Queen of the Universe Proclamation #9

100-year ban on all commercial fishing and ocean-based fish farming. (Sustainable inland farming is OK, like catfish and tilapia and barramundi. Also OK if you actually catch a fish yourself.)

Queen of the Universe, continued

7. Biting insects and blood-borne pathogens, begone! But with some kind of "don't screw up the entire food web/population balance" rider.
8. There's got to be some kind of population control. I know this is going to be why the peasants rise up and burn me in my palatial roundhouse, but I think there are too many people. Finding new ways to grow more food seems like a losing proposition, eventually, what with our planet being finite and all. Best suggestion so far: Everyone is reversibly sterilized at birth, no exceptions. Then, after you turn 21, if you want kids, you apply for a breeding license. At first I don't think there will even be any more hoops than that. You apply for one, you get one. Like a fishing license.

When I'm Queen of the Universe

I was gonna write these up in a Facebook note but then I got all paranoid about ownership and copyright issues. Weird.
Anyway: My Queen of the Universe Platform / List of Proclamations

1. Proselytization is punishable by death. Zero tolerance. You want to set up a storefront or a website or a mail-order business telling people about your god(s), have at it. But you start knocking on people's doors or invading their countries and telling them they have the wrong gods, and you will vanish without a trace.
2. All public trash cans that look like barrels with two legs and round heads shall be painted to look like R2D2.
3. Some kind of kilt subsidy. I used to think I would proclaim Tuesdays as Utilikilt Day, but I don't want to make it too structured. I just want more men to wear kilts, more of the time.
4. Ban advertising. (In part just to see what happens if people only buy things they actually need, or that they happen across and find delightful. Also because I think advertising is a corrosive force, spiritually and psychologically speaking.)
5. No patents for life forms. I feel like genetically modified organisms are a giant Promethean Frankenstein nightmare waiting to happen, but I also think that viral genetic medicine is interesting and potentially beneficial, and I love the Golden Rice concept, so I don't really know how far to take this one.
6. No Christmas music before Thanksgiving. And no "holiday medleys" of any kind. The severest penalties will be reserved for medleys of holiday music composed after 1900, played on "classical" instruments like violins and cellos and piano, and then broadcast by stations that should be playing actual classical music.

Don't watch this space.

I haven't been blogging.
I blame Facebook.
Friend me there: http://www.facebook.com/simone.parrish.
I'll probably still post here sometimes.
Ehren never blogs, ever.
And he isn't even on Facebook.
I'd be happy to hear your opinions on how long a blog can go without a post before it should declare itself to have joined the choir invisible.

Sightseeing

Lunch walk today was Mission: Ducklings.
Lafayette Park: Cordoned off due to a demonstration/protest of some kind. Couldn't get close enough to see what the issue was. No ducks at all.
Constitution Gardens: Many, many ducks and ducklings (including very sweet little peeping noises from the underbrush), and two herons, possibly great blues (which eat ducklings), and several geese but no goslings.
19th & Penn: Hillary Clinton crossing the street. (No ducklings in her modest entourage.)
I Street between 19th & 18th: The Giant Inflatable Rat. (No ducklings there, either.)

I ATE'NT DEAD

I just haven't been blogging much since I started playing with Facebook.
I have limited social media bandwidth.
But from the Mutant Super Power file, I was watching The Riches yesterday (on DVD), and a new character named Eamon Quinn appeared on the screen, and I thought "Huh, he looks really a lot like Richard Harris."
Eamon is played by Jared Harris.

Lantern-bearers and Ada Lovelace

I love the idea of Ada Lovelace day. I've known her name since I was maybe nine because my dad had a crush on her. I've been thinking about the women who are my technology role models, and the person who floats to the top is Jeanne Kramer Smyth.
Jeanne's not famous. She's not a household name. But in her enormous social and professional network (in which she plays a vital node-like role, gathering people and keeping them connected), she is a go-to person for technical advice. She has a voracious appetite for new ways of managing information and connecting people to each other and to the information they need. If anyone has a question about search engine optimization or RSS or piping or blog templates or visualizing information, it's Jeanne we call.
I became an IT professional by accident, and I still feel quite seat-of-the-pants a lot of the time. Jeanne's example of how far noodling around can get you has been very inspiring to me. She has traveled the paths, and her light still clings there, tracing the paths for others. She sees possibilities that would never occur to me, but seem obvious once she lays them out. I feel less lost when I'm exploring something new, because of the way she sets out exploring. She is a dear friend, but I'm not sure I've ever told her how important she is to me from this technical and professional perspective, so this post is a little tribute to her. She's my Ada Lovelace Day pick. She blogs at http://www.spellboundblog.com/.