Weekend trivia

Four-day weekend v. good idea, must do this more often. Tidied and dusted the craft table (long overdue), and bought some drawers to sort my modelling bits and pieces, with the usual "must do something with those!" moments that that entails. Got lots of puttying and pinning done, plus some glueing; my mumakil from last year, which originally came in 41 pieces, is now in just 11. Lots more putty to go, but it's getting there.

sarin_girl came over to feed us on Thursday, and waitingman had dinner with us on Friday and was introduced to 'Robin Hood: Men in Tights'.

Discovered that pate has onion in it. *grumble grumble*

Watched some of the making-of stuff from Heat, which went a long way to explain why the firefight scene is so effective. Something I noticed after a comment by Michael Manne: it's a movie where the notion of 'luck' is almost entirely absent. There are no coincidences, no flukes of fate; everything of significance that happens, happens as a foreseeable consequence of somebody's decisions. Got in 18km/11mi pedalling: total 93 km/57 mi, putting me 4 miles short of Farmer Maggot's fields - Heat is an excellent exercise movie.

Edit: Via Pharyngula et al., angels vs T-rex! More here.

I'm not a violent man, but...

Everybody has their buttons. One of my biggest is scumbags like Kevin Trudeau.

From transcript here:

NBC5's Don Lemon: "Do you know someone who actually has a natural cure for AIDS and is not sharing it or its being suppressed? Or is this information that you've gotten second-hand?"

Trudeau: "No. The book is me reporting on what I've found, what I've researched, what I've personally investigated."

Lemon: "Hydrogen peroxide, intravenous, in your veins."

Trudeau: "Correct."

Lemon: "Using hydrogen peroxide to cure AIDS?"

Trudeau: "Correct."

Lemon: "I'll move on. And the sun does not cause skin cancer? Sunscreens do?"

Trudeau: "Yes."

Baldness, addictions, poor memory - you name it, Trudeau (who served two years for credit-card fraud back in the '90s) has a quick-fix. His book Natural Cures "They" Don't Want You To Know About has been on the NY Times bestseller lists for months.

And yes, like all the best lies it incorporates a few grains of truth. There *are* problems with the way medical research works; he's absolutely right in claiming that the patent system fosters drug research while leaving precious little financial incentive for research on things like lifestyle-based preventative medicine. But he is still a parasite who feeds off people's fear and pain. I'm not usually a fan of capital punishment, but I'd be willing to make an exception for 'assisting' quacks to die by their own methods.