Happy holidays! Today kicks off the holiday season, at least in Michigan. Working backwards: New Years, Christmas, Thanksgiving, and Opening Day. Yup: Today is opening day of deer season in Michigan. Some factories shut down; workers take vacation days; union workers take sick days; Michigan Kennedies call in drunk. It's a jovial time, but you may not want to put on a pair of toy antlers and rummage around your local cornfield.
Note: I don't like venison. And I don't want to hear, "You haven't had it the way I make it." Yeah I have. You can cut it thick, you can cut it thin, you can dice it, you can marinate it in deer urine for 366 days, you can grill it with onions. It doesn't matter: venison is venison. I appreciate that some people like it. Good for them. If they're going to kill the deer, they better eat it. As for me, I'll stick with beef, chicken, turkey, and pork.
Caveat: I like venison beef sticks (like thick Slim Jims), but the venison purists say that's not real venison because it's mixed with other stuff. No matter: I still like it.
Related: I love friend chicken, especially Kentucky Fried Chicken. Okay, so I'm white trash, but a little KFC puts a smile on my trailer. Incidentally, you can now see the Colonel's smile from outer space. KFC today became the world's first brand visible from space. The fast food company has created a 87,500 square feet version of their founder, Colonel Sanders.
Another reason to celebrate today: It's the feast day of Thomas Aquinas' mentor: Albert the Great. He's the patron saint of scientists. He could also be the patron saint of magicians, since the two pursuits were intertwined in science's early years, but I suspect that patronage would present diabolical problems.
I once wrote an article, pointing out that science was merely a continuation of the magicians' lust for control. I've always found it interesting, so I'm reproducing part of it here (simply skip past the block quote, if you're not interested):
Although not commonly acknowledged, the Renaissance's cutting-edge intellectual current was magic. The daring intellectuals of the day were magicians. Marsilio Ficino, Cornelius Agrippa, Tommaso Campanella, and Giordano Bruno taught esoteric, magical doctrines to society's upper-crust–a strata of society that has always felt a need to be on the cutting-edge of intellectual pursuit. (In a telling example, the genius pioneer of modern astronomy, Johannes Kepler, was often unable to make a living as an astronomer, so he frequently fell back on working as a court astrologer.) . . .
The Scientific Revolution is an enigma. No one really knows what started it. In her book Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition, the historian of intellectual history Frances Yates examined the science boom of the early seventeenth century. Noting, among other things, that it began at the same time as Hermes Trismegistus' downfall, she concluded that the attitude of magic didn't die away, but rather was passed to the arena of science. Quoting the leading historian of science, A.C. Crombie, she wrote, “'In its initial stages, the Scientific Revolution came about rather by a systematic change in intellectual outlook, than by an increase in technical equipment'.” This systematic change in intellectual outlook was the old Renaissance magician's urge to control passed to the hands of a new discipline. The attitude was the same; the tools for asserting the attitude had merely changed. “The new world views, the new attitudes, the new motives which were to lead to the emergence of modern science [previously] made their appearance” in Renaissance magic.
Forget the cheesy chat-up lines, flash car or dodgy dancing, men are now whipping out their mobiles to attract the ladies, research from Sheffield Hallam University reveals.
The research also found men actively display their phones more than women in social situations to look important and popular and also to show off to male peers.
So, do the guys want to be seen with big cell phones or little ones?
A Russian woman who drank up to 5,000 litres of Coca Cola has successfully sued the company for making her ill.
Natalya Kashuba, 27, the owner of an up-market clothes shop, drank up to three litres of the soft drink every day for five years.
Three liters is about 16 cans a day. There are 140 calories in a can, so she was drinking about 2,250 calories a day. Did I hear that Letterman is trying to call her? Is my Coke-loving wife jealous?
