Betsy Devine: Funny ha-ha and/or funny peculiar

Pirates of the Caribbean will have two sequels, according to
ComingSoon.

And Rolling Stone Keith Richards (the non-cartoon half of Johnny Depp’s inspiration as Captain Jack Sparrow) will play Sparrow’s dad.

Shhhh–nobody tell Jack Valenti.

Never work for a start-up.

Congratulations to Amity! She successfully defended her thesis this morning (no, not with an Uzi.)

I will, however, be trying not to go around mentioning “my daughter,
the doctor.” I’m counting on the rest of you to keep me honest.

• Remember that funny radio show I did about blogging?
• The one where Tony Kahn added full sound-effects to my gladiator striptease by Russell Crowe?
• It finally aired on WGBH in Boston on Morning Stories, and if you have RealAudio, you can listen to it here.

Amazingly, I got paid to have this much fun!

Now, from the Feedster side of my work and play life, Steve Rubel of Micro Persuasion just posted an interview that we did about using Feedster as a PR tool and how people get to be Feed of the Day.

Steve asks very good questions. He’s running a series of Bloggerside
Chats as he explores the blog universe, and I’m looking forward to
reading a lot more of them.

For the interview, Steve asked for a picture, so I drove over to Mickey’s lab late at night with the digital camera and then came home and removed from my favorite photo a background full of white lab coats, old filing cabinets and etc. I sent Steve a nice professional-looking photo, but I couldn’t resist tampering with it some more, just for you. It symbolizes my efforts to look professional as all the wonderful crazy excitement of blogworld goes on around me. I hope my imagined self has the good luck to notice, don’t you?

In the most recent Gallup survey, 51% of those polled gave George W Bush a negative rating for job approval, with 46% giving a positive rating.

This is Bush’s lowest rating ever, says Gallup.

My little sister Ri and my little brother Kim. Can you tell from this picture that they are the sweet 2 in our family of 4? As the oldest, I was well-meaning but kind of bossy. My brother Mark and I were also the naughty ones.

Mark grew up to be brave and funny and kind. He was always ready to help, to play, to enjoy, to emote.

When our Great-Aunt Mae was in a nursing home, Mark was the one who cared enough to woo all the kitchen staff into sending her up the hot dogs she loved instead of the fish that she hated. As a result, Aunt Mae was happy, he was happy, and the people in the kitchen were very, very happy.

At our mom’s 80th birthday-party-cum-musical-comedy, I thought nothing of writing him into the hardest roles–including Elvis. (That photo shows him belting out an Elvis number.) I knew he would knock them out of the ball park. He did.

After a year of telling us he had “a cold”, he went to the hospital and died of melanoma, all through his chest, in two days. How we miss him.

Today the full text of the secret March 9 report on Abu Ghraib prison, written by Army Major
General Antonio Taguba, is online at NBC, The Smoking Gun, and a bunch
of other places.  I saw bits of it yesterday, in Joi Ito’s weblog.

This quote from the report really sticks with me–“intentional abuse of detainees by military police
personnel” included:

Prison conditions were so chaotic that a 15-year old could be (allegedly) raped by a fellow detainee?
Prison conditions were so chaotic that this was the way guards responded to such an (alleged) event?
Officers gave this much power to soldiers who couldn’t spell a six-letter word like “rapist”?

In response to persistent reports of abuse at the prison. General Taguba’s report was requested on January 19, 2004.
It was delivered to military authorities on March 9, 2004.
As of May 4, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld claimed he still didn’t know what was in the report.
Now that it’s on the Internet, I hope he’ll read it.

Here come the buzzing, munching, mating cicadas, after 17 years underground.

I just checked out Cicada Mania—recent Feedster Feed of the Day–and started thinking–what was I up to, the other times those bugs showed up?

2005 – 17 = 1988

That spring, in a house on a Santa Barbara canyon, I was planning the next year’s sabbatical. How I worried that both children would have big school transitions (9th grade for Mickey, kindergarten for Mira) in faraway Cambridge, MA. Now, as you may have noticed, it’s where we all live.

1988 – 17 = 1971

That spring I was getting ready to graduate from college and planning a road trip to Alaska with my little brother Kevin. I wouldn’t have noticed if giant woolly mammoths had crawled out of the NH soil and taken wing.

1971 – 17 = 1953

I do remember cicadas during that summer. We had invited some family friends from Manhattan to spend a summer week in the relaxing countryside. After one night of New England bug serenades, the Rosenblatts packed up and headed back to NY.

1953 – 17 = 1936

Too early for me–see if you can find somebody else who remembers the cicada season of 1936.

Here they come!

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The New Yorker recently ran a wonderful piece about joke collectors (printable version), going back to the Greeks.

But more fascinating to me than Palamedes and Philogelos was Garamond Legman–whose first published work was about–er, well, he claimed to
have invented the–er, well, among other things, he claimed to have invented the phrase “Make Love not War.”

Legman left the US for a life of poverty a French castle, where he
collected crates full of index cards covered with extremely dirty
jokes. (“Zut alors, this joke should be filed under ‘offspring from sex with sheep’–what is it doing here in ‘outrageous farting’?”)

Legman’s story spooked me a little bit–maybe because I too have spent years collecting old jokes, though my specialty is nerd and scientific humor. Maybe because his real life in poverty sounds much uglier than the glamorous life of writerly French poverty I once dreamed of.

A physicist, a mathematician, and an engineer walk into a bar.
The bartender says, “Hey! Is this some kind of joke?”

Interesting to think what kind of joke Legman would have made of it….