An icon of my youth, Joni Mitchell, has busted out of her long-silent shell with a new album, Shine, produced by Starbucks' (yes, that Starbucks) record label. She's learned the lesson of the present age -- the way to get attention is to be cranky.

Shine on the Catholic Church
And the prisons that it owns.
Shine on all the churches
That love less and less.

Shine on lousy leadership
Licensed to kill.
Shine on dying soldiers
In patriotic pain.
Shine on mass destruction
In some God's name.

On the singer's web site, she comments about If I Had a Heart, another song on the album: "I spent a couple of years in anger. I had fallen into a place where there was a lot of shaming and blaming, which I believe is the lowest level of evil. It conspires to having a bad heart-a heart poisoned with anger."

It seems, my friend, you are not free of anger-poisoning yet. And it seems to be particularly targeted at men, Christianity and the US government. In the words of a friend of mine, Joni appears to have gotten her knickers in quite a twist. "What's coming out of me is all sociological and theological complaint," she complained to the New York Times.

I'm afraid so, my dear. We'll pray for you. In the meantime, though, just say "no" to hate. I have it on a bumper sticker, if you want to borrow it.

HT to the Curt Jester with extra credit for his witty "Old hippie Joni Mitchell bravely confronts Islam's treatment of women... oh, wait --"

UPDATE:
I find the response of iClaudius to the Curt Jester's post simply irresistible: "They paved paradise and put up a Starbucks" just doesn't have the same ring to it." Yeah. You'd think that at least she'd be shilling for Ben & Jerry's or something like that.

Two questions, actually.

The symbol #, usually referred to as "pound", actually has a technical name. What is it? (Answer will appear below when you highlight the empty space by clicking and dragging with your mouse.)

OCTOTHORPE

Now, the $64,000 question: what is the origin of the term? (Hint: yes, the first half of the word refers to the 8 points formed by the ends of the straight lines. Now you're halfway there.)

The symbol had been chosen by Bell Labs to be one of two elements on the newly developed "touchtone" phone keypad to be dedicated solely to data use. (The other, as you know, is the * (star) key.) If you're not old enough to remember that all telephones used to have rotary dials, now you know -- that keypad is "newfangled".

One of the developers who was trying to devise a memorable name for the symbol was a sports fan. He began introducing the term "octothorpe" in written communications as an homage to Jim Thorpe, the noted Olympian. He calculated that it sounded technical enough that no one would suspect that he had just made it up out of thin air.

You could look it up.

Courtesy of Carrie at Eclectic Experiment:

There are 10 kinds of people in the world:
Those who understand Binary, and those who don't.

In Dwelling applauds this application of incisive analysis to issues that matter.