzgerald scratched her signature on an absentee ballot from a bed in her North Charleston, S.C., home, where she had moved to be close to some of her nine children. She died an hour after the ballot was mailed, said her son, Terry Fitzgerald, of Woodland Road in Foxboro.