Musings from Brian J. Noggle
Wednesday, April 30, 2003
Big Money Pundit Sez:
David S. Broder of the Washington Post sez (registration required for full column):
-
The next question came from a man wearing the campaign button of Ohio Rep. Dennis Kucinich. Edwards had salted his speech with a Reaganesque line expressing the hope that the United States would once again be seen by the world "as that shining city on the hill, a beacon of freedom and democracy."
Life must have been so much easier when you were writing for un-educated, non-Googleabled rabble, wot?
(Thanks to Dr. Thomas Prendergast at Marquette University for the pointer. Because my section of Early American Philosophy came early in the morning, I was still awake, and because Winthrop came early in the semester, I was caught up in the reading before I gave up the struggle.)
- posted by Brian J. @ 10:23 PM 0 comments
As I Tell Them During Morning Harangues....
I often discuss politics with the people with whom I work, when I am not dogmatting religion and gender issues in a thought-provoking mixture to create the proper subtle, yet tranquil Hostile Environment. And when I do, serving up my traditional lemon harangue pie complete with elaborate hand gestures and occasional white board diagrams or full costume reenactments of elections, I often strike the point echoed elsewhere in the blogosphere: the time has come for the rise of a Third Party to become a leading contender in state and national politics and possibly even supplant and existing participant in the Two Party System.
I, too, think that the libertarian impulse, if not the Libertarian Party, will make itself felt in politics in the future as the the younger generations of more tolerant (and let's face it, morally relativistic) Americans arise.
I disagree with Robin Goodfellow, author of the piece hyperlinked above, in the timing. This shift won't occur in the next ten years. This country's, with its aging and greedy Boomer population, is not going to give up their Social Security benefits until their retirement ends (the Wall Street Journal's Complete Lifetime Guide To Money's euphemism for slipping the Barry Bonds of earth). They'll fight false tooth and press-on nail for continued big government regurgitance of workers' indentured contributions into their pockets.
I do think it's coming, though. It will require two things of the Libertarian Party, though, for them to capitalize upon the opportunity. The Libertarian Party needs to stop letting the hedonistic side of the party dictate its terms of debate. Sure, it's okay to legalize drugs, prostitution, gambling, and all the other human vices, but the mainstream of America has not been convinced, especially as its culture has not emphasized reason, individualism, capitalism, and the other prerequisites for human advancement. Instead, the Libertarians need to identify, most vocally, what separates them from the current dominating parties' platforms.
As far as government spending goes, Libertarians make the Republicans look like tourists at Disneyland. Laissez-faire capitalism? The Republicans are Keynesians pikers compared to Libertarians. When it comes to defending the neat parts of the Bill of Rights, the Libertarians make the Democrats look like the Catholic Church in Seville circa 1550. Unfortunately, when it comes to advancing their own party line, the Libertarians look like San Franciscoans, circa 1970 and after a fruitive trip to Mexico.
When they grow up, the Libertarians will be a powerful force.
(Pointer from Instapundit)
- posted by Brian J. @ 10:00 PM 0 comments
Stay on Heather's Good Side
MSN's got a complete list of manners for the gym.
Rule number 1: Put the weights back where they belong, in order by weight.
- posted by Brian J. @ 3:25 PM 0 comments
Ladies, Open Your Little Black Books!
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The personal of the day from the Chicago Sun-Times for April 30, 2003. His profile name is Anubis78. Doesn't that scream, meet me on the Internet? Remember from your Egyptian mythology that Anubis is the jackal-headed god of transit to the cities of the dead. "Anubis" is Egyptian for "Charon Who Barks." Who wouldn't want to meet a guy who bills himself as the being in charge of ferrying you to the afterlife, preferably somewhere dark and secluded where you two can be alone? Anubis is not the god of death, after all, he's just a guide; you have nothing to fear from him. No, it would be Mr. Happyshiningblade, that you should fear. Is that a banana in his pocket, or is he happy to finally meet you after all those e-mails? Advice to someone who's met a hottie on the Internet: don't make your user name more creepy than you really are. Fortunately, stlbrianj is not as creepy as I am in real life. |
- posted by Brian J. @ 12:35 PM 0 comments
Monday, April 28, 2003
Somebody Sue the Media for Negligence
The Washington Post today contains an oped piece by the hysterical widow of one of the Beltway sniper's victims. Her beef: Congress has begun to pass laws to indicate gun manufacturers are not responsible for the misapplication of their products.
I won't go too into detail with this piece, except to perhaps excerpt the first paragraph, which says:
- With little public notice, the House of Representatives voted this month to give an extraordinary level of legal immunity to an industry whose negligence helped kill my husband. Now the Senate has the responsibility to stop this atrocious bill from becoming law.
Oh, yeah, but:
- I am confident that the criminal justice system will work to punish the people who killed my husband. But the civil justice system must also be allowed to work. Those who share responsibility for my husband's death must also be held accountable.
- I and families of other sniper victims have sued these gun sellers. I hope that by holding them accountable, we can cause others to behave more responsibly, and that future tragedies such as mine will be prevented. I understood when I filed the case that I was not guaranteed victory, but that's okay. All I wanted was my day in court. But if S. 659 is enacted, the courthouse door will be slammed in my face.
And then when We The People have survived the federally-mandated detoothing and declawing programs and have only our piteous mewlings to protect us from human nature as demonstrated by predators who've never even studied Hobbes, perhaps we can sue the media and the unthinking tanks that made it all possible.
- posted by Brian J. @ 7:14 PM 0 comments
Legacies While U Wait
I have heard about the 24-hour news cycle and its impact on current events and their perceptions, but now the Washington Post is reporting that historians are taking their first cracks at The George W. Bush Presidency and What It Means.
Welcome to the short attention span society. George W. Bush (some hope) is history now, and after he returns to civilian life and returns to the title of Governor Bush (not President Bush or ex-President Bush, you pikers; there's only one president) he'll be forgotten by most, idolized and vilified by some (typically different somes), and we will have moved onto whatever sixteen year old song ostrich is gracing the cover of Entertainment Nanosecond.
- posted by Brian J. @ 6:47 PM 0 comments
Sunday, April 27, 2003
Fessing Up: It Is Our Fault
Fidel Castro's put the blame quite squarely where it belongs for the fact that his old style of executing and jailing dissidents has come back in style again. Although some American leaders are saying it's not really our fault, I cannot keep silent. America, the hegemon, does cause unrest, dissidence, and optimism.
America still stands as an example of what freedom, limited government, and capitalism can do to a society. Ours is the highest standard of living in the world, where even the poor people watch television, and we do it without having to shoot citizens who disagree with the prevailing government. We just don't elect those people, and if their feud with the government spills into another crime, such as bank robbery or terrorism, we try them.
America provides an optimistic example to some oppressed people around the world, a template for the way their lives can be. So they resist or oppose their governments, so their governments have no choice but to act for their own corrupt survivals.
If only our regime were as oppressive as Not In Our Name, ACLU, and AI say, then people would not be foolishly goaded into disagreeing with their governments and getting shot, tortured, and jailed, not necessarily in that order. We are responsible for executions in other countries just like rich riverbed loam is responsible for tall tiger lilies that get thoughtlessly plucked by some damn punk teenagers who are skipping school.
- posted by Brian J. @ 8:51 AM 0 comments
Saturday, April 26, 2003
Balancing the Budget on the...er, Backs of Porn Users
The St. Louis Post-Dispatch reports that the Missouri state government, or certain portions therein, want to add an excise tax on porn and strippers, which a senator somberly, and regretfully, informs us is a growth industry in Missouri. Yeah, I am sure he regrets getting any more money to spend.
More troubling, though, is that the state wants to start seizing assets of outlaws more easily. Sure, it's drug dealers this week, but what happens when the state needs more money? Seizing cars from speeders, sorry, I mean those guilty of "excessive vehicle noise," to support a program to keep people from spreading pathogens on the state grape? A slippery slope's not a fallacy, folks, it's a description of government.
- posted by Brian J. @ 8:54 PM 0 comments
What Do You Expect From a Paper Called The Post-Intelligencer?
The editorial columnist from the Seattle Post-Intelligencer ran an interesting cartoon about the state budget crunches.
Tag line: "We had a pretty fine country going here till some darn fool let all the states go broke."
You know who that fool is, buddy? Each voter who doesn't hold his or her legislators accountable to control spending. All the states are breaking themselves, and they think the Deus Ex Federa's going to pull them out. That's foolish.
- posted by Brian J. @ 8:44 PM 0 comments
I Right Reel Good.
CNN's reporting that a National Commission on Commissioned Writing Professionals, or some such nonsense, reports that kids in school cannot clap together enough ramshackle sentences to impress the academic commissioners. Undoubtedly, though, the students are floating lazily on a tide of their own scholastically-induced self-esteem while trying to use emoticons to describe the sentiment of Julius Caesar when he said, "Et tu, Brute?"
The commission, or some other commission (I get confused since the article apparently refers to three or four different bodies), most heartedly recommends five points:
- Every state should revisit its education standards to make sure they include a comprehensive writing policy.
I sincerely hope that in the tablet handed down from the commission, it didn't chisel in a pronoun disagreement between every state and their. Nevertheless, this sounds a lot like each state should chair a statewide commission of its own, or three. - Those writing policies should aim to double the time most students spend on writing and insist that writing be taught in all subjects and in all grades. They should also require writing theory in teacher licensing.
Of course, a national commission would want a national solution, and doubling time spent on writing might be too much in many cases. Unless they propose making the school day fourteen hours, they're asking schools to take that time from other programs--programs with their own national commissions, no doubt. - Political leaders should call for a national conference on writing.
It's a special call, sort of a trilling not unlike a ruby-throated thrush. A clarion call that alerts the flock that it's time to feed on tax dollars scattered among the golden fields. Of course, calling is not action, but perhaps that's best, since the action would be more expensive contemplation by the distinctly non-ascetic wandering wisemen who sit on these committees. - Higher education should provide all teachers, no matter what their discipline, with courses in how to teach writing. Writing courses for students should be improved.
Of course, higher education used to require courses in writing, rhetoric, and other thoughtful disciplines until some committee said it should focus on whatever discipline the student chose to pursue. The courses are available as it is, but when you're twenty, you're more into studying the opposite, or the same, sex. Besides, higher education is part of the system that's churning out students who cannot write, including teachers, I would assume. - States and the federal government should provide more money so schools have the time and staff needed to focus on writing.
Tkaching! Now we're into it. Spend our way out of stupidity, or at the least keep the committees and commissions running so the academic experts don't have to teach students. The old saying intones, "Those who can't do, teach," but apparently there's a corollary that says, "Those who can't teach, administer, lobby, and commiss."
You want Brian's tips for better writing? Here, have some for $0 in tax revenue:
- Do it yourself.
It's okay to take a couple of classes at the college if you want, but it's a starting point. Doing the bare minimum you need to finish the class, whether it's just a couple five page papers or participating in unholy group writing assignments, won't teach you how to write well. They'll teach you to write enough to get by. - Read a lot.
Read cereal boxes, newspapers, magazines (and not just laddie magazines). The exposure to writing styles, words, and turns of phrase will give you fodder for that slot machine in your hand to improve the odds that something you click out on a keyboard will be a jackpot. Although this is not necessarily the case, as the last metaphor proves. - Write a lot.
Write every night. Get a blog and run off at the fingertips as much as you can. Send letters to long-lost friends and family members. - Workshops won't teach you how to write.
Join a workshop if you want, or suffer through an academic one, but understand that the workshoppers can only tell you what they think of what you write. They can't tell you if it's good or not. But if they react the way you want them, whether that's to make them mad or to revulse them, tells you if you're doing it right. - Drop the IM and E-Mail habits.
Current standards, or lack thereof, let you get away with shortcuts, emoticons, and poor diction. They sux. - And then read and write some more.
Update:Make a statement, someone will disagree. An opinion in Wired says kids learn how to think from video games. But not necessarily how to write. (Link discovered on TechDirt.
- posted by Brian J. @ 6:03 PM 0 comments
Friday, April 25, 2003
The Wheels of Legislature, Grinding
Since I have started this blog, I have discovered things beyond the ken of normal man. I have researched into the bowels of the Internet, and I have found shocking, eldritch things. Such as what government does daily.
Of course, they put it out there in plain sight, on Web sites of the .gov domain, where no one will see it. How better to hide the time-wasting activities designed to provide legislators with a part-time job to fill the time between fundraisers and elections?
For example, on the Missouri State Senate site, I have learned that our state senate has passed bills for the following just on Thursday (April 24, 2003):
- Fire department should get water during emergencies wherein, I assume the fire department will be called to put said water on a fire. This bill seems to specify that the fire departments should get water even if they haven't paid their water bills. I have to wonder if this represents an upcoming budgetary cut.
- Car rental companies cannot charge more in damages than the replacement value of the car. Seems like a good idea, but it doesn't really fit with laissez faire capitalism. Simple publication of the fact that XYZ rental company will charge you $60,000 for a stolen Hyundai Accent would probably impact XYZ enough to make them reconsider. More than a $1,000 fine would. And the fine print type size can be no smaller than 10 point!
- Made it a class D Felony to photograph or otherwise record an animal research or production facility, and to intentionally and knowingly release a pathogen therein. So Dan Savage can lick Gary Bauer's doorknob in Iowa, but if he coughs in a Tyson chicken plant in Missouri, he's going to jail!
- Names the official state grape. Okay, I admit, when it comes time for my weekly report at work, I like to finish a bunch of short things to at least have a number of items in my bulleted list of accomplishments. Surely the senators feel the same way, as they approved this one liner of a bill. I won't tell you WHAT the state grape is. You'll have to check it out yourself.
But I have to wonder how important a lot of the legislature's business is. Do we really need a state grape? Legislation defining, and reglating, professional ultimate fighting (no throat hitting allowed)? How seriously will my state senator vote on these things? How will he (or she) react to a letter detailing a list of my positions on these issues?
Rightly, I would be labeled a crackpot, but wrongly I expect I would be ignored and/or sent a form letter based on some weird keyword search/merge. But this is what my state representative government does all day, four days a week, all legislative year.
- posted by Brian J. @ 7:21 PM 0 comments
When Driving Calves Is Outlawed, Only Outlaws Will Drive Calves
Why is driving with 5 calves illegal in Arizona?
(From Fark.)
- posted by Brian J. @ 6:28 PM 0 comments
Is That A Challenge?
Frequent reader willr points out a story about a teenager who was dumped at a Kansas hospital after a party with a blood alcohol content of .425, which is five times the legal driving limit and 42 times the limit that MADD is undoubtedly going to try to mandate at the Federal level, tying some highway funding into it in that neat manner in which republics learn to subvert themselves.
According to the story:
- KCTV5 News used an Internet calculator to determine how much a 160-pound man would have to drink in an hour to have that much alcohol in his system.
Drinking 5 percent beer, he would have to drink 14 and a half beers or almost eleven glasses of wine or 18 shots of 96-proof alcohol.
- posted by Brian J. @ 6:13 PM 0 comments
Perhaps They Don't Know The Meaning of "Smaller"
Drudge is linking to a story in the Boston Globe about how the Federal Government, that is to say the White House, wants to make it a Federal Crime to assault a pregnant woman if you hurt the fetus. That's not only icing the schnucking cake, that's putting some cool little candy roses on it.
This represents another example of the drive to give prosecutors a bigger buffet from which to choose how to prosecute someone for a crime. Already, the options rival the Biggie menu at Wendy's. So now they want to add a new venue as well as crime. Correct me if I am wrong, but isn't assaulting a woman already a state or local crime? In many cases, it's already a state or local crime to harm a fetus. But in some, it's not, and so the Federal Government wants to step in and supersede the local will.
Contrast this with the commentary provided by one Senator Santorum (link found with help from Andrew Sullivan) who argues for sodomy laws at the state level precisely because it cannot be allowed at the Federal level.
Okay: So if you can outlaw it at the Federal level to make an end-run around pesky states who might feel differently than the party in power on the national level, do so; if you cannot, it's okay for the individual states to make up their own minds as long as they're outlawing the right things.
No wonder I am not returning Marc Racicot's letters any more.
- posted by Brian J. @ 6:00 PM 0 comments
Families Want Perpetual Roadside Memorials for Accident Victims
Meanwhile, north of Milwaukee, families of car accident victims and their sympathizers have restored the spontaneous pile-up of crosses, flowers, and other memorabilia at the site of the accident that claimed their loved ones. The headline of the coverage says "Dispute over crosses for crash victims continues." Dispute? Do litterbugs have disputes with the people on the people who adopt highways and impede the litterbugs' rights to free expression of casting of the detritus of our consumer culture and metaphorically despoil the countryside as the fast food restaurants are culturally despoiling the nation?
The insensitive Department of Transportation gave these roadside memorials six months after the accident and then cleaned them up. The DOT argued, probably rightly, that these memorials provide a distraction to drivers. Undeterred, the crosses and whatnot have sprouted again like mushrooms after a cool spring.
I understand grieving for your loved ones, and I understand marking their passage, but is it really appropriate to stick a gaudy plastic cross on the expressway? Couldn't you afford a real headstone where your family member is interred? Is that truly the sum of that person's life, that he or she became a statistic, probably while driving sixty miles an hour while eating a McBreakfast and changing CDs in the fog? If so, I doubly pity you and your unimaginitive lifestyle, redeemed only in your public display of suffering.
I know, I know, I just don't understand how you feel. Let's just leave that sentiment in high school were it belongs, okay, and make that frightening journey from adolescence into adulthood, where we can grieve without gratuitous displays and without nailgunning ourselved to the gaudy vinyl cross of outrage that the cold government is infringing our rights to clutter the public square with bulletins of our passing.
- posted by Brian J. @ 5:30 PM 0 comments
What Did She Mean, Anyway?
Good day. I notice a lot of traffic dropping by from IMAO, and I wanted to clarify what my esteemed spouse said in the comment to Frank J's props for Michael Moore.
Hey, I say The Big One when it ran at the artsy Tivoli theatre here in St. Louis back in the 1990s. I liked it well enough. After all, corporate power abusers are the same fun targets for drive-by rantings as governmental ones, ainna? So when I spent my four bucks to join the Quality Paperback Club, I selected Stupid White Men. I knew the basic plot, so it's not like I was getting something I wasn't expecting.
It became a boon that I bought it in paperback. I could more vigorously "dialog with the text" without damaging the furniture or walls of my home. Highlighting? Marginalia? How about a schnucking drop-kick when Moore pillories the new attorney general for disposing of gun background checks as the law says he should--which Moore calls ILLEGAL! How about a backhand expulsion of the tome the eighty-second time Moore describes Bush as illegitimate? I forget at what point I spiked the book to the floor and stomped on it, but I made it all the way through.
I'd recommend the practice of paperbacks when reading books with which you disagree. It's not always the case that you'll feel such vitriol that you'll need to physically abuse a book, but when lies, quarter-truths, and whatnot cover most of the material between the title page and the "About the Author" section, it's best to be safe from gouging drywall, concussing cats, or hurting yourself.
Thank you, that is all.
- posted by Brian J. @ 6:49 AM 0 comments
Thursday, April 24, 2003
Sinead O'Connor Apparently Still Alive
Billboard reports that Sinead O'Connor is going to retire in July of 2003 so that she can pursue another career.
I thought the industry had made that decision for her some years ago.
(Thanks, Drudge. You're my hero. But I had a hat first.)
- posted by Brian J. @ 5:38 PM 0 comments
Governor Pataki Just Says No
Although it seemed a good idea to those legislators that like to bump up on additional tax revenue, New York Governor says no to a tax "surcharge" that the state would have applied to people making more than $100,000 a year.
Good to see an executive pushing himself away from the table.
- posted by Brian J. @ 5:27 PM 0 comments
Tenure For Teachers Getting Easier
Steve Chapman in today's Chicago Tribune (registration required) discusses the means by which teachers in Illinois will soon have tenure in three years instead of four.
While the rest of us out here in the real world have to worry about at-will employment, it's good to see our teachers are safe from the economy and, in some cases, their own incompetence.
Next step: inherited tenure. Primogenitenure!
- posted by Brian J. @ 10:37 AM 0 comments
Wednesday, April 23, 2003
Eminent Domain vs. Imminent Domain
See? I am not the only one who thinks Eminent Domain, as it's currently interpreted, sucks.
- posted by Brian J. @ 11:16 PM 0 comments
Am Not!
In my defense, life with me is not as surreal as it's presented.
Thank you, that is croissant.
- posted by Brian J. @ 8:56 PM 0 comments
Anti-Stutter Bias at all Time Highs
The St. Louis Post-Dispatch loves its crusades, particularly its crusades for simplistic issues and individual concerns. This morning it reported a shocking case of PREJUDICE against a man with a disablility. A man with a stutter alleges that a nationally-syndicated radio show refused to play his request because he stutters. The Post-Dispatch, with its characteristic fervor, describes the travails of this guy who cannot get his bit on the air because of his disability.
The crusading story describes how the man tells them the producer or call screener slurred his stuttering nature and uses that allegation as its reason d'outrage. Of course, the article also mentions that the protagonist of the "story" has repeatedly called the program and has made on-air dedications before. Further, this dedication is another one for the man's ex-wife and the man himself is a repeat criminal offender. In the Post-Dispatch's eyes, he is the Little Man to cast against the Big Media Empire.
Now, I wasn't there, and unless the gummint powers-that-record release the tapes of the conversation, we'll never know whether the screener told the guy to buzz off because of his speech, or because he was a weepy repeat caller who wanted to send his estranged ex-wife a different song every hour. However, based on the information in the story, I cannot judge in favor of the alleged stutterer. As a matter of fact, I would have to trust someone who has a reputation and an audience to protect.
As a result of this micro-crusade, though, the local radio station that carried the national show has stopped carrying the show based on this outrage. Well, no, they were going to drop it next month (i.e., in seven days) anyway, but they'll pay a DJ for a week to cover the extra week of dead air. Message: They care about their individual listeners.
Everyone wins! The stutterer gets his revenge, although I suspect the revenge he wanted remains to be decided by a civil court. The paper wins because its crusade on behalf of the little guy has gotten results. The radio station wins because it sacrifices little to Support the Wronged Little Man.
Of course, producers of the radio station and skeptical readers everywhere are saying "WTS (What the Schnuck)?" and wondering if something in the water stripped from the Missouri River and lightly chlorinated makes St. Louisians this whacky.
The secret's in the psychadelic Iowan sewage. Who needs shrooms?
- posted by Brian J. @ 8:31 PM 0 comments
Paging Senator Proxmire
Forbes has coverage of an annual report by a group called Citizens Against Government Waste that outlines some of the more distinctively foolish government programs upon which the government lavishes money. The late Senator William Proxmire did a more limited run of this sort of thing with his Golden Fleece Award, but apparently takes more detailed view of the complete budget.
This sort of thing would make an excellent checklist for a line-item veto, ainna?
- posted by Brian J. @ 7:23 PM 0 comments
Tuesday, April 22, 2003
Think You're Priceless? Think Again
A new ad campaign has been launched in seven states to "inform" public opinion on the pitfalls of capping malpractice lawsuit lottos.
Here's a bit from the article describing the plight of one set of parents:
- One of the new ads features the mother and father of a 2-year-old boy who died
of dehydration. The child is shown in an oversized cowboy hat, drinking from his
baby bottle while his parents mourn their loss.
"All he needed was an IV ... It's unheard of in the United States. You don't lose children to dehydration," says the child's mother, Shawnna Gardner.
"They lose one of their sons or daughters to medical malpractice, they won't be concerned about putting caps on damages," says the boy's father, Vern Gardner, referring to the bill's critics.
Message: Little Billy was priceless, but we'll take two million for him.
Get a clue, people. Sometimes accidents and oversights happen, and money should not alleviate your suffering. An accident calls of this sort calls for a thorough inquiry and perhaps a warning to the attendants if they were not grossly derelict or malicious, but not a chingchingching payout for the bereaved at the expense of everyone else left paying into the system.
I mean, get a load of this ad:
- In the third commercial, a young boy buying a candy bar is told the cost is
$14.03. "But it's only a candy bar," he says. "Yeah, but my investments lost a lot
of money. So, I'm gouging my customers," the store owner replies.
What the store owner needs to say is, "Yeah, but little schnucking Charlie on the next block put a whole schnucking chocolate bar into his mouth before riding his bike down the embankment from a freeway overpass and ramming head on into an electrical utility pole whereupon he choked on the candy bar. So now I have to pay malcandy insurance because I can't be sure you're not part of the same chocolate-choking death cult, kid, take it or leave it."
But I guess that runs longer than thirty seconds.
- posted by Brian J. @ 7:00 PM 0 comments
St. Louis Is Now As Sensitive as Washington, D.C.
A St. Louis judge will be asked to resign for using a word that someone who heard it doesn't understand. Because niggardly sounds like nigger, someone wants the skirt to resign.
So now in the game of Sensitivity Charades, even Sounds Like is thought to be grounds for an excommunication from public life, even when committed by another minority persecuted through the ages.
A wonderful addition to my quiver of insensitivity quarrels! So now phonetics, elision, and the book-learned-vocabulary mispronunciation that I call my "Wisconsin Accent" can now get me in trouble when the random collection of syllable tumblers click into a combination that sounds naughty to a random listener. I call that alignment of the forces against me a hostile universe environment, but nobody's listening unless I howl, Lee.
I better be careful the next time the St. Louis Blues play the Nashville Predators. My position as Doc-U-Matic 3000 would be in jeopardy were I to appreciate the goalie's play. Tom Vokoun is a twofer.
- posted by Brian J. @ 6:15 PM 0 comments
What To Get The Linux Lover Who Has Everything
I think I'm going to name mine Billy Gates.
- posted by Brian J. @ 5:09 PM 0 comments
Turnabout Is Fore Play
Shocking! Apparently, Saddam Hussein was paying off at least one person in the west that opposed the war against his regime.
You mean they bought off members of the opposition so they wouldn't fight? Whereever did he learn that trick?
(Story discovered via Little Green Footballs and Den Beste.)
- posted by Brian J. @ 6:35 AM 0 comments
Monday, April 21, 2003
It's A Good Law If It Doesn't Affect Me
In Coral Gables, Florida, you cannot park your pick-up truck on the street or in your driveway between 7 pm and 7 am lest you be mistaken for someone who actually has to work for a living. The city enacted the law in the 1970s to preserve its sense of uniquely fake Mediterranean decorum, to keep property values and tax assessments suitably elevated, or simply to thrash property rights whereever it can, and most of Coral Gables was fine with it until recently.
The pick-up owners have rebelled. Now that pick-ups have evolved from utilitarian cargo haulers to 250 XXL Buses-With-Lidless-Trunks-For-Beds, the pick-up owners think their trucks are no different than SUVs, so the SUVs should be banned from driveways and streets at night. And the powers that fill the city's coffers with ticket revenue agreed. Dadgum, SUVs are trucks!
So now the fifty percent of the city who violate the new interpretation of the law decide they want the law changed, or at least clarified so only the minority who own unsightly, disgraceful pick-up trucks are punished for their combined choice of vehicle and residence. After all, the obvious intent of the law was not to infringe upon their property rights, but upon the property rights of others. So until the law was interpreted to affect them, it was okay.
All righty, then. They used to call this sort of thing fascism before they devalued the word.
- posted by Brian J. @ 7:48 PM 0 comments
A Protest Song 30 Years Too Late
In the song "Big Yellow Taxi", the Counting Crows and Adam Duritz take on the burning issue of DDT usage in agriculture with the following verse, delivered as usual in Duritz's thoughtful soul-voice:
-
Hey farmer, farmer, put away your DDT
I don't care about spots on my apples,
Leave me the birds and the bees
Please
So the fact that you cannot find spots on your apples, Adam, represents the fact that the apples in the produce section of the grocery store are sorted by their physical appeal, and the spotted apples end up in your canned apples and applesauce.
As a side benefit of your happy spotted apples, the world's population explosion is being alleviated as malaria enjoys a resurgence.
In other news, I too will take a courageous stand. I am working on my protest song that tackles the controversial matter of burning witches at stake.
- posted by Brian J. @ 11:06 AM 0 comments
Sunday, April 20, 2003
Se Habla Un Poquito Del Espanol
I took four years of El Espanol en la....I mean, in high school, and then a year and a half in college. I got to use the language in a real world situation this weekend when I scrawled a "Felices Cumpleanos" on a birthday card for a friend whose party was at a Mexican restaurant. It's a good thing that the party wasn't held in Mexico proper; "Felices Cumpleanos" is about the extent of the extant vocabulary within my Spanish repertoire. But although the Spanish vocabulary and much of the advance conjugation and syntax have passed into the memory cells waiting to be recycled for Pink lyrics, I still retain some of what I picked up in Spanish classes. No, I met the lovely and talented Heather elsewhere. I meant I learned something in Spanish class.
Of course, early in my educational career I knew I was an English Nerd (Geek would have paid better). After all, I graduated from high school with ten credits of English, the equivalent of ten years of English classes, and I accumulated almost enough English credits in college to render me ineligible for an English degree. Although the typical high school grammar-indoctrination courses were geared to beat the rules of English grammar and syntax into my head, I didn't really grok the point until I started fumbling phonics in another language.
Trying to speak another language helped to abstract the principles of written, and to a lesser extent oral, communication. For example, take the simple question "Could you run to the store?" Although common enough in the common vernacular, the content of this simple sentence relies upon a number of peculiarites of the idiom. To whit:
- "Could" represents the conditional tense, which means that a condition must be satisfied for the statement, much like in computer programming. I could, if that damn pit bull hadn't gnawed my leg of at the shin--bad Otis!
- "run" is the English equivalent of "go" and can stand in for run, walk, drive, or whatever means of locomotion is appropriate.
Of course, I came away with this insight only because my natural predilections normally predilecked toward the uses of languages. I'm not so sure the others who similar classes came away with a similar appreciation for the subtle art of speaking and writing clearly. Most of them still like to mix the red blocks with the blue blocks when making a tree, but they've had every opportunity to know which pieces are green.
- posted by Brian J. @ 8:38 PM 0 comments
Saturday, April 19, 2003
Consume What You Harvest
In line at the hardware store with the artist formerly known as hli, I saw the most saddening thing I have seen in some time: a tennis racket that's electrically configured to zap bugs. Although the thing says it's not a toy, it's designed and packaged to be used as a tennis racket with insects as the ball, and their deaths as the result.
That's right, boys and girls, it's specifically a toy to kill insects. This is ohsovery wrong.
Swatting bugs inside the house or upon you when you're outside is necessity in preventing parasites from using you for lunch or preventing insects from consuming your grain. However, to simply go out of your way to kill them is kind of sick. They used to perjoratively say that a bad seed was the kind of kid to "pull the wings off of flies." Now some bunch of yippie skippy Ron Zapeils come along to make it fun for the whole family.
Some PETA gum flapper might come along and say it's just like huntung, but it's not. Responsible hunters consume what they harvest. I assume these wannabe bug batters are not. If they do, and they're putting moths, beetles, and bumblebees on the table for dinner, I don't have a problem with it. But you're not going to see Ted Nugent kill it and grill it (in one convenient step!) any time soon.
Fortunately, there's not been a craze or anything, which proves either we're in a recession and people cannot afford the finer things in life like a battery-operated taser-set-on-kill toy, or that America's not slid so far into irreverant decadence that mainstream people want to kill something anything, other than virtually through video games, for fun. When I get a warm fuzzy glow after a pitcher of margaritas, I can convince myself it's the latter.
- posted by Brian J. @ 8:57 PM 0 comments
A Guaranteed Business Plan
At the local Casinoport grocery store we attend, a giant green monstrosity sits just beyond the cash register. A Coinstar machine. A machine designed to count coins and dispense almost as much in dollars as you put in in cents.
There's a business plan for you. To build a machine that counts coins for Americans who are too lazy or who cannot count their own coins and takes a 7% vig right off the top.
When I tried the old, "Do you have a quarter for two dimes" trick in elementary school, I couldn't find any takers. I should have, instead of using the "human touch" factor, just built a cold machine to do the same thing. People pay for that sort of convenience.
- posted by Brian J. @ 2:40 PM 0 comments
Survivors Will Be Prosecuted
Authorities in Tennessee have arrested a conflagrant lawbreaker for going into his burning building apartment building to save his dog. 26-year-old Jarrod Martin was led away in shackles after retrieving his year-old pit bull named Bishop from certain doom.
Authorities have charge him with reckless endangerment and disorderly conduct for his heroism. They say he put his life at risk, and potentially put at risk the lives of firemen who would have had to drag him out if he were injured in the blaze.
About as funny, and tragically so, as the laws against suicide. The various governments will now tell you what you can or cannot value to the risk of your own life. After all, if you sacrifice or take your life, they only get your death tax, if any, not the recurrent revenue of your income, sales, and excise taxes. You're worth more alive than dead, so you really should only risk your life to save one or more other taxpayers or future taxpayers. Ogre, it should be illegal to charge into a burning building to save a pet or dive into a raging river to try to retrieve a lucky fishing hat that was a gift from your father.
And make no mistake about it, survivors will be prosecuted.
- posted by Brian J. @ 1:32 PM 0 comments
Friday, April 18, 2003
Quick! Name Three Countries Beginning with P!
My wife asked me this question, minus the additional pressure of the "Quick!", earlier this week. I know she works with shipping software, so I didn't know if she knew and was testing my comprehensive knowledge of trivia, or if she had a point.
"Uh," I said, buying time for the beginning of the tour of the mental globe I could conjure. "Papua New Guinea, the Phillipines, Paraguay...." I didn't know if the world only contained three P countries. I knew I couldn't depict Africa in my mind with any accuracy, or the South Pacific, but I thought the three I named were countries, for sure.
She wasn't testing me; she needed the information for her blog. But she piqued my curiosity, and I knew where to go to quickly uncover an alphabetical list of countries. As an IT professional, albeit a technical writer hanger-on, I might be expected to go to Google or some other Internet source to isolate the information I need. Oh, but no.
I have a World Almanac. A micro-Internet on my bookshelf, and its response does not depend upon the traffic between me and my ISP. My World Almanac indicated I had forgotten such obvious selections as Pakistan, Panama, Peru, and Portugal, as well as Palua. In addition to the names, my World Almanac provides me detailed information about population, currency, land mass, and other trivia too trivial to mention.
Since they continue to print almanacs, I assume I am not the only one who still gets them (albeit this one was a gift from my lovely wife, who must have thought my trivial overload in any conversation was somewhat lacking in diversity and scope). Before people could wander the Internet to use portals and search engines to pique their interests in new subjects to explore, they had encyclopedias and almanacs. Whereas the World Book and Encyclopedia Britannica have pretty much fallen by the wayside, and their online counterparts struggle to keep an online public informed, some hardy publishers keep printing and binding almanacs.
I'd like to take a moment to thank them for the effort, and for the eventual Trivia Night supremacy they're provoking. Although the Internet remains directively informative--you have to really have to make some effort to find factual material--almanacs let you recline in a chair and browse them while a fire hisses from the gas fireplace and swing music whispers from the digital cable stream.
All right, I guess I am in the middle of a shift from the traditional to the digital, but I have the best of both worlds. When almanacs are gone, we'll have one less world of which we can enjoy the best.
- posted by Brian J. @ 11:24 PM 0 comments
Thursday, April 17, 2003
First Surgical Mask Sighting in St. Louis
This afternoon, when I stopped at the local grocery store, I saw my first surgical mask covering the breathing apparatus of one of my fellow Casinoport denizens.
Was she protecting herself from the world-trotting unwashed masses, or was she protecting me from the S.P.E.C.T.R.E. of S.A.R.S.? Perhaps I should have coughed at her to fnd out.
- posted by Brian J. @ 10:00 PM 0 comments
Sylllogism from the Sixties Songsters
| Lyric | Distilled | Source |
| Freedom is just another word for nothing left to lose |
Freedom=Nothing Left to Lose | "Me and Bobby McGee" Janis Joplin |
| When you've got nothing/ you've got nothing to lose |
Nothing=Nothing Left to Lose | "Like a Rolling Stone" Bob Dylan |
| Therefore | Freedom=Nothing | |
Don't tell me about the fallacy of the undistributed middle, you whelp. I have been distributing middles since you were, well, a pre-whelp. Get offa my lawn!
- posted by Brian J. @ 7:13 PM 0 comments
Don't Mess With Texans More Than One at a Time
I mean, the crime is harrowing enough: two parents strangle and then decapitate their four children, either because they're too poor to afford children, or because the children are possessed by the devil, or because Hollywood called for "Andrea Yates meets Selena." Bad juju, no doubt.
But buried within the story, hidden in the plain sight of the second paragraph, we find this nugget:
- A grand jury indicted Maria Angela Camacho and her common-law husband, John Allen Rubio, on three counts of capital murder, and a fourth count was filed against them Wednesday under a state law allowing an additional charge if two or more people are killed at the same time.
I can only assume this is not what legal experts call a Deceased Equidae Cudgel (DEC) law. The goal of these laws is twofold. First, to rationalize the need for a full-time legislature, or a nine-month-a-year-for-more-than-a-working-man's-salary legislature, legislators need to pass laws. Factories are judged on their productivities, and bicameral representative bodies are, too. Publish or perish, legislate or languish, but show the People they're getting something for the money. As a result, we get more laws upon laws covering the same basic acts.
Secondly, DEC laws give prosecutors a Old Country Buffet from which to choose which felonies go with their appetites when confronted with a given act and criminal. This end run around Double Jeopardy protections ensures that prosecutors have plenty of statutes with which to prosecute for the same misdeed, for a different "crime," until they receive a conviction. Let's see, killing three people with a handgun used illegally in the commission of a felony on a Sunday while washing your horse with a garden hose--a prosecutorial pentathalon. Commit three crimes, get the fourth charge free! Yankee ingenuity overcomes the obstacles of starchy old English common law traditions.
Of course, this law serves not so much a retributive value--Texas executes killers with satisfying regularity--but a deterrent value. Thoughtful and legally-savvy mass murderers will choose less mass-murder-friendly states, like Oklahoma, Louisiana, and New Mexico, when planning getaways to the American South by Southwest.
Here's a motto for license plates in the Lone Star state (with apologies to Rachel Lucas): Ordnance AND Ordinance.
- posted by Brian J. @ 6:12 PM 0 comments
More time for Morrie
I quoth from the book of Albom:
- Instead of going indoors in early May, you can mow the lawn and say, "I can't believe the Wings lost like that."
On an unrelated note, http://www.dfp.com is not the URL for the Detroit Free Press. Don't try this one at work, folks.
- posted by Brian J. @ 7:57 AM 0 comments
Wednesday, April 16, 2003
One Man, Alone, With A Compiler and A Dream
Oh, and lest I forget, UltraEdit rocks!
One guy has written this supreme text editor and has refined it over a number of years. And it works. No exception boxes, no blue screens, just text with formatting elements in a different color.
Thanks, Ian D. Mead. You're an inspiration to us all, except you don't own your own fighter jet or 20,000 square foot house on a Pacific bluff. Here's my $35, though; buy yourself a case of Guinness Draught.
- posted by Brian J. @ 7:38 PM 0 comments
Airline Unions Vote for Lingering Death at Taxpayers' Expense
It came right down to the wire today, but the Association of Professional Flight Attendants decided not to garrote itself. Its members decided they could concede some money and benefits to keep American Airlines out of bankruptcy this quarter. I am disappointed. Bankruptcy would save the United States taxpayers a lot of money.
However did air travel ever become the tax pit it has? Taxpayers fund the airports, they pay for the security, and they frequently apply an unsanitary gauze of several billion dollars to staunch a sucking chest wound. What are our billions buying? CEOs and their Aspen homes. God Bless America.
What is it about the romanticism of airplanes that makes the government pour money into the big carriers? Pork for the piglet constituents who work for the airlines? To protect a couple thousand jobs, the government shovels billions of dollars a year into these slot-machine companies, hoping for three cherries of some sort. Here's a radical idea, gov: if you're so damn worried about the little voters who push the drink trays, instead of keeping the dinosaurs that employ them, how about buying 100,000 airline employees an engineering degree at a state university? You could do 100,000 airline employees per pork barrel, or 100,000 a year. They could find better jobs in markets that make money.
I mean, the hub business model doesn't work. In fields that don't use bbbbbbbrrrrrmmm! airplanes, the Move Less Than A Full Container Between Arbitrary Hub Warehouses model didn't work so well for Consolidated Freightways, but the government just let that company collapse. Maybe the terrorists have won now that we cannot ship Less Than Truckload (LTR) shipments nationwide. Or maybe smaller companies that can fill the niche using economically sound principles won. To Keynesians, entrepreneurs and terrorists look a lot alike.
So what happens if the government lets American, United, and their ilk go bankrupt? Air travel becomes more expensive, which is to say the companies have to cover their own costs. Smaller carriers with fewer routes make more money. A lot of cheap used planes come on the market, spurring expansion for these small companies. We the People have to ride AMTRAK, which might stop suckling on my paycheck, or drive. Corporate types who absolutely have to go coast to coast in hours still soak The Company for it, and the celebrities that pass over our Midwestern heads continue to do so just like the invisible celestial bodies they are.
And the United States Federal Government has a couple billion dollars a year to refund to we taxpayers or, more likely, to study the homeland security threat of poison dart frogs.
- posted by Brian J. @ 7:24 PM 0 comments
Adam Sandler Says
Adam Sandler posted a message to the troops on his Web site
Now he's really not going to win an Academy Award.
(My apologies to the blogger who first brought this to my attention. I have forgotten the location, and cannot properly credit you.)
- posted by Brian J. @ 6:21 PM 0 comments
Tuesday, April 15, 2003
Ayn Rand Liked A Green Card...and Branden
Also in the Atlantic Monthly this month, but not online (go check), a cartoonist named Edward Sorel does a page and a half Little-Annie-Fanny rendition of Ayn Rand's life. Great! She married Frank O'Connor, she bopped Nathaniel Branden, then she died.
Of course, this simple rendition doesn't even have the depth and subtlety of Branden's Judgment Day, for crying out loud. There's something wrong with reducing a full and long life into nine panels. Oh, what the hell, let's Fisk it:
- Panel 1, Russian emigre, changes name to Ayn Rand. Check.
- Panel 2, She marries Frank O'Connor for a green card? I've heard they were in love, but that's a little complicated for one panel of a cartoon.
- Panel 3, The Fountainhead published and movie rights bought. That's right, but what's the idea jabbing at Jack Warner, head of the studio who bought the movie rights? Aren't you slamming Ayn Rand here?
- Panel 4, Nathaniel and Barbara Branden wed. This accounts for 11% of Ayn Rand's life and accomplishments? Wait a minute...here it comes....
- Panel 5, The Start of the Affair. Ayn and Nathan, rutting in a bed....
- Panel 6, The Affair Part II. Branden feels guilty, and Ayn is a shrew.
- Panel 7, Atlas Shrugged published, "A cult is born."
- Panel 8, The End of the Affair. Branden has an affair with someone under 65, and Ayn excommunicates him.
- Panel 9, Ayn Dies. Alan Greenspan is there, and look how he's effed everything up now.
Don't get me wrong, I too have been cast from the reasoned land of capital-O Objectivism for thinking Ayn was less than perfect and that maybe Branden made some contributions to the objectivist cause, but to limit her life to nine panels, and her entire obra to an ill-advised affair and other cynical motives is to ignore the content of her work. Of course, maybe that's the goal of modern criticism, or maybe modern critics just can't make it through ~2000 pages of The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged.
But I have. Twice, each. Nyah nyah.
So go watch Ayn Rand: A Sense of Life for the story beyond the cartoon. Beyond, perhaps, the cartoonist's comprehension.
- posted by Brian J. @ 9:43 PM 0 comments
Hitler Liked Dogs....and Books
Robert B. Parker's fond of having his characters in his Spenser novels say, "Hitler liked dogs" as a way of illustrating how even the worst antagonist might have some refined or sympathetic characteristics. This month's Atlantic Monthly also illustrates that Hitler liked books and was somewhat well-read.
As author Timothy Ryback recounts, Hitler gathered a large library beginning after World War I and collected books until his suicide. Ryback discovers a large amount of "dialoging with the text" wherein Hitler makes margin notes and underlines passages. This marginalia provides a sort of insight into his thought's developments. The article's a fascinating read.
Let this be a lesson to sophisticates, academics, and aesthetes who look down their noses at people with less formal education or less widely read in those contemporary "classics" that dictate the intellectually "in." Being well-read differs from being good, or being right.
- posted by Brian J. @ 6:55 PM 0 comments
Techies Salaries Might Fall To Earth In Twenty Years
Doom, doom! they say. CNet News is reporting that United States technical workers are standing in line for the welfare cheese handouts at local churches and have begun selling their collections of new or leased exotic sports cars to keep in their eat-out-six-nights-a-week habits. No, wait. Actually, CNet is reporting that tech salaries are not rising as fast as they used to, they are, or maybe they're really falling. Technical workers should be worried!
All right, first of all, I am not looking up at sour grapes here. Although I am not a real techie--a developer or admin of some sort--I am, even as a hanger-on to the IT industry, earning annually at 31 more than what my father earned at 45 after years of hard labor. So pardon me while I interject into the common IT thought a spot of perspective from here in the Midwest.
The median household income in these United States is $42,228 according to the U.S. Census Bureau. All of you techies out there, compare and contrast this figure with what you take home in a year, and remember that this is the household income. Many households have two people working, sometimes more than one job each, to come up with their household income.
Not many Americans buy houses in fashionable neighborhoods at 25 or spend time each morning deciding whether to drive the Porsche or the Miata to work on any given day. An unfortunate number cannot have a spouse stay home with the kids. For some, McDonalds is eating out.
Now, I don't mean to harsh your mellow employment, and I don't want to attack tech workers or the economists who service them. I would prefer a little less hysterics in the media coverage of the economic sector and employment therein. Don't panic, enjoy the high income while it's there, but understand the economics of the situation will even themselves out. The pay goes up when the workers are scarce, and then suddenly everyone wants to do that job, and the pay stabilizes or comes down. Take what the field offers, but don't expect it's entitled to you.
And thank your lucky stars that you don't work a job where your arms can get ripped off by an unforgiving amalgamation of steel and someone else's ingenuity if your attention wanders, or a job that will make you walk slowly and slightly stooped after thirty years of toting and bending and lifting. For $10 an hour. For the rest of your life.
- posted by Brian J. @ 5:31 AM 0 comments
Sunday, April 13, 2003
Does This Cover Power Ballads, Which Are No Longer Popular?
Catholic leaders across the pond have finally banned pop songs from weddings, a step Lutherans seem to have taken already here stateside (at least in the church where I got married).
No word yet whether this includes power ballads, such as Motley Crue's "Without You" or Firehouse's "Love of a Lifetime", music formerly used as filler material on hair rock albums until someone in 1986 discovered this pap would make radio music directors and audiences see a sensitive side to a band where one probably didn't exist.
Also no word on whether this ban will be enforced at Milwaukee's fabled Chapel of the Little Bells, home of the 20-minute-wedding-performed-by-a-guy-with-seventies-hair-flaps-over-the-ears-and-a-shiny-electric-blue-suit.
- posted by Brian J. @ 4:46 PM 0 comments
So I Was Listening to Montgomery Gentry
I bought Montgomery Gentry's My Town this week because I liked the title track. As a matter of fact, after peeling of the cellaphane and stripping off the numerous security annoyances and inserting the CD into the player, I played the song several times in succession. It raises goosebumps upon me as Eddie and T-Roy celebrate their community. Vicariously, through the joy in their rendition of music and lyrics by Steele/Owens/Bates, I can enjoy a sense of belonging in a community group.
As a member of the current urban/suburban class, I moved around a bit when I was young. Although my splintering family didn't adhrere to the rigorous Military Family Bivouacking Schedule (MFBS), I managed to spread my youth across six houses in two states by the time I was eighteen. I don't have a small town from my past to idealize, with its close-knit (sometimes stifling, but sometimes comforting and supportive) social structure.
My current suburban municipality of Casinoport, Missouri, doesn't qualify. Any town incorporated in the last twenty years to protect a tax base from other municipalities whose names were created by land developers automatically lack a cohesiveness into which new residents can fit. The designation of Casinoport as a town or city is a matter of convenience only. The local government exists to spend the loot from the casino taxes on a set of gestures and residential perks designed to show the world they are a Real Nice Place To Live. The residents go to bed here at night and go to work in Clayton, Creve Couer, or St. Louis during the day and go to Bridgeton, Chesterfield, or maybe even stay here in Casinoport. It doesn't matter, because these communities are interchangeable, and you can't really tell where one ends and another begins except for the big signs that say, Now Entering A Different Town That's As Good As The Rest.
Some municipalities in the St. Louis Metroamalgamation, such as Webster Groves or Kirkwood, were real towns when the boundaries of St. Louis reached them. They have an identity for those who want to participate in the community. They have some institutions born before the Reagan presidency. Granted, even these communities suffer from the same centrigugal transience as the newer suburbs, but at least the homecoming fairs have some of the same faces from decade to decade.
I do tend to romanticize the city of my birth, but as a more abstract entity than a community. I appreciate it, when I am there, more platonically than a community member. Perhaps if I return someday, I can fully My-Town-Grok the community or the neighborhood in which I reside. Given my personal history and latent moods, I doubt it.
I realize I am one of the transients that's a part of the problem. I'll spend my requisite seven years in this home and will move onto a bigger home in a different community instead of helping build the traditions and institutions here that others might enjoy in future generations. I prefer to think I am hedging my bets by not wanting to invest in start-up communities, instead preferring to put my capital in something established.
So it's vicariously that I enjoy the celebration of community in song. I respect, and appreciate, the sentiments even though I do not get to participate directly in them.
- posted by Brian J. @ 12:32 PM 0 comments
I Was Just Thinking
If a man were truly a master of all he surveyed, Zogby would rule us all.
- posted by Brian J. @ 8:59 AM 0 comments
Saturday, April 12, 2003
I Work Around
Here's a little song for those who work with software out there. My apologies to the Beach Boys:
Round round work around
I work around
Yeah
work around round round I work around
I work around
work around round round I work around
From job to job
work around round round I work around
It's a real cool app
work around round round I work around
Please don't make it snap
I've got little bugs runnin' in and out of the code
Don't type an int or it will implode
My buttons don't click, the users all moan
Yeah, the GUIS are buggy but the issues are known
I work around
work around round round I work around
From town to town
work around round round I work around
It's a real cool app
work around round round I work around
Please don't make it snap
work around round round I work around
I work around
Round
work around round round oooo
Wah wa ooo
Wah wa ooo
Wah wa ooo
We always make a patch cause the clients get mad
And we've never missed a deadline, so it isn't so bad
None of the data gets checked cause it doesn't work right
We can run a batch job in the middle of the night
I work around
work around round round I work around
From job to job
work around round round I work around
It's a real cool app
work around round round I work around
Please don't make it snap
work around round round I work around
I work around
Round
Ah ah ah ah ah ah ah ah
Round round work around
I work around
Yeah
work around round round I work around
work around round round I work around
Wah wa ooo
work around round round I work around
Oooo ooo ooo
work around round round I work around
Ahh ooo ooo
work around round round I work around
Ahh ooo ooo
work around round round I work around
Ahh ooo ooo
- posted by Brian J. @ 5:52 PM 0 comments
Magazines Take a Page From eBay Sellers
Okay, who came out of publishing school (or maybe flunked out of law school) and decided that magazines could start charging shipping and handling separately from the subscription price?
I discovered this trick first in Reader's Digest, which I attributed to the last thrashings of a dying magazine. Let's face it, readers who digest it are the same diminishing audiences who listen to Paul Harvey, and so long as damn punk kids like me resist federally funding their Viagra and Allegra and Nexium, they cannot keep splurging on reading material. So, I assumed, Reader's Digest was looking to squeeze every last dime from its readers before their retirements ended.
But I just spotted the same kind of offer on a GQ reply card. It's not as though GQ is suffering; their ad-to-content ratio is suitably annoying, with dozens of pages of beautiful people almost or mostly wearing Armani, Hugo Boss, Hilfiger, and Rolex. For only $12 a year plus $3 shipping and handling, I could spend a year reviewing the affluent coastal lifestyle.
The cost of mailing represents a normal cost of business for a magazine. They might as well stick us for a couple of dollars for printing and a couple of dollars for office rental, and pretty soon the subscription invoice looks like the phone bill. Instead of printing the real price, which means the real total in big numbers, the subscription departments play marketing games. This little game doesn't get my ire up as much as an unsolicited subscription offer designed to look like an invoice so the unwary inadvertently pays for something that he or she did not order, but it's close.
Magazines used to at least give lip service to wanting to inform and to have a thoughtful readership, but the new paradigm seems to be the more ignorant, the better. Look at the colorful ads and give us your money. Thank you, that is all.
- posted by Brian J. @ 5:37 PM 0 comments
Friday, April 11, 2003
Damn Product Placement Is Everywhere Check out this photo of celebrating Iraqis.
- posted by Brian J. @ 5:37 PM 0 comments
Music Industry Says, "Is Not!"
Perhaps in response to my assertion, the music industry asserts that its trouble is all a result of piracy.
As evidence, the music industry does not cite the trouble the software industry has found itself in from d00dz cracking video games from the 1980s to the years beyond their biologically-sanctioned adolescence, nor on businesses exceeding their licenses with Microsoft Office.
Of course, the software industry offers more than Sticky Bear Teaches the Alphabet and Street Sports Baseball, but that is merely coincidence (or lack of foresight), music industry insiders might assert.
- posted by Brian J. @ 5:07 PM 0 comments
Wednesday, April 09, 2003
So, I told Shawn, at least Avril is not half our age
I just turned thirty-one, and although I no longer smell post-college fresh, I am not a CBS viewer, either. So consider that throughout the rest of what follows: although I am an acolyte curmudgeon, I haven't passed the physical yet, so this complaint is not the rambling of someone who chases the damn kids from his lawn. With that dash of pepper, I have some advice to Big Music: get those damn kids offa the charts.
"Doom, doom!" the music industry shrieks. CD sales in the year 2002 declined from the year before, which also declined from some idyllic moment when the music industry assumed its growth would continue, unfettered by reality, at ten percent a year. By 2102, CD sales would reach a dizzying 10,792,975,584,549 or so units, or 100 CDs a day for each person currently in the United States. However, Big Music's plans have gone awry or amok, or maybe both, and the number of CDs sold has dropped.
Pop music, for one genre, is dying. Britney, Eminem, Christina, and Ludacris aren't selling the albums they used to, and certainly not the number of albums their predecessors did. Rockers like Creed and Nickelback fell 8.7%. Alternative hype bands with soon-to-be-forgotten names didn't ring the platinum bell enough times for Big Music's taste. So Big Music keeps looking for the Next Big Thing, or more appropriately, the Next Young Thing. Therein lays its fallacy.
As I review the music news these days, I notice the artists keep getting younger, and not just relative to my advancing age. Avril Lavigne, the new Canadian big thing now that Alanis Morrisette has retired, is almost ready for college. Singers who hit the big time before drinking age were a novelty in previous decades--remember Tiffany and Debbie Gibson? In 1998, 1999, and 2000, Destiny's Child, Brandy, Monica, Mya, Dru Hill, Tatyana Ali, Usher, Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera, Jessica Simpson, 702, Samantha Mumba, Blaque, Aailyah, and Pink all charted hits at age 21 or younger.
As the average age of the top 40 singers has declined, so has their music's content. Avril only worries about her sk8er boi and her high school consort's preppy clothes. Destiny's children want only satisfactory bed partners. Britney wants her baby to hit her with a big sloppy kiss one more time. Even Vitamin C is promising to be best friends forever after graduation, and she's thirty years old, which is either a commentary on to whom you have to target your music to be heard or a commentary on public schooling.
I know pop music has always been weighted to the young, but contrast the current musical scene with the top 40 charts of the 1980s, when I was busy walking a mile to the school bus stop across the street. Huey Lewis and the News sang about working for a living. Bruce Springsteen feared for his job and his family. Dionne and her friends reveled in long-term friendships. Although the chart had its share of skirt chasing, the overall content tempered youthful exuberance with adult concerns.
Big Music should correct this oversight, this overhype of youth at the expense of providing music for those of us with mortgages but with disposable income. Without recognizing life after 25, Big Music will watch its pop and other CD sales decline as adults migrate to songs with adult content. One genre continues to address these concerns: country music's sales increased 12% last year. I suspect Big Music doesn't know why, but probably assumes a nineteen-year-old navel-baring singer could make next year the best yet.
- posted by Brian J. @ 7:23 PM 0 comments
Reinforcing Gender Stereotypes?
I am not a misogynist, but.... Of course, if I say that, immediately you think either the next words out of my keyboard will be, or that I am learning the proper obsequiescence of a Sensitive Nineties Man (SNM) too late for it to do any good for the nineties, but I am not a misogynist; I think women are one of the top two genders in the world. So with that waiver aside....
The Girl Scouts' annual April Showers drive is this month. They left their little yellow bags hanging from our door knob last weekend, and they will return this Saturday to collect whatever HABA effluvia we care to cast off.
So while the Boy Scouts go scouting for food every year, blocking subdivision streets with their herds of minivanned mothers trailing so Junior doesn't collapse from exhaustion walking down one too many driveways, the Girl Scouts collect shampoo, soap, lotion, and brushes? The male hunter gatherer refills the larder while the female of the species lies around the house, eating Thin Mints, and occasionally collecting hair care products for the impoverished.
I would not be against giving out a second helping of food in April, as the Christmas charity supply dwindles, so why don't the Girl Scouts collect food, too? I mean, with the vast masses starving while the Republicans allegedly burn Baghdad for light to better read their violin scores, is there nothing more we can do than to make sure our hungry people smell better? Soap, shampoo, and lotions are the first corners whacked off to appease the budgetary gods of the hungry belly. Have we, the charitable Americans, so sated this hunger that we're now onto putting free ribbons in their hair?
Oh, but no. Instead, we have the opportunity to give soap and feminine products. I'm not saying there won't be a bag on the big red SG doors this weekend; we [the artist formerly known as hli and now Mrs. Brian J.] get enough bath baskets for Christmas that we can certainly provide some Jasmine Jetsam of some sort or another. I guess I'd rather see the opportunity for effortless giving of necessities, not self-esteem boosters. And certainly not posed as the main concern of the futre women of America.
- posted by Brian J. @ 7:15 PM 0 comments
Anyone Remember This Game?
I don't remember this game in arcades, but I was never into Video Game Wars.
- posted by Brian J. @ 6:16 PM 0 comments
Bad Hair Day Post Traumatic Stress Disorder
Here in beautiful St. Louis, a woman is suing her hairdresser for unspecified damages after the hair treatments she received led her to feel unhappy. No kidding.
After the bad hair appointment, er, "treatment" (for her "aesthetical follicle arrangement system," no doubt) on August 9, 2001, the plantiff became distraught at her appearance, took an early retirement from her job, and morphed into a despondent recluse who probably no longer travels abroad.
Because her hair was different in the autumn of 2001. By the second week of September, no doubt it was a total loss.
- posted by Brian J. @ 10:45 AM 0 comments
Tuesday, April 08, 2003
The Plucky Little Mother Who Could [Alter Copyrighted Works Without Permission] The Ladies Home Journal, in their May 2003 issue, presents a story in their "Life Stories: Controversy" section called "Screen Saviours" that depicts the story of one Marlo Garrett, a plucky, inspirational woman not afraid to take on Big Hollywood.
You see, Ms. Garrett runs something called Clean Cut Cinemas. Clean Cut Cinemas is one of those houses that takes whole movies and cuts out the naughty bits, whether swearing or nudity or sexual situations, and then redistributes the bowdlerized work. Unlike the online stories covering the story of the lawsuits in Colorado filed by CleanFlicks to enable this gross violation of copyright, the Ladies Home Journal definitely favors the triumph of this family's values over the property rights inherent in intellectual and creative works protected by copyright.
This is the other side's story. A woman and mother wants to provide family-ready hit entertainment. Of course, the artists and big Hollywood are lining up against her, and copyright holders everywhere are cringing. Although her motives are purer than a thirst to be slaked by a quick buck, she and related companies and actions would reduce any author or moviemaker to the role of one of n monkeys with typewriters, eligible for revision by whatever gorilla comes along with a red pen.
Hopefully, the movie studios and directors will come to their senses and start seeing the opportunity for additional bonus features on DVDs that include a family-friendly release of popular movies, maybe even for five bucks more a disc. Undoubtedly this will bring Aggressive Agitator Parents (AAPs) to their lawmakers with lawn rakes and Citronella torches, protesting a "family tax" dictated by the market, but it would represent the market, and not the government, at work.
Our world would be a better place if these super parents, who have time on their hands to have a career AND run a successful Internet business, can turn the ample attention they spend while their children sit stupified before a Disney version of Reservoir Dogs to better things, such as revising James Joyce's Ulysses so it's readable and suitable for families. In that better world, I'll broaden my mind with whatever paragraph is left of formerly great literature.
- posted by Brian J. @ 7:32 PM 0 comments
Book Review and Gratuitous Slap at President
Pages magazine is a buzz book for the publishing industry, with many of the ads directly related to the content of the editorial copy. I got the March/April 2003 magazine as a part of my ongoing "market" (pleasepublishme) research.
So I came to "Trouble Man," Heather L. Hughes' review for Robert Young Pelton's The World's Most Dangerous Places. The book sounds like a slightly more serious treatment of the subject covered in P.J. O'Rourke's Holidays In Hell--going to dangerous places and writing about what it's like traveling there. I might pick a book like that up--after all, I did read Holidays in Hell.
I liked the review and had a favorable impression of the book until I got to the Typical Sanctimonious Condescension Digression (TSCD) about George W. Bush:
- "The reason I wrote it funny and as a travel guide was I wanted to make it cool to care about things. To present politicians with their clothes off, rebel leaders without their dogma, to find the human motivations behind these people," explains Pelton. "So when you see George [W.] Bush on TV making a speech about the axis of evil, you can flip to my book and go, 'George, you don't get out much, do you?' George really needs my book. If he did get it and go out there, I'm sure he'd have a very different view on the world."
The review's not available online, but I would recommend it for a browse if you're in the coffeeshop of the local megabookstore. Just remember to leave a coffee ring around Robert Pelton's intensely serious visage.
- posted by Brian J. @ 6:15 PM 0 comments
Monday, April 07, 2003
I Was Just Thinking Why don't our special forces grab this Iraqi Minister of Information during one of his "Nonsense! They couldn't hit an elephant at this dist...." news conferences?
- posted by Brian J. @ 10:41 PM 0 comments
Porn Spam At Work Can Be Sexual Harrassment
Thank goodness lawyers are chasing parked ambulances on our behalf!
http://news.com.com/2100-1032-995658.html?tag=fd_lede1_hed
Carrying this to its logical conclusions, businesses will become reponsible not only for their workplaces, but any external communication within those workplaces. Unsolicited e-mail, obscene phone calls, billboards that employees can see from their windows....The sooner we're working in sensory depravation tanks, the better for our employers' legal departments.
- posted by Brian J. @ 5:06 PM 0 comments
Sunday, April 06, 2003
I Was Just Thinking I want to start a band and call it Almost As Good As Ezra, But Looks As Good At A Distance.
- posted by Brian J. @ 11:56 AM 0 comments
You Can Quote Me: It's a dog-eat-dog world, and sometimes you're the dog.
- posted by Brian J. @ 11:51 AM 0 comments
Saturday, April 05, 2003
My life was simpler before I started reading the details nestled among the ubiquitous service contracts I am suddenly expected to sign, apparently without reading or forethought. Previous generations’ advice tells us people once entered contracts after negotiation and attorney consultation, or at least deliberation. Now, however, corporations and other groups have decided consumers don’t need to pay attention since we’re getting such a deal! Initial here and sign by the checkmark.
For example, when I explored Digital Subscriber Line (DSL) options available for high-speed Internet access, a provider wanted me to sign and fax back a contract, ASAP. He could immediately connect me, THE SAP, and give me the full benefit of that day’s special pricing. His pressing need smacked of an unmet quota and a touch of unbridled hucksterism. I read the contract from paragraph 1 to paragraph 14, and I encountered paragraph 13. After some empathetic text about the company’s certain costs associated with business, I would “agree that [I] will reimburse [them] for any and all direct costs, fees and charges that [they] may incur from other providers as a result of [my] installation….”
Although I recognize the business difficulty the DSL provider might have pacing customer demand with its existing equipment, this paragraph makes me responsible for any equipment or services the company needs to honor its end of the contract. A new router for several thousand dollars? That’s my responsibility, since I was one customer who put the provider over its current equipment capacity.
I pointed this out to the DSL salesman. Of course, he assured me, that’s not what they meant. However, contracts are not supposed to be open to interpretation. Between what the DSL provider meant and what the contract said, the court would rule against the fleeting meaning every time. When I pursued the matter, the DSL company decided it no longer sold residential DSL.
When my wife and I wanted to adopt a rescue dog, we had a hound visit our house, mainly to see if it wanted to eat our cats. The rescue volunteer provided a packet of information about dogs and a contract we would have to sign to take possession of the pooch. The contract included house inspections at will of the rescue group. It could also take the dog back at any time if it found our conditions “unsuitable, which includes but not limited to…” a non-exclusive litany. If we lost the dog; we’d pay the rescue group a thousand dollars, even if we “lost” the dog ten years hence when it died and we did not notify the rescue group in 1 (one) week.
Of course, that’s not what the contract meant. Contracts don’t mean, they say explicitly. I’d rather not subject myself to the next generation of dog rescuers and their intents, which might differ from the people who wrote the contract in the first place and what they meant in the contract. So our cats are safe today.
As contracts become more ubiquitous, we consumers are becoming conditioned to sign and accept them at face value. As a result, organizations use them more and stack them more against the unquestioning signer. I question the contracts, and argue with adamant, unthinking organizational organisms. These people never negotiate, and if I don’t like the contract, they challenge me to find a better deal. As a result, I’m happily on a month-to-month dial-up connection and without a dog or cell phone. However, I’m also not dependent on fickle intentions and interpretations of my service providers and their boilerplate, cut and paste contracts.
- posted by Brian J. @ 7:59 PM 0 comments
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