No fate but what we make

The boss got called in for jury duty today. I guess that counts as Friday the 13th bad luck, although the rest of the office may think otherwise. Not that he's a jerk (far from it) but it makes it that much easier for me to hang out in my office plugged into the iPod.

As for my personal luck, the client I went to the UK for may be hiring us for more work, which would probably win me another trip there before the end of the year. In other news, Friday office-donuts are a mixed blessing, but I made my unluckiest choice with the Del Taco jalapeno/bacon/chicken quesadilla. I expected, well, jalapeno pieces, but instead it has jalapeno bacon pieces, which is quite a different animal altogether. Adding insult to injury, it hadn't quite been heated enough to actually melt the cheese, so it was rather disappointing. And I really didn't need to know about the nutritional info. I think I'm supposed to be aiming for something better than 50% fat. Though at least I've never had their taco salad. For a 'salad', 77% of the calories from fat doesn't sound so hot.

Along the lunch-walk, I noticed that someone in the area is flying a Jolly Roger.

In other news, will Christians finally wake up and discover that they've been played like a Strad by the Bush Administration?

“Tempting Faith’s” author is David Kuo, who served as special assistant to the president from 2001 to 2003. A self-described conservative Christian, Kuo’s previous experience includes work for prominent conservatives including ... Bill Bennett and ... John Ashcroft. “National Christian leaders received hugs and smiles in person and then were dismissed behind their backs and described as ‘ridiculous,’ ‘out of control,’ and just plain ‘goofy,’” Kuo writes.

Nought so queer as folk

For the first time, researchers have documented a culture that uses words and gestures to describe how the past stands before an individual and the future lies behind – unseen.

The Aymara subjects, particularly the elderly who didn't have mastery of Spanish, thumbed or waved over their shoulders when speaking about the future. And they swept their hands or arms in front of them while speaking of the past – closer to their bodies for events in the recent past and wider gestures for events in the distant past.

“It was quite striking when people were starting to point . . . in directions that seemed totally unnatural to us,” Núñez said. “We're talking about non-technical, everyday notions of chronology here.”

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This is so unnatural, that if this appeared as a characteristic of an alien race in an SF story, I'd think it was phony-baloney.