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peta’s beauty paegent

Peta periodically runs an event to decide who is the sexiest vegetarian alive. Actually two, male and female. It’s a pool of celebrities; there’s another event for the “sexiest vegetarian next door” for the common folk. My money would be on Siouxsie Sioux and Rob Zombie.

So… is the contest a good idea to recruit new vegetarians, or is it likely to cause teenagers to go vegetarian for a week and then give it up permanently as “too hard” because they lost interest? Obviously it’s not going to brainwash anyone very easily. Saying a celebrity is hot because they’re vegetarian is not quite the same as saying they’re hot because they’re 94 pounds at 6′2″.

Slowly fading blue

Here’s the speech Obama gave in Cairo:

My reaction was fairly much being stunned. I didn’t expect to hear an American president project say things like this in my lifetime. Hope? Sure. But not expect. This is precisely the sorts of thing we need to do, to stop causing the rest of the world to often be righteously angry at us. It’s not projecting moral authority. It’s creating moral authority that we sorely lack, something that’s absolutely critical for a democracy to have for accomplishing any international goals.

Also, it’s impressive that he did not look down at the podium a single time. I would not want to argue against him in a formal debate of any type.

Dr. George Tiller

Any doctor shot for providing abortion services, who then goes back to it after, is already a civil rights hero. To be gunned down even after that - while fully expecting it - is much more.

Advocating or proclaiming the worthiness of anyone’s murder, for even a moment, is hardly “pro-life” and is simply anti-choice.

Condolences to Dr. Tiller’s family and friends, and many hopes that he rests in peace.

reasons I’m vegan

Some things I like about being vegan:

1. 88 animals per year
2. fresher food, especially when chefs cook special orders
3. healthier, which is useful
4. not contributing to the veal industry
5. environmental impact of trading a low-mpg SUV in for something with fuel efficiency
6. being a pacifist 24-7
7. producing more food for people in need
8. being a member of a secret society with arcane rituals, hell-bent on world domination by 2015
9. bean burgers
10. grilled vegetables aren’t just a side dish, so I can grow dinner.
11. eating desert first. if there’s fruit.
12. nearly no cross-contamination in the kitchen. cross-contamination is gross.
13. milk stays fresher, longer, and stores in the pantry for months
14. vegan products are frequently organic
15. carbs
16. naked peta fur protesters are on my side
17. cool flair
18. less pesticide in my diet
19. pre-cooked food might be good to eat without cooking
20. can afford the good snacks at the expensive hippy grocery stores
21. convenient excuse to try out any new restaurants
22. kitchen thermometers are only needed for candy
23. the steak knives stay sharp, even though I use them
24. Hollywood starlets are ever-so-slightly more likely to go out with me. Slightly.
25. an international organization wants to run ads during Super Bowls, to convince the world that vegans are teh hottness
26. desert and brunch are completely indistinguishable
27. my own menu (or used to) at Disney World
28. I use the word “juicy” to accurately describe my food
29. soy lattes
30. thinsulate works better than wool
31. pleather is the new leather
32. my car seats are never sticky or hot enough to burn skin on a hot day in the sub-tropics
33. if my food were to ferment, it would be consumed at a party rather than threatening disease
34. can say I’m committed with a fair amount of authority and credibility
35. no danger of microwaved fish smell
36. finding a place to eat dinner with someone on a restricted diet isn’t very difficult
37. vegan sushi

galaxy zoo

Galaxy Zoo is my latest internaut obsession. Basically, as a user you look at an image of a very distant object (far enough to almost certainly be a galaxy), and answer some simpler questions about what it looks like. There’s no right answer, because the idea to to get many people looking at each galaxy, and then look for the galaxies identified in an interesting way by the most people.

It turns out that experience has almost nothing to do with how accurately one labels a galaxy. Statistically, a PhD and a bored teenager are indistinguishable. Both, however, are far better than any image recognition software found on the market today. So anyone who can recognize a few basic shapes (circle, ellipse, cigar, spiral, line, ring, and random other thing) saves an astronomer an incredible amount of time. Which is important, because this categorizations needs to happen as part of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS), which aims to thoroughly map a large portion of the sky. That actually hasn’t been done before, at the depth when one starts to see many galaxies that aren’t simple blurs. The survey has already made new discoveries based on the categorizing, and the researchers hope to make a few specific discoveries based on the current round.

vegan grilling

Peta has a decent selection of grilling recipes. Many are meat-like, but far from all. They add choices to omnivorous and vegan eating patterns alike. However else they do it, making vegan food appealing to non-vegans is part of Peta’s mission as an outreach organization. That alone may make some of their recipes worth a try.

I’m often asked what, or why, a vegetarian grills. I think the answer is nearly common knowledge. Meats are often covered in or saturated with vegetables (for example, as marinades and sauces) to impart the real flavor of the finished dish. Veggies do things like caramelize, and vary in flavor with changes to temperature in a range of appetizing ways. Some easily-vegan dishes, like fajitas, traditionally require some sort of grilling surface. Also, restaurants frequently run stove tops hundreds of degrees hotter than in a home kitchen, basically grilling everything cooked on them to some extent… and I certainly can eat vegan at many restaurants.

Dark Skies

Dark Skies Awareness is a IYA (International Year of Astronomy) project to educate the public about light pollution and why dark skies matter. They’ve made a video that explains the problem of dark skies disappearing, and how individuals can reduce the light pollution they create.

Star Trek

It’s awesome. Buy tickets in advance. Watch the trailers if you’re not sure whether to go to a theater, they match well.

Tea Partying

Today is the day that the IRS wants their forms and money related to income for 2008.

To be blunt, I’m a pacifist, and if anyone says they support how our government spends money less than I do, I raise a very sceptical eyebrow. I still pay my taxes, because I think it’s the most fair thing to do as someone who benefits from the modern economy and uses government services and laws.

Recently, some people in the GOP have sponsored “teabagging” parties in which people throw teabags to show their disgust at the government spending based on allegedly unfair taxation. Presumably doing so is expressing rage at the Bush government with it’s budget-busting spending, as that’s the administration which ceased to balance the budget (thank Clinton for balancing it in the first place, in the similar aftermath of prior administrations). Apparently this is in imitation of the Boston Tea Party. I suggest there are some differences:

• No one is imposing a tax on tea.
• No one is imposing taxation without representation. Members of Congress and the President are elected. The King of England was not.
• The tea for the Boston Tea Party was stolen from private businesses (as if they weren’t oppressed by the tax…). Republicans are buying the tea to support Lipton, a rather large multinational corporation accused of it’s own forms of oppression.
• The Sons of Liberty - a notorious, acknowledged terrorist group - conducted the first Tea Party. Think “central American death squad” or “more violent and active version of the Weather Underground” for a similar, more recent incarnation of the idea.
• The Sons were afraid of personal repercussions (being upper/middle class), so they disguised themselves as members of another race and committed their acts under cover of night.
• The Tea Party was part of a campaign in which ideological opponents were tarred and feathered. Tarring and feathering was lethal, and the victims died of either shock or sepsis. By comparison, the Tea Party was easy to support.
• The tax being protested was intended to suppress rebellion.
• Many considered the situation at the time to be the precursor to armed revolution.
• The tax being protested was used to pay for troops occupying the colonies, with the express purpose of using armed force to stop local opposition.
• The local, negative economic ramifications of citizens not paying taxes was nil.
• Today’s protesters are not placing themselves in physical danger on a constant basis by being on the frontier far away from the safety of the country they directly supported.
• The Sons were (at least in name) supporting new concepts of organization for the citizenry, new to most of the world including the remote land which controlled the government.
• Asserting that government should be local is not considered treason today. Unless you’re a modern Communist… but I doubt many of today’s protesters say that they are Communists.
• The taxes being protested at the first Party were new. A federal income tax has been around a while, and Obama didn’t invent it. Income tax was invented to fairly provide a revenue stream for the government.

Admittedly, like the first Tea Party, today’s event was organized by some of the wealthiest people in the nation.

I do not think that word means what you think it means.

From NPR:

“I’m going to put people in my place, so when the history of this administration is written, at least there’s an authoritarian voice saying exactly what happened,” Bush said.

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