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picture The gaudy red Jordan coat of arms is one they sell in souvenir shops in Ireland.

The right-hand Jordan coat of arms, also from Ireland, is one I found on the Internet. The horse-whip tail on the lion is pretty good, but I like the top half best. It's like a blank coloring book.

I can't figure what's with all the lions. They don't even have lions in Ireland.

The Maya Stela further down the page translates into my birthday.
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Personal Stuff

Non-University Interests:

Travel, archaeology, museums, religions, languages (esp. Esperanto, Chinese, Nahuatl)

Tastes:

Good Things:
Hikes, short whodunits, farcical films, really clever computer programs, nuts, having a captive audience, pop-up books, beaches, music written before the XXth century, museums, July, theatres, vanilla, literacy, nifty places, rocking chairs, artists, mail that requires no answer, beer, alphabetical order, Teflon, Gothic architecture, sherry, cartoons, maps, web pages with actual content, funny food (within reason), bug-free woods, ingenuity, being met at the station, Wikipedia, Arab salads, heaven, flowers that grow though neglected, HTML, pipe organs, sunset, tamales, pop-up books, , straight teeth, friends, spumoni ice cream, decorative tile, smiles, seashores, corduroy jackets, health, skepticism, indoor plumbing, Hawaiian shirts, history majors, pork chops, PDAs, books with peanut-butter-proof bindings, traveling to new places, opera, freshmen, Wikipedia, fish tacos, universal single-payer health care, lessons one & two, pleasant weather, pockets, reliable machines, naps, the Upper Paleolithic, red wine, the pyramid of Unis, espresso, national parks, free trade, printed instruction manuals, maternal advice, curiosity, hot baths, Corto Maltese "graphic novels" (= comic books), tea, human rights, smoked salmon, Chinese temples, Esperanto & (most of) the people who speak it, the sound of rain on a roof that doesn't leak, Harry Potter books, a seat in the front, encyclopedias, foods that start with A, E-Readers.
Bad Things:
Talk radio, flu, poems that don't rhyme, being a captive audience, things that don't work right, cilantro, idiots with power, flat tires, science fiction, baseball, the word "like" used as spoken punctuation, gurus and their followers, wet dogs, spam and junk mail, mosquitoes and/or flies, careless writing, floods & fires, garden snails, spin doctors, dust & spider webs, budget deficits, fundamentalists, nag boxes, ethnic cleansing, music written after the XIXth century, handguns & assault weapons, clattering skateboards, termites, supreme leaders, exams, pictures printed across binding margins, DJs, oversold flights, the Bush administration, illegible labels on electronic devices, group-think, art that fails to lift the spirit, robber barons & labor bosses, bottled water, electioneering, murder & mayhem, English spelling, karaoke, preachers who go by nicknames, call-in shows, telephone trees, madding crowds, feminists & anti-feminists, acne, protectionism, motivational speakers, traffic congestion, the Lower Paleolithic, public broadcasting "membership" drives, human sacrifice, bandwagons, graffiti, terrorism, vacuous gibberish, game shows, arthritis, weeds, self-locking car doors, invasions, programmers who want my whole hard disk, campaign promises, museum labels far from what they label, famine & plague, reality TV, rabble rousers & roused rabble, silk ties, forgetfulness, isms, horseradish, viruses, "people who."

Rhetorical Questions About the Great Issues of the Day:

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  1. Why are the car keys in the refrigerator?
  2. How come computers and plumbing fail on weekends?
  3. What if they don't speak English in heaven?
  4. Who is that lady whose voice is always used in political attack ads?
  5. Why do so many people imagine that anger leads to happiness?
  6. What exactly is so immoral about cloning?
  7. Why is it better to ban gay marriage than to ban firearms?
  8. What is the shame that makes mobile phone manufacturers bury the model number behind the battery?
  9. Why should a course be required of a student who can pass the final exam on the first day?
  10. How come boys do skateboards but girls do rollerblades?
  11. Why is the Chinese government afraid of everybody?
  12. Is it really true that no living person actually understands the whole federal tax code?
  13. How come the expression "family values" means meaning making babies, carrying guns, and cutting the taxes for rich people?
  14. If a politician never changes his mind, how can we be sure he has one?
  15. Would reasonable people still want to go to heaven if they thought teenagers and construction workers got to pick the music there?
  16. How do strings, wires, cords, and hoses get twisted up even without moving?
  17. If people don't care what happens to their old fingernail clippings, why should they care what will happen to their dead bodiese?
  18. If your highest goal in life is separating other people from their money, what makes you worth having around?
  19. If God is both merciful and just, will he forgive Postmodernists or send them to hell?
  20. My parents have been dead for years; why does Microsoft keep wanting me to activate parental controls on my computer?
  21. Why do voters find it comforting for politicians to be stupid?
  22. Since people can change their religion at will, why is discrimination based on religion worse than discrimination based on other ideas people have?
  23. Why do people think wearing hearing aids is more embarrassing than wearing glasses?
  24. Do people at Microsoft actually think it is cool to sit around waiting for computers to reboot?
  25. When eventually everything has been made illegal, will we need to have a revolution and start over again?
  26. How come pictures of people making love are considered dangerous to children, but pictures of people killing each other are judged harmless?
  27. How can it keep taking half an hour to get some place that's only five minutes away?
  28. Which is more driven by fads, a teeny-bopper in a mall or a professor discussing politics?
  29. If "intelligent design" counts as science, who counts as a monkey's uncle?
  30. If almost no Americans can write a page of English that is ready for publishing without further editing, then why do we think the problem lies with the school system rather than with the conventions that govern written English?
  31. If people (correctly) think American college students can't write publishable English after 16 years in school, then why do they imagine English is appropriate for use as an international language?
  32. If you really think that what you have to say is persuasive, why are you shouting?


Favorite Mottoes & Quotations:


Pictures:

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Off hand I can't think of any reason why you would want to look at a picture of me. Even I don't have much interest in pictures of me. However if you click on the guy in the pot it will lead to a my favorite picture of me, which, in turn, is but a mouse-click away from a huge, appallingly narcissistic collection of photos of me that will amaze and disgust you and take longer than Lent to download into the bargain. (It isn't my fault. Somebody sent me a picture of myself to put on my web page and things just kind of got out of hand.)

Grotesquely Intimate Details of My Personal Life:

You don't want to know intimate stuff.


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