Here's another interesting tidbit from Bradley K. Martin's Under the Care of the Fatherly Leader, his look at North Korean dictator Kim Il Sung and his son Kim Jong Il. It seems that however Communist North Korea may claim to be elements of Korea's folk medicine tradition continue to linger. As Kim Il Sung aged the Kim Il Sun Institute of Health and Longevity was established(at the behest of Kim Jong Il) to help the Great Leader live a longer and healthier life. One of its recommendations was that Kim Il Sung consume dog penises of at least 7 centimetres in length.

Of course my response, as it would be of most Western readers of such a prescription, was disgust. Eating dog is bad enough, but dog penises is even worse. But as we all realise this is a culturally ingrained response. Koreans have long consumed dog and so would not find consuming unusual bits of dogs for health reasons odd. Similarily people who grow up in Muslim countries, even if they are not Muslims themselves or abandon the faith, may find the idea of eating pig odd and disturbing.

We have a bird bath in the backyard, a wide ceramic dish that sits on the stump of an old tree we cut down a few years back. Today one of the local crows was drinking from it. This is the first time I've seen one do this, but I imagine it won't be the last. It was interesting to watch him stand on the edge of the dish and move around the edge as he drank. Afterwards I wondered if a crow would be heavy enough to tip it over. Probably not.

The crow population in Saskatoon has gone up quite a bit over the last few years. Crows seem to be the kind of birds that actually benefit from human activity. Tokyo apparently has seen a major increase in crows over the last decade or so. Because of government regulations plastic garbage bags are clear, and supposedly this attracts crows because they can see there is something they want to eat in the bags.

While I'm at it I must mention my amusement at the Google Adsense output when I updated the blog. Alongside an ad for a Christian sci fi novel (how's that for a genre!) it has ads for lesbian pulp fiction and "quality lesbian eBooks," as well as an ad for a vampire novel. "One of these things is not like the others...."

Wow, check out the reDiscovery Institute. They're taking up the fight against those horrible Godless scientists and secular humanists with their cockamamie periodic table of the elements theory. (This important website came to me from a post at Orac's blog.)

I've mentioned the Teletoon cartoon series Braceface a couple of times on here. As a result I get regular search engine hits for the phrase "braceface porn." The scary thing is that given some of the other hits I get, including ones for "Sharon Spitz porn," I suspect these folks actually are looking for explicit pictures of the characters in a cartoon show intended for pre-teen and teen girls. I get hits for "Megas XLR porn," but at least the hot babe character in that show is an adult. Unless of course people are looking for pornographic images of Megas, the titular giant robot. Don't say it couldn't happen, because some people have actually written sexually explicit fanfics involving robots from the '80s classic Transformers.

I did quite a bit more magazine cutting up the past couple of days. It sure is a lot of work when you have dozens to go through. I was chopping up old Vintage Guitar mags today and ended up with lots of ink on my fingers as those were printed on newsprint. It was interesting to thumb through an old issue of Option Magazine(now defunct, unfortunately) and come across an article on Green Day just after they released Dookie. The article speculated on whether signing with a major would help or harm the band. Guess we know the answer to that. The group took a lot of flack at the time from punk "purists" for "selling out," but as Billie Joe Armstrong pointed out its easy to be a purist when you're not looking at music as a step up for your life as the working class members of Green Day were at the time.

Had a bit of a chuckle this afternoon when I saw a FedEx driver who could have been Jude from 6TEEN. He was a blond kid with a baggy shirt and a toque, just like the cartoon character. Wouldn't surprise me if he was a skater, the hat looked like the kind a skater would wear.

Right now I'm listening to Barry Gray's music for the Space: 1999 episode "War Games." Powerful stuff. Gray wrote a fascinating mix of stuff for the first season of the series, from straight orchestral stuff like this, to the very abstract piece used in "Force of Life." I think it sounds more timeless than Derek Wadsworth's year 2 music, which sounds a lot like much of what else was being written in the mid 70s, although I do in fact like his writing as well. Considerably more library music, including quite a bit from Gray, was used in year one versus year two. The decrease was probably due to budget constraints. Despite what was claimed at the time the evidence would seem to indicate that year two had a considerably reduced budget over year one.

In an effort to clean up some of the clutter around here I spent quite a bit of today going through old magazines (pretty much all music mags) to cut out the articles I'm still interested in and disposing of the rest. There's really no point in keeping a hundred pages of paper around when you only want 15 or 20. But I had a rather interesting moment of realisation when I noticed something about the stuff from the '80s and early '90s. A complete lack of internet related things. No e-mail addresses or urls. Compare this with today, when even the smallest of record labels and the most of obscure of artists will at the very least have an e-mail address, if not a website. I haven't even noticed contact information for the computer networking organisations that did exist at the time like Compuserve or Fidonet. In 15 years its all gone from a fringe activity largely unfamiliar to most of society to an ubiquitous presence. I suppose people in early 1930s must have felt something the same when they went through old magazines and newspapers they wanted to throw out and noticed the absense of mentions of radio broadcasts.

An update on Toronto Blue Jays catcher Gregg Zaun. He's been diagnosed as having a concussion, and will be placed on the 15 day disabled list.

By the way, in case you didn't know there actually is such a thing as Bible fanfiction. For example the popular Fanfiction.net fanfiction archive has a Bible section. There are even people who write Bible slash fics, which you can be sure will offend a lot of people.

Bad news on the Blue Jays front. Catcher Gregg Zaun was seriously injured in today's game. I was watching the game on TSN when it happened. Very nasty. Hopefully there was no permanent damage.

If you're the owner or employee of a San Diego bodyguard firm you might want to get in touch with Anne Rice. The novelist, famous for her various vampire books, plans to release a book detailing the early years of the life of Jesus later this year. You can bet someone as high profile as Rice doing this will heavily piss off a lot of people, especially given the content of her books. Some folks find it rather ironic that Rice, who has very aggressively attacked writers of fanfiction based on her novels in recent years, is writing what could be considered a piece of fanfiction herself.

I've been prowling eBay a lot lately looking for musical equipment to pick up cheap, and I'm starting to notice some of the same stuff for auction over and over again. A good example is this auction for a Roland SH3 synthesizer. This is the third or fourth time I've seen this on offer in the past month or so. You'd think he'd figure out by now that his starting bid is far too high. Frankly even with a low starting bid he's likely not gonna get 1300 bucks for an SH3, which is one of Roland's earliest and most primitive synths.

I could have bought an SH3A, the followup to this keyboard, years ago for dirt cheap, as it sat in the basement of a now defunct music store for a long time. Even better would have been the Roland MC202 synthesizer/sequencer I could have bought from another shop, but was too chicken to ask the guy about. I probably could sell it today for twice what I would have paid for it.

I would love to know what kind of parameters Google's Adsense system uses to determine what ads should be shown on your ad banner. I've been getting ads for arthritis treatments and alternatives to the painkiller Vioxx of late. Neither topic has come up on this blog. I would assume the ads have shown up because the word nutrition appeared in a couple of recent posts. If I'm correct in this assumption I'm surprised that cancer treatment ads haven't appeared given the role nutrition is believed by some to play in either getting or treating cancer. Its kind of amusing sometimes when an ad pops up in response to a negative post on something. A post about a webpage for those who hate the Hummer H2 lead to Hummer related ads appearing on the ad banner. Yet my mention of Darth Vader didn't lead to any Star Wars related ads. How odd, especially with Revenge of the Sith about to hit the theatres.

I was just reading a segment from the book Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader: North Korea and the Kim Dynasty, by Bradley K. Martin. It mentioned that one of the things US troops found when they briefly seized Kim Il Sung's command bunker in the North Korean capital Pyongyang in 1950 was an organ. Kim had played the organ as a youth. Kim's cult of personality, along with the mention of his musical interests, made me think of another cultish leader, Shoko Asahara of Japan's Aum Shinrikyo. Although most of the world first heard of Asahara after Aum's 1995 attack on the Tokyo subway system I knew of him for at least a couple of years before that. In the early '90s I listened to quite a bit of shortwave radio, and at the time Radio Moscow was selling airtime to interested parties. One of them was Aum, and their broadcasts quickly became familiar to many shortwave listeners. Included in each broadcast was a hymn or two, supposedly written by Asahara. After they were played the Japanese lyrics were explained. Unfortunately like the rest of their program the English speakers they used weren't particularly good, and listening was rather surreal. The vagueries of shortwave broadcasting, such as fading and interference, didn't help.

It would seem that their Russian programs were rather more successful. Russia proved to be the most successful area outside Japan for Aum recruiting, and a decade later many of the converts to the group hold their allegiance. Some reports even claim Aum, or Aleph as it calls itself now, currently has more followers in Russia than Japan.

When the first news reports hit Canadian radio and tv about the 1995 subway attack and the possible involvement of a Japanese cult I almost instantly began to wonder if it was Aum. I wasn't all that surprised when the answer was yes. What had been merely some amusing broadcasts of some weird religious sect suddenly became much more disturbing. Over the next few years we learned of what Aum had been doing before the subway attack, activities that included the murder of a critic of the group and his family, attempts to spread disease organisms, and attempts to develop or obtain weapons even more dangerous than the homemade sarin gas they actually used. Shoko Asahara was convicted as the mastermind of the Aum attack, and last year was sentenced to death, although this doesn't appear to be going to happen anytime soon.

Got bitten by technology again tonight. I decided to haul out an old album I hadn't played in a good long time, Decoder by Cypher 7. Unfortunately it wouldn't play on the CD drive on the computer, which is how I listen to a lot of music these days. It has a software data track as the first cut, and the computer wouldn't recognise it as a music CD. Grrrr! This CD is from the early Windows 95 era, which likely doesn't help when using a computer with Windows XP. So it was off to the bedroom to unplug the portable CD player I run into my ancient Sony ghettoblaster and drag it back in here. Listening via headphones revealed something I never noticed before, that the portable is kind of hissy.

Another one for the guitar nuts out there. Unfortunately its a case of the uglies again. Oddly enough this poor thing has received a bunch of bids. I guess someone besides the seller likes the look of that monster.

Thanks to Orac I found out a very well know celeb has taken up blogging, and on blogger.com no less. Darth Vader! Boy, does the fella ever get pissed off a lot! Perhaps he needs to take up yoga, or tai chi, or some other form of relaxation practice.

With all the talk in recent years of atheletes using steroids and other performance enhancers I've often wondered if people were using them years ago. The answer is yes, they were.

If you're a baseball fan check out the April 24th issue of the New York Time Magazine. The cover story discusses whether power hitting is being overemphasised instead of more subtle ways of getting on base.

The Blue Jays managed to take 2 out of 3 games from the Yankees on the weekend. I wonder when the last time that happened was. The Yankees are currently 7 and a half games behind division leading Baltimore, something that hasn't happened since September of 1997, and are 5 games below .500. They're hoping to pick up some ground playing against Tampa Bay over the next few days, the Devil Rays having lost 7 straight. You can only imagine the kind of howling out of the Yankees' front offices if Tampa should stomp them.

As a followup to my comment about the "Nutrition facts" on some Breathe Savers I bought I purchased some Aquafina bottled water today and it had such a listing. It told me that bottled water is not a source of any significant amounts of nutrients or of fats, all of which makes the inclusion of such information rather redundant. Did the company actually have to officially test the water to come up with those stats? Bottled water is arguably a bigger moneymaking scam than soft drinks. At least the company has to pay for some sugar and other flavourings. With bottled water all they have to do is filter it, if that.

Boy, do I feel down right now. Oh well, things can always be worse.