The Daily Parker

I discovered this joke from the head of Duke's CCMBA IT department:

An accountant is having a hard time sleeping and goes to see his doctor. "Doctor, I just can't get to sleep at night."

"Have you tried counting sheep?"

"That's the problem - I make a mistake and then spend three hours trying to find it."

And 24 hours from now, I'll be somewhere over Minnesota on my way to Shanghai...

Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, whose work I have followed for years, want to arrest the Pope when he visits the U.K. in September:

Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, the atheist author, have asked human rights lawyers to produce a case for charging Pope Benedict XVI over his alleged cover-up of sexual abuse in the Catholic church.

The pair believe they can exploit the same legal principle used to arrest Augusto Pinochet, the late Chilean dictator, when he visited Britain in 1998.

Dawkins and Hitchens believe the Pope would be unable to claim diplomatic immunity from arrest because, although his tour is categorised as a state visit, he is not the head of a state recognised by the United Nations.

I think the Pope's conduct in the child-abuse cover-up completely destroys any credibility and moral authority Ratzinger claims to have through his office. Still, despite the history of the U.K. vis a vis the Catholic Church, I caution Dawkins that perhaps this isn't the best way to make his case.

I think Dawkins was correct last month when he suggested the Pope "should remain in charge of the whole rotten edifice - the whole profiteering, woman-fearing, guilt-gorging, truth-hating, child-raping institution - while it tumbles," which creates dramatic irony, rather than trying to arrest him, which makes Ratzinger a victim. I just hope more children aren't tied up and raped before it happens.

Darwin's Tears is now available in printed form. (It's been available for Kindle for a couple of weeks.)

Before continuing yesterday's list of Star Wars lines that only a 14-year-old could love, I need to tip my hat to reader AS who found this sparkling diamond of a list. Change one word in a Star Wars quote to "pants" and you get, for example, "I find your lack of pants disturbing," or, "In his pants you will find a new definition of pain and suffering." Fascinating that the list includes lines from all six movies, and yet only lines from the first three made it into the top 20.

Here's a clue. Here are the top 10 lines from The Empire Strikes Back:

1. "And I thought they smelled bad...on the OUTSIDE!"
2. "Possible he came in through the south entrance."
3. "I must've hit it pretty close to the mark to get her all riled up like that, huh, kid?"
4. "Hurry up, golden rod..."
5. "That's OK, I'd like to keep it on manual control for a while."
6. "But now we must eat. Come, good food, come..."
7. "Control, control! You must learn control."
8. "There's an awful lot of moisture in here."
9. "Size matters not. Judge me by my size, do you?"
10. "I thought that hairy beast would be the end of me!"

And from Return Of The Jedi:

1. "I need more men."
2. "Our instructions are to give it only to Jabba himself."
3. "Thanks for coming after me."
4. "Rise, my friend."
5. "I can't do it, R2."
6. "Look, I want you to take her."
7. "I'm endangering the mission. I shouldn't have come."
8. "General Solo, somebody's coming."
9. "I have felt him, my master." "Strange that I have not."
10. "Back door. Good Idea!"

Further evidence that Lucas lost his art when he did the first three.

Did you ever wonder about these lines from the original Star Wars?

1. "She may not look like much, but she's got it where it counts, kid."
2. "Curse my metal body, I wasn't fast enough!"
3. "Look at the size of that thing!"
4. "Sorry about the mess..."
5. "You came in that thing? You're braver than I thought."
6. "Aren't you a little short for a storm trooper?"
7. "You've got something jammed in here real good."
8. "Put that thing away before you get us all killed!"
9. "Luke, at that speed, do you think you'll be able to pull out in time?"
10. "Get in there, you big furry oaf, I don't care what you smell!"

Looked at a certain way—i.e., like a 14-year-old would—they're kind of funny.

Bonus 11th line, from reader SSH: "Take care of yourself, Han. I guess that's what you're best at, isn't it?"

Truly stunning news from Russia this morning, with devastating repercussions for Poland:

A plane carrying the Polish president, Lech Kaczynski, and dozens of the country’s top political and military leaders crashed in a heavy fog in western Russia on Saturday morning, killing everyone aboard.

... Among those on board, according to the Web site of the newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza, were [President Lech] Kaczynski; his wife, Maria; former Polish president-in-exile Ryszard Kaczorowski; the deputy speaker of Poland’s parliament, Jerzy Szmajdzinski; the head of the president’s chancellery, Wladyslaw Stasiak; the head of the National Security Bureau, Aleksander Szczyglo; the deputy minister of foreign affairs, Andrzej Kremer; the chief of the general staff of the Polish army, Franciszek Gagor; the president of Poland’s national bank, Slawomir Skrzypek; the commissioner for civil rights protection, Janusz Kochanowski; the heads of all of Poland’s armed forces; and dozens of members of parliament.

The crash fits the strict definition of tragedy, as have so many air crashes involving VIPs:

A press secretary for ... the governor of Smolensk, said the landing took place under very bad visibility, and Russian air traffic controllers advised the crew to land in Minsk, but the crew decided to land anyway. The Polish news channel TVN24 reported that moments before the crash, air traffic controllers had refused a Russian military aircraft permission to land, but that they could not refuse permission to the Polish plane.

And unbelievable irony:

[Kaczynski] had been due in western Russia to commemorate the anniversary of the murder of thousands of Polish officers by the Soviet Union at the beginning of World War II. The ceremonies were to be held at a site in the Katyn forest close to Smolensk, where 70 years ago members of the Soviet secret police executed more than 20,000 Polish officers captured after the Soviet Army invaded Poland in 1939.

The crash quite literally decimated the Polish government. Poland has some difficult days ahead.

Update: Author and pilot James Fallows explains why this is a tragedy in the literal, Greek-dramatic sense I meant above.

That the governor of Virginia is stupid, or racist? And how well does he actually represent the Virginia Republican Party?

This time, he proclaimed April "Confederate History Month," but left out a detail:

Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell apologized Wednesday for leaving out any reference to slavery in his recent proclamation designating April as Confederate History Month, calling it a "major omission."

"The failure to include any reference to slavery was a mistake, and for that I apologize to any fellow Virginian who has been offended or disappointed," McDonnell said in a written statement.

Some mistake. The proclamation read, in part, "It is important for all Virginians to reflect upon our Commonwealth's shared history, to understand the sacrifices of the Confederate leaders, soldiers and citizens during the period of the Civil War, and to recognize how our history has led to our present." It left out how the sacrifices of the Virginia Commonwealth had as their proximate cause Robert E. Lee's abrogation of his oath to the U.S. Army, and had as their consequences the deaths of 600,000 Americans.

CNN buries some inconvenient facts for Gov. McDonnell at the end of today's article:

The Sons of Confederate Veterans asked the governor to declare April Confederate History Month in Virginia, which had seceded from the Union on April 17, 1861.

Brandon Dorsey, a spokesman for the group, told CNN Radio that Confederate History Month isn't about slavery or race, but about studying the four-year history of the Confederacy. He said it will also help draw visitors to the many Civil War battle sites in Virginia, helping to boost tourism.

"The proclamation's main goal is to call attention to the fact that there is Confederate history in the state of Virginia, of course, across the South," Dorsey said. "It's simply a tool to expose individuals to that history. ... It's not meant to discriminate against anybody."

Other Southern states have issued similar proclamations for April. In Alabama, Republican Gov. Bob Riley declared April, the month the Civil War began, as Confederate History and Heritage Month. His statement condemned slavery.

Note to Confederates everywhere: you can honor the memory the Civil War without appearing to endorse slavery by simply remembering the war. If you think Virginia attempting to secede from the U.S. was a good idea, that's of course your right as an American. But the Confederate leaders picked the wrong issue to go to war over. Slavery was vital to the Southern economy through the 1860s. That doesn't mean it was defensible.

I'm glad the Party of Lincoln has come full circle. It keeps things nice and ironic.

Last one today, with two articles on paying cash v. paying with credit cards. First, Ryan Sager at Neuroworld:

Every person’s financial situation and mind works differently. For some people, doing many more of their transactions in cash (or check — you have to have some way to pay bills) would be a huge improvement. If you shop a lot recreationally, for instance, this could slow you down. For some people, just using a debit card could be the answer. For me and other people who like a lot of control and data and feedback — and I swear this whole post isn’t a viral add for Mint.com — a solution like credit cards plus something like… Mint.com is a good answer.

The key, as in so many things, is a high degree of self knowledge, a willingness to experiment and track results, and the information to understand what biases might be driving your behavior.

An older article on the same subject from Jonah Lehrer:

What's interesting to me is the way credit cards take advantage of some innate flaws in the brain. When we buy something with cash, the purchase involves an actual loss - our wallet is literally lighter. Credit cards, however, make the transaction abstract, so that we don't really feel the downside of spending money. Brain imaging experiments suggest that paying with credit cards actually reduces activity in the insula, a brain region associated with negative feelings. As George Loewenstein, a neuroeconomist at Carnegie-Mellon says, "The nature of credit cards ensures that your brain is anaesthetized against the pain of payment." Spending money doesn't feel bad, so you spend more money.

Once again I remember the semi-dystopian Friday by Robert Heinlein, in which he imagines a Republic of California with a constitutional right to credit. Of course, that means everyone in California is in debt....

It turns out, all that pollen covering my car happened in part because of the really pleasant winter we had in Raleigh this year. Really:

The N.C. Department of Environment and Natural Resources' Air Quality Division measured a sample of air Wednesday that had 3,524 pollen grains per cubic meter at its Raleigh office.

The count normally falls between 1,000 and 1,500 in the spring. The previous peak was on March 27, 2007, when air quality staff over at DENR measured 2,925 pollen grains per cubic meter.

The jump in pollen has made this a stuffy, sneezy, eye-itching spring for pollen-allergic Triangle residents.

Be grateful, however, you're not in Winston-Salem. The pollen count there was measured at 9,632 grains per cubic meter on Tuesday, according to DENR.

Despite the predicted thunderstorms tonight, predicted pollen levels remain "very high" (only because "OMFG" isn't an official pollen level).

Apparently, though, it's worse elsewhere:

Via Andrew Sullivan, a bit of morning hilarity (NSFW and kind of gross around 4:00 but funny as hell):