U.S. military is going to launch a study to better understand why people suicide while in the military. Evidently the rate now exceeds that of the civilian population which is not usual. With all the variables that the study plans to examine it is to be hoped that they'll also look at the possible role played by the "stop-loss" orders that are extracting more service involuntarily out of the people who have already served. It would be interesting to see if there is a correlation between the two.

I don't have to live like this.

That phrase caught my attention and i've been mulling it for awhile now. It's true. It's something of an epiphany. I don't have to live like this. But then the question is: How do i want to live? What do i want? What is the best way of getting there? Having had to cope with depression of varying degrees of severity for most of my life i've had lots of practice with staying out of touch with how i feel about almost everything. So if there's aspects of my life that i don't want how would i be able to improve on it if it really isn't clear as to what i do want? Even if it isn't possible yet to be terribly articulate about what i want, it's getting easier to figure out what i don't want.

I spent some time today looking through newspaper clippings and other assorted papers, most of which are momentos of other phases of my life. Some i kept but there were others that ended up being tossed because there's no foreseeable way for them to be useful to me in the future. Science doesn't want me anymore; i've been away too long so why should a reprint of an article from a biophysics journal be kept? Even if i myself wanted to get back into laboratory work there's no reputable lab that would hire me so why keep something that reminds me of something i can never go back to and would probably make me acutely miserable if i did?

What is it about some people that they think the solution to not having a particular, personal relationship with a given person is to murder that individual? That's so messed up on so many levels.

"She walks like a man!"

That's what i heard when i passed four teenagers on the street today. Back in my 20's when someone addressed me as "sir" i might joke about it but it was pretty offensive. The red-necks in Illinois who sneered at me and said i was trying to look like a man only confirmed for me the stereotype that red-necks are stupid, parochial, and a waste of carbon. Now that i'm middle aged it's more amusing than offensive--but it still strikes me as pretty weird. I suppose it's better than someone saying that i'm walking like a three-legged terrier.

But it still isn't clear to me what it is they mean. My gait is rather wide and tends to be quicker than that of many people. Except for those periods of my life when i've been limping from an injury there is a tendency for me to bounce; but i've never noticed men as a general group to bounce. If anything i'd be inclined to say i walk like a cross between an android and a pogo-stick.

So, how does a man walk anyway? Or perhaps the more interesting question would be: why do people expect folks to walk a certain way depending on their gender?

Fun flash animation (even if you don't speak or read Japanese):

http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/461635

blog rating revisited
Worldle.net has a fun toy that takes text and makes a word cloud out of it. My blog entry concerning the rating of blogs, when run through their applet, looks like this:

If you're interested in American politics...

You might be interested in what Mr. Uhler writes about the current interest in dissecting whatever Obama says. Remembering from high school history class the contrast/compare exercises concerning Jeffersonian versus Jacksonian democracy I can't help but think that what he writes is true. Corporate culture is American culture, sentimental thoughts to the contrary notwithstanding. Is this a good thing or a bad thing? That probably depends on what one thinks of humans in general.

Experian, one of the top credit reporting companies, isn't very happy with another company called LifeLock because

LifeLock's scheme costs Experian millions of dollars every year in processing large numbers of improper initial fraud alerts, mailing mandatory notices to consumers, and providing free credit reports to consumers who are not eligible for such reports

There are also, apparently, other reasons why Experian is not happy with what LifeLock is doing, too.

Under other circumstances i might actually have some sympathy for Experian, but given my experience with them hounding me for months to provide information about a company that doesn't exist simply because one of my domains has ".com" at the end of its name, i can't say that i'm sorry that Experian is being compelled to provide free credit reports to people whose records may well be inaccurate for reasons for which Experian only has itself to blame.

This blog is not suitable for young children

Tell me something i didn't already know. On the other hand, it's mildly amusing that one of the factors that resulted in the R rating was the use of the word "crap".

Oh, my.

Back in the days of my formative years, "crap" was considered a reasonable substitute for the nasty, never to be said aloud word "shit". I remember the first time i said the word "shit" in school; my third grade teacher's reaction was such that you'd think i had just pulled a stiletto out of my sleeve and stabbed a classmate; her eyes got really big, the color of her face changed, and she screamed at me. Mind you, i had been hearing the word tossed around at home by my father for as long as i could remember. He used other words that were considered unsuitable for public speech, too, but considering how often he used the word "shit" compared to the others it seemed a relatively innocuous word at the time. So if even the word "crap" is considered unsuitable i have to wonder how the folks at justsayhi.com would rate a site that offered tutorials on statistics and used a certain gambling game to illustrate concepts of probability.

What's really a hoot, though, is that my website magpiebridge.net is as a whole rated "G" by these same people. The poetry page mentions fun things like guns, ropes, and arsenic, the prose page alludes to death only slightly less often than a page of obituaries, and the nonfiction section by itself easily gets an NC-17 rating from all the times the word "suicide" is used. To give a more apt rating of a website there should probably be an option to indicate that it *is* a website being evaluated so the script that does the rating digs a little deeper than the URL of the page it's initially led to.

Of course, it's really all for fun and isn't meant to be taken seriously. The site that hosts the blog/site rater also carries fun items like How Many Five Year Olds Could You Take in a Fight? and What Are Your Chances of Surviving a Zombie Apocalypse?

At a subtle level, is this person trying to be ironic?

This ad was found on a website that is oriented toward freelance workers. I have blotted out the identifying details to spare the company some degree of embarrassment. The idea is that people who freelance go to the site and post a resume and/or view the jobs available section that describes jobs that companies are trying to fill. Unless there has been a drastic change in the English language recently (and if there was, why wasn't I sent a memo?), the project details section of the jobs available section is supposed to describe the job or at the very least list some minimum skill set that a worker would be expected to possess in order to be considered for the job. So why does this project description do neither? This is for a company that specializes in communication so in a cynical way I find it rather funny that the project description says nothing about the job requirements or what the company is looking for in a worker and instead tries to market the company to prospective workers at what is probably the most general level possible. The company wants a "Web Developer" but that job title could mean anything from a code monkey who can use HTML and CSS to translate content into a format easy to read and navigate to a person with extensive experience with database/website integration. Is the meta message here that the company is really flexible about what it requires from prospective workers to fill a given task or is it rather that the company scarcely has a clue as to what it wants?

I learn something new every day.

According to Adam Curtis, i'm a bully. The very fact that i blog makes me one. Of course, i'm prolly not as much of a bully as people who update their blogs on a daily basis, shrilly proclaiming that anyone and everyone who doesn't agree with my point of view is either stupid or evil, but that i do have a point of view and that i presume to express it in this way somehow still makes me a bully.

Or perhaps Mr. Curtis simply makes sweeping generalizations. But he does have some rather interesting ideas about the expression of ideas in the present age.

Thinking that anti-depressant drugs will keep someone from committing suicide? Think again.

Normally i don't bother with the online "what kind of [fill in the blank] are you" multiple choice tests because, on the whole, they bore me.  But the results of one i tried recently actually seemed to know what it was about.  Results are below:


House Jackalopean
Take What is your true magickal house? today!
Created with Rum and Monkey's Personality Test Generator.

Jackalopean House values originality, independence, thinking outside the box, waaaaaay outside the box! Its emblematic animal is the jackalope, sometimes shown being carried by a Yeti riding the Mothman just to tick off certain types of people. Its colors are magenta and silver foil. Bugs Bunny is the house spirit, Jackalopean house corresponds roughly to the element of Chaos.

Main magickal methods, teachings, type of divination: Chaos Magick and or Synchronistic Engineering, Enlightenment via dynamic discord, Off the wall guessing while sleepy, or just making crap up.

Most potent magickal items owned by and spaces guarded by House: Apples of Chaos fruit juicer, Ethereal Bong of Timothy Leary, Library of Uncensored Forbidden Books.

Philosophy: Life is not only weirder then you think, its weirder than you can think.

Ninety-nine U.S. soldiers killed themselves last year, the highest rate of suicide in the Army in 26 years.  What's even more interesting is this:

The Army also has been working to stem the stigma associated with getting therapy for mental problems, after officials found that troops are avoiding counseling out of fear it could harm their careers.

It would be interesting to know the specifics of how the army is trying to reduce the stigma; if its efforts are limited to the spouting of propaganda it's unlikely to work.

What did she do with her time?

The world's oldest woman died recently at the age of 114 and the thing i wonder about the most is what she did with her time the last decade or so of her life.  Did she read? Gossip with the other residents of the nursing home?  Meditate? Watch television? It's rather unlikely that she went skateboarding.

Last week i spent in West Virginia on retreat and most of the time involved me sitting around with my feet propped up, reading a book about Druids. I had hoped to spend a fair amount of the time hiking around, exploring the land, but various issues made that infeasible though it was possible to take a short walk past the cow pastures toward the end of the week. So lately i've been thinking a fair amount about time and my relationship to it. I'm nowhere near reaching any conclusions, except perhaps that i seem to waste a great deal of it playing games on the computer. I plan to do less of that, but i'm not sure that that is going to make me more efficient at getting other things done; sometimes it seems like the most appropriate thing to do is to do nothing, really.

Korea has a higher suicide rate than Japan. What especially caught my eye in a recent article about suicide in the former country, though, was this comment about people there who use the net to find partners for a suicide pact:

Now they're more careful. Once they've met each other, they shut down the site and switch to e-mail and cellphones. You need a lot of searching and hunches and luck to track down these people.

Perhaps it's naive of me to ask this, but rather than hunt down people who clearly don't want to be found, wouldn't it make more sense to figure out what it is about the present cultural conditions there that inspire so many to suicide and to change that?

The other day i read that the creator of the Dilbert comic strip starts work each day by spending two hours blogging, and then he'll spend the next 3-4 hours working on his comic strips.

Ever wonder what can happen to someone who steals bandwidth?
http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/03/27/john-mccains-myspace-page-hacked/ Not that his site was hacked, really.

Kinda sums up my experience with quite a number of folks:

I'd be pleased to give credit to the creator of
that jpg if i only knew who that person was.

CDC reports that suicide increased among children in 2004. Some people think it might be due to a decreased use of antidepressant drugs while others point out that funding has been cut for programs that give children and teens access to psychological counselling. Personally, i wonder if the spike in the suicide rate was fueled by the muck-raking, lame excuse for journalism that was being splashed all over the net about that time.