Can't learn to shop happily

So one downside to doing the grocery shopping if you're a guy: they won't bag your groceries. I've been doing the grocery shopping for more than four years by myself (or sometimes with one or two kids in tow). I can go through the checkstand with a full cart and the bagger will wander off to help a woman with a little handbasket of groceries. I can go through with a full cart and two babies (as I did on Sunday) and the bagger walked away as I was unloading my stuff onto the belt.

I don't think it's just me, I have noticed that women and the elderly get their stuff bagged no problem but I see other men bagging their own fairly often. It's much worse at Dierberg's than it is at Schnucks, surprisingly. It doesn't bother me when it's just me, I don't *need* help when it's just me, but when I have Boo or the babies it seems a bit absurd that I'm bagging my own groceries. In the past I've mentioned it to managers who say "Gee, I'm sorry, maybe it's because we were really busy." Yea, the store was jam packed 5 minutes ago but now strangely enough you've got more baggers than customers.

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We're gonna shake, we're gonna quake

I was trying to get back to sleep after taking Boo to the bathroom. We're doing nighttime potty training so I'm up every few hours to make sure she gets to the bathroom. Suddenly I feel a very gentle shaking. As in the whole house is gently being awoken from it's slumber. "Earthquake" I thought. Well, this is Missouri and earthquakes large enough to feel aren't common. Boo's bed was tapping the wall, I checked to make sure she wasn't messing around. Mae was up, wondering what it was. We theorized it might be a big truck, but we hadn't heard a truck and it lasted far too long. I said "I grew up in California. I know an earthquake when I feel one." You can feel the difference between a house being shaken by tornado speed winds and being shaken from the ground up. I went through the two biggest quakes in CA of the last twenty years. I was in the Bay Area during the Loma Prieta quake (the World Series quake) and in L.A. for the Northridge quake.

West Salem, IL

Technical Details

If you felt it, report it!

It took 40 minutes for any local news site to have it up (KMOX), the post updated about another 10 minutes after that. I went straight to the USGS site, though they only update every half hour or so.

UPDATE Aftershocks will be listed here. Thanks to Chris Guthrie for that link.

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I am the first mammal to wear pants

There have been a few stories about the dishonesty of the producers of Expelled, including the false pretenses of their interviews with several preeminent scientists, their possilbe copyright violations in some of the material included in the movie, refusing to screen the movie for anyone but True Believers, and of course expelling a scientist who is *in the movie* from a screening.

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In the dream I fall into the sleepless sea

[10:01] rev: We started night potty training last night. So I'm a zombie. But I think we successfully trained me to wake up every two hours and get Boo up to go to the bathroom.

[10:01] sparky: lol. i don't think that was the goal

This of course reminds me of the classic Black Adder scene about Great Boo. But that might be the sleep deprivation talking. It tends to say things like that.

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Show no crip to pretend when I`m seen

It is at least encouraging that the parents are planning for their childs' future.

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But youre brainwashed yes you are

Today was another evangelist proselytizing to a gullible audience. In this case a guy who identified himself as "a .Net guy" spent the better part of a half hour explaining to another guy and a few onlookers why the iPod is the worst MP3 player on the market and Apple is evil and you're locked in to their platform forever. Among the false claims he made, most of them repeatedly:

• You can only play music from the iTunes Music Store on the iPod.
• You can only play that music on one device, so if you authorize it to play on the iPod you can't play it on your computer.
• You can't stream the music to your TV or stereo at all unless you buy more Apple hardware.
• If your hard drive crashes you can never recover all the music you paid for at the iTunes store.

I opted not to correct any of his statements because he was defining his entire opposition to Apple on a combination of bad information and a loudly proclaimed loyalty to Microsoft. True Believers aren't worth talking to because they are unwilling to incorporate new or corrected information into their world view. I've talked to guys like this before and when I say something like "Actually, the iPod will play any MP3 file. Whether you get it from iTunes, Amazon, the web, or rip it from your CDs yourself" they go on a rant about Apple's DRM which doesn't allow AAC files to play on MP3 players other than the iPod. Note that AAC is not MP3. You correct their facts and they simply ignore what you say and respond to a different argument. I vacilate as to whether their tactics are due to a fundamental mendacity or simply being too stupid to understand that AAC is not the same file format as MP3.

Given the plethora of devices that allow you to stream iTunes to your tv or stereo, including Linksys, Slingbox, Wii, and *Microsoft XBOX* it's just plain ignorance on the part of .NetGuy to be unaware. Unless he was being intentionally dishonest. Given my further experiences with him throughout the day I consider it a distinct possibility.

And I'll note that the linux zealots (I love linux, I use linux, but I'm not a fanatic about it) are worse than the Microsoft zealots.

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We'd need an ark to survive the drool

There are few things more tedious than a Jehovah's Witness and an Evangelical Christian arguing doctrine. They completely talk past each other and never approach even attempting to understand what the other is saying. I did note that the evangelicals tend to move the goalposts a lot more often. What is amazing is how often they both say things like "we know xyz". Well, no, we don't. We know that something that happened 2000 years ago or more (if you're talking Old Testament) has been through several mistranslations (intentional and otherwise, informed by political agendas, racism, nationalism, and valuing ideology over accuracy) over many hundeds of years Funny that any time the non-Evangelical brings up a point that contradicts the position of the Evangelical, the Evangelical claims it's an unimportant issue regardless of what it is.
Evangelical makes a statement about an issue (in this case the number of witnesses in a case)
Jehovah's Witness mentions a story in the bible
Ev claims that's not in the REAL bible (Meaning, I think, that that story isn't in the KJV Bible)
She grabs his bible and points to it
He then claims it doesn't say what she thinks it says, that the text is different between the two
She points out that no, they're pretty much identical
He then claims that it doesn't mean what the words say.
This is why I don't bother discussing any issues at all with True Believers of any type (religion, economics, politics, software, music, etc). The one thing they had in coming was their persecution complex. They agreed wholeheartedly that the reason they were kicked out during voire dire is because they were so much smarter than the lawyers in the case who didn't even recognize that they quoted the Bible in their answer to the questions.

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She told the truth and then she lied

Ah, April Fool's. The day where you have to assume everything you read online is fake. Wait, how is that different from every other day?

Moderately annoying, as I have to assume all the stories/blog posts*/etc are fake so I simply won't bother reading pretty much anything today. I hate April Fool's day.

It's not that I don't appreciate a good fake story. It's that so many April Fool's stories are pretty much totally lame. Predictable, unimaginative, and trite are the themes for the day. Nothing like Joey Skaggs or the Spaghetti Harvest.

*I'm looking at YOU cybrpunk...

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