Caveat: The atheistic gyrovague – who me?

I'm cleaning house among my documents.   Here follows another set of collected "non-starters," from my list of "possible things to blog about."  Utterly random.

1.  "Somehow it seems to fill my head with ideas – only I don't exactly know what they are!" – Alice, after hearing the Jabberwocky poem.  But this reminds me of something Tracey said in class the other day:  "Teacher!  I understand the topic.  I just don't understand my ideas."

2.  Found at at https://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2009/07/kill-first-find-guilt-later.html:

Student Leader: In Iran we always use this joke to describe this situation: they say that a group sees a fox that is running away, they ask him, "Why are you running away?" The fox says, "The ruler has ordered that all foxes that have three testicles be killed." They note, "But you have two testicles," and the fox responds, "But first they kill and then they count."

This is exactly the situation activists in Iran are facing. Any crisis is an excuse to suppress them; their crimes have been decided beforehand.

3.  I don't normally have much interest in chess.  But I was surfing wikipedia and found a long article explaining some aspects of "fairy chess," which I found fascinating.

4.  What is a voodle?  [it's a "video doodle" … nice.]

5.  Comedy Central neologisms…
Stewart:  "obitutaiment" (RE Jacko's infinite death coverage)
Colbert:  "the dead can twitter!" (RE Jeff Goldblum's visit to his show)

6.  "Writers don't own their words. Since when do words belong to anybody? 'Your very own words,' indeed! And who are you?" — 'Cut-Ups Self-Explained' in Brion Gysin Let the Mice In, while reading about Wm S Burroughs' life in wikipedia…

7.  "not proven" is apparently a concept in Scots law, which creates a double opposition to traditional English law's "Guilty vs Not Guilty" … hmm, cf. Arlen Specter, years ago, on President Clinton's guilt during the misfired impeachment of that era.

8.  Multiculturalism in Korea … in the newspaper, and poking around online: https://gypsyscholarship.blogspot.com/2008/05/expat-living-multiculturalism-in-korea.html

9.  "…the idiosyncrasies of civilization…" a sculptor talking on Canadian radio show "As It Happens," about his bronze sculptures being stolen by meth addicts.

10.  "A man of honor lives with whatever he does."  – the Rachael MacCloud character, in episode 4-15 of the Highlander TV series.

Notes for Korean:
부드러운= furry, soft, smooth (really! all of those meanings)

Caveat: Bing? uhhhh… Boogle.

I have been trying to use alternatives to Google, when searching things online.  Why?  It's not that I dislike Google.  It's that I always tend to favor the underdog.  It's some kind of instinct, almost.  I try to be anti-follow-the-crowd.

So, although I despise Microsoft in some respects, especially their Windows consumer franchise (can someone please repair Vista?  why does my computer crash several times a week under Vista, but never crashes when I boot under Windows Server 2003, and only crashes rarely under Ubuntu?), lately I've been making an actual effort to try using their newly branded search engine, Bing.

What a joke.  Today I was doing some searching on something Bing is supposed to be good at, according to the reviewers:  shopping.  I've been thinking of buying some "gadgets" before leaving Korea, to best take advantage of my hoard of Korean cash.    So I was trying to research camcorders and netbook and small notebook computers.   Hahaha.  The entire first page of results when I typed in "camcorder comparison shopping" were links to Google directory pages!  Which, in my personal experience, are useless for actually finding anything out.

Well, at least we know that Microsoft isn't skewing results to proprietary sites.  But, still… how could they allow this to happen?

Anyway, back at Google, I had much better luck finding some comparison buying guides, etc.

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