OK, I admit it. I am a hopeless Star Wars fan. Been so ever since I watched he first (fourth) film, at the tender age of eight. Come to think of it, that is way to young. I would not let my daughter watch these movies if she was eight. Granted, the early ones were not as brutal. No graphic depictions of people's legs being cut off or burning them alive. *Shiver* Anyways. I was also a Lego freak. I loved to build gigantic, elaborate stuff from those tiny bricks. So how thrilled do you think I was when I saw this? http://www.fbtb.net/images/rotb.mov I love it! Especially Darth Vader conducting the stormtrooper orchestra doing the Imperial March. Tee-hee.

Well, I guess the sexual revolution is finally over. In this country, that is. America has firmly slided back into being terrified with anything naked, or anything perceived to be naked. It's the fifties, folks. The nineteen-fifties, that is. Or maybe the eighteen-fifties. At least you could show a pickture of woman's bare back in the nineteen-fifties, right?. Well, some radio station down in Norfolk VA decided to advertise their station by putting up billboards of bare-backed women with the tag line -Go Rock Yourself-: http://vartv.com/wnor_censored_babes.jpg (More on this at http://vartv.com/) Their poor taste aside, and looking past the incessant, degrading sell-your-crap-by-posting-pictures-of-pretty-girls, you would think there would not be much to say about this. Not so in the opinion of city officials in Norfolk. They demanded the billboards be pulled down because of concerns about, and get this, perceived partial nudity! PERCEIVED! Sheez. That is so sad. What are these people so afraid of? How did this ever get to be called land of the free?

See, here is an example of how strangely my brain works: As I was reading about Linda Buck's fascinating olfactory studies, http://www.hhmi.org/news/buck4.html , all I could think about was why so few women have gotten the Nobel Prize. In anything. But especially in science. A hundred years ago this Monday, Marie Curie had to sit in the audience while her husband gave the Nobel lecture. Since then, only three other women have been awarded the Nobel Prize in physics or in chemistry, and none since 1964. Nineteen-sixty-four! In addition to Dr. Buck, only six women have been awarded the Prize in physiology or medicine, the last one of those ten years ago. It is only in literature and peace that women receive moderate recognition, ten and twleve of them, respectively. Now how am I supposed to explain to my daughter, when the time comes, that these women are not the exception? That any woman is just as capable as any man? That Maria Goeppert-Mayer and Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin were not strange crackpots, an exception to some transparent gender rule, but brilliant scientists? So brilliant, indeed, that they even overcame this species' bias against strong, thinking women. I guess I will just have to rely on her trusting me, and not the rest of society, screaming at her that despite everything, she is somehow not quite as good.

I know that I have once again stopped taking care of this beast. But this time it is not my fault. Honest. My Blogger has gone all japanese on me. No no, this is not just some lame excuse. See for yourself: http://flickr.com/photos/49503151873@N01/ , if you don't believe me. Even the buttons are all Kanji, and I really do not feel like taking wild guesses with these my practically only written expressions in years, pitiful as they truly are. I have already pleaded with Blogger support to anglo-sax me, but so far to no avail. Starting to look like a not-so-polite messege to get out of here, with the typepad nerds et al. Or maybe this is just cosmic justice that is catching up with me, for not taking better care of this animal. Anyways, I have reverted to the trusted old Terminal to blog this rant, courtesy of the Blogger API. If you, like me, are a part of that .5% that actually still uses a Mac, and would like to experiment a bit, then here's the poor little code that I stole and mangled for this purpose: http://blog.ziffdavis.com/gallagher/archive/2005/05/31/7024.aspx Seeing how I am still running Jaguar, instead of the fancy new Tiger, which apparently finally lets osascript pass arguments, I actually had to create a seperate AppleScript, blogger, with the ScriptEditor, and run that in the Terminal like so: osascript /Users/user/Documents/Etc/blog/blogger, which kinda defeats the whole purpose. But hey, I'm a nerd wannabe, and this works. So enjoy.