Tuesday, April 08, 2008

Falling really

Read: 'I love being a call girl - I'm in control,' boasts fallen child genius

wtf?*

She went from math genius in University to call girl. How exactly is this “fallen”?

I made a case a while back about reporting actually being editorializing and not true straight-up non-judgement stating of the facts. This is a prime example of a moral media-judgement headline.

Hypocrites, especially, and some others who judge off hand will qualify this girl as “fallen”.

Irate socio-control freaks will also judge this girl to have fallen.

Parents, who only want “their” definition of what’s best for their child, will declare this girl to have fallen.

On the other hand, some will espouse the opinion that she’s making a huge mistake; taking huge risks and whatnot, is out of, well, control… oops, that was already covered above wasn’t it?

And a select few others will be jubilant at her will to take control of her life, regardless of personal foibles, beliefs and moral makeup.

Whether anyone thinks it’s a valid career choice or not, the bottom line is this: she’s making some serious money but more importantly making a living at something she apparently loves doing!

We should all be so lucky.

*Note: wtf ? – is web-speak shorthand, basically an acronym for “what the fuck ?”

Tuesday, April 01, 2008

W Strikes on One

After the daylight savings debacle, the American government (read W Bush) has decided to change the layout of Months now, for chrissakes… so check it out:

It’s been a long standing problem that not all months have the same amount of days, so effort is now being made to homogenize this, but the solution is anything but simple.

Apparently, the rationale being that February for example is short a few days and furthermore, as happened this year, is added an extra day – this creates havoc in timings and calculations for satellites, space shuttle, and of ALL things – missile trajectory problems for space-based technology and submarines. A likely story… right.

So, coming next year, the calendar will be redone from top to bottom, homogenized to carry the same number of days, and account for bissextile years…

Now the problem is that we’re still using 24-hour days… this will also need to be tweaked to line up properly with the needs of American interests.

Thankfully, the days will remain almost the same length as now… but the divisor units will be 13 which is the same number as the horizontal stripes on the Flag. The identifier “hour” will be disbanded by the way: so we’ll move to 13 “stripe” days.

Back to the months, there will now be 50 months, again, apparently to line up with the 50 states, and each month will carry the name of a president. Since there have only been 43, dual terms will be counted as well. So we’ll have Clinton-1st and Clinton-2nd for example. Impeached presidential terms will be deleted (and others adjusted)… thereby allowing W. Bush to be included in the last month.

There is an insanely complicated method whereby 365.25 x 13 “stripe” days will be fit into 50 months, but the political scientists working on the issue assure us that they will have a solution soon.

Furthermore, since there’s still a big push on for separation of church and state, and W. doesn’t want to appear insensitive to the needs of non-Christian religions… the whole on-the-seventh-day-the-Lord-rested bit is being disbanded, since weeks will no longer exist, neither will Sunday.

I don’t know about all this… all seems pretty asinine to me, although come to think of it, our current calendar was built in precisely this manner, albeit with different rationale but just as unscientific really

I really do hope this all doesn’t come to pass, I mean seriously! What godforsaken day will April 1st land on?