Dear Democratic candidates:

I watched your debate tonight, and I was profoundly disappointed. Very few of you were able to stay on topic in order to coherently respond to the question posed by your moderator, and none of you were able to consistently remain within the time constraints, leaving your peers without a voice with which to respond to the same issue you just gave your viewpoint on. Is this the kind of competition you want? Do you honestly think you can incessantly drone on about the woes of a president whom you’ll not be running against should you win the primary and be debating the candidate who is taking his place in the Republican party? Shouldn’t we be after the person who’s best for the nation, and not the one who makes the most longwinded ideological diatribes?

Look, I understand that you don’t like Bush. The majority of this country doesn’t like him either. It’s wonderful that you think you can appeal to us on that alone, and it’s depressing that you probably can win the primary that way. When it comes down to it, though, you’re going to need an actual platform. You want to get us out of Iraq? Great! You can do that in your first few months in office, assuming that they don’t manage to override the veto this week, in which case the one thing you’ve spoken at length about will be a moot point. What then? There are other problems facing us, and no, they’re not gay marriage or abortion. By all means, it’s important to me that you place a Supreme Court candidate who will uphold Roe v. Wade, but you cannot possibly guarantee that there will be a vacancy when you’re in office, and you will have no personal hand in the long-term repercussions of last week’s decision. Gay marriage is not a matter of national discourse. Legalize it and be done with it, please.

We have very real concerns about the viability of our position on the world stage in the future. China will soon be just as much of a superpower as we are, and the EU also. Does it concern you that 75% of our jobs are in the service sector? That Japan, India, China, Germany, Russia, and South Korea are graduating academics on a scale which is orders of magnitude higher than ours? It should, and many of us think so. Can you pass some initiatives which give teachers a wage more than slightly above that of a fast food manager? Can education be a priority? Get a plan. Hell, think about the future of this country beyond the next four years. We do not need another shortsighted fool in office.

Will you please propose a plan for universal healthcare which does not involve buying into the same coverage you have? The problem with healthcare is not a lack of options, it’s a lack of money. Those who do not make $200,000 a year by sitting in Congress have problems with their premiums. You are not helping that by listening to lobbyists, PACs, and poll groups. The majority of you have not been a normal American in a long time. Try talking to some of us, and not just the ones who happen to live in primary states. For that matter, why don’t you take a look at Canada’s system, or the UK’s, and figure out a way to implement a system where we can walk out of a hospital or doctor’s office without a bill in hand or in the mail. They can do it there, why can’t we do it here? I know the pharmaceutical lobbies and HMOs want to take you out to nice dinners at expensive restaurants or contribute inordinate amounts of cash to your campaign or slush fund just to woo you over to their side. Consider for a moment that the kind of people who are too poor for health insurance can’t afford to do that either, but they still need your ear also.

We don’t want to see you grandstand about how the government “failed” us in Virginia. They did not. All the proper procedures were followed. Though some of you apparently cannot follow the news, his commitment to a mental institution was voluntary. It would not have disqualified him nor even been knowable there. I’d rather see you make an honest statement about it (thank you, Bill Richardson, you got points), talk to families of the victims, or do any number of things rather than harassing people on campus or making speeches which they do not want to hear right now. We don’t want to see you show up at anniversaries of civil rights events to try to woo the minority vote. Perhaps you should spend your time in the South visiting those whose lives are still in shambles from a hurricane which hit years ago, and doing something to help them. It’s not just a photo opportunity. You can make a difference in their lives in a way that most of us cannot, and you’d get a lot more goodwill out of it.

It’s all well and good to talk about how we are still not secure, since the ports, railways, and other accouterments of the modern economy are still rather open. Well, what have you done about it with your time in office, and what do you plan to do about it? Also, why should we care? I mean, you’ve given us no assurances at all that the extraordinarily invasive measures taken after the last attack have afforded us any security whatsoever. Sixty percent of us are in debt, and you’ve done absolutely nothing to remedy that situation. We really don’t need to pay higher taxes for some ephemeral sense safety right now. Why not fight for our rights with credit agencies reporting things badly, raise the minimum wage to something reasonable, prosecute executives who abscond with our retirement funds who are not named Kenneth Lay, or do anything else for the people? Believe it or not, trickle-down economics are not working, and neither is free-market capitalism.

In short, stop being wishy-washy. Make a statement about something and stick with it. Do not redirect every question to “why we should not be in Iraq.” Appeal to us the way politicians of old did (as did Clinton). Make us believe that you will really make our lives better, rather than being yet another face which summarily ignores our needs after we (maybe) put you into office. Please. We need you.

Sincerely,
A concerned citizen

A worldly 21 year old? I call shenanigans

One of the worst dates I’ve had the misfortune of experiencing was tonight. I suppose I’ve already gone over the details with Dan, and that rather got rid of my ranty mood, but let’s just say like I don’t often feel torn between walking away with half a beer left or giving myself a lobotomy. I like my frontal lobe. If you want to believe that our generation knows more about international politics than any before it, and that’s why we’re not politically active (rather than apathy), don’t get offended when I ask you if you know who the president of one either of our two neighboring nations is (that’s a no), if you know what NAFTA does (yes) and whether or not either of the tables of 20-something people near us knew (no), or if you know about Britain wanting to leave the EU over the pound sterling (no, and you say you lived in Ireland until you were fifteen, for God’s sake).

I’m not generally argumentative in person. I can have a conversation about pretty much anything amicably. You’re a fucking Poli-Sci major, though. That’s fine, we don’t have to talk about politics. If you want to, though, please don’t tell me that people here are against the light rail for idealogical reasons (it’s more that they don’t want to see their property taxes go up for a system which pretty much runs from Maple Grove to Bloomington, and not whatever suburb they’re in), that the US government had no jurisdiction over the Louisiana National Guard (federalize them, like they did the year before that in Florida), or that Europe is homogenized. Jesus. Even Western Europe varies wildly (Iberian vs. France, Sweden vs. Italy), much less Eastern Europe. I don’t believe that you hate the South because New Orleans had no bookstores when you went there (I recall at least two in the French Quarter alone), nor that people in Seoul have any illusions about what would happen if North Korea attacked. Anthropology and history are not worthless fields, merely that you do not see the benefit of them during your lifetime. Firsthand historical documents are not supposed to draw conclusions, they are intended to inform you about events which occurred from the viewpoint of somebody who was actually there. Draw your own conclusions. Economics as a field applies to a lot more than just the economy, actually. Your father is an economics professor. You claim to read The Economist. Look at JEL classification codes to see the diversity. The definition of economics (given by one of the father of modern economics) is “Economics is a science which studies human behavior as a relationship between ends and scarce means which have alternative uses.” What does that say to you?

Why? Why must these be the people I meet? I’m done dating 21 year olds. Maybe I’m done with the whole dating ritual. The hell with trying to make an intellectual connection. Perhaps I should go back to randomly falling into relationships primarily based around sex.

On the upside, I’m quite the wizard when it comes to fixing other people’s relationships!

A little different

Y’know, I’m sure that at some point later in life it’ll be nice to look young. ; Maybe when I’m my parent’s age I’ll be happy to look ten years younger. ; For now, I don’t particularly enjoy getting carded for R-rated movies. ; Yeah, I expect to get carded for cigarettes and alcohol. ; That doesn’t bother me. ; I find it amusing when new people I meet think I’m just out of high school. ; However, it’s just sad to have a seventeen year old girl write her phone number on my sandwich wrapper at Jimmy John’s. Don’t get me wrong, it’s flattering, and it’d be nice if more women were more forward, but do I really look young enough to date a seventeen year old?

I was going to write a long blog about vitriolic whores (Debbie Schussel) obsessed with the idea of Islam as a religion of hate (see this), but I watched what may have been one of the most depressing specials ever last night. ; It was, of course, on PBS. ; Operation Homecoming on America at a Crossroads. ; Yep, it’s a book, and yeah, I’ve read it, but it was not quite the same. ; The program, like the book, was sponsored by the NEA (National Endowment for the Arts), and the commentary went rather above and beyond what the literary version entailed. ; What got to me, I think, was a monologue about this war in the national conscience of the American populace less than any before it in our history, and I’m just as guilty of that as anybody else. ; Sure, we all know there’s a war going on over there, but it doesn’t personally affect us the way, say, Vietnam did. ;

There is no draft, no riots and demonstrations. ; The casualties of the conflict are the fruits of our all-volunteer military. ; I know a fair amount of people in the military. ; All of us probably know at least one. ; I have to say, I don’t think about those who are deployed all that much. ; When Shaun got deployed at the start of the war, we spoke fairly often. ; It’s been so long at this point (four years) that it’s really just become an accepted part of life. ; I don’t like that. ; I go on diatribes about the media focusing on missing white girls rather than the political idiocy, but neither of those issues should be at the forefront of the nation. ; Sure, the massive corruption in our current administration certainly had a hand in the plight of the soldiers, airmen, sailors, and marines over there right now. ;

There’s naught I can do to help, really. ; I have this compunction to enlist, though. ; I’m really not sure why, but I’m fairly certain it’s a personal struggle I’m going to lose. ; I have no idea when, but it’s something I feel that I need to do. ; I realize full well that my skillset, talents, and abilities would be largely worthless deployed (much as they need smart men over there, also). ; That matters little. ; I’ve got another ten years or so (though 35 is the upper limit, and I’d rather not push it quite that much), and at some point I’ll walk into a recruiter’s office to inquire about quick shipping. ;

Cooking without me? ; For shame! ;

Listen to Year Zero. ; Also, a heat-reactive CD is a very cool idea.

Hypocrisy most vile

I should be rewriting some of my monitoring tools and benchmarking our new SAN, but I have hours to go, and I’ve elected to protest the ill-conceived notion of sticking me on nights until early June by doing as little as possible while maintaining a modicum of work accomplished. ; As there appears to be some confusion as to what my work schedule actually is now, let me clarify. ; I’m on 8PM-5AM today, tomorrow, and Wednesday, 5PM-5AM this Thurs/Fri, then back to my normal days on/off, albeit 5PM-5AM rather than 5AM-5PM. ; Yes, it sucks. ; However, I’m still free Monday nights, Tuesday nights, and alternating Sundays for the usual plans. ; Also, I’m now free on Wednesday nights. ; Not free Fridays ’til June 8th (I go back to days June 7th). ; Make sense?

Anyway, I was watching Fox News before work. ; I’m not entirely sure why, but Travis turned on the O’Reilly Factor for amusement. ; Is it really possible that right-wing idealogues feel that there’s some kind of massive conspiracy out to get them? ; He was talking for a while with a “Democrat” (as if your political affiliation somehow makes a difference) who was talking about a “list” of people they were “targeting,” such as Imus, Coulter, and O’Reilly. ; Even if there were a list of people “left-wing extremists” were going after, I’d imagine it would have Cheney, Rove, Limbaugh, and other egregious asshats (probably including O’Reilly and Coulter), but not hideous old men who wear cowboy hats. ; Still, the notion that they are so reviled some mysterious cabal of individuals are plotting to remove them from the airways is ludicrous. ;

This segment was immediately after he defended his use of the word “wetback” to immigrants (legal or not, and for anybody who finds immigration to be a problem, please look at the issues with the system, such as the H1B cap being met in 24 hours for the year), just for comparison. ; Followed by an interview with Tom DeLay about why Rosie O’Donnell should be taken off the air for slandering DeLay (not that I like O’Donnell, but joking about DeLay’s lack of ethic and impending conviction is not slander, even without considering the Abramoff connection). ; The man has no moral compunctions whatsoever. ; I’m not sure why I find it irritating to watch him talk about Al Franken and other liberals “attacking America.” ; Maybe it has something to do me being utterly incredulous that people actually believe this stuff. ;

What should we be paying attention to? ; I don’t know. ; Military men telling us that the Pentagon thinks global warming is a national security issue? ; Even the idea of a war over water sounds ludicrous at the moment, but we do have some issues in the US, for one. ; The Ogallala aquifer provides about one-third of the water used for irrigation in North America, and it’s dropping precipitously. ; Current estimates from the USGS say it’ll be gone in 60 to 250 years. ; Gone. ; Have a look at long-term drought indicators. ; Most of the areas with heavy snowpack (Colorado and Northern Minnesota, for instance) are in severe drought along with the agricultural South, and much of the “breadbowl” of the US is in flood. ; How do we expect to maintain crop viability? ; Mexico, Chad, China, Australia, Spain, Turkey, Israel, Iraq, India, and other countries have similar problems. ; ; China, in particular, is in awful shape.

They could talk about the fact that Wolfowitz’s mistress (yes, he’s still married) was getting paid ludicrous sums of money for a position that may not even exist. ; Is there no oversight? ; How is it that nobody noticed that the branch she supposedly works for has no offices, no description of her responsibilities, and nobody that can be contacted about it. ; It sure sounds like a ludicrous money-laundering scheme or horrendous corruption (not that either would surprise me at this point), but nobody seems concerned. ; They’d rather grill the dean of a school which happened to have a tragic event occur. ; I guess none of them have the ability to look up statistics (34% of campuses report at least one incidence of murder, attempted murder, manslaughter, assault with a deadly weapon, or aggravated assault per semester), and they’d rather blame the whole thing on the campus administration for not disrupting everybody’s day over what was perceived to be an isolated event. ; Do we always need somebody to blame?

Maybe the economy? ; Here are some fun statistics:


Totally normal, right? ; Not at all an indicator of ever-worsening class boundaries. ;
What we don’t need are studies on whether or not kissing elicits a greater physical response than chocolate. ; In particular, heart-rate monitoring is not a fair comparison when they’re talking about couples (who have clearly kissed before, and maybe enough times that it’s mundane).

A telling statement

USA Today purports to have higher distribution than any other paper in the US. ; It’s possible, given that it was founded to give an increasingly ignorant populace palatable access to the news by adding colour, lots of pictures, and removing erudite content. ; Reading their list of the 25 most influential books of the last 25 years may give some indication as to why that is. ; Only one in the top 5 (9/11 Commission Report) is even remotely readable, the majority of the list is comprised of appalling “literature.” ;

A wizened British hag takes the #1 spot with possibly the worst fantasy series of the last decade, which is convincing generations that basilisks don’t have legs and adding mangled Latin suffixes to regular words makes them sound magical. ; I don’t even want to comment on the number of people who now believe the Philosopher’s Stone is not at all related to alchemy. ; The story revolves around a precocious brat with no respect for authority (nor should he, as the figures in charge routinely bend, break, or simply forget their rules, laws, and regulations to accommodate whatever he seems to be doing) who is by birthright and random circumstance de-facto better than everybody he encounters, no matter their age or experience level. ; Not a protagonist you can empathize with. ; No, I’ve never read them, and despite hearing multiple times (generally from those who don’t read much, or at least don’t read fantasy) that the story gets more “mature,” I refuse to debase myself by touching that travesty.

The “Greatest Generation?” ; A self-aggrandizing mockery of anybody who happens to have lived before or after those people who lived through WW2 and the Depression by coincidence. ; The book emphasizes their “trials” and the “things they’ve lived through.” ; Honestly. ; Most of those people were in their 70s-80s by the time this book was written. ; Yes, they “lived through” man going to the moon, the 60s, desegregation, and lots of other things. ; They’re old. ; How much will we have lived through by that age? ; Will we trumpet the glories of “living through” 9/11 and whatever else occurs which we were, by in large, not involved in whatsoever? ; I certainly hope not.

Oprah’s book club books? ; $something for the Chicken Soul? ; The Atkins Diet? ; Left Behind? ; Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus? ; Yes, there are a few books which are influential in the long run (A Brief History of Time, Satanic Verses, 9/11 Commission Report, Bonfire of the Vanities, What to Expect When You’re Expecting, Fast Food Nation, Beloved), but the majority is unadulterated rubbish.

This news is a few days old, but still relevant. ; Relevant because it’s yet another excuse from that segment of the population leading preventable death statistics now has yet another excuse. ; It’s not that I have a particular beef with overweight people, it’s that it’s always something you can change. ; Eat less, move more, work out (squats, pushups, pullup, kettlebell press, deadlist). ; Stop watching so much damn TV and snacking on the couch. ; You don’t need an appetizer and dessert along with your meal. ; Nobody says it’s easy or fun, but it can be done regardless of genetic factors. ; Having pseudo-scientific reasons why you think you can’t is just exacerbating the problem. ; Maybe they should be more right-handed.

It’s not as ludicrous as the current push for abstinence as sex education, however. ; That’s been a colossal failure on all levels, and yet another study is out showing that it has no effect whatsoever on the likelihood of teenagers to engage in promiscuous behaviour or have unprotected sex. ; Surprise. ; Traditional sex-ed programs, on the other hand, at least show a statistically significant difference in the use of protection. ; It’s a good thing the White House is pushing for more abstinence programs, since adding more on top of will ensure that we see a difference, right?

A classy way to commit suicide

I had a very odd dream on Wednesday. It’s unusual that I’ve even had two dreams within memory, but this was particularly bizarre. ; I was, for some reason, at an apartment that I haven’t been to in years (with a girl who doesn’t live there anymore), and I was dying. ; Not on my deathbed or anything, but the fact that I was going to die very soon seemed to be commonplace. ; Some kind of brain injury, and a replacement head was ready to swap out once my medulla shut down and I had a fatal heartattack, which was performed by said girl. ; The rest of the dream just consisted of me having amnesia (not total amnesia, though) and doing fairly normal things. ; It was strange to come into work and read that Vonnegut had died due large in part to complications from a brain injury.

Starting here, I’m going back to the normal news/politics mantra for a while, since there’s way too much going on out there. ; Where to being? ; Bush abusing recess appointments? ; No, this is not the first time he’s done it. ; Far from it. ; Basically, any time Congress shoots down one of his candidates, he waits until a break and sends them anyway. ; A few judges, Bolton (infamously), his deputy director of social security, etc. ; The simple fact is that the majority of his nominees are getting rejected by Congress because they’re flatly unqualified. ; The new ambassador, for instance, has no experience in foreign relations whatsoever. ; Sure, to some degree they we always have appointees who have little experience. ; They’ve generally been approved by Congress and at least done a little more than donate lots of money to Bush, though.

We can see his success record with a parade of other fools, such as ; as the Special Humanitarian Coordinator to Sudan who refuses to admit that there’s a genocide still occuring in Darfur. ; I just can’t fathom why. ; I hardly think we’d feel obligated to commit to aiding them if we admitted it happened (we certainly didn’t do a damn thing for the Cambodians, Rwandans, or anybody else). ; Does the administration want to claim “victory” over the cause? ; Also, why is the collective memory and attention span of the American populace so short? ; So Imus makes some racial slurs. ; There’s a scandal with the Attorney General, we forget about Walter Reed and secret prisons in the US. ; Imus makes some racial slurs, we forget about the Attorney General. ; A white girl goes missing, we forget about wiretapping. ; Now we can’t pay attention to this either. ; At least Ann Coulter can still Godwin this and make comments about Al Sharpton with no repercussions, and the Black Panters can call Michelle Malkin a whore on national TV (it’s a great thing to watch).

I really don’t even know where to start on the Attorney General thing. ; I mentioned some weeks ago that the White House was using non-governmental email addresses (hosted by the Republican National Committee), and my hope that they’d subpoena those records. ; Well, they’re gone. ; Estimates say perhaps five million emails have been “accidentally deleted.” ; I’m not a particular fan of the RNC, but there’s no way their archival policies are so appallingly lacking. ; Even the mail headers from five million emails would add up to a few gigs in plaintext, much less HTML mail. ; No paltry sum of space on a mail server, and who knows how many accounts they host? ; That sort of thing gets backed up. ; To tape. ; You rotate and have one set offsite in case of fire or some other unforeseen disaster unless you are utterly incompetent. ; Beyond that, copies of said emails are virtually assured to be elsewhere. ; They probably use Outlook and Exchange. ; Ok. ; SMNP lets you edit documents on the fly. ; They’d have to have the RNC Exchange server on their domain in order to do so, however (unlikely), so these were getting passed around with standard SMTP, probably.

The real crux of the issue here is that White House employees are not even allowed to use Gmail, Hotmail, or any other clients of that nature due regulations requiring all presidential communication to be archived. ; I’m sure they’ll find some scapegoat for losing the emails, but hopefully Congress does not lose sight of the fact that these are actions they never should have been committing in the first place. ; It would go well with their long history of losing documentation, though. ; Go White House. ; Keep pushing to take away more of our protections.

In the meantime, I’ll just post an interview with Vonnegut:

You have lived through World War II, Korea, Vietnam, the Reagan wars, Desert Storm, the Balkan wars and now this coming war in Iraq. What has changed, and what has remained the same?

One thing which has not changed is that none of us, no matter what continent or island or ice cap, asked to be born in the first place, and that even somebody as old as I am, which is 80, only just got here. There were already all these games going on when I got here. … An apt motto for any polity anywhere, to put on its state seal or currency or whatever, might be this quotation from the late baseball manager Casey Stengel, who was addressing a team of losing professional athletes: “Can’t anybody here play this game?”

My daughter Lily, for an example close to home, who has just turned 20, finds herself—as does George W. Bush, himself a kid—an heir to a shockingly recent history of human slavery, to an AIDS epidemic and to nuclear submarines slumbering on the floors of fjords in Iceland and elsewhere, crews prepared at a moment’s notice to turn industrial quantities of men, women and children into radioactive soot and bone meal by means of rockets and H-bomb warheads. And to the choice between liberalism or conservatism and on and on.

What is radically new in 2003 is that my daughter, along with our president and Saddam Hussein and on and on, has inherited technologies whose byproducts, whether in war or peace, are rapidly destroying the whole planet as a breathable, drinkable system for supporting life of any kind. Human beings, past and present, have trashed the joint.

Based on what you’ve read and seen in the media, what is not being said in the mainstream press about President Bush’s policies and the impending war in Iraq?

That they are nonsense.

My feeling from talking to readers and friends is that many people are beginning to despair. Do you think that we’ve lost reason to hope?

I myself feel that our country, for whose Constitution I fought in a just war, might as well have been invaded by Martians and body snatchers. Sometimes I wish it had been. What has happened, though, is that it has been taken over by means of the sleaziest, low-comedy, Keystone Cops-style coup d’etat imaginable. And those now in charge of the federal government are upper-crust C-students who know no history or geography, plus not-so-closeted white supremacists, aka “Christians,” and plus, most frighteningly, psychopathic personalities, or “PPs.”

To say somebody is a PP is to make a perfectly respectable medical diagnosis, like saying he or she has appendicitis or athlete’s foot. The classic medical text on PPs is The Mask of Sanity by Dr. Hervey Cleckley. Read it! PPs are presentable, they know full well the suffering their actions may cause others, but they do not care. They cannot care because they are nuts. They have a screw loose!

And what syndrome better describes so many executives at Enron and WorldCom and on and on, who have enriched themselves while ruining their employees and investors and country, and who still feel as pure as the driven snow, no matter what anybody may say to or about them? And so many of these heartless PPs now hold big jobs in our federal government, as though they were leaders instead of sick.

What has allowed so many PPs to rise so high in corporations, and now in government, is that they are so decisive. Unlike normal people, they are never filled with doubts, for the simple reason that they cannot care what happens next. Simply can’t. Do this! Do that! Mobilize the reserves! Privatize the public schools! Attack Iraq! Cut health care! Tap everybody’s telephone! Cut taxes on the rich! Build a trillion-dollar missile shield! Fuck habeas corpus and the Sierra Club and In These Times, and kiss my ass!

How have you gotten involved in the anti-war movement? And how would you compare the movement against a war in Iraq with the anti-war movement of the Vietnam era?

When it became obvious what a dumb and cruel and spiritually and financially and militarily ruinous mistake our war in Vietnam was, every artist worth a damn in this country, every serious writer, painter, stand-up comedian, musician, actor and actress, you name it, came out against the thing. We formed what might be described as a laser beam of protest, with everybody aimed in the same direction, focused and intense. This weapon proved to have the power of a banana-cream pie three feet in diameter when dropped from a stepladder five-feet high.

And so it is with anti-war protests in the present day. Then as now, TV did not like anti-war protesters, nor any other sort of protesters, unless they rioted. Now, as then, on account of TV, the right of citizens to peaceably assemble, and petition their government for a redress of grievances, “ain’t worth a pitcher of warm spit,” as the saying goes.

As a writer and artist, have you noticed any difference between how the cultural leaders of the past and the cultural leaders of today view their responsibility to society?

Responsibility to which society? To Nazi Germany? To the Stalinist Soviet Union? What about responsibility to humanity in general? And leaders in what particular cultural activity? I guess you mean the fine arts. I hope you mean the fine arts. … Anybody practicing the fine art of composing music, no matter how cynical or greedy or scared, still can’t help serving all humanity. Music makes practically everybody fonder of life than he or she would be without it. Even military bands, although I am a pacifist, always cheer me up.

But that is the power of ear candy. The creation of such a universal confection for the eye, by means of printed poetry or fiction or history or essays or memoirs and so on, isn’t possible. Literature is by definition opinionated. It is bound to provoke the arguments in many quarters, not excluding the hometown or even the family of the author. Any ink-on-paper author can only hope at best to seem responsible to small groups or like-minded people somewhere. He or she might as well have given an interview to the editor of a small-circulation publication.

Maybe we can talk about the responsibilities to their societies of architects and sculptors and painters another time. And I will say this: TV drama, although not yet classified as fine art, has on occasion performed marvelous services for Americans who want us to be less paranoid, to be fairer and more merciful. M.A.S.H. and Law and Order, to name only two shows, have been stunning masterpieces in that regard.

That said, do you have any ideas for a really scary reality TV show?

“C students from Yale.” It would stand your hair on end.

What targets would you consider fair game for a satirist today?

Assholes.

Oh, and somebody really ought to actually make this alarm clock.
;

Flowers for Algernon

I think I need more productive things to do with my time. ; Don’t get me wrong, I like road trips and driving, but I’ve come to the conclusion that most parts of Minnesota pretty much suck. ; John and I were discussing the state the other day, and all the random things we export. ; I made the mistake of mentioning that though I’d heard of places like Willmar, Winona, Thief River Falls, and so forth, I can’t recall ever going to any of them, and I don’t know where they’re located. ; He wanted a Wii. ; I was off all day. ; After calling around to everyplace in the cities with a chance of having them in stock, we started looking in the sticks. ; New Ulm. ; Cambridge. ; Brainerd. ; By some miracle, we managed to locate six of them in Wadena, MN.

I had no idea where Wadena was. ; Google Maps informed me it was about 175 miles. ; That’s doable. ; I mean, three hours or so each way (given that it was US-10 for the last 100 miles, and US highways are always slower), but not awful. ; Picked up Kevin, and had a grand time driving out there while he regaled us with stories of random places in Minnesota (every random town mentioned seemed to elicit a comment about how he’s “slept in his car in that parking lot” or “$bumtown is on the way to $sticksville”). ; Yes, I’m a city boy, dammit. ; In three hours, a town that would have taken about a minute to drive through had sold three Wiis, but we got one. ; Success! ; Drive back to the cities. ; They had neither Wii points cards nor nunchuks, but that’s ok, someplace in the cities will have them!

Wrong :/ ; Columbia Heights Super-Target didn’t have any, Eagan 24 hour Walmart had none, Apple Valley 24 hour Walmart had none. ; So, we called around again. ; Willmar had four. ; It was, at this point, about 11PM, but that one was also 24 hour. ; Fortunately, Wilmar’s only two hours away or so, once you leave 394. ; In all, it was 12.5 hours and 594 miles from the time I picked up Kevin, but we got a Wii, 4 nunchuks, Wiiplay, 2 classic controllers, 4000 Wii points, and a few games. ; Wii! ; Nothing better than breaking a sweat boxing somebody in video game format.

That being said, the next day was… odd. ; If you haven’t read Flowers for Algernon, please do so. ; It’s an excellent book. ; Anyway, the reason I don’t usually partake of certain intoxicants is that I feel like Charlie. ; ; No more of that! ;

Yes, this blog sucks. ; I’ll post real things later.

The most worthless day of the year is upon us

Clearly, I’m at work. ; It should be obvious, because I never bother posting blogs when I’m off. ; I don’t want to say I have better things to do in my free time, but that’s probably the truth. ; I find myself more bored today than I have been… ever. ; Not entirely true, I guess. ; The waiting room at the ER leaves me with less to do with this. ; I can at least check ITRC, Nekochan, and SunSource here. ; As previously noted, I generally spend my weekends here perusing the news and generally catching up on any work which I haven’t accomplished during the week (or side projects), which doesn’t amount to much. ;

The problem with April Fool’s Day is that it’s been an internet meme since 1984 (technically that was Gopher and Usenet, but still). ; Any site which I frequent with a modicum of regularity is spending their time on worthless jokes and fake stories. ; I’ve spent the last ten hours downloading more music, playing with a VMS system, reinstalling IRIX on my Octane2, and slowly watching the clock tick. ; Sure, some of it was productive things (learning more Python, putting together a webpage for somebody, writing a new spam filter, upgrading IOS on some of our routers/switches), but it’s mostly a waste. ; Slashdot is full of fakes (and not as funny as OMGPonies! was last year), Fark is full of fakes, Digg just sucks, kuro5hin is virtually dead, DailyKOS doesn’t have much… ; What to occupy myself with when I have absolutely naught to do? ; Looking for new workstations on eBay only holds so much appeal, and I’m really not the type to lose myself in Myspace (it’s kinda drab, and sticking 1,000 videos/flash slideshows does not make your page suck less, quite the contrary). ;

I’ve felt like a crisis counselor lately. ; I’ll always be there for my friends, (whoa! ; I check the comp/sci and free sections on Craigslist fairly religiously. ; Who gives this away?, if it were really “new in box” you’d think he’d have returned it [edit: aww, he took it down, but it was a sex swing that his wife "wasn't fond of"]), and I don’t begrudge anybody that. ; I’m not a paragon of healthy relationships by any means, but I generally give good advice (so I hear). ; For the most part, had said kernels of wisdom been accepted by the party or parties involved, things wouldn’t have turned out as poorly as they did. ; Sometimes you just need to walk away after giving it rational thought (this being of utmost importance, else you’ll regret your decision later) and realizing why it’s going to turn into a clusterfuck of Caligula-like proportions if you obstinately insist on sticking with it. ;

It astounds me that anybody comes to me for advice, though. ; Sure, I’m almost always right. ; I’m also jaded and slightly cynical, and my track record of making things work is abysmal. ; ; Do I exude some quality which makes people implicitly trust me? ; I have no idea. ; In reality, I don’t have a clue how I appear to people outwardly anyway. ; Seemingly, the first impression that some people I’ve gone out with is “I think he may be too smart for me.” ; I’ll be the first to admit that my speech mannerisms in person are not as… something as my writing (particularly emails). ; In real life, I’m more comfortable getting to the point in a roundabout way which is frequently derailed and led into another thought anyway. ; In front of a keyboard I’m more concise. ; No, laconic isn’t proper either. ; I have a propensity to ramble both in person and in text. ; Perhaps it’s just that there’s often one word which conveys a sentence worth of ideas, or at least does so in a more eloquent manner. ; Something which can be mean exactly what I intended to. ;

Regardless, if possible, it’d be interesting to get a perspective from a member of the opposite sex on this (not on me, I don’t give a damn what people think). ; I’m intrigued by the idea that somebody could be considered too $positivequality for somebody else. ; It’s never been a hindrance in any of my experiences (i.e. I’ve never had somebody tell me it’s not going to work out with that as the reason), but the concept piques my curiosity. ; Isn’t the aim of this endeavor to find somebody stable and responsible who will enhance your lineage (not that I’m any of these things)? ;