the frig blig

If I were a genetic engineer dabbling in DNA I would definitely want to attempt mixing chromosomes of dogs and cats.

Of course it would not be easy, but if the resulting creatures lived and were able to reproduce, I would quickly patent them and begin marketing them to pet-lovers as super-pets, containing all the best and none of the worst qualities of each species.

This would certainly confuse many people, especially cat lovers who despise dogs and dog lovers who despise cats.

But it would appeal to the exotic pet crowd, and would eventually grow a legitimacy and constituency of its own.

The first person/company to successfully enter this market will make history, and a killing.

You heard it here first!

I like Doc Searls’s post about Daniel Schorr’s death:


Sad news

He was 93. We should all live so long, and well.

My wife and I have been discussing the possibility of retiring, eventually, to Florida’s Gulf coast. But now that, thanks to the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig explosion, the Gulf of Mexico contains a hundred or so million gallons of oil, not to mention toxic dispersants such as Corexit and methane gas…I’m wondering if Florida’s Gulf coast will be such a desirable place to live in upcoming years.

I’d really like to see some serious scientific forecasts of the extent of the effects of the oil plumes, dispersants, and methane on Florida’s Gulf coast. This information could (and should) bear on our decision to spend years of our lives there.

My ISP inwa.net was back up this morning when I tried it from work. So ‘nevermind’ my previous post, my normal email account is working again and I think I’ll keep it as my main point of contact for now.

However, the first thing I did after checking my email (I use pine) was to make a local copy of my addressbook. A quick google led me to a convenient, time-saving script to reformat my pine addressbook into a CSV file importable by gmail. This little gem saved me mucho time, so many thanks to Cengiz Gunay for writing his perl script pineaddrbook2csv and posting it on the internet.

If and when inwa goes down again, next time I won’t lose all those contacts!

My ISP inwa.net has been down since July 2 — at least 4 days, quite long in internet time. I’m not sure if they’re the victim of a malicious attack, suffered catastrophic hardware failure, or just pulled the plug. If it’s the former, I wish them well fixing the problem. If the latter, I’m disappointed that they didn’t give their customers advance warning.

Be that as it may, I no longer receive email sent to my inwa.net address. Until such time as they are online again, please use my emergency backup email address: frieda dot peeps at gmail dot com (translated into the standard format). If you sent messages to me between July 2 and now, please resend them to this address.

The main thing I’ve lost with my inwa account is my addressbook. Shoulda backed it up; I know better. Let this be a lesson to me.

Thanks and sorry for the inconvenience.

Natalie Angier, in her New York Times article ‘Save a Whale, Save a Soul, Goes the Cry‘ quotes biologists who equate the cetaceans’s mental and social abilities as being on par with people’s. Granting personhood to these creatures will not protect them from being ‘harvested’ by actual people, however, given how we kill our fellow humans with impunity. Call them communists or terrorists or islamofascist or just plain evil and they become worthy of slaughter.

Or just spew a few million barrels of oil their way and let’s see how smart they are. Whatever. The whales aren’t hiring.

Looking at a photo in the paper this morning of an oil-coated pelican being cleaned up at a wildlife rehab center, made me wonder: what percentage of birds covered with oil are lucky enough to end up at a rehab center where they are cleaned? What percentage of the cleaned birds survive the ordeal? What percentage of the survivors end up back at the oil spill, and get messed up again? How can humans communicate to birds the danger, and to stay away from it?

Drinking coffee offers no real benefit as reported by Lewis Page in The Register.

Beached dolphin at Horn Island, Mississippi

And now a few words from Larry Teich:

“Some thoughts about the oil in the Gulf. We need to stop calling it a spill. That’s a nice little word to decscribe what can be wiped up with some paper towels. It’s an oil gusher, avalanche, contamination or torrential explosion but not just a spill. Whatever the enormity of its effects on wildlife and the environment, people need to not be shocked or numbed into inaction. Doing anything will help even if it’s trying to prevent this from happening again. I’m just sorry that BP was the company involved since i’d like to be calling it the Gulf of Texaco now.”

Here are some links Larry provided about the spew: one is a CBS News story about BP withholding info and the other is a Google map in which you can overlay layers of the spill and its effects by date:

CBS News

Google Map

Rocked out with The Tripwires at the Sunset Tavern in Ballard last night. Opening were Orange Peel, a young pop band from San Francisco, and Spanish for 100, energetic rockers with an insanely hot lead guitar cat.

The Tripwires did not disappoint. They encored with a cover of ‘Crawling From the Wreckage’ — sweet! I never realized before how much the Tripwires sound resembles a hard, tight, hook-laden Rockpile.