An ambitious peasant overcompensates for his humble origins.

He is assisted by:

~epw, professional badass;

Aaron, his man in Japan;

Adam, Dean of Albuquerque;

Rachel, Muse;

Martin, still undercover in England;

Randy Brown, Prison Doctor;

Kevin, Cave Gentleman, and

Simon, the one true overmind.

All death threats, complaints, and other communications direct to:

kikuchiyo-*-at-*-gmail.com

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Kikuchiyo News is maintained by a soon-to-be graduate in economics and international relations preparing to study reading for an M.Phil in Economics at Oxford University.

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Shock and Awe
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Rumsfeld, 4/1
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My sincere condolences to all KN readers and staff currently residing in the United States. Ronald Reagan has died, and now God's veil of protection is likely to be withdrawn from the country. Here's hoping y'all survive the locusts, water turning to blood, &c.;
posted by Kikuchiyo at 10:58 AM

 
Ever want to watch the intro from Denver: the Last Dinosaur or The A-Team. Yeah, well this guy has a ton of them on his site.

80's Tv Intros

It's partially in Dutch, but that shouldn't impede your finding the intros.
posted by Aaron at 4:09 AM

 
Points are deducted for fun at the expense of special needs students, but it is kinda funny anyway. The animation is included because we believe that this humor is intentional to some degree. Verdict: The bit with jail and no playstation is quite sad, and the bit at the end about no lights is downright creepy.
posted by Kikuchiyo at 7:50 PM

 
Story of my life. Sometimes. The rest of the newletter is decent this week, as long as for "decent" you don't read "acceptable for minors or people with sensibilities."

We need more words with only one meaning. Somebody work on that...
posted by Kikuchiyo at 7:43 PM

 
This new chair thing has totally worked today. Kikuchiyo is seriously pleased with it. Following today's reader request, I'll show you it's lovely picture:



Yes, this is very exciting to me. Yes, this does mean that any claim that I might have ever had of not sucking is wiped away forever. No, I do not have the time to care about that right now.

[ note: My normal personality is scheduled to return around June 17th, in case you were waiting around for that lazy jerk.]
posted by Kikuchiyo at 6:05 PM

 
...I do not have a morning link. I do have a new comfortable chair, and a lot of work to do. The present theory is that the new comfortable chair will prevent the awkward age-changing effect whereby I begin working at 9:00 as a twenty-three-year-old boy and end the day at 9:00 pm as a ninety-eight-year-old man who spent his working life immitating a question mark in a performance art troupe. In short: seldom in the history of human events has one man wanted one chair so very, very much. Have a lovely friday.
posted by Kikuchiyo at 9:19 AM

 
Here. It's no pandagolf, but it's very cute.
posted by Kikuchiyo at 9:21 AM

 
Link. Funny as hell, but kinda funny strange too.
posted by Kikuchiyo at 9:07 PM

 
Ass kickin ketchup.
posted by Kevin at 6:30 PM

 
I am glad my students like me. Cuz' when they get mad here, it's serious.

Yahoo! News - Stunned Japan Agonizes Over Schoolgirl Stabbing

If you check out the full article you'll see reference to a story about a boy who killed two younger boys and put the decapitated head of one of them on the school gate. That happened here in Kobe, and recently that kid, now an adult, has been set free from prison. Apparently reformed.

I guess we have school shootings, so maybe not as shocking for Americans. However, you have to admit a 12 year old girl slitting the throat of another girl with a box cutter is pretty gruesome. Somehow i just believe it takes a lot more malicious intent to slice somebody than to pull a trigger.
posted by Aaron at 3:32 PM

 
Asi es esta tierra del sol.
posted by Kikuchiyo at 9:26 AM

 
Charming, as far as I'm concerned.
posted by Kikuchiyo at 8:39 AM

 
If this book is available in the place where you live, then I suggest buying it. Also fun: stand around a bustling tourist area, reading a travel guide for an eastern European country that does not exist. Watch for smirks on the faces of passers-by, who seem to think that somehow you've confused England with "a land untouched by modern dentistry."
posted by Kikuchiyo at 8:24 AM

 
I can't prove PEP is a joke, but since they're giving the free-market a "second chance", I won't even try.
posted by Kevin at 1:56 PM

 
...and my nervous system is basically shot. I spent an entire night last night going over and over the minutiae of generalized least squares regression. It would have been OK if I'd have been awake, but I feel terribly robbed of sleep. And innocence.

Dreams are not the place for optimal weighting matrices to be derived. I fear that a part of my humanity has been lost forever.
posted by Kikuchiyo at 9:48 AM

 
Evidence indicates the Mike Moore might have done something classy. Noted.
posted by Kikuchiyo at 5:51 PM

 
Hey kids, I've got great news for you if you can read Japanese and so can your browser!

My new weblog in Japanese:

http://juicebear.blogspot.com/

Mega Juice Bear...

it's juicy!
posted by Aaron at 3:38 AM

 
For Adam. For movie-lovers.

For the rest.

Enjoy your hangovers, lads. And ladies. While you're drinking, think of me and my all-too-sober revision nightmare.
posted by Kikuchiyo at 9:08 PM

 
I guess that it turns out that lots of economists' blogs are full of posts that aren't about economics.

Whatever.
posted by Kikuchiyo at 8:46 AM

 
Only one month ago, American Idol viewers were "incredibly racist"; what are they now, incredibly patronizing?
posted by Kevin at 3:18 PM

 
The BBC looks set to let people check out their archives under Creative-Commons-type license agreements. I, for one, welcome our new free content overlords.

Thanks, Slashdot.
posted by Kikuchiyo at 10:47 AM

 
A website from New York City's Feral Cat Resource. It discuss methods fro catching feral cats.

This is one of those sites where the subject matter seems to be fake, but then it's serious. So, you read it, and then you stumble upon stuff like this:

5. Luring into a Closed Space
If you can draw the cat into an indoor space (with no exit, holes in the wall, etc.) and close the door behind him, he's yours. Once confined, you can take the patient route by setting a normal trap and otherwise depriving of food (though this can take days).

"Close the door behind him, he's yours." Yikes.
posted by Aaron at 7:00 AM

 
Okay, I have never been one to pick on Bush's problems in using the English language. However, this is too ridiculous! The Abu-Ghraib incidents are likely going to cost him the presidency, and STILL he mispronounces it! Not once but three times!

For God's sake.
posted by Aaron at 3:51 PM

 
Before we get into discussing the relevance of Ken Wilber’s thoughts in the world today, I thought it might be good to introduce some of the basic thoughts which Wilber sets down in the first chapters of A Brief History of Everything (BHoE). In his previous book Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, Wilber outlined twenty basic principles, or tenets, which govern reality. He does not discuss all of them in BHoE, but he does share those he considers the most important.

Today, I'd like to just cover two tenets which will be important to our discussion on US political parties:

1) Tenet 1: Reality is composed of holons.
2) Tenet 4: Holons emerge holarchically..

Tenet 1: Holons is a term that Wilber uses to connote the fact that all things are both whole entities and at the same time part of something else. In itself an entity is whole, but it always composes something else. Wilber’s example, “a whole atom is part of a whole molecule, and the whole molecule is part of a whole cell….” So, all of these things are both whole in themselves, but also a part of something else. And this is true not only of the material world, but also in the biosphere and noosphere (sphere of human thought).

Tenet 4: This is the idea that all of these holons emerge in a naturally hierarchical fashion. The hierarchy spans form least wholeness to greatest. This is somewhat obvious in the material world. As Wilber points out, “particles to atoms to cells to organisms, or letters to words to sentences to paragraphs. The whole of one level becomes a part of the next.” Each stage above the next is more whole than the previous one, but also entirely dependant on its existence.

Alright, I don’t want to make things too complicated for now. I will leave the terms at this for today. Have comments, suggestions, or questions? Please let me know.

posted by Aaron at 7:07 AM

 
I want a large swath of the press to be partisan and brutal and ugly, all the time.

GR reminds us how pretty tame they're now, especially since they've got all that modern Constitutional leeway. However, in my view the real reason most media are way too polite for real human beings is that its patrons act like simpletons, and expect the published work to always be refined, to usually have manners, and to sometimes come framed in morals.

However, Instapundit suggests that blogs will bring media necessary diversity. Diversity is a codeword meaning, "To hell with diversity and temperance, I want blogs to coerce the media into a war of bombast and tripe, until my sitemeter explodes" or something of the sort. In the very least diversity means that "respectable" newspapers should generate a habitual mocking smirk on the faces of elite university students.

Frankly I don't trust myself. And if the I am part of the media, I can find no reason to trust Maureen Dowd and Ann Coulter at all. Besides, they're both women, allegedly and to the disbelief of my wife.
posted by Kevin at 3:32 PM

 
Sherpa scales Everest in 13 hours. As a measure of scale, it ordinarily takes four days. Via MR.

As for the spotty blogging: it's going to get worse before it gets better. ETA for full-court-press blogging by me: 10 July 2004, when exams and a trip back to the states are complete.


posted by Kikuchiyo at 9:08 AM

 


That is all.
posted by Kikuchiyo at 11:09 AM

 
The stream is here. What caught my ear today was a reading from the author of the week, which went something like:

"There's four sorts of people trying to get to be rulers. They're trying to make things better, but they all want to make them better in different ways. The conservatives want to make them better by keeping them exactly as they are now. The liberals want to make things better by altering them just a little bit, but not so much that anyone would notice. The socialists want to make things better by taking everyone's money off them. And there's the communists, and they want to make things better by killing everyone but themselves."

In fairness, the communists tried to kill a lot of themselves as well.
posted by Kikuchiyo at 4:42 PM

 
He had a good life. Easiest call so far. This is an incredible display of skill and threatening psycosis. The rest of the newsletter is here. You may be wondering if there's a special pick for people who need to funnel their livees into flash-based games for a few days. The answer is: Breakout, except in a circle. It's not as addictive as pandagolf, but it is 2 billion times more nausea inducing.


posted by Kikuchiyo at 10:14 AM

 
Thanks to a well-planned act of censorship by Rio Rancho High principal Gary Tripp, New Mexico has hit the blogs. The Agitator and The Volokh Conspiracy have noticed that Albuquerque is, by and large, a wretched hive of scum and villany.

It's always fun to watch people's reaction when they find out that there's something nasty and festering lying between Texas and Arizona. Please don't mistake this vitriol for a dislike of the place-- I absolutely love being from and even actually visiting the great smear of urban blight where I was born. It's just hilarious when somebody gets excited by some simple fact of life, like that at all times the principal of Rio Rancho High is a raging incompotent idiot.

People: they have student riots there every few years. The school board doesn't want to send a real principal down there just to see his remains come back packed neatly into a shoe box. Proof? He's a P.E. teacher.
posted by Kikuchiyo at 10:06 AM

 
Article radically overstates Gmail exclusivity.

I wonder how often a blog had to be updated in order to get on Google's list? Did the other Bloggers for the KN get the invitiation? Why the hell am I not making sure that I can derive the asymptotics distribution of a quasi-maximum-likelihood estimator right now?


posted by Kikuchiyo at 5:41 PM

 
Man-o-man, Cosby is not kidding around...

Movie & TV News @ IMDb.com - WENN

[comparing] sixties civil rights activists with today's youth. He said,

"These people marched and were hit in the face with rocks to get an education, and now we've got these knuckleheads walking around. The lower economic people are not holding up their end in this deal. These people are not parenting. They are buying things for kids - $500 sneakers for what?

I can't even talk the way these people talk, 'Why you ain't,' 'Where you is' ... You can't be a doctor with that kind of crap coming out of your mouth!"

Cosby then added his thoughts that petty criminals who are shot dead should not be a source of sorrow. He explained, "These are not political criminals. These are people going around stealing Coca-Cola. People getting shot in the back of the head over a piece of pound cake and then we run out and we are outraged, saying, 'The cops shouldn't have shot him.' What the hell was he doing with the pound cake in his hand?"

Why doesn't he have a show anymore? And what the hell am I doing with pound cake in MY hand?
posted by Aaron at 2:31 PM

 
This is the first article in a series I plan to write about Ken Wilber's writings and my personal ideologies based on some of his principles. I have been a fan of Wilber's for about 5 years now, and have read his online writings and a couple of his books.

I recently finished re-reading, A Brief History of Everything(BHoE). I highly recoommend this book to anyone interested in philosophy and logic. The emphasis of the book is half psychology half philosophy with spiritual undertones. It is at times a difficult read and full of self-references to his previous tome, Sex, Ecology, Spirituality. This puts some people off, but the overall ideas in BHoE are worth wading through the chuff.

I will publish these articles on the web at three different places. First, my weblog aaronsmethurst.com. Second, at Kikuchiyo News. And finally in a PHP Bulletin Board on my website, which will allow for dialog of the issues for those who would like to discuss them.

I look forward to your comments and hope that I can interest you in Wilber and his works. I believe his work to be a major step forward in prodcing an advanced philosophy for the world. To that end, each week I hope I can bring up some of the most relevant issues discussed by Wilber and present them in a easy to understand and succinct manner.

I hope you enjoy the articles.
posted by Aaron at 12:06 PM

 
And apparently, they're scarce. As in, enough to go for $100. So: if you know someone who really wants a Gmail invite, let them know that I'll consider inviting them in exchange for enough cash to keep KN advertisment free for another year.
posted by Kikuchiyo at 10:38 AM

 
Here. Via Andy. That's pure animal protien.
posted by Kikuchiyo at 9:18 AM

 
Pledge Drive kind of thing inspires Derb to new highs of decorum. There's not one point in this entire segment where he breaks down and starts shouting "BUGGERY BUGGERY BUGGERY!" Also odd, he's suddenly gone all optimistic on free markets. He even claims that his work is "without rancor or misrepresentation." Hi. Lar. I. Ous.
posted by Kikuchiyo at 9:21 AM

 
Well, you remember when your mom told you not to pet the jaguar. There was a reason for that apparently.

Man Pets Jaguar, Pays with His Finger

A New Mexico man made a hasty exit from a zoo after climbing close to a cage to illegally pet a jaguar, but police were able to track him down by the severed finger he left behind.

The shriveled and dried finger from the man's right hand was found outside the cat cage last week by a groundskeeper, Tom Silva, assistant director of the Albuquerque Biological Park, which includes the zoo, said on Tuesday.

The owner of the finger has been identified and is forbidden to return to the zoo, Silva said, adding the park is not planning to press criminal charges.

"I think he's suffered enough," he said.

And it all happened in Albuquerque. Man, I miss that place.
posted by Aaron at 1:26 AM

 
1,000GB of free space on the Gmail account, now. So if you felt like emailing me, say, an uncompressed video of your life story, feel free to send it to the gmail account. Does it seem odd to anyone else that I've got more email storage capacity than actual hard drive capacity? Because it seems odd to me.

Relatedly, I think that upping Lycos' offer by a factor of 1000 counts as flexin' on Google's part, eh?
posted by Kikuchiyo at 8:49 AM

 
Warren Brown gives the car a thumbs up. Is it really possible to not like a car that starts at $150K? Actually, most of the review does not even discuss the car, but with paragraphs like this, who cares?:

"Money is not the root of all evil," Reverend Ike contended. "It's the absence of money that's the root of all evil." And I'd say "Amen" to that, too.

posted by Kevin at 2:01 PM

 
This fellow is giving his paper on ambiguity today, so I get a break from aggregation considerations and so on. Still not tons of time to blog, but do note that Sadly, No! is back under the control of Mr. Sadly himself. Woo.
posted by Kikuchiyo at 10:14 AM

 
... is a field of study created to prove that Nietzsche was wrong to suggest that life must be a choice between suffering and boredom, because you can have both. If you'd like, you can have them with a side of absurd behavioral assumptions. See: Theory of Capital and Investment.

Actually, I don't ordinarily mind Macro at all, I'm just cranky today.
posted by Kikuchiyo at 4:33 PM

 
Derb is trying to prove that he's in excellent company by posting a reader's email which claims that Carl Sagan was a "mild and tolerant homophobe." What's the point of that? I mean, if you're going to sully your personality by being a homophobe to begin with, what do you gain by being mild and tolerant about it? And isn't there some kind of oxymoron swimming around here?

I'm busy, as you can see, and not generating the usual output stream. Full bore blogging may take a month to return...
posted by Kikuchiyo at 10:05 AM

 
More about the Japanese released by Iraqi militants:

The Japan Times Online

This is article is by a guy named Debito Arundo. Actually his former name was David Aldwinkle. He changed it so he could be a Japanese citizen.

Listen to him, not me.

posted by Aaron at 12:18 AM

 
Ok, I swear this wasn't me, but with a name like mine, who else could it be?

this is cornwall - news, entertainment, jobs, homes and cars

Sam, did you put something in my drink?
posted by Aaron at 3:47 AM