Inedible Ink

OK, so it’s not an Oscar.

OK, so it’s not for Oscar.

It’s an Emmy, and it’s for the man behind, er, underneath? the voice of Oscar the Grouch. Caroll Spinney will be awarded a lifetime achievement award for his work on Sesame Street.

He does Big Bird too.

Bird brained - The Boston Globe
Caroll Spinney has played Big Bird and Oscar the Grouch on ”Sesame Street” for 37 years — enough time for Oscar to turn from orange to green, Snuffy to be revealed, and a little red monster named Elmo to achieve world domination. At the Daytime Emmys tomorrow, Spinney will accept a Lifetime Achievement Award.

Wordpress tells me:

“Akismet has caught 96 for you since you installed it.”

That was just ten hours ago.
technorati tags: Akismet, spam,

First, an admission: I don’t know any more about Andrea Clarke that you can read right here:Wesley J. Smith on Futile-Care Theory on National Review Online. She and her family are in a perfectly horrific situation that seems to need prayers and miracles.

The bioethics committee at St. Luke’s Hospital in Houston, Texas has decreed that Andrea Clarke should die.

Her case has been deemed “medically futile” and the hospital would withhold treatment.

First, a DU poster tells the story of her sister Andrea, then Rightwing News picks it up. More at: Beth’s MVRWC, Wizbang and Prolife Blogs.

Some, like Andrea’s sister, are quick to point out how this case is nothing like the case involving Terri Schiavo. This, I understand to mean that Andrea is conscious when not sedated and that she believed that Terri had previously expressed a wish to die in a situation such as that in which she spent the end of her life. I also expect that she was in favor of withdrawing food and water from Terri, she would like medical staff to keep her sister alive, and she would like other people who were in favor of withdrawing Terri’s feeding tube to help her in her struggle to keep her sister alive.

Similarities, though, are hard to escape. Andrea is currently alive, helpless, hospitalized, dependent, and innocent. Andrea is also human. Terri was alive, helpless, hospitalized, dependent, innocent, and human. Does her right to having her life protected come from her ability to demonstrate conciousness, or from her humanity?

The two cases differ further. The hospital staff in Houston are taking the initiative to discontinue life support without consent of the patient and family.

I do not know the extent of life support required by Andrea Clarke. It seems very clear that it is more intensive care than food and water.

The prognosis in the Schiavo case was not perfectly clear, but it was not good. The prognosis in the Clarke case is not a matter of public record.

We must all realize that there simply are limits to modern medicine. Nothing about that fact detracts from the sanctity of any human life. No patient or family member can wish that limitation away.
Certainly, family members could arrive at different conclusions about the “futility” of medical care than a hospital’s ethics committee would.

The AMA has a statement within its code-of-conduct regarding medical futility here. That statement does not contain the words “sanctity of human life“.

If there really is such a thing as the “Houston City-Wide Guidelines on Medical Futility” stay out of those Houston hospitals. It’s one thing to have a hospital policy and procedure to follow in the event of determining matters of medical futility, but it makes me particularly nervous to think that Houston would have set uniform city limits on hope.

A long-awaited seat at the table of Swedish Arts and Letters has been made for W. The Academy which awards Nobel Prizes may have to consider itself when it grants the award for contributions to world peace. The world-renowned body, in addition to granting Nobel prizes, is responsible for having admitted W to the Swedish alphabet this week.

‘W’ Gets Its Own Place in Swedish Language
STOCKHOLM, Sweden - The letter ‘W’ has entered the mainstream of the Swedish language, getting its own section for the first time in the country’s most respected dictionary.

The Five-Alphabet Spelling Council with Arabic as a non-voting member will be meeting later next week to determine if sanctions on the Nordic nation’s exports of Umlauts and artisan punctuation can finally be lifted after years of oppressive tariffs.

A Hawaiian delegate who was generally encouraged by the move to recognize W as its own letter expressed some resentment that the character was not allowed to be a vowel “where it truly belongs.”
The Ultra-Consonant Swedish Nationalist Spelling party with ties to neo-traditionalist dictionaries is said to have used its considerable influence to bring the issue to the fore while steering the debate away from possible vowelism.
Hamas denies it’s right to exist, and today renewed vows to pursue all possible avenues leading to W’s eventual destruction.

Spelling Bees from Malmö to the Arctic Circle have been put on indefinite hold while spelling officials re-publish word lists and determine if any rules changes are required by the change.

Officials from ASCII could not be reached for comment before press time.

The shirt reads: “I do all my own stunts.”  So apt.

There is a new selection of photos in the sidebar. It’s been a long time coming.

Most of the close-ups are of a 1845 pepper-box pistol that has been in the family for a long time. It has six revolving barrels and a wooden handle. I believe it was ball and powder, fired with caps.

The other gun is a toy carved in wood.

The book is a German language Lutheran songbook, published in 1855, in New York. It has a lengthy inscription that I can’t quite make out.

When I read Friday’s Gospel it struck me that the exact number of fish in a net was a curious thing to put in an account of a story about our ressurected Lord. This is Jn 21:1-14 where the ressurected Jesus, from shore, tells the disciples to cast the net on the right side of the boat, the net is filled with 153 large fish, Peter swims to shore, and Jesus is made known in the breaking of the bread.

153. It is an irritant. Is this a two-thousand year old fish story? an exageration? Fishermen are known for their tall tales, why not this one? “There were 153 of ‘em, and they were THIS BIG!”

I was letting this nagging question lie untended to eventually slip away when Martha, Martha asked “Why 153?”

I am a geek, and I am hopelessly addicted to Google: I must Google 153

First Google result: Curious Properties of 153 By Shyam Sunder Gupta says:

It is the smallest number which can be expressed as the sum of cubes of its digits: 153 = 1³ + 5³ + 3³
It is equal to the sum of factorials of number from 1 to 5: 153 = 1! + 2! + 3! + 4! + 5!
The sum of digits of 153 is a perfect square: 1 + 5 + 3 = 9 = 3²

Ok, not a normal, er, average, er, random (doh!), uhm, boring number. But what does that mean?

CHRISTIAN APOLOGETICS RESEARCH MINISTRY Says:

1 = THE NUMBER OF UNITY.
5 = THE NUMBER OF GRACE.
3 = THE NUMBER OF DIVINE PERFECTION.

And then this:

In John 21:11, after the resurrection the disciples caught 153 fish. The word fish in Greek is ‘ixthus‘ which has a numerical equivalent of 1224, or 8 x 153. Remember, which is Jesus Christ is 888. 153 people received a blessing from Jesus in the four gospel (not counting the 5000 and examples like that).

Huh? Where did all these 8s come from?

Wikipedia has the following on 51 and 153 in the Numerology article:

Fifty-one has the meaning of repentance in the Bible. The number gets its meaning from Psalm 51, king David’s Psalm of repentance after his adultery with Bathsheba. The number 51 is confirmed by the 153 fishes (3 x 51) the disciples caught in John 21.

So 153 = triple repentance? For Peter? the triple-denyer?

Am I on a numerology kick? Nah. I just think that the Gospel writers were apt to encode extra information into their words by means of the symbolism of numbers. I don’t think these were meant to be hidden puzzles, like Easter egg features on DVDs, or that secret install of MS Flight Simulator inside Excel 97. No, these were as meaningful and as obvious as the numbers in today’s culture. Maybe I’d sound like a basketball snob if I referred to His Airness simply as “23″ but there would be no doubt among fans that I was talking about Michael Jordan. Similarly, I could evoke a complex and emotional response if I called something “another 911″.

I’m no fan of numerology, I think there are clues in the numbers.

Were there really 153 fish in that net? I bet there were.

Six seconds past Six-oh-Six on June Sixth of this year, 2006.

Pardon me while I file a little copyright paperwork on “The DayRunner Page of The Beast.”

Before you think I’m getting carried away with Rev 13:18. I think that John was merely referring to the Emperor Nero in that verse, and Bill Gates III is probably not Satan.
From Boing Boing:

Some cool upcoming dates in 2006:

06:06:06 06/06/06 (6 minutes and 6 seconds past 6 on June 6th, 2006)11:10:09 08/07/06 (10 minutes and 9 seconds past 11 on 8th of July 2006 in the US system or on 7th of August 2006 in the UK system)

technorati tags: Hexakosioihexekontahexaphobia, 666, Nero

Ooooooh, yeah, ooh, yeah

Everythin’, everythin’, everytin’s gonna be alright this mornin’
Ooh yeah, whoaw Now when I was a young boy, at the age of five
My mother said I was, gonna be the greatest geek alive

No B, O child, Y
That mean nerdish boy
I’m a geek
I’m a full grown geek
I’m a geek
I’m a natural born lovers geek
I’m a geek
I’m a rollin’ stone
I’m a geek
I’m a hoochie coochie man

Sittin’ on the outside, just me and my mate
You know I’m made to move you honey,
come up two hours late
Wasn’t that a man
I spell mmm, aaa child, nnn
That represents man

-----BEGIN GEEK CODE BLOCK-----
Version: 3.1

GB$d+s+++:++>+aC++U-W++N+wOPS–PE++b++(+++)
DI++++D—G-e+++h—-r+++y++++

------END GEEK CODE BLOCK------

well, well, well, well
hurry, hurry, hurry, hurry
Don’t hurt me, don’t hurt me child
don’t hurt me, don’t hurt, don’t hurt me child
well, well, well, well

The Nerd Score is by way of Laurathecrazymama who is not the particular “Laura the crazy mama” I had in mind, but whom I’m glad to have found all the same.

I apologize to anyone troubled by my misappropriation of the Mannish Boy Lyrics, the real thing is below the fold

(more…)

Baby James and the proud papa.

4/19/2006