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as for the cats thing i was trying to work out what a hashtag translation of #catscatscats would be in as many languages as possible.

I got french and italian so far.

trí cait  (3 cats)

FWIW the German plastinated people tour, Body Worlds, is less shady than the other (plastinates only volunteer donor bodies who sign up while they are still alive, no Chinese prisoners). It's one of the most surreally beautiful things I've ever seen. The competitor one, Bodies, is all Chinese prisoners who did not give consent.

Thanks Nigel - this is good to know. I wasn't against the concept in principle. It was the sourcing of exhibits that bothered me. Mind you, how many museums out there are not full of plunder & bloodshed?

I think Body Worlds swings through CT every now and then, so maybe I'll get to see it and have less ick in my conscience!   

How did we miss this one?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chris_Denning 

I predict vampires are making a comeback.

Vampires have to make a comeback...or else they're just corpses.

The "Bodies" exhibit by the crazy German anatomist dude (or the rival offshoot exhibition).

I was encouraged to go see this in New York when I was at massage school. I did not for the following reasons:

a) I aced all my anatomy exams at school from good old fashion books & flash cards. Seeing cadavers is not as useful as you think, especially when you consider that the clients you work on are alive. Turns out working on living people and dessicated husks reeking of formaldehyde is not the same.

b) More importantly, the vast number of subjects in the exhibit are Chinese. Given how easy it is to get onto death row in China (and how very very hard it is to get off when you are innocent), I'm having a hard time believing that there's a torrent of adult Chinese men (and some women) whose burning ambition in life is to be turned into plastic medical mannequins. It's ok though, apparently executed 'criminals' want to help Westerners learn Science! The thought that maybe even one single person in there might've been someone on death row for a crime they didn't commit and ended up with all their flesh removed and posing naked holding a fucking golf club was a chance I wasn't going to take.

Thus, I didn't go, took the day off and went on a road trip with Mrs Mang instead. In boycotting this event I also forfeited my chance of meeting David Blaine who, apparently, hung around my classmates to remain in earshot of my anatomy teacher.

Others:

Facebook/Twitter - have never done either. No inclination to.

Walmart - Avoid as much as possible.

Dunkin' Donuts - Even if run by enlightened super-beings of the most elevated consciousness, the coffee is beyond terrible.

Amazon - Only buy from them after all other reasonable options are exhausted. I used to love being Mr "One Click" and getting all this stuff. That was until I started to talk to people who ran real bookstores, worked in publishing or are authors. The Amazon business model has made the publishing industry bland and overly conservative. The variety of what gets published has shrunk because, unless you drop a multi million unit-shifter in their lap, they have no interest. It's the literary equivalent of the music industry. Book deals are highly tied into Amazon sales rankings. One author I spoke to over 4th July weekend told me that his book was being sold through 'Amazon' affiliates as being 'used' on the day of release!

Suu and the Alphaman beat me to it. Basically, too many parameters and none of them seem prioritized.

As for Hartford, the only thing biological there is the scum and miasma that infests it. The city is mostly financial jobs - insurance, financial planners etc. Don't know what opportunities there are in biology in other CT towns/cities. Would have to look into that...

Oh, undoubtedly you are right... it's just that when it comes to my wife, I want her to be as safe as humanly possible.  I don't want to sound like I'm mental illness witch hunter, but when Nigel mentioned that aspect of the bullying phenomena, the story (which is still ongoing, that incident I mentioned only happened a matter of weeks ago) popped into my head.

I know how you feel. In Mrs Mang's last job, she worked with some pretty deranged people. Some of them were kind of people where you just had this feeling that you're going to see them on the 6 o'clock news complete with camera close ups of crime scene tape and those little markers they use for shell casings.

Does Mrs Hoopla have other work colleagues or higher ups to talk to or does the buck stop with her?

My wife recently hired a young woman, who in the interview seemed extremely exceptional... she was outgoing, intelligent, had all the right schooling and references... her first week there she came to my wife in a panic that someone had given out her information to a guy who was stalking her online.  My wife obviously took this very seriously, and took her to a board room to discuss... the conversation quickly broke down as the female described the situation it seemed obvious (I don't recall the exact details at the moment) that it would have been impossible for this individual to have gained any information about the female, at least from her very very new job.

A week or so later, she came to my wife again, in tears.  She claimed that her co-workers were in cahoots against her, talked about her all the time behind her back, made running jokes at her expense, and finally deleted the work she had due.  My wife has known her co-workers for years, and obviously found all this a little hard to swallow.  Keep in mind she's been at this job for less than three weeks at this point.  My wife gets IT to look into the issue, and they discover that the work was never on the computer to begin with.  Suddenly the new girl remembers that she had it all on a flash drive, which she must have taken home.  Or maybe one of the other employees stole it, trying to sabotage her.

Also, somewhere in this conversation her stalker comes up again, but this time the stalker is a female.  Someone from high school, apparently.  When my wife mentions the male stalker, the girl begins to cry that nobody ever understands her.

I told my wife: you have to get rid of this chick before she comes in and stabs the fuck out of everyone.  And get your supervisor to do the firing.   That seems like a lot of warning signs to me.  Am I right?

Could be schizophrenia?

When step-Mang #2 got married, I sat next to one of her good friends at the wedding reception. Seemed like a nice, sensitive young woman. But she talked...A LOT. I started to realize that across however many hours dinner lasted, she talked entirely about herself and while I learned a great many things about her extremely complicated, drama-stricken life, she didn't once ask anything about me. I could have written biography of moderate length about her while she, on the other hand, would've had trouble remembering my name.

When she wasn't yammering to me, she kept going over to step-Mang #2 and tried to embroil her in yet more drama, plots and what have you.(Most of which centered around the desperately unhealthy relationship between her on again, off again boyfriend). She was fairly sure that all the woman in the bathroom room were talking about her, giving her the 'evil eye' and all the rest. Aside from the compulsive talking she was drinking at a fairly alarming rate, even for a wedding.

Later on, we heard from Step Mang #2 that this behaviour got worse & worse complete with 'voices in the head' and all that. Turned out to be a classic schizophrenic break which, thankfully was diagnosed and medicated (correctly for once) and the person concerned is doing pretty well and getting on with things.

One of the interesting features of schizophrenia that I heard about is the way in which it slices up time perception & memory. It's possible that she (the new hiree) sincerely believed she had done the work or was about to. Because a person suffering from this loses the normal linear sequence of events, they can frequently end up in odd situations, places etc without a proper memory of the how & why. Maybe she believed she had done the work and couldn't find it because of 'time slippage' and then panicked that it was missing. If you're paranoid, you're going to assume someone else must've fucked with it.

This woman sounds like she needs help. Gotta wonder if this has been diagnosed or whether she's got medication(s) that are not being used correctly, if at all.

Don't know enough about these things in terms of threat level to your wife or other employees. Having seen this in Step Mang 2's friend (and some others) it seems like a different type of problem to the 'I hate my parents/school/police so I'll shoot them' syndrome.

What a shock. I wonder if he's still going for the "crap satan" look. The last load of mugshots with that shitty goatee made him look hilarious.

What is shocking is this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gary_Glitter

In particular, the number of times the phrase 'reduced sentence' appears.

This just in from our 'completely unsurprising' dept:

http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-27720875

Remember good old fashioned torture? (You know, before it got all politically correct)

Remember the time before the War On Drugs, when heroin was less available, more expensive and of lower purity?

Remember Sundown towns?

It sounds like he's autotuned his voice....and yet it's still completely out of tune. HOW IS THAT POSSIBLE!??? 

And this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gSjLiQxEZlM

(apologies if it's a repost...)

Mangrove, even if you're right, NEVER GET IN THE WAY OF A GOOD POLEMIC.


Anyway, I still hate Chick Corea with the passion of a thousand suns.

How the hell did Herbie Hancock turn out so fucking cool if he started in Jazz?

He's just one groovy motherfucker.

I have in laws in Maine.

My wife's niece was visiting from Maine with her boyfriend. He explained that his buddy wanted to go to Cabela's to check out a gun which, he had no interest in but figured it was something to do.

So, the friend is talking guns with the Cabela's guy and for yuks says "See him over there...he's a liberal!"

The Cabela's guy calls him over and then reams him out in public, in all seriousness without a trace of irony, tongue in cheek nor indeed any kind of awareness..

"WHAT ARE YOU GOING TO DO WHEN THE SYRIANS INVADE!!!??"

Watch out Mainers, Assad has his eyes on you.

[Chick Corea.]

Chick Corea.

This man made it his life's work to ruin three, I repeat, three kinds of music-- and he succeeded.

This is the guy that decided it would be a great idea to graft jazz, rock and roll, and latin american music together in a hideous, Frankenstonian Cerebus of a genre called "Jazz Fusion". 

So awful was his power that he was able to convice Miles Davis that this was a good idea.  Granted, Miles was on a lot of heroin at the time, but still...

What's worse is that this is directly responsible for the abject horror we know as "soft jazz".  And because of that, RWHN.

I want to go back in time and crush this man's fingers with a 10-pound hammer.

I'm a little uncertain about your chronology here...lol....

During the 1960s, the middle aged Miles Davis was facing a potential career crisis. Jazz was beginning it's decline in popularity, Miles wanted to be 'cutting edge' but did not want to join in with the 'New Thing' (aka Free or Avant Garde jazz). So, he opted initially for a middle ground by bringing in a bunch of younger players (Hancock, Shorter, Carter & Williams) who could play all the mainstream jazz material (blues, ballads & standard songs) but had an ear to the kinds of things going on with Ornette Coleman, Coltrane quartet etc. (Snarky side note is that Wynton Marsalis states that at this point, Miles had peaked technically and basically wasn't up to the music that his younger cohorts were capable of playing)

Having gone as far with that as he could, Miles was looking for something new, especially if it carried a larger paycheck. He really liked James Brown, Sly Stone and Jimi Hendrix...(note that he liked Jimi but not the rest of the Experience who he thought were terrible.) Add that to a massive amount of cocaine, the fact that music companies were giving him free electric pianos and that Miles was fucking younger women who were into rock & R&B and HEY PRESTO....FUSION was born. It's when Miles' hair started to recede and he gave up wearing Brooks Brothers suits in favor of bell bottoms, massive sunglasses and stuff with tassels. 

Everyone who had a career in 'fusion' went through Miles' band first:

Herbie Hancock ---> Headhunters
Joe Zawinul, Wayne Shorter ---> Weather Report
Chic Corea ---> Return To Forever
John McLaughlin ---> Mahavishnu Orchestra
Tony Williams ---> Lifetime
George Benson ---> gave up straight jazz in favor of making pop & soul records.


All of these people had established careers playing acoustic jazz, then they played with Miles in the 60s/70s following the gradual dissolution of the 2nd quintet. After their time in Miles' band they all went and made fusion records of their own. Miles made his pianists play the Fender Rhodes. People like Hancock actually liked technology so he rolled with it. Keith Jarrett on the other hand thought it was godawful, hated playing it and the music he did with Miles, but he just wanted to be around him. Unlike the others, he did not make a fusion record but went back to his regular piano and that weird, squeaky, scat singing noise that he makes when he plays.

So, I contend that Mr Corea did not invent fusion. Miles Davis having a mid-life crisis created fusion.

I don't know who to blame for 'smooth jazz' but I don't think that can be laid at Mr Corea's door. What he does need a bitch slapping for however, is his insistence that his being a big old Scientologist has negatively impacted his opportunities as a performer. Uhh....Hollywood much?

Should you get that time travel thing working, to prevent the existence of fusion, you'd have to check Miles into rehab, get him to date women his own age and explain that he can't ask Columbia records for huge salary raises just because he wants them.