Mid-Election Hooptedoodle, 2020 Edition

 I wrote this not long after the 2008 election:

Someone else came over to me the day after the election and, clearly hoping to gloat, asked what I thought of the results. I said, "What a horrible, humiliating night...for Obama."

Their eyebrows shot up, and they asked how I could possibly say that.

"Easy. After Bush's two terms, given his incredibly low approval ratings and popularity, the Democrats should have been able to nominate a lava lamp and get almost 500 electoral votes. Obama's under 400. His winning by that close a margin is like me playing one-on-one against Michael Jordan, and his winning by ten baskets to seven. Nobody expected me to win, but the fact that it was that close is embarrassing to him."

Multiply that by... well, a really big number to understand how mortified Biden and his supporters should be by the current uncertainty. The mainstream media and the jobless left have spent four years caterwauling nonstop about President Trump. Some small percentage of it was even justified. He's been continually and loudly condemned as a monster, a buffoon, a tyrant. 

And the best and brightest that the Democrats could muster, with four years to prepare, is currently in a dead heat with him, too close to call. Imagine being pitted against the love child of Hitler and Charles Manson in a popularity contest and having the voters unable to decide which of you they prefer.

Enough rambling. Here's a picture of sunglasses.

Old Man Canada & Infant Israel

Conservatives often make the communications mistake of overestimating the intelligence of their audience. Not necessarily the audience that's actually in the room with them, but the wider audience that's only going to hear the sound bites that the media feeds them.

As I explained a long time ago in a blog post not so very far away, a basic truth in public communication is that when writing, whether for publication or verbal presentation, you need to assume that your audience is stupid and mean. Stupid, in that if anything you say can reasonably be accidentally misconstrued, they will do so. Mean, in that if anything you say can be manipulated and taken out of context to sound damaging, they will deliberately do so.

When conservatives are speaking, the media members in the audience usually provide the mean and trust the wider public to provide the stupid. The public rarely lets them down.

Consider the recent flap over Mike Huckabee supposedly saying that women can't control their libidos. He said nothing of the sort, of course, but if your information diet consisted of mainstream media sound bites, you'd be convinced otherwise. Here's what Huckabee actually said:

And if the Democrats want to insult the women of America by making them believe that they are helpless without Uncle Sugar coming in and providing for them a prescription each month for because they cannot control their libido or their reproductive system without the help of the government, then so be it. Let us take that discussion all across America because women are far more than the Democrats have played them to be, and women across America need to stand up and say, ‘Enough of that nonsense.’

Contrary to the gleeful soundbites and tweets, Huckabee is clearly not insulting women. He's just pointing out how Democrats do. To claim otherwise is disingenuous at best.

While researching the preceding paragraphs, I saw that the narrative has shifted somewhat. Now that the left-wing media is having trouble selling the lie about what Huckabee said, they're shifting to saying that they never tried to lie about it in the first place and conservatives are big meanies for claiming that they did. Yeesh.

Another great example of this was when Sarah Palin knew when the Boston Tea Party happened, and knew that her live audience knew it too, but "Gotcha"-playing left-wing activists journalists mistakenly assumed she must have been trying to cite the year of America's independence, because everybody (who went to journalism school) knows nothing else important happened in the 18th century. They jumped down her throat about it, insinuating she was stupid. If only we could harness ignorant hypocrisy as an energy source.

The attentive reader may notice that I'm not linking to liberal attack sites. That's not an accident. It isn't because they're hard to find or because I can't document sources, but because I'm not interesting in taking the chance of giving them more hits. I prefer to link to credible sources rebutting them. However, for this last item, which inspired this post, I haven't seen anyone else challenging it yet. I'm hoping it catches on, because I'd love to see Michael Coren or Mark Steyn eviscerate the writer.

Heather Mallick is a left-wing shill who writes for the Toronto Star (at the risk of repeating myself). If it's not atheist, pro-abortion, liberal, Liberal propaganda, she's against it. Stephen Harper could rescue a hundred puppies from a burning high-rise building and she'd complain that he didn't brush them and clip their nails on the way down the stairs. As a good leftist, she's also not real fond of Jews, although she spends a chunk of the column I'm describing protesteth-ing that point too much. (Protip: if you claim you're not anti-Semitic but protest every security initiative Israel takes on to defend its citizens, you're actually  arguing that Jews don't have the right to self-defence, effectively endorsing their slaughter. No sale on the whole "not anti-Semitic" thing.)

I had wanted to go point-by-point through her column correcting the logical errors, but that would take longer than I'm willing to invest right now. I don't want this piece to join my collection of half-finished posts that are no longer even remotely timely. I really need to point out one particular jaw-dropper, though. Mallick takes it as a point of faith that Stephen Harper is a bumbling, uninformed hick. She uses this example in an attempt to hammer that point home:

Here’s the most uneducated thing: Harper claimed Canada is the "polar opposite of Israel” as it has "much geography but very little history." The state of Israel is 65 years old, Canada is 147 and humans first arrived on this continent perhaps 16,000 years ago.

I've said it before, and I'll say it again: Wow. Just wow.

And this woman is a professional journalist. By thinking that the nation of Israel sprang into existence ex nihilo in 1948, Mallick demonstrates her place in the ranks of the painfully ignorant.

For those who don't know (which is arguably fine, as long as you don't think you're being really clever by trying to smugly rebut someone who does), the nation of Israel was established in, umm, Biblical times. Even if you reject the idea that the Bible was divinely inspired or that there was anything supernatural involved in Israel's rise and fall, there is no question of Israel's existence prior to the adoption of the calendar by which we now measure years. Israel was sacked by the Romans in 70. That's the year 70, as in one thousand, nine hundred, and forty-four years ago. Almost two millennia since it fell, and considerably more than that since it was founded.

But by all means, Ms. Mallick, please continue to impress us with how much less history Israel has than a country that's been around for about a buck-and-a-half, and how  "uneducated" Stephen Harper is.

I'm guessing Ms. Mallick didn't do so well in math class. If you insist that 1944 < 147, your teacher will probably mark it wrong.

Oh, well, for those who are terrible at math (and history), I suppose there's always journalism school.


Enough rambling. Here's a picture of a bottle of something of which my wife has a bottle. And of which she took a picture.

Just For The Record

The more I hear from him, the better I like him.

Enough rambling. Here's a picture of the picture I already posted, because it bears repeating.

Turns Out The Batusi Is Not The Sign For Anything

It's probably wrong that I think this is hilarious:

JOHANNESBURG, South Africa - A man who provided sign language interpretation on stage for Nelson Mandela's memorial service, attended by scores of heads of state, was a "fake," the national director of the Deaf Federation of South Africa said on Tuesday...sign language experts said the man was not signing in South African or American sign languages and could not have been signing in any other known sign language because there was no structure to his arm and hand movements.

I used to think finding stuff like this funny made me a jerk. Now I realize it's just a symptom of the underlying condition.

I need to update my will. I hereby request that at my funeral, somebody who doesn't know sign language should stand up at the front making random gestures as people speak. Rudeness is encouraged. If at all possible, work the Macarena in there somewhere.

We can only hope this episode inspires a new fad on Youtube: superimposing fake sign language interpreters at famous speeches. Imagine having someone standing to the side looking like they're playing charades and/or having a petit mal seizure (a fine line, that) as Reagan talks about tearing down this wall, or King talks about having a dream this afternoon (it's always a good idea to catch a nap before giving a big speech), or Obama lies through his teeth and says you can keep your plan if you like it, or Walter White proclaims himself The One Who Knocks. Internet, make this happen!

The Gettysburg address would be a good one, but for some reason I can't seem to find it on Youtube. With all those people gathered to hear the president's big speech, you'd think somebody would have brought a camcorder.

At first I assumed that this was a prank that got way out of hand. Maybe the guy was one of Johnny Knoxville's buddies, or one of Ashton Kutcher's Punk'd accomplices. Maybe the ghosts of Dick Clark and Ed McMahon are orchestrating bloopers and practical jokes from beyond the grave. The fake signer probably thought that surely somebody would call him out before the event actually got rolling. It wasn't until showtime that he finally decided between fake sign language and an homage to Garrett Morris's assistance for the hard of hearing.

Or maybe it was a wacky misunderstanding, like that time a cab driver got shanghaied into appearing on the BBC as a computer expert.

But no, turns out this isn't the fake signer's first time to the rodeo:

The man also did sign interpretation at an event last year that was attended by South African President Jacob Zuma, Druchen said. At that appearance, a deaf person in the audience videotaped the event and gave it to the federation for the deaf, which analyzed the video, prepared a report about it and a submitted a formal complaint.

Seriously, guys, checking references isn't a bad thing. Next time at least Google the name of your prospective hire.

At least this kind of thing is too ridiculous to be a widespread problem, or even a regional one.

Wait, what?

 Bogus sign language interpreters are a problem in South Africa, because people who know a few signs try to pass themselves off as interpreters, said Parkin, the principal of the school for the deaf. And those hiring them usually don't sign, so they have no idea that the people they are hiring cannot do the job, she said. "They advertise themselves as interpreters because they know 10 signs and they can make some quick money," said Parkin.

This reminds me of Marge Simpson's plan to give piano lessons despite not knowing how to play the piano: "I just have to stay one lesson ahead of the kid."

I have a nephew who lives in South Africa. I wonder if he can account for his whereabouts on Tuesday. Assuming he wasn't involved in this fiasco (which is probably the case, given that he's seven), I have a moneymaking suggestion for his future reference.

This situation has only gotten funnier / more disturbing as more information has come out:

The man accused of faking sign interpretation while standing alongside world leaders like U.S. President Barack Obama at Nelson Mandela's memorial service said Thursday he hallucinated that angels were entering the stadium, suffers from schizophrenia and has been violent in the past.

Thamsanqa Jantjie said in a 45-minute interview with The Associated Press that his hallucinations began while he was interpreting and that he tried not to panic because there were "armed policemen around me." He added that he was once hospitalized in a mental health facility for more than one year....

Asked how often he had become violent, he said "a lot" while declining to provide details. Jantjie said he was due on the day of the ceremony to get a regular six-month mental health checkup to determine whether the medication he takes was working, whether it needed to be changed or whether he needed to be kept at a mental health facility for treatment.... He said he has previously interpreted at many events without anyone complaining.

...

......

......... Anyway, that's a thing that happened.



As for Mandela himself, I have no opinion. I used to think he must have been a great hero, because Rolling Stone magazine said so. There were even songs about him, and surely bad people never have songs about them released on major labels. However, in accordance with 1 Corinthians 13:11, I've long since stopped blindly believing what the media tells me. The death of my former liberalism was the inevitable result.

My travels around the Net leave me unsure what to think of Mandela. Sorry, no links because I didn't keep track. However, you can probably type "Nelson Mandela" into a search engine as easily as I can, or even easier since you can just copy and paste it from where I just typed it. Looks to me like he was a communist sympathizer (at least), explicitly refused to renounce violence while in prison, and didn't even qualify for any sympathy from Amnesty International.

Standing up against Apartheid is certainly a huge point in his favour. He also seemed to keep things pretty peaceful once he was in power. If there was a lot of revenge-fueled racial violence in post-Apartheid South Africa, it's been kept pretty quiet (which is a distinct possibility).

However, Mandela was also a mover and shaker within the ANC, which has used some pretty questionable tactics over the years. I have a hard time endorsing the organization that invented necklacing. The enemy of my enemy can still be pretty reprehensible.

I was discussing this uncertainty with a friend who said, "You have to respect his spending 27 years in prison."

I replied, "Manson's been in longer than that. You may want to chose a different yardstick."




Enough rambling. Here's a picture of the patio stones in my back yard.

Saturday Night's All Right For Blogging

This is an experiment. Every day I have a pile of ideas to write about. My backlog of notes stretch back for years. Almost every day I intend to write, but don't. So today I'm going to start up this text file, add arbitrary bits to it throughout the day as the urge strikes, and post it late tonight. It may be a lot, or very little indeed. We'll see how it goes.

---

I've been filesharing since long before filesharing was a thing. It started with copying programs on cassette for my Commodore Vic 20. Then the Commodore 64, with its 1541 disc drive and a program called Fast Hack 'Em (itself copied, of course). Weird side note: I once got a new bank card with the randomly assigned PIN of 1541. I didn't change it, because it was so easy to remember. Every time I used that card, I just had to visualize putting it into a Commodore disc drive.

A little later, when my friends and I started getting seriously into music, we habitually took turns buying albums (cassettes at this point). Only one of us would buy any given album, then the others would run off copies.

Around 1986, we had just started getting into Genesis. We only knew the singles from Invisible Touch that got radio play and an hour's worth of videos that were on a two-part MuchMusic Spotlight, which I still have it on a VHS tape somewhere. I remember (future-)Pastor Derek and I deliberating over who would buy which of their albums. I picked Abacab first because it included Keep It Dark. I don't remember which one he got - I think it was Duke or A Trick Of The Tail. Either way, he got the better of that arrangement.

I also remember that no one wanted to buy Trespass. We had never heard of any of the songs on it, and there were only six tracks, so it had to be really short and therefore a ripoff, right?

We would learn.

Given this well-established propensity to piracy, I was all over Napster when it came along. I still have the issue of Maximum PC that included the client software on a bundled CD-ROM. Over the years, I went through many other alternatives. Usenet, BearShare, Kazaa, DC++, Shareaza, WinMX, and many others whose names I have forgotten have come and gone.

Nowadays, of course, torrents are the way to go. I used uTorrent when on Windows, and have settled on KTorrent here in Linuxland.

I've always practiced hit-and-run strategies for any files that a copyright holder might object to having passed around. That is to say, any commercially available material. My default settings in KTorrent are to stop seeding as soon as my download completes. Impolite, perhaps, but it's kept me out of court thus far.

When I have something that I can safely leave seeding, though, I happily do so. Free open source software, concert recordings (usually safe to share, although not always), and anything with explicit permission to distribute stays seeded. I leave my torrent software running most of the time, and I've managed to rack up some good share ratios. Here's what I'm currently seeding, with ratios as of this writing:

Ubuntu Studio 13.04                41.32
World English Audio Bible       36.01
AVLinux 6.01b                           17.35
AVLinux 6.0                                17.23
Ubuntu Studio 12.10                10.42
LibreOffice 3.6.4 installer        1.83
Deep Purple 2012 concert        0.54
LibreOffice 3.6.4 Help files      0.41
Paul McCartney 2013 concert   0.28

(Sorry the numbers don't line up all pretty. I could insert a table or play with the spacing, but that sounds like more work than not doing either of those.)

I'm especially impressed that the newer version of AVLinux moved ahead of the old version so quickly. I've been seeding version 6.0 for over 59 days (actual seeding time only), but 6.0b for only 13 days. I'll probably stop seeding the old versions of AVLinux and Ubuntu Studio pretty soon, if only to free up some hard drive space, since all the demand is obviously for the newer versions. I'm also pleased with the demand for the audio Bible, although of course I'd like it to be way out in first place.

---

Volumes have been written about Kermit Gosnell, with much wringing of hands from the pro-abortion side, alternatively claiming that he did nothing wrong or that he is an aberration, a stain on the fine profession of abortionist.

The simple truth about Gosnell is that he's nothing unusual. The babies he killed wound up no more dead than those killed by any smiling ghoul in a clean gown, working in a well-lit facility to terminate the pregnancies of women who don't even look pregnant yet.

The stage of gestation is not the issue, the killing is. The actions of every abortionist are as vile as those of Gosnell, and deserve the same condemnation.

---

My bit about my new saw includes one joke that pleases me far more than it should. I know it's poor form to laugh at your own jokes, but if I don't, who will?

Anyway, there's one joke in there that seems like an easy, stupid pun but which actually works on a whole other level. Which is still a stupid pun, but one that generally gets missed. I've gotten eye rolls from people around me when I pointed it out, which makes it no less entertaining to me.

---

I'm glad Dexter is wrapping up. I've had a complicated relationship with this show. I like the premise, and I like Michael C. Hall's acting, so I figured it was worth a shot. About a year ago I borrowed the first two seasons from a friend, and... obtained... the rest of the seasons (remember my first big topic today?).

Season 1 was awful. Around the time that Dexter found the doll parts in his freezer, I turned to my wife and said, "The killer's going to turn out to be somebody from his past that he doesn't know about. If it's his long-lost brother, I'm out."

A few episodes later, the killer was revealed as Dexter's long-lost brother, and I was out.

Oh, yeah: spoiler warning.

If only there were some way to go back up and insert that warning earlier. Ah, well, perhaps someday such technology will be within reach of the common man.

Anyway, I gave up. My wife persevered. She assured me that it got better after season 1, and I really enjoy Jimmy Smits's acting (he's why I started watching my all-time favourite show, NYPD Blue), so I decided to give it another chance, at least until Smits did his bit.

The writing still varied widely, but was good enough to keep me in. Barely. I loved the John Lithgow and Colin Hanks / Edward James Olmos seasons (the Hanks / Olmos twist is the only one in the entire series that I didn't see coming). However, I despise the "long lost relative" trope, and they've gone to that well twice.

I've long gotten the impression that Dexter has a senior writer or two with a lot of clout but no fresh ideas. They churn out the hackwork, and generally drag the show down to the lowest common denominator. However, the writing staff also includes at least one or two people with good ideas but little influence. They manage to slip some quality material past the guards here and there, but mostly get quashed. If those fresher voices had been louder,  the show could have been great.

They're three episodes into the final season, and I'm glad it's ending. I want to ride the show out to the end at this point, but I wish they were only doing six episodes. Everyone involved seems to be phoning it in this year.

This season seems like a Greatest Hits compilation, only in Dexter's case they're revisiting the worst aspects of the series. Deb being whiny, ineffectual, and so annoying that I spend every episode hoping someone - anyone - will kill her? Check. A serial killer expert shows up and makes Dexter nervous? Check. New character has extensive but never-before-hinted-at ties to Dexter's past? Check. Painfully bad dialogue, especially in Hall's narration? Check. Misuse of technical terminology by characters who are supposed to be experts and therefore know better (there's a difference between "psychopath" and "sociopath", and every time Vogel opens her mouth she proves she doesn't know it)? Check, Check, a thousand times Check.

Even the technical aspects of the show are getting lazy. Watch any scene with dialogue between two characters. Every time the camera angle switches, say from a front-angle two-shot to a shot over a character's shoulder, the actors' head positions jerk around wildly. They go from looking straight at one another to one looking down to either or both staring off into the distance with each new shot. Nobody involved could be bothered with little details like continuity between shots.

I can't imagine Bryan Cranston tolerating Breaking Bad sliding off a cliff this badly.

All dramatic writing is about getting from Point A to Point B. With Dexter, I often hate Point B (long lost relatives ahoy!), but how they get there can be interesting. On The Walking Dead, Point A and Point B are consistently good, but how they get there can be lazy. Case in point - everyone disagreeing with Dale about whether to kill a prisoner, even though several of the characters would clearly have sided with him. However, they needed to alienate Dale from everyone to make his death later in the episode all the more tear-jerking ("I never got to tell him... sniff..."). The characters get moved around like pieces on a chess board, characterization to this point be hanged.

Oh, yeah: spoiler warning.

The Walking Dead has gotten better on this score. I think the writers may have even realized their mistake. Glenn gave an out-of-nowhere speech in a later episode about how Dale had been right and he shouldn't have abandoned him like that. Well, yeah, Glenn, and you wouldn't have if your writers had been more conscientious.

For the ultimate in good writing, though, nothing beats Breaking Bad. Point A and Point B are both terrific, and how they get there is always compelling and unpredictable. I'm not glad that Breaking Bad is ending, but I am looking forward very much to seeing how they do it.

---

Helen Thomas, the terrorist-sympathizing former journalist, has passed away. The CNN Breaking News e-mail bulletin says, "Thomas retired in 2010 after she made controversial comments regarding Jewish people."

I guess you could say that. She accidentally let her anti-Semitism show in front of the camera, and "retired" a week later. If a public figure to the right of Mao had made those kinds of statements, they'd still be reviled and propped up as an example of the "racism of the right". But since Thomas was a credentialed (literally) leftist, it's a dog-bites-man story and the media lets one of their own "retire with dignity".

---

I've been listening to the new, complete audiobook version of World War Z by Max Brooks. It's pretty good, and the voice cast is top-notch. It probably works better as an audiobook than as a novel. One of my main criticisms is that the dialogue doesn't really offer different "voices" to each character, with little to distinguish them in terms of vocabulary or speaking style. Having different actors play each character ameliorates that problem, but doesn't solve it completely.

I will one day watch the movie, which by all accounts I've been able to take seriously appears to be a soulless Hollywoodized disaster, just out of geeky completionism. I certainly won't pay ten bucks to watch it in a big dark room with noisy texting strangers. I'll wait until the DVD rip hits the torrent sites is released and available at my local Blockbuster store.

What?

I think they missed a bet with the World War Z adaptation. It should never have been a movie. It should have been a TV series. The self-contained episodic nature of the book would have made for a great series. Each episode could have had the interviewer going to speak to another survivor, switching to their story told in flashback as they spoke. Of course, you could have the interviewer's support staff, UN personnel, etc., as recurring characters. It would essentially be an anthology series with a stable framework. Although anthology series are a tough sell to an audience these days, I think the zombie / survival horror fanbase would be large enough to get the show off the ground.

Alas, what could have been.

I haven't finished the audiobook yet. If Brooks ever reveals what happened in North Korea, don't tell me. Everybody hates spoilers, right?

What?

---

A woman in the U.S. found out that her unborn baby has down syndrome. Unwilling to raise the child (for the record, I have no problem whatsoever with her making this decision - giving a child up for adoption is always an option), she put the word out: if anyone would adopt the baby, they could have him or her. (I try to avoid referring to unborn children as "it", which concedes important linguistic ground to those who would deny the child's humanity.) If no prospective adoptive parents stepped up, she would have an abortion.

The plea went online, and over a thousand people volunteered.

I've frequently railed on the cognitive dissonance and refusal to accept facts that are inherent in the pro-abortion position. Can even this case make them finally pack in the ludicrous "who's going to raise all the unwanted babies" argument? Probably not, but I can hope and pray.

Parents are available for unwanted children. I have friends who waited years for adoption. We're a long, long way from running out of loving homes for any child who makes it through the gauntlet that the world offers those with doubts about having a baby.

There are no unwanted children. There are just a lot of people who project their own unwillingness to be a loving parent onto others.

I was almost in an adoption situation myself several years ago. My wife heard a woman say that she just found out she was pregnant, and wasn't happy about it. She wasn't seriously considering abortion, but was hesitant to raise the child herself and was musing about trying to find adoptive parents. My wife told me that she very nearly volunteered on the spot. She wasn't 100% sure I would agree, but knew that it was a pretty safe bet. She was right. I assured her that if she's ever in a situation like that again, she has carte blanche.

The pregnant woman wound up keeping the baby and raising her herself. They live in our neighbourhood, and that no-longer-baby goes to school with my son. Everything turned out OK, as it usually does.

There is no shortage of homes for "unwanted" children, at least in North American society.  I can't speak for the rest of the world, but last I heard international adoption was a thing that people do. Anyone who clings to the "all the unwanted children" argument is demonstrating that they're too ignorant (willingly or unwillingly) to take seriously in a discussion of life-and-death issues.

---

"You can't argue with results" is just a prettier way of saying "the ends justify the means."

"To each his own", depending on context, is usually just a prettier way of saying "Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law."

---

I recently saw this listing on a classified ad site. I've touched up the grammar and punctuation, which were atrocious, partly because I couldn't stand them and partly to make tracing the post to its source (not the point) less likely:

$290.00 Crib Voucher for sale! You pick out the crib, and I'll buy it at the store for you (the voucher has my name on it). Reason for selling: I have no space for the crib at the moment. Selling it for $225 (brand new).

I can't come up with any theory for this that doesn't involve words to the effect of "The kid can sleep in a cardboard box. Mommy needs crack money!"

Can anybody else?

---

This has gone better than I had expected. I think I'll stop now.

---

Enough rambling. Here's a picture of some of my PC Gamer magazine collection, rotated to maximize the nerdiness.

Reading Log: Catching Up With Kafka

Hopefully I remember my login credentials for this blog, so this can actually get posted. I hadn't noticed passing the anniversary of my last post. My sense of time is such that my last post feels recent to me. Another gap may or may not happen again after this one. I have no specific intentions either way.


Before we get to the book, an update on my online activities. I'm wasting as much of my life on the Internet as ever, but I've been more a spectator than a participant of late. One of my everpresent goals has been to list (and maybe link) all the sites I read regularly, if only to have the list available when I'm away from my own computer. Being able to refer to a post here would be easier than trying to remember my bookmarks and recently visited history. Maybe someday. It's still on the list.

I still post to the Forge forums fairly often. Mostly bug reports or suggestions these days, since there are pretty much no cards left for me to script. All the easy stuff has been done. I could join the mad scramble to claim cards from new sets as they're released, but I'm lazy enough to sit back and let others do the work.

I also dip a toe in the waters of comments sections from time to time, usually during discussions about politics, religion, abortion - you know, light, fun stuff.

Most recently, I've spoken up to refute the claim that censorship comes largely from the right / conservative side of the political spectrum, and cited my Fallacy of Family principle to explain Senator Rob Portman's pathetic abandonment of what he claimed were his principles.

I also stepped into a discussion where a pro-abortion individual was arguing that abortion is an economic necessity, while simultaneously insinuating that pro-life conservatives are heartless greedmongers who only care about money. I sometimes wonder whether cognitive dissonance can actually become physically painful for pro-abortionists. Anyway, this compassionate friend of women and children was making the point that we need to exterminate as many young and/or poor mouths as possible, and that death is preferable to foster care because the latter is expensive. When they claimed that meant adoption also wasn't an option, I offered that adoption and foster care aren't the same thing. That's why there are two different terms for them and everything.


I've given up on commenting on CNN articles. I'm almost free of the temptation to even read those comment threads, and soon may quit bothering with the articles. CNN has gone completely off the rails. CNN always had a strong left bias, but over the past several months I've watched it slide into outright dementia. On any article that has anything to do with religion, politics, or moral issues (and on a lot of the articles that don't), the comments immediately get swamped with hate-filled rants condemning anything that doesn't agree with the poster's point of view, which is inevitably radically far-left and atheistic. Make a drinking game of it. Take a shot every time you see anyone to the right of Michael Moore called a fascist, or whenever you see a reference to an "invisible sky fairy" or "invisible pink unicorn". You'll be sloshed before you have to scroll the page down.

The sheer hatred flowing from those who profess tolerance is disconcerting, to say the least. A report of The Bible miniseries garnering high ratings devolves into paranoid fantasies of Christian theocracy. Responses to a fluff piece on Chris Tomlin's songwriting start with cries of "Stupid music for stupid people!" and go quickly downhill from there. Any voices of moderation even from reasonable leftists (yes, I gratefully affirm their existence) are shrieked into oblivion by the horde.

This is not all entirely the fault of CNN itself. Unless they wanted to moderate or censor their comments, there's little they can do about this Escape From New York, "it's the end of the month and the crazies are out of food" ecosystem.

However, one must wonder. Much more controversial topics are discussed all over the Internet with few mainstream sites being as hate-flooded as CNN. Why have so many trollish folk chosen CNN as the bridge under which to dwell?

I think it's their natural environment to some extent. Those of us on the right lean towards Fox and Sun News, not because they're perfect but because they're likelier to handle our views with some respect. Conservatives don't demand fawning agreement on every point, but it's nice to have a place to discuss mature matters in a mature way.

The hate-filled hew to CNN for the same reason. At some level, they're being fed there.


On to the book. This part may well be shorter than the preamble. Spoilers for Kafka ahead.


I finally got around to reading The Trial, by Franz Kafka. I bought this book in 2008, and wrote about doing so here. It took five years to reach the top of my reading pile, which isn't a bad turnaround time.

Over the years I've tried to make a point of reading as much oft-cited or so-considered "classic" literature as I can. Awareness of my own mortality has forced me to accept that I won't be able to read everything I'd like to before I die, since I want to read everything, so I'm trying to prioritize it a bit better. I'll probably never get around to War and Peace, but I may read about it on Wikipedia one of these days.

Some "classics" have been dealt with, as far as I'm concerned. I read enough Shakespeare and Bronte in high school to convince me that I never want to read any more, and I made repeated attempts at Moby Dick before accepting that it, not I, was the problem preventing me from making it more than a few chapters before abandonment.

As for Kafka, I had a vague notion that he wrote about surrealism and confusion, with characters turning into nonhuman forms and being frustrated by impenetrable bureaucracies. His recurring theme seemed to be people getting caught up helplessly in events beyond their control. It didn't sound like fun reading, but it sounded like thought-provoking, possibly important reading.

I also wanted to read Kafka to put an end to (one bit of) my own unearned smugness. Describing unpleasant situations as "Kafkaesque" has become a cliche. It's gotten to the point that when I hear some hipster in line at Tim Horton’s describe having to wait in line for more than thirty seconds as a Kafkaesque nightmare, I want to swat the jaunty cap off their head and ask whether they've ever actually read Kafka, or if they just heard a big impressive-sounding word and decided to throw it out there in case it might be appropriate. Not having read any Kafka myself would make doing so rather hypocritical.

Now I have licence.

The Trial certainly does portray confusion. The protagonist, Joseph K. (we never learn his last name), is inextricably caught up in a maze of oblique statements and undefined expectations. He is "arrested", though never never actually held in custody, and held over for trial, although he never actually sets foot, so far as the reader knows, in a courtroom. Throughout the story it seems that everyone knows all about this shadowy legal system, which is simultaneously evidently near-invisible and near-omnipotent. No one, including Joseph or the reader, ever knows what offense Joseph is even alleged to have committed, although everyone agrees that it's a very serious matter and his chances at trial aren't good.

The book ends with Joseph's sentence being carried out. He has evidently been found guilty, although once again it is never said so simply. He does not seem surprised by this, but only indignant at the abrupt nature of his (spoiler alert!) execution.

The entire book is a smoky labyrinth of people talking around facts, pontificating endlessly without conveying any actual information. The dialogue is completely unrealistic, but realism is not the point. Kafka is working in moods and metaphors, expressing that modern society, with its bureaucratic systems, has long since passed being too complex for the simple man to comprehend. Now it has become too much for even a worldly, sophisticated man like Joseph K., a multilingual, well-travelled, upwardly mobile banking executive, to grasp.

I didn't care at all for the writing style, but I assume that it was a deliberate decision on Kafka's part and respect his writing ability for it. As the book began to drag for me, I tried to fall back on a fiction-reading shortcut from my high-school days. When I get stuck slogging through material that doesn't merit my full attention (Bronte, I'm looking in your direction), I start reading only the first sentence of each paragraph. That first sentence usually contains the key information to carry the story along, and the rest is often just descriptive embellishment.

That doesn't work with The Trial. Perhaps to represent the impassive metaphoric wall that the legal system of the book presents to the characters, Kafka uses extraordinarily long paragraphs. Pages can go by without a paragraph break, with entire back-and-forth dialogues between characters contained between a single set of carriage returns. While technically incorrect by modern editorial standards, this style lets Kafka make the reader feel as trapped and overwhelmed as the characters. I must admit that by the end of the book, I was skimming long sections.

I don't regret having checked this book off my "someday" list, especially since it was such a short, quick read despite its density. however, I don't intend to seek out any more of Kafka's work. I'm considering watching either the 1993 or 1962 movie version of The Trial, but doubt I'll bother.

My edition of The Trial was a sort of director's cut, with deleted sections and notes. It was interesting to find that the book was not properly finished. At least one chapter abruptly stops with a note that Kafka's manuscript for that chapter ends there, obviously unresolved. Even the order of the chapters is uncertain, as Kafka wrote them in separate notebooks and gave the chapters titles but not numbers. The Trial was only published posthumously, and against Kafka's explicit request that his unpublished works be destroyed. Subsequent editors have disagreed about the best ordering of the chapters, which says much about the coherence of the narrative.

I think that although I'm glad to have finally read Kafka, I'm done with him. I've had Terry Gilliam's Brazil queued up to watch for a long time, and I fear I'm going to have the same feelings about it when I get around to it.


Enough rambling. Here's a picture of something my wife cooked and ate. Over the last year she put in an amazing amount of hard work, and lost very close to a hundred pounds (which I never would have thought she had to spare). In the course of this she joined a weight-loss cult organization, and in the course of their activities she frequently contributed recipes and even photos of her food creations. This is one of them. As the reader may surmise, I'm not impressed with the organization, understanding that she was the one doing all the work. Their contribution was getting paid, rather handsomely at that, to weigh her each week. She's happy, though, and her efforts were very successful, so no lasting harm was done by their involvement. She's been invited as a featured speaker at an upcoming event of theirs, because she's a great "results not typical" success story. I'd love for her to get up and explain that the organization's contribution was negligible at best, but she's much nicer than I am.

Perfectly Ordinary Shirt Day

I'll put my hatred of bullying, and contempt for the bullies themselves, up against anyone's. I have a visceral reaction to any abuse of power or authority.

This holds true whether we're talking about bullies on the playground, or anywhere else in life. Members of Parliament who intimate that objecting to their proposal implies you're in league with child pornographers, thuggish cops whose first interaction with a distraught foreigner is to taser him to death, teachers who run screeching to the police to arrest a man because his four-year-old daughter draws a picture of a gun, or people who think it's OK to kill babies in the name of convenience, and hey, it's not like they can fight back - they're all cut from the same cloth as playground tyrants, and I want them all knocked off their high horses. Hard.

However, as much as I deplore bullying in all its forms, I won't conform for the sake of an empty gesture.

Tomorrow is Pink Shirt Day, intended to demonstrate opposition to bullying. There will probably be millions of people, including lots of them at my son's school and my workplace, wearing pink shirts under the delusion that a momentary meaningless gesture of solidarity will dispel the satisfaction that bullies get from exercising brute force. Their intentions are good, but on Thursday they'll be dressing normally and the Nelsons of the world will resume business as usual.

This display will do nothing to dissuade bullies, mainly because bullies aren't very smart. If they were, they'd be far more frightened of possible consequences of their behaviour, like the school shooting currently playing out in Ohio. Interestingly, earlier today I saw reports saying that the (alleged...) shooter was a favourite target for his school's bullies. Those seem to have now been scrubbed offline.

That's the sole upside of school shootings: the hope that somewhere a bully will furrow their unibrow and wonder whether that little spaz they torment might do the same to them if pushed too far, and back off. I'd rather they back off out of personal growth, but in the interim fear will do. And no, that tiny upside doesn't mitigate the tragic downside.

Anti-bullying has entered the fashionable mainstream. That's only because now it's politically useful to some people to call attention to some of the victims. Kids have always been picked on by other kids. Some can take it, some can't (which is not meant to denigrate those who can't, because they shouldn't have to). The awkward kids, shy kids, tall kids, short kids, fat kids, smart kids, homely kids, and yes, those kids who don't conform to the mainstream stereotypes of masculinity or femininity, as the case may be, have always gotten picked on. The worst thing a kid can be in the eyes of other kids is different. And everybody tisked and muttered about how that shouldn't be, but it went on more or less unabated for millenia.

But now it's intolerable and the greatest scourge of our society because of the fashionable (take that as a pun if you like) victims.

"It gets better" is a message for all kids, not just those in trendy subcultures.

As for me, I will not be wearing a pink shirt tomorrow, partly because I don't own one but more because I'm largely immune to peer pressure. This is closely related to my near-total lack of social skills and inability to understand normal human interaction.

This immunity has some downsides. Sometimes it's wise to go with the herd, because there be tigers in the other direction. On the other hand, not caring (or often, even realizing) what everyone else is doing lets you skip over a lot of nonsense in life. I rather like it when I look at the magazines in the supermarket checkout aisle and don't recognize any of the people on the covers.

I'm actually hoping that one of our office cheerleaders calls me out tomorrow for not wanting to play this latest reindeer game. If and when they do, I'm going to make a loud spectacle out of asking them why they're singling me out for negative attention just because I don't conform to their expectations. I'll grow increasingly (mock-) distraught as I proclaim how much they're hurting my feelings by picking on me for dressing differently from them.

Then I'll abruptly shut off the histrionics and thank them, because I feed on irony. Their lack of self-awareness is like manna to me, the sweet nectar of paradise. I may lapse into a Montgomery Burns impression for this stage of the bit.

"But Z-Dog," you may interject at this point, "if you do this to some poor unsuspecting sap, won't that make you, kind of, well... a bully?"

To which I reply, "Don't call me Z-Dog. You sound like an idiot." Also, "Yes."

The best answer to bullying, unfortunately, is a bigger bully. We live in a fallen world, wherein every last member of the dominant species is corrupted by sin. The best of us isn't very good. The best we can ever hope for is that the bully at the top of the food chain is benevolent. This is why I'm quite content with America being the dominant world power for the last few decades. Yes, she occasionally throws her weight around, but virtually always with good intentions and often to good ends.

In summation, I hate bullying (but not the bullies themselves, a crucial distinction) of any sort as much as anyone, but I'm not interested in meaningless gestures that consist largely of leveraging peer pressure to force conformity, itself a concept dear to every bully's heart. I'll stick with knocking the feet out from under bullies at every opportunity, and encouraging others to do the same.

And I don't wait until the victims are a politically correct group.


Enough rambling. Here's a picture of round Winnie-the-Pooh and Tigger dolls that look like they could be wadded into balls for easy storage. I call them Poohkemon.

10 Short Thoughts Not About Glenn Gould

I just read the Maclean's year-end "Newsmakers 2011" issue. It contains a series of articles about the supposedly most newsworthy people and events of the year. With this issue, we hit a new journalistic low.

It's a given that a few people on these annual "most intriguing", "most interesting", etc., lists will be women who are there solely because of who they slept with. However, this issue features Pippa Middleton - who is on the list not even because of who she slept with, but because of who her sister slept with.

At least her sister finally got a promotion this year, after eight years of casual / temporary status as the Royal Penis-Warmer. Pippa's most newsworthy activity appears to have been showing up at the wedding.

To be clear, this is not meant as personal criticism of Miss Middleton. She may be a very intelligent and capable person. She may be very accomplished in the field of whatever it is that she does. However, none of that makes her particularly newsworthy.

No, this is meant to mock the media, and by extension its audience - that's us, folks - for being overly concerned with her. She isn't the problem, the people giving her undue attention are the problem. There's no discernible reason for anyone to be talking about her in "news" articles or magazine profiles.

Or in blog posts, for that matter.


Whoops.

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Although I accept that there is truly nothing new under the sun, I sometimes strive for some semblance of originality. A while back I scrapped a drafted article / joke because I had expected "penis-warmer" to be a something of a rare term, but Google told me otherwise. I was surprised, especially by how many of the results were product listings on eBay (with optional what cozy?!?).

That said, I have high hopes for the revised term used above, "Royal Penis-Warmer". As I write this, there are no Google hits for that phrase.

Soon there will be one.

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The Walking Dead (the comic, not the TV show) has been disappointing me of late. I'm getting a little tired of the last page cliffhanger/shocker that completely fizzles and is completely forgotten about within the first three pages of the next issue. Kirkman's going to that well just a bit too often.

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An occasional commenter here, TB, has a blog of his own now. If you think I'm cantankerous sometimes, you should buckle up, go over there, and take a look.

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I'm still not writing much here lately, I know. I've been posting comments some other places, though, like the Forge forums, Comics I Don't Understand, and Slashdot. I can often be found in one of those places when I'm not doing much here.

I've also been known to show up in comment threads in places like Jim Shooter's blog, Roger Ebert's blog, Crime Justice & America, and Ken Levine's blog.

That last one is probably my favourite, because Ken Levine actually responded to one of my comments in a later post (the one I linked). In this culture, getting my (fake Internet) name mentioned by a guy who knows some famous people is better than money!

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The Supercommittee failed to reach a budget deal. By most accounts, the Democrats on the committee refused to consider any proposal that included any spending cuts, and the Republicans refused to consider any tax increases. No shocker, really. But it gave us a great chance to play Mediawatch! Here's how to play:

Think about the blurbs you heard in the media about this. The headlines, the soundbites, the text crawls at the bottom of the screen, the snarky remarks from "unbiased journalists" and late-night comedians. Notice how many of them blame the stalemate entirely on the Republicans "refusing to compromise" and completely ignore the equal but opposite intransigence from the Democrat side.

Oh, sure, some of the long articles mentioned the Democrats' equal role in one of the "continued on page 26" paragraphs - we're just talking about the short versions that are all most people will perceive.

But remember, only Fox News is biased. Well, and Sun News if you're in Canada.

Here's the scary part of playing Mediawatch. Consider any newsworthy topic of which you have some deeper knowledge. Now consider how ridiculously distorted you find the media's reporting on the matter.

Now consider that most people don't have deeper knowledge of most topics, and all they know is what the media feeds them.

Now consider that that includes you. The media usually talks about subjects where you don't have any particular insight. It's statistically inevitable, just because of the sheer volume of information on the world. It's humanly impossible to know very much about very much.

And when out of one of your comfort zones - which is most of the time - you only know what they tell you, and then usually only what was in the headline, sound bite, or crawl across the bottom of the screen.

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Notes for historical purposes:

We got six trick-or-treaters this year, and most of those were kids whose parents specifically drove them here because they know us.

We have no snow to speak of yet. We've had flurries, and a few times enough to cover the ground (barely), but it's all melted away again so far.

My son's current obsessions are Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword and Roblox.

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I don't like bad arguments being used in support of positions with which I agree. To that end, I wish people who oppose capital punishment - as do I - would stop saying that it has no more deterrent value than life imprisonment.

The problem with arguing about the deterrent value of capital punishment is that there's a ridiculous time lapse between a criminal being sentenced to execution and that execution being carried out. The lapse is so long that a death sentence is effectively the same thing as a life sentence.

Oba Chandler was executed recently for a crime that was committed in 1989, and of which he was convicted in 1994. 17 years after conviction, 22 years after the crime. With gaps like that, of course there's no extra deterrent value involved. Criminals know full well that execution is not a credible or imminent threat. It's too remote to be taken into consideration.

I'd be interested in seeing statistics on how many criminals die of natural causes - e.g., old age - while on death row. I wouldn't be surprised if it's more than are actually executed.

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In all but completely informal conversation, and sometimes even then, I'm a stickler for terminology. This is because correct use of terminology demonstrates comprehension of the subject. Incorrect use of terminology demonstrates the lack of same.

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My wife and I started watching Breaking Bad a few weeks ago, from the first episode. It's great. We have only one episode left to watch - the fourth season finale, which is the last episode to date. We'll probably watch it tonight, then commence complaining until season five begins.

I like it because it's neither formulaic nor predictable. It took me many episodes to accept that I could almost never accurately predict what would happen next. Most TV shows and movies, including my nevertheless beloved Walking Dead (the TV show, not the comic), are predictable enough that at any point I can tell you more or less how any given scene will develop and/or resolve.

Not so Breaking Bad. It's a constant stream of nothing but curve balls. The writing is so good that I'm amazed that Vince Gilligan, the series creator, worked on the X-Files. I was not a fan of the latter show, to the point where I only made it all the way through one episode (the one Stephen King wrote). I thought the X-Files was trash, frankly, nothing more than rehashes of Scooby-Doo episodes, and it was painfully obvious that the writers had no idea how to resolve any of the longer story threads. I remained aware of the X-Files because my wife liked it (she has the entire series on DVD, and still re-watches them all from time to time), and because I worked in a comic shop in the late 90s.

The acting is also first-rate. When I first started watching Breaking Bad, I thought of Bryan Cranston as Hal, the goofy dad from Malcolm in the Middle. Hal is long, long gone now. There's not a trace of him in Cranston's performance by this point. It would be odd to go back and watch Malcolm reruns now, because I'll probably think of Cranston as Walter and wonder when somebody is finally going to drive that little punk Reese out into the desert and give him the bullet he deserves.

Giancarlo Esposito deserves every bit of praise he's gotten, too. He can express more with the slightest facial twitch than most Oscar winners manage in their entire career.

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Enough rambling. Here's a picture of what it takes to get me to throw out a t-shirt. The last time I wore this shirt was to a Maplenoise show in September. It was in this condition by then. Partway through the concert, my wife suggested that I put my jacket back on. The shirt is solid black with orange and red letters - all of the light colour is a pillow I stuck in it to display the extent of its decrepitude. It's a Rez shirt, from the early 90s or so. The writing is (was) a Biblical reference ("For our God is a consuming fire, Hebrews 12:29"), written in the shape of a flame.

Very-Nearly-Year In Review

This entry is being posted so that I can semi-legitimately say that I didn't go an entire year without posting. This post is not a farewell. It is not an announcement of a return. It just is.

I had no explicit intention of abandoning this blog. I still don't. I never made a conscious decision to stop posting. I still haven't. I just didn't post one day, then didn't post the next day, then it was 2010, then it was late August.

Now, for the last year-or-so. These are more or less random thoughts, barely sketched out.

I'm still in the same job that I've been in since early 2008. Starting that job - or more accurately, leaving my last job, or even more accurately, being informed that my last job was coming to an abrupt and unforeseen end, was part of the catalyst for starting this blog.

The new job I had thought imminent in the summer of 2009 still hasn't happened. It may or may not happen at this point. The prospective new employer took me on some all-expenses-paid training in the summer of 2009, and their hiring is proceeding on schedule, but I haven't gotten called up yet. There's at least one more wave of hiring to go on the project, so hope remains. I'm quite content where I am now, and more than adequately compensated, so I have no complaints no matter what happens, but I'd definitely switch over to this new situation given the opportunity.

Since I haven't changed jobs, I also haven't moved. We're still in the same house, which is now paid off in full, as are all our household's student loans at long long last. The house has also received some much-needed repairs thanks to a contractor who actually showed up and did his job, and a new back step and backyard patio thanks to my father-in-law.

My son is in school and doing fine. I'm not sure that the various school district employees who deal with him are doing quite so well, but that's why they get paid the big bucks. My favourite moment from a parent-teacher meeting was when I ripped into his teacher and a school district drone chaperone for his report card saying they'd like us to hold him back on his reading, because the material he was reading was getting too advanced. They hemmed and hawed and stammered trying to justify this in the meeting; first they were concerned that he might not be intellectually and / or emotionally ready for some of his preferred books (although, to be clear, it's not like we're letting him read a lot of novels on the theme of nihilism), then that his chosen material was so far beyond that of his classmates that they might have trouble relating. The truth is one of two things. Either his advanced reading makes it harder for the teacher, or he's reading material that his teacher and/or the useless suit-clad sycophants from the district office can't understand themselves.

My wife has returned to work, for the first time since before our son was born lo those many years ago. It's a pain. The logistics of childcare and other family responsibilities become exponentially more complicated without one always-available parent to cover home base. She's on a short-term contract, and we're kind of hoping she isn't offered an extension. We certainly don't need the money; she's working because she wanted to try getting back out of the house for a bit, and that experiment may have run its course. I also wanted her to have some more recent experience on her resume in case I drop dead tomorrow and she suddenly gets drafted as the primary breadwinner for the family.

We have a new dog. A female mutt, mostly black lab. I have a definite type (three of my last four dogs matched that description). She's six months old, and got spayed last Thursday. She's long since back to her goofy normal self. At this early stage, she's the best-behaved dog I've ever had, and I've had some very good dogs.

I've subscribed to Macleans magazine, and its arrival in the mailbox is one of the highlights of my week. Usually. For the last few issues my favourite columnist, Mark Steyn, has been notably absent, but the editors claim he'll return shortly. He'd better, for my subscription's sake. Anyway, it's two bucks or so a month tacked onto my cable bill for a weekly news magazine, so it would have been tough to pass up. Plus, although it would be a massive stretch to claim that the overall tone of the magazine is conservative, it's clear that the editors are willing to at least allow conservative voices to be heard, which is near-miraculous for Canadian media.

On to geekier stuff.

My wife and I have gone through sporadic bursts of playing Magic. I also had a brief relapse into playing the Microprose Magic game, released in the 1990s, thanks to a group of wonderful lunatics who have hacked it to add lots of newer cards.

Even that, though, has fallen by the wayside thanks to Forge. Forge has almost everything I want in a Magic program: a huge card selection, adequate single-player AI, and full custom deckbuilding capabilities. I've been playing it way too much, and building way too many decks, for the last few weeks. My wife plays it too. We have two computers set up, and it's not unusual for us to each be on one of them playing Forge. The only things Forge is missing, as far as I'm concerned, are multiplayer and the rest of the cards. Yes, my ideal Magic computer game would include every card that's ever been printed. Whereas the new version of Forge added almost 400 more cards, I get the impression that the developers have the same goal.

I also finally went to Linux. I built a new PC last fall - 2.3GHz quad-core, 4 GB RAM, 1.3 TB of hard drive space. Its name, as longtime readers (if there are any of you left) may have guessed, is Levi. Levi is the most powerful PC I've ever built by a long margin, and I decided it was time to take the plunge. I set it up to dual-boot between Windows XP and Ubuntu Studio, and resolved to stick as exclusively with Ubuntu as much as I could.

I haven't booted Levi into XP in months. Well, with one exception - I tried installing a Windows program that purported to prepare a virtual machine image based on my actual XP installation. You see, I wanted to cheat. The Microprose Magic game doesn't work under Wine (a program that lets you run some Windows software in Linux), and I was going into withdrawal. I planned to set up an XP virtual machine in Ubuntu for that single purpose. However, that little program didn't work, or I did something wrong. I puttered at it a bit, and while doing so stumbled across Forge, which works fine in Linux. I now have pretty much no interest in going back to the Microprose game, or Windows.

I've found a Linux application for everything else I want to do with my computer, with the sole exception of MP3tag, which works fine under Wine. Bye bye, XP. See you when Diablo 3 ships, and probably not before.

I got my son a Wii for Christmas last year. He loves it.

I actually bought it in the early fall, and spent every evening for weeks on end at a workbench in the basement where I'd set up the Wii, hooked to a tiny old TV set. I wasn't playing games (much) - I was modding the holy jumping monkey bugs out of it. By the time he opened it on Christmas morning, it included a media player, MAME and a pile of ROMs, emulators for several other older game systems with huge ROM sets, and an external hard drive with...well, a lot of games preinstalled. Too many, actually - to this day, he's barely scraped the surface, preferring to stick with Super Mario Galaxy (1 and 2), Mario Kart, and New Super Mario Bros. Wii. I sense a theme.

I could say much more about each of these, and many other topics besides. I hear there's even stuff going on in the world outside my house. Maybe I will over the days to come. Maybe not. I really don't know.

For now, I'm stopping here in the interests of getting this up before it's officially the anniversary of my last post, at which point I fear this blog might have turned into a pumpkin if left fallow.


Is anybody still out there?


Enough rambling. Here's a picture of the middle shelf, left-hand side, on bookshelf # 1. Once again, spot the theme. For nonexistent bonus points, identify the two books that aren't strictly on-theme.

Quick Notes

Some hither-and-yon ramblings in lieu of a real entry. Things are still hectic.


My son and I went to see Up. It was good, if surprisingly melancholy. He appreciated the floating house and talking dogs. I appreciated the theme that we will all inevitably lose everything and everyone we ever loved. This movie was fun for the whole bipolar family.

Spoiler time. If I had been in charge of the movie, the photo montage over the end credits would have included a shot of the kid (sorry, I forget his name and am far too lazy to look it up) sitting alone in the funeral home, in a throwback to the earlier shot of the old guy (see what I said about the kid a very short time ago) sitting alone at his wife's wake. That shot seemed like an obvious capper to me, and I was disappointed that it wasn't included.

I also liked that Pixar made a movie with virtually no merchandising potential. Nobody is going to want action figures of the old guy or the chubby kid. It's almost as though the Pixar crew were thumbing their collective nose at the Disney machine to which they were tethered. Now that the Pixar/Disney split is imminent, I know which side I'm on. My son and I will probably be at the next Pixar movie. The next Disney movie, not so much.

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While at the theatre for Up, I picked up the free movie magazine in the lobby. Trendy Nitwit Monthly or somesuch. Most of it was of course vacuous fluff. I take perverse pleasure in flipping through it without reading the captions to see how few of the stars-du-summer-blockbuster I recognize. My ratio is down to about one in ten.

Anyway, one article (the movie started late, so I actually read a good chunk of the magazine) caught my interest. Not for a good reason. In an article about an upcoming werewolf movie, this passage appeared (sadly, the link means I now know the actual title of the magazine. I preferred Trendy Nitwit Monthly):

Director Chris Weitz told USA Today the requirements included having Native American or First Nation ancestry, because their characters belong to the Quileute tribe, based in La Push, Washington. “They had to have papers that proved their heritage,” says Weitz.

See the problem? If not, I'll wait.

OK. Anybody who doesn't think there's a problem with that needs to consider the logical outcome of this sort of thinking. I foresee a World War II movie in which the director insists that all Nazi characters be played by actors who are purely Aryan and have the papers to prove it. After all, racial purity is important in filmmaking, right?

When that happens, I don't want to hear any whining from anybody who doesn't acknowledge the problem with demanding racial papers from actors playing Native American werewolves.

Now there's a sentence that has probably never been written before.

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Michael Jackson is still dead. Just throwin' that out there.

Actually, I've got a couple of other notes on the matter.

First up, I feel especially bad for poor old Latoya being tossed into the spotlight again. I think most of us had forgotten about her, which was the best thing for her reputation. It's pretty rough when Janet Jackson is your sister, but you're still considered the trampy one.

Second, Michael is on the cover of every tabloid this week, and most mainstream "news" outlets are still running factoids about him as their top stories. Farrah Fawcett is getting thrown an occasional bone. (Don't snicker at that phrasing. Show some class.) Ed McMahon has been largely forgotten already.

There's a worse omission, though. Where's the love for Karl Malden? The guy was in Patton, for crying out loud! That alone should be worth any number of swimsuit posters, "Hey-Yo"-s, and child molestation allegations.

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Driving things further into the sewer, let's play a round of America's fastest growing quiz sensation, Choose Your Own Punchline! Today's episode is rated For Mature Audiences due to immaturity.


Today I noticed that a co-worker's wristwatch was loose. Having my watch sliding around on my arm like that would drive me crazy. He said, "I lost some weight, and now my watch is loose. I need to readjust the strap sometime."

I replied, "I don't think losing a few pounds should make your forearms shrink that much. That's a loss of muscle tone."

Knowing full well what he was getting into, he said, "Do you have any suggestions how I could build up my wrist muscles?"

Which brings us to that time again...Choose Your Own Punchline!


(A) "Get a divorce."

-or-

(B) "Stay married a while longer."


As always, your votes will be tabulated by Price-Waterhouse-Cooper! Well, Price and Cooper. Waterhouse is off somewhere building up his wrist muscles.

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Hey, did a U.S. Supreme Court Justice actually say something this revealing while discussing Roe v. Wade?

Frankly I had thought that at the time Roe was decided, there was concern about population growth and particularly growth in populations that we don’t want to have too many of.

Why, yes. Yes, Ruth Bader Ginsburg did.

I've said it before and I'll say it again: If you don't see the problem here, I can't help you.


Enough rambling. Here's a picture of the top left shelf of bookshelf # 1. This shelf is a slushpile of stuff that I haven't sorted away in a proper place yet. Highlights include several photo albums / scrapbooks (the last three on the right are full of Beatles clippings), unread books by B.F. Skinner, Ayn Rand, and Richard Matheson (I like to imagine those three hanging out together when they were alive, perhaps at one of those old drive-in burger joints with the waitresses on roller skates), and my beloved three-hole punch. It's under the monkey. No, the other monkey. No, the one in the middle with the Santa hat.

Omar Khadr And Michael Jackson

I had intended to call this post "Michael Jackson And Omar Khadr", but I decided that just for once, Omar deserved to get top billing.


I've received four CNN Breaking News E-Mail Alerts (so far) about Michael Jackson's death. Unless he got back up shortly thereafter, screamed "BRAAAAAINS!" and took a bite out of Tito, that's probably three-ish too many.

What, too soon?


Poor Farrah Fawcett. She died first (garnering only a single CNN Breaking News E-Mail Alert for doing so), and promptly got overshadowed. It reminds me of C.S. Lewis dying on the same day as John F. Kennedy, meaning few people noticed. And so we add one final item to the list of "Eerie Coincidences Between The Lives Of Farrah Fawcett and C.S. Lewis".


On to Omar Khadr. This was going to be the entire entry until celebrities started dying. Khadr's case lets some people demonstrate that they think Canada should be dictating American policy (emphasis added):

...the argument raised by the federal government's lawyer in telling the courts to butt out of its handling of the Omar Khadr case is chilling...Federal Court Judge James O'Reilly had issued a blunt order "to return to Canada as soon as practicable" the young Canadian languishing in American custody... Justice O'Reilly's finding in April that the government's refusal to demand Mr. Khadr's repatriation was against fundamental justice...

In case you don't get the point, those quotations are from an editorial called, "Lawyer Exposes The Fragility Of Civil Rights". While the editorial makes some interesting points, most of it boils down to a theme that Canada should be able to demand (note that exact word used above) that the United States release accused murderers of their citizens, as long as the accused have a Canadian birth certificate. Sadly, lots and lots of people (in lots and lots of countries) don't seem to understand that this is at its core an issue of national sovereignty.

Omar Khadr is in American custody, facing charges under American jurisdiction for offenses against Americans. I would have liked his case to have been resolved in a more timely manner, but that's a separate issue.

Here's the bottom line on this whole debate: Canada has no business interfering with how the U.S. deals with Mr. Khadr. Imagine for a moment that an American were to come into Canada and commit serious crimes. Suppose that this hypothetical American criminal were then arrested and charged in Canada. If American lawyers were to call us up, demanding that we turn him loose and send him home, we'd see this as a ridiculous attempt at bullying. We'd say that he's our problem now, and that the U.S. can have him back if and when we're done with him.

In short, we'd tell the American lawyers to pound sand, go hug a rope, and / or sit on a pencil and twirl. And rightly so.

The same principle holds true in reverse. As long as Omar Khadr is in American custody, facing charges under American jurisdiction, then the diplomatic thing for Canada to do is butt out. We have absolutely no right to attempt to dictate to America. To even attempt to sway the proceedings by "just asking" (a suggestion contained in the linked editorial) would be an insult.

I acknowledge some exceptions. Rogue states and dictatorships sometimes lock up foreign nationals without valid cause, and in those situations I think it's perfectly appropriate for their home countries to call for their release and repatriation. However, I haven't heard any credible suggestions that Khadr was an innocent kid in the wrong place at the wrong time. By all accounts he was a non-uniformed enemy combatant on a foreign battlefield, which makes him a terrorist by definition, and quite possibly a war criminal. He could have been shot down like a dog on the spot, which in retrospect would have been simpler. Apparently I'm more grateful than he is that they chose to bring him in instead.

Just to deal with the objection that any wayward Daily Kos readers will surely raise at this point: just because you didn't like George W. Bush doesn't make him a fascist. Despite your fantasies, America did not change into a dictatorship between 2000 and 2008, on a slippery slope to dissidents being rounded into prison camps. The leftist delusion to the contrary is disproven by one simple observation. If America were really a draconian dictatorship, then Al Franken, Janeane Garafalo, and everyone whose picture appears on Zombietime would have disappeared in the night long ago. Instead, each of those folks are perfectly free to complain to their heart's content, without fear of jackbooted thugs showing up at the door. That's one of the greatest things about America: you can live in it without having to like it. (Same goes for Canada, incidentally.)

Here's a summation for Canadian terrorist sympathizers: how the U.S. of A. chooses to deal with Omar Khadr is really none of your business. He's their problem now. Go ahead and write all the protest songs about him that you want, but don't expect the grownups to take you seriously.


Hey, is Michael Jackson still dead? I haven't gotten a CNN Breaking News E-Mail Alert about it in like twenty minutes. How am I supposed to know?

Before this dies down (hey, see what I just did there? And it was an accident!), Jackson is going to be reported dead more often than Generalissimo Francisco Franco.


Enough rambling. Here's a picture of an unfinished frog pinata. This started out as one of those projects with the kids (or kid, in my case) that sounded good on a dreary weekend afternoon, but for which all involved lost their enthusiasm partway. This thing hung in our kitchen like this (ostensibly "for the paint to dry") for months. The story didn't end there, though. Stay tuned!

You Get More Of What You Subsidize

Lobster prices are apparently low in New Brunswick this year. The same may be true in other areas as well; I neither know, nor could be bothered to check, whether that's the case.

For those who enjoy eating lobster and live in an area where the price is down, this is a good thing. For my part, I don't care to eat underwater cockroaches, so this has remarkably little effect on my life. I always wonder two things about the first time a person ate lobster. Number one, how did they get one in the first place? Lobsters are bottom-feeding scavengers. They don't, to my knowledge, occasionally poke their eye-stalks above the surface to look around, or creepy-crawl up onto the beach for some sun.

No, it takes effort, and generally a big specially constructed wooden box, to catch lobster. I like to imagine that someone built one of those big wooden boxes and tossed it into the ocean on spec. "I don't know what'll wind up in there, but I'm eating it!"

Yes, yes. Tidal pools, accidental beachings, etc. Things that belong on the ocean floor wind up on the beach all the time. This doesn't help the case of the first person who ate a lobster they just happened to find. Take a good long look at a lobster. It looks like something that escaped from one of David Cronenberg's nightmares. The correct response of the first person who found one, not knowing what it was, should have been to run as far as they could, then dare their friends to go poke it with a stick.

This brings me to my second question about the first lobster-eating. How freaking hungry was that person? A lobster, even disregarding the possible hygiene and disgust factors of finding one lying on a beach, already dead and decomposing, is not an appetizing sight. A lobster is an aquatic earwig.

Of course, my scenario of that first lobster-finder daring their friends to go look (this, of course, assumes that finder was male) leads to another possibility. The first person to eat lobster may have done so on a dare, or possibly when bribed with the epochal equivalent of a dollar. Remember that kid you knew in elementary school who would eat pretty much anything for a buck? The first person to eat lobster was somebody who grossed him out.


Sidebar: at this very moment, somewhere out there a reader who enjoys lobster is preparing an indignant retort about how delicious it is. Save it. If it doesn't nauseate you, then by all means enjoy. The fact that I see eating lobster as pretty much equivalent to scarfing down insect-infested roadkill means all the more for you. You should be thanking me, really. End sidebar.


I have another issue, besides disgust, with eating lobster. I am neither a vegetarian nor an animal rights activist. I understand that every time I eat meat, I'm eating an animal that was killed for that express purpose, and I'm generally OK with that. However, I think that those animals should be killed in as quick and painless a manner as possible. I have a hard time seeing "dropped alive into a pot of boiling water" as humane.


Anyway, all of that was preamble to what I really intended to write today. My actual topic is the economy of lobster fishing (which should be called "lobster roaching" or something - are lobsters "fish" by any definition?).

The low price of lobster is not so good for lobster fishermen. Having learned something from the business acumen in the banking and automotive industries, lobster fishermen have responded to this downturn by asking for government bailouts:

On Thursday representatives from every wharf in the area met to discuss the issue with the hopes they can organize something to get the attention of the government, (a spokesman) said.

"We're not paid enough even to cover costs and we need help from the government."

(The spokesman) said they are hoping both the federal and provincial governments will step in to help fishermen.

Here's the problem with that line of thinking. This applies to every industry, not just fishing. The government cannot help. Oh, they can throw some money (your money and mine, by the way - the government has no money except what it takes from citizens) at a problem to try to put a band-aid on the bloody stump, but in the long term that does more harm than good. Here's how.

Let's assume there are 1000 lobster fishermen in New Brunswick who can't make any money at it this year due to low prices. I have no idea whether that number is remotely accurate, and don't care since it's only for illustrative purposes.

If the government steps in and hands them each a bag of money not to fish this year, or does anything else that has the same end effect of insulating them from any financial losses (regulating prices, etc.), then how many of them will come back and try to fish lobster again next year? Probably about 1000. Maybe more, since a government bailout means guaranteed profits.

The same problem will then repeat itself next year. And the year after that, and the year after that, ad infinitum. This is not indefinitely sustainable. At some point, an industry has to be allowed to suffer some negative consequences of economic cycles. Even if we ignore the debatable morality of the government stepping in and interfering (I'm not going there today; this is going to wind up long enough already), it destabilizes the market and leads to much larger long-term problems.

Now, consider what happens if the government doesn't interfere. Yes, it'll be a rough summer for some lobster fishermen. However, what would happen to those same 1000 lobster fishermen next year? I'll expect that by then, some of them would have found something more profitable to do. Let's say 10% of them move on to other occupations, go back to school, move to another region, whatever. That leaves 900 trying to fish lobster next year. That means less lobster on the market, which means higher prices, which means maybe the 900 can make a living at it. If not, then maybe only 700 will try the next year. Eventually, and in a shorter time than you'd probably expect, the market will stabilize and the remaining fishermen will be making money.


Sidebar for those who went to public schools in the last thirty years, or who don't see the problem with the bailout mentality: when the government keeps its nose out of things, the price of anything is normally determined by two factors: supply (how much of it is available) and demand (how much of it people want). This is called the free market, and it's a good thing for all kinds of reasons that we don't have time to go into today. Sorry to complicate this - I know those three italicized terms will be completely new and foreign concepts to a lot of people these days. End sidebar.


So if the government stays out of it, despite some tough times in the interim for a relatively few people, things will work out in the end. If the government gets involved, and they probably will, they'll destabilize the market and foster a cycle of dependency. Bailing out an industry to avoid a down market cycle (or even a long-term shift - if cars were just being invented now, governments would be making guarantees to buggy whip manufacturers) may prevent a little pain in the short term, but it causes a lot more in the long term. It's the equivalent of not teaching a child the alphabet, because that's an awful lot to ask of a toddler, to let them struggle through life as an illiterate adult.

And about that whole dependency thing, here's a quote from a spokesman for the fishermen, from later in the same article. He's talking about the possibility of the fishermen only running their boats for a few weeks this year: "How would you then qualify for EI?"

I'm not trying to belittle their situation. I appreciate how hard it is to find work under the best of conditions, and Atlantic Canada in 2009 is far from the best of conditions. However, I just don't see how it's the government's problem, or mine, if somebody can't work long enough this summer to qualify for EI ("employment insurance", which is what Canada calls unemployment benefits to try to put on an Orwellian happy face). Once again, maybe people should be encouraged to move on from an industry where you plan to collect unemployment benefits every year, and look for something more stable and sustainable.

For that matter, the fact that the I in "EI" stands for "insurance" makes the thought occur to me that planning to collect on insurance is normally considered insurance fraud. The law says I can't insure my house then deliberately burn it down, or take out life insurance on someone then kill them, and expect to benefit. Insurance is meant to compensate unforeseen losses. But this, again, is a whole other topic that I'll leave for today.

As a postscript, that newspaper I linked to earlier has a "public opinion" feature in their editorial section. I like to call it the Uninformed Person On The Street feature (I used to call it "Ignoramus On The Street", but decided that was too harsh). It doesn't seem to be in their online edition. Like Jay Leno, they send a reporter out to ask people in the streets what they think about various issues. The problem here is that most people haven't given most issues a moment's thought. This includes me - as I've noted before, I don't know enough about most things to form an opinion, and you can assume that the things I write about are the rare exceptions.

So the odds are that this feature will consist of a lineup of citizens expressing uninformed opinions about situations they don't remotely understand, and offering untenable solutions. Sure enough, that's almost always what you get.

In a recent edition, the reporter asked about this lobster situation. Several apparently random people were asked whether the government should step in to help the fishermen (without defining what that means - obviously, we all understand that it means "give them a pile of money").

Every single one of them said yes, most with emphatic emphasis.

I can only hope against hope that none of those people vote.


Enough rambling. Here's a picture of evidence that Hostage Bunny is being mistreated in yet another way: the use of stress positions. You may notice that in every picture his body has been in precisely the same posture, indicating that his fiendish captors are not allowing him to move. Unless he's allowed to stretch occasionally, cramping is inevitable.