Breakfast of Challengers

Prejudice: now in the large Economy Size

2007-07-21T16:46:00.001-05:00

A car dealer in south Florida decided to do one of his TV commercials in Spanish.  Not a surprise in south Florida, right? What really surprised Earl Stewart was the response he got from certain members of the public.

The ad began running a week ago and I have been surprised and shocked by the negative phone calls and emails I have received. There have not been a lot, but they have come in steadily every day. There are more people in South Florida than I realized who resent Hispanics. They tell me that they are insulted that I would allow a Spanish language ad to run on the TV set in their living room and that they would never buy a car from me. Some miss the point of the commercial entirely and tell me that “those Hispanics should learn to speak English!” I can’t figure out why they think Hispanic people are watching WPTV Channel 5 news if they don’t understand English. I also hear a lot of people who say they can’t stand the phone recordings that say “touch one for English”, etc. I don’t quite see how that relates to my TV ad. Perhaps the most disturbing phenomenon has been comments from friends of mine who feel strongly that the only language that should be permitted to be spoken in America is English.

I don't live anywhere near Florida, but I have a feeling he wouldn't get a much warmer reception in my region. I'm not convinced that racism has declined much at all since it became recognized as a national problem decades ago. It's just another of the forms of stupidity that humans seem unable or reluctant to let go of.

I think about racism every time I see Obama on the news. My gut feeling—admittedly pessimistic—is that he doesn't have a chance of being elected president, and as a running mate he could easily ruin Hillary's chances as well. Too many racist voters are just not ready for that. And if you want to throw sexism into the mix, I'm not sure Hillary's chances are all that much better either.

I felt a lot better about the US's potential for social progress before GWB got elected—twice! So far the millennium hasn't been too encouraging. Whatever happens next, I doubt I'm going to like it.

Quote of the Day Dept.

2007-07-17T13:13:00.001-05:00

Today's pithy observation come from Plog:

To the fascists who run Curves: Why is my Y chromosome a barrier to entry? Fred Astaire could do everything Ginger Rogers could do, only forwards and with more upper-body strength.

A Long-Standing Question, Answered

2007-07-03T12:55:00.001-05:00

I'm not the best person for detecting sarcasm, but Paul Begala is clearly snarking off when he says that George W. Bush is One Tough Hombre. This is obvious to some people, not always to me. And there are people in the comments there at the Huffington Post who criticize Begala for saying in this piece what he didn't say on TV on the same subject, Libby's pardon/commutation/get-out-of-jail-free-card.

At any rate.

Like I said, I don't do well at detecting when someone is saying what they mean, so maybe Begala means all this stuff and maybe he doesn't. What he said is definitely correct, though, and if I said the same things I would mean them in spades.

Along the way he does clear up one persistent mystery:

Mr. Bush is tough enough to invade a country that was no risk to America, causing tens of thousands of civilian deaths and shedding precious American blood in the process. Tough enough to sanction torture. Tough enough to order an American citizen arrested and held without trial. But if you're rich and right-wing and Republican, George is a real softie. As George W. Bush demonstrated in giving Scooter Libby a Get Out of Jail Free Card, he is only compassionate to conservatives.

So that's what "compassionate conservatism" means to Bush. If you're coonservative, he's compassionate.  Otherwise, it's "Son, you're on your own."  With that thought in mind the last six years or so make a lot more sense.

Them Gosh-Darned Atheists

2007-06-15T14:03:00.001-05:00

Ever wonder just what those pesky atheists are thinking?  And why do they have such a bug up their tailpipe all the time?  Now there's a website that'll give you a peek inside the minds of those pesky critters.  It's called Ask The Atheists, and you can even submit your own questions.

My own view is that you never learn anything by only listening to people you agree with.  If you're an atheist, find out what the believers think, and—if you can manage it—find out why.  If you're a religious believer, visit this site and find out what the atheists think and why.

I only know one statement that applies equally to both sides of the argument.  Dave Barry said, "People who want to share their religious views with you almost never want you to share yours with them."

Remembering some well-known dead guy

2007-05-22T09:38:00.001-05:00

Kristine recounts that she was by sheer stroke of fortune the one to break the news to Richard Dawkins that Jerry Falwell had joined the Thanato-American demographic:

Later that night, I was at Richard’s table when someone asked how Jerry Falwell died. And if there was one moment in my life when I was ready with a clever answer, this was it.

“He had an attack where his heart should have been,” I replied.

Here's something strange. When I heard about Falwell, the first thoughts in my head were of Jim Henson and John Lennon, two people who died unexpectedly and left the world poorer for it. Falwell was just the opposite of that—someone who lived to a ripe old age and made the world worse while he was here.

Some people are always looking for good ideas and good information, and when they find them they spread them far and wide, to the benefit of everybody. Other people fight the spread of information and try to keep people as ignorant and unquestioning as possible. Falwell and his defenders fall into the latter group. The world suffers from the presence of people like that.

Welcome to Reality Island

2007-05-07T12:58:00.001-05:00

I always had a problem swallowing the positive-thinking, if-you-believe-it-you-can-achieve-it philosophy—and not just because it bears more resemblance to a sale pitch than a genuine philosophy. Mark Evanier at news from me puts his finger on the real reason:

But then I've never believed there's a lot of value in blind optimism. The few times I watched Fear Factor, I was repulsed way before they got to the part where the contestants eat fried mule anus. At the beginning, six contestants are all saying over and over, "I will win, I will win, failure in not an option." Well, it's not only an option...it's the future for five of them. Five of them are going to lose. I'm all for positive thinking but I've never felt there was any value to believing your victory is predestined. I've always found that if you're aware of the possibility of failure and realistic about its probability, you can do more to avoid it.

Yeah, it's all about how firm you like your grip on reality. Most people don't seem to care for reality much, and I can't say I blame them; I'm not all that crazy about it myself. But you ignore reality at your peril, since by definition—well, one definition anyway—it doesn't go away because you stop believing it.

I'll bet a lot of people first lose their taste for the sciences when they realize that science keeps you from believing stuff that you might well prefer to believe. Same goes for math, and probabilities in particular.

Other shoe, meet floor

2007-05-03T12:44:00.001-05:00

When Imus, AKA Snarly McCryptkeeper, got fired, I had an inkling that the situation was bound to become more interesting. Honestly, I expected his public apologies to become gradually more emphatic as the gravity of his situation sank in. Let's face the truth here, Imus had the most cushy and best-paying job you can imagine, one that left him with plenty of time to devote to outside projects geared to play on his celebrity. The only drawback I could see was having to wake up and go to work at such an early hour. At any rate, at the time I was thinking he had to be panicking somewhere behind that foam-latex countenance. He does not want to lose that swank job, thought I.

Now Gail at TestPattern reveals that the I-Monkey is already hatching a Plan B scenario:

Don Imus was all apologies when the fire was raining down on him for calling the Rutgers' women's basketball team names. But he's not taking his firing sitting down, according to Fortune.com. They report that the DJ plans to sue CBS radio for the $40 million remaining on his contract.

At first, the alleged suit seems laughable. Imus messed up, he got fired, and now he wants his big paycheck for doing nothing. But nothing is that simple. A source tells Fortune that Imus' contract urged him to be "confrontational and irreverent," and that he was promised a warning before he was fired. I'm no contract lawyer, but if that, especially the last bit, is really in Imus' contract, he may have a case.

I should submit a cartoon to the New Yorker, one of those two-old-guys-in-chairs deals, with one coot saying, "I used to be just a cranky old SOB, but now I'm confrontational and irreverent." Don't you dare, Robert Mankoff, I thought of it first!

Pomposity of the Day Dept.

2007-05-03T09:48:00.001-05:00

"Craft an email."

Usage:

"We need to get the district office to approve this, so I need to craft an email to them."

I don't know if I can explain what I find so hilarious about this. Seems to me that the phrase is condescending to forms of writing that really call for an application of craft.

Bush not entirely ignorant

2007-05-02T11:22:00.001-05:00

Quiz time. Who said:

Victory means exit strategy, and it’s important for the president to explain to us what the exit strategy is.

And a couple of months later:

I think it’s also important for the president to lay out a timetable as to how long they will be involved and when they will be withdrawn.

That was W in 1999, in reference to Clinton pulling out of Kosovo.

To me, this doesn't indicate hypocrisy as much as a simple lack of principle. He's saying that something can be the right thing to do, except when it's a case of W and something he'd prefer not to do.

Of course he has a history of resisting persuasion, not to mention logic, when he doesn't want to do something. No telling why, but if he's trying to simply avoid professional embarrassment, someone should tell him that that ship has sailed.

The Cowardice of Your Convictions

2007-04-26T11:43:00.001-05:00

I'm going to quote a lot from Paul Harris, a radio host in St. Louis and maybe one of the best radio guys in the country. He's talking about an upcoming charity event in his town that's threatening to evolve from a tempest into a full-on kerfuffle:

I've said many times that anyone who does something to help sick children is doing something noble. For 19 years, Bob Costas has been raising money for Cardinal Glennon Children's Medical Center here in St. Louis, with an annual fundraising concert at the Fox Theater. He calls upon his showbiz friends to line up major comedians and musical acts (e.g. Ray Romano, Jerry Seinfeld, Jay Leno, John Mellencamp, Tony Bennett, Hootie & The Blowfish) and thousands of people show up each year.

This Saturday, the headliners are Billy Crystal and Sheryl Crow.

Today, Archbishop Raymond Burke condemned Sheryl Crow's participation, calling it a "scandal" that a Catholic hospital would be involved with someone who has publicly expressed her pro-choice position and appeared in ads last year supporting Amendment 2 in Missouri (the stem-cell referendum). Burke is the same religious leader who told Catholics that they shouldn't vote for John Kerry or any other pro-choice politician.

What if this situation was reversed? Just imagine the reaction if Sheryl Crow announced "I'm not going to do a benefit for a children's hospital if it's associated with the Catholic church, because I don't agree with them on abortion and stem cell research." She'd be crushed by all the negative publicity, with people asking how she can turn her back on the sick kids and let her political agenda get in the way of helping them. It would make her "one sheet of toilet paper" gaffe seem even less insignificant than it actually was. Is it fair to treat Crow that way for her views, but not Burke?

This is the kind of situation I always think of when somebody says that organized religion is a force for good in the world. What's really sticking in somebody's craw here is that someone who disagrees with the church can still be a good person with fine charitable goals.

I'm going to have to give some thought to the difference between the courage of one's convictions and cowardice in the face of criticism.

You too can be a name-caller

2007-04-11T13:53:00.001-05:00

Barbara Ehrenreich at Barbara's Blog knows why you just don't talk about people that way:

This doesn’t excuse Imus, because he misses a crucial point: That an insult, used often enough, becomes the exclusive property of the insulted. Take the word “bitch,” as applied to any woman with the guts to offend. At first it stung, but then we appropriated it for ourselves. Elizabeth Wurtzel wrote a feminist book called Bitch, and there’s a feminist magazine of the same name. I can call my sister “bitch” in a jokey, tough-gal, way. But you can’t call her that, not if you’re a guy, unless you want to step outside with me.

In other words, in a normal social context, it matters who the remark came from.  By the same token, Chris Rock or Dave Chappelle can make jokes that Imus or Leno or Letterman absolutely cannot make.  That's not unfair, it's just a question of keeping your footing on the marshy ground of social interaction.

But people who have too much money or status and too little contact with what's going on at street level can fail to understand that.

And speaking as someone who's getting crankier, older, and (weirdly) whiter by the minute, I'm entirely within the limits of propriety to call Imus a cranky old white guy.

QT and RR together again

2007-04-05T16:15:00.001-05:00

I had to laugh at the first commercials for Grindhouse
(link points to Rotten Tomatoes review page). They all said "This Film is Not Yet Rated." Well, hey, you didn't have to be Jack Valenti to guess what the rating was going to be, assuming that nobody involved was going to let this one into theaters with an NC-17 rating.

Although you can never tell, at the moment GH sports a healthy 87% tomato rating, so maybe it will justify depriving your butt of blood flow for the 3:10 it will take to spool out. It sounds like a consensus to me. One repeating theme in the reviews is that, unfortunately, one of the stories just isn't as good as the other one. But there's little agreement over which half is which. It's anybody's best guess that they'll both be good in different ways.

I am so staying out of New York

2007-04-03T10:59:00.001-05:00

Overheard in New York highlights the heartwarming conversation that follows when "A tourist mom with three teens in tow halts in the middle of the block, causing two suits and several other people to crash into them."

I won't reproduce the dialogue here.  Click through if you're in the mood for a massive dose of Noo Yawk vitriol.  I don't know how you'd pick which of the participants here are more self-absorbed—the tourists who act like they're the only ones on the sidewalk, or the "suits" who can't be bothered to watch where they're going.  I guess on that count they're even.  But for me arrogance is a greater sin than momentary cluelessness, and I have to wonder if the suits would have acted the same way if the tourist group had included just one big bruiser of a gentleman who appeared capable of pounding a spoiled stockbroker into a grease stain on the pavement.

I believe anybody who ever lived has plenty of reason to be humble, and that's why I don't accept arrogance from anybody.  Not bosses, celebrities, or presidents.

Okay, one other point.  Does New York have anything like traffic ordinances that govern the use of busy sidewalks?  I've never heard of such, but after learning about alternate side of the street parking, I'll believe anything.

Quotes of the day

2007-03-27T11:15:00.001-05:00

I'm currently reading Techniques of the Selling Writer by Dwight V. Swain.  Interesting stuff.  The copyright date is 1965, and now that I've read several of the more popular writing books published since then, I think I know now that this is the book a lot of those subsequent authors were pilfering ideas from.

Oddly, I'd never heard of this book until recently.  But at about 50 pages in, it sure looks like the mother lode for someone who'd like to write salable work—that is to say, write something that a non-relative would want to read.

I'm learning why it's so hard for me to find time to write, too.  Swain says:

The greatest talent in writing is nerve: You bet your ego that your unconscious has something in it beside dinner.

If there's anything I lack, it's nerve.  He also says about planning and preparation:

Everyone has a God-given right to go to hell in his own way.

I think he's getting ready to explain why writing involves a lot more than just cranking out pages of copy.  But that comes much later in the book.

Anyway, maybe this book will help overcome my doubts and put me on a better track.

Quote of the Day Dept.

2007-03-16T10:03:00.001-05:00

From Salon:

Chris Rock thinks the country may be ready for Barack Obama to move into the Oval Office, telling Life magazine, "It's ready for a retarded president, why wouldn't it be ready for an African American president?"

I wonder what Eddie Murphy would have to say about this. I don't know what he thinks of Bush, but I vividly remember a bit from Murphy's early standup days—his impression of the first black president giving his inaugural address. It went like this:

"My fellow Americans—" [gunshot rings out]

Chris Rock's comment, bitter and funny as it is, sounds a lot more optimistic than Murphy used to.

This doesn't mean that the doors to the White House are wide open to any qualified candidate, though. A study last year from the University of Minnesota found that a wide majority of voters wouldn't vote for an atheist no matter how well qualified.

I guess I'll have to stick by the view that the political process does a better job of perpetuating social problems than relieving them. In my admitted ignorance I can't think of a single major social problem that's been solved by political means; that seems to happen mostly by social movements that challenge the political system. I think the main function of politics is to prop up people's Confidence in the System by reassuring them that something is being done.

Anyway, as low as my opinion of politics is, our current Oval Office occupant has rid me of the notion that it doesn't matter which loser is in charge. But he does demonstrate that political power in general is a better instrument for harm than for good.

Workplace Camaraderie

2007-03-16T09:40:00.001-05:00

I have to tell you this office story because it's what Dear Abby used to call "a dandy day-brightener."

One of my work duties is secondary time-sheet person. There's a lady who takes everybody's time sheets and enters them into the system so we all can get paid. If she can't do it for some reason, I do it instead. She's not allowed to enter her own time sheet, so she has had someone else doing hers. Someone who is not me.

Now she has decided that the other person is messing up her time sheets, so she's going to have me do them for her instead. That's fine. It's no big time-consuming challenge.

But to borrow a phrase from R. Crumb, what's so goddamned delightful about the situation is the way she chose to inform me of the change in responsibilities. Here's how she launched the conversation:

"Okay, well, I guess I'm going to have to trust you now."

I didn't exactly know how to react to this effusive display of confidence in my abilities, so I just said, "Hey, do you mind if I turn that into a needlepoint? I can put it on the wall for when I need a morale boost."

Then I told my boss, who I'm sure heard the whole exchange, that I was going to walk to visit another office "before my head gets too big."

Smitty's razor

2007-03-01T09:31:00.001-06:00

Wikipedia describes Occam's razor:

Occam's razor (also spelled Ockham's razor) is a principle attributed to the 14th-century English logician and Franciscan friar William of Ockham. The principle states that the explanation of any phenomenon should make as few assumptions as possible, eliminating, or "shaving off", those that make no difference in the observable predictions of the explanatory hypothesis or theory. The principle is often expressed in Latin as the lex parsimoniae (law of succinctness or parsimony): entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem, which translates to: entities should not be multiplied beyond necessity.

This is often paraphrased as "All things being equal, the simplest solution tends to be the best one."

In other words, when multiple competing theories are equal in other respects, the principle recommends selecting the theory that introduces the fewest assumptions and postulates the fewest hypothetical entities. It is in this sense that Occam's razor is usually understood.

This is supposed to be one of the basic philosophical principles of the skeptical movement. You know the skeptics, right? They're the ones who say you shouldn't believe in ghosts, psychics, and alien conspiracies—only I sort of hesitate to call them a movement because they haven't made much progress in recent years.

It's a good rule of thumb, though, as far as it goes. When you're seeing unexplained lights in the sky, there's no reason to suppose that they are alien spaceships. First, because that answer doesn't really tell us anything about what the lights are and what they're doing. And second, there are any number of simpler explanations for the appearance of lights in the sky, answers that don't require you to assume the existence of something when there's no evidence to support it.

Anyway, I have a corollary to add to the mix, called Smitty's Razor.

"All things being equal, the most disappointing answer tends to be the correct one."

That's my new guideline, although I've been following it subconsciously for years. Use it any way you like, but don't be surprised if the results are disappointing.

Well, there's your problem ...

2007-02-27T15:38:00.001-06:00

What made the Hottentots so hot? What puts the ape in apricot? What do they got that I ain't got?

I believe I have a clue on that last one.

Blogs, naturally, are loaded with opinions. One thing you can't accuse bloggers of is not having the courage of their convictions. You can tell they have strong beliefs by the way they express them—loud, long, and repeatedly. They love their opinions, and they're willing to defend them against all comers.

All except me, that is.

The long-suspended realization finally struck me. While those guys like their opinions, I pretty much hate my own. Take these few examples:

God probably isn't real. This is the one I'm the most bitter about. Although the supreme being that most people seem to believe in is by all appearances a deranged twit, it would be a comfort to know that somebody was pulling all the strings—if only so we could then hunt down that somebody and beat him until he's a stain on the ground. I actually envy people who can find peace in the form of religious belief. My brain just refuses to jump through those hoops.

The planet is not being visited by space aliens. Nobody would be more tickled than I would if this were really the case. It's such a fascinating prospect that plenty of people do believe it, in spite of a total lack of evidence. Again, I wish it were true.

Football is not entertaining; likewise most professional team sports. Just think how easily I could entertain myself if I could become a sports fan. Television in particular caters to fans, but there are also plenty of sports-themed movies, books, magazines, and video games around. I would never lack for sources of amusement. Another opinion that harms nobody but myself.

It isn't that I have no opinions at all, or that I only half-heartedly believe them. I'm just not that crazy about them. Give me a good reason and I would drop any of them in an instant. That's my trouble. I need a good reason.

I, Product

2007-02-11T21:41:00.003-06:00

Bob Harris explains why some cable channels dedicated to serving you information end up serving you useless crap instead.

To review: news shows are, yes, shows. They do not make money by providing us useful information. They make money by providing us... to the advertisers.

And according to the Google News "Most Popular" section, we care a great deal about dead Playmates, stalker astronauts in diapers, Ryan O' Neal getting arrested, and Britney Spears not being a lesbian.

In college they taught us that stuff about the business of broadcasting. Most people think that the viewers are the customers and the programming is the product, the inventory. They think that because broadcasters spend so much effort selling the programming to the viewers.

But that's not correct. In truth, the advertisers are the customers and the viewers are the product, the inventory. They're selling us to the advertisers. The programming is incidental, and it's becoming ever more so, since programmers are finding that loads of people will watch practically anything.

Quote du jour

2007-01-30T15:06:00.001-06:00

Stuff like this is why I love The Quotations Page:

Nothing is more admirable than the fortitude with which millionaires tolerate the disadvantages of their wealth.

—Rex Stout US mystery novelist publisher (1886 - 1975)

Stiff upper lip, and all that.

Said better than I could

2007-01-12T12:21:00.001-06:00

Terry Jones has our quote for the day:

The US has spent a million dollars for every dead Iraqi - is that what they mean by value for money?

He goes on to say that nobody seems to know what's happening to all the money paid to military contractors like Halliburton over there, and nobody seems to be in a great hurry to explain it.

Even my henchmen think I'm crazy

2007-01-04T10:53:00.001-06:00

There's this guy, see, name of Jonathan Coulton, who writes and records the greatest and craziest songs from deep within his underground lair somewhere in New York City. My favorites include Skullcrusher Mountain, Re: Your Brains, and knockout remakes of We Will Rock You/We Are the Champions and Baby Got Back.

I had Baby Got Back on in the car the other day and it made the teen in the back seat literally beg for mercy. Which is always a plus.

I'm generally disinterested in new music, but Coulton is actually doing something interesting, making quite a contrast with all the slackers I saw on Dick Clark's New Year's Rockin' Eve earlier this week. Is there really anything all that interesting in what Rascal Flatts or Christina Aguilera are doing these days? I submit to you that there is not.

A Heartwarming Christmas message

2006-12-22T09:10:00.001-06:00

Cecil Adams has the last word on belief in Santa:

Let's just say his existence can't be definitely ruled out.

He goes on to deliver what I'd call the last word on the subject:

Besides, to believe in Santa Claus is to believe in magic. The belief in magic in many respects is a pernicious thing. Because of it you've got countless multitudes thinking that aliens abduct people, that Elvis is alive, that you can earn big money stuffing envelopes in your home, and that the TV preacher can cure you if you send him 50 bucks. A certain class of persons, of whom your columnist is one, will go through their lives attempting to extinguish these foolish hopes. No doubt in the main it is good that we do so. But even the sternest among us remembers the wonder we felt as children to think there was a force having a kindly interest in us that wasn't bound by the rules of this drab world. Wherefore if there's someone who's going to say flat out that Santa Claus doesn't exist, it's not going to be me.

Cecil may be the last remaining media figure who we can still count on to level with us when it counts. Personally, I believe Santa Claus is as real as God, and unlike God, Santa's love is unconditional. For that I will forgive Santa almost anything, even being imaginary.

Mail-in rebates must die

2006-12-20T09:06:00.001-06:00

I got an email from Micro Center about their big day after Christmas in-store sale. They're trying to get me all excited about going shopping on Boxing Day, but all they succeeded in doing was making me angry.

Every single one of their specials involves a substantial mail-in rebate.

And I hate those.

Listen up, retailers. If you want to mark something down, or put it on sale, then by golly go ahead and do it. Don't give me hoops to jump through to get that special deal. I got enough hoops in my life. And don't sell me something hoping that I'll either forget to send for the rebate or that the rebate will never arrive for some reason and I'll have limited recourse to pursue it.

Don't do that stuff if you want my business.

My hope is that mail-in rebates will eventually go away, ideally because more people start to recognize them as the phony bullshit tap-dance that they are.

Here's my advice, if you're tempted to buy something based on the offer of a rebate. The store you're buying from may be rock solid, but they have farmed out their rebate processing to a separate business, and those guys come and go all the time. Try tracking one of them down when you have a problem with a rebate offer and see how far you get. How much additional work are you prepared to do to get that rebate you were promised? It isn't worth the hassle. Mail-in rebates must die.

Movie Review Money Quote Dept.

2006-12-06T11:00:00.001-06:00

Hey kids! Get your coats and let's go to the movies! There must be something playing to help us get into the holiday spirit. Oh, here we go:

Deck The Halls spends 90 flailing, graceless minutes making horrible people do horrible, vaguely criminal things to each other before flooding the audience in a warm bath of sticky, unearned sentimentality.

Never mind, kids. Let's just stay home and watch something more festive and cheerful. Like, say, Santa vs. the Snowman.

The magic words, "No, thank you."

2006-11-29T13:07:00.001-06:00

Here's an interesting point from Father Dan: When they ask to check your receipt at a store where you just purchased something, you are not obligated to show it to them. The exception is a membership store like CostCo where you've already agreed to show it by joining.

I had an interesting "conversation" with a yellow shirted door monkey at Best Buy in San Carlos Ca. a few months ago. Had my stuff in the bag, walking out, intercepted - "Can I see your receipt?" - keep walking, "No Thank You." - stunned look, you could hear the gears turning in his head. "I have to check your receipt!" he proclaimed. "No Thank you" I replied, now past the first set of doors and approaching the second set. "HEY! You have to show me your receipt!" he bellowed, highlighter raised in anger. Passing through the second set of doors I said "No you don't, and if you have a problem with it - call the police!" This really stumped him. He exclaimed "This is my job!" To which I muttered under my breath, "Then you should have stayed in school." as I got into my car.

He also mentions that stores aren't nearly as aggressive about this kind of thing as they used to be a couple of years ago, but it still happens all the time. I've never had it happen at Target, though, which is one of the stores he talks about.

This is the kind of thing that some people get angry about and other people think is no big deal. The interesting part to me is thinking about the different way those two people think. I think Father Dan has a point, but I'm too much of a coward to let myself become a civil-liberties test case over the issue.

Peoples is funny

2006-11-28T08:56:00.001-06:00

Cartoonist Tom Tomorrow over at This Modern World has a comment about navigating the Infotainment Age:

Just got an email from someone at an ad agency who saw a couple of my illustrations in the New York Times Book Review yesterday and tracked down my email address (presumably through the Times) to inquire as to whether or not I had a website with further examples of my work, and where it might be found.

Don’t mean to cast aspersions on the inquiry, though I politely turned it down. I’m just truly puzzled by people who don’t think to use Google as a matter of course.

I always find this interesting any time you're talking about information that's available by automated means. You have two choices. You can push the right buttons and find out something without troubling anybody. Or you can think of someone else who might know, and ask them—in other words, do it the old fashioned way.

If you go to the library to look for something, you can either (a) find it yourself because you've taken the trouble to learn how the library works, or (b) find the nearest librarian and let him hand-hold you through the search process.

I think people are inclined to approach the situation one way or the other, but I don't know exactly what that means about the differences among people.

Thought for the day

2006-11-20T15:44:00.001-06:00

Scott Adams of The Dilbert Blog is an interesting guy. Thoughtful. I often wonder if he might be insane. But I can't argue with his fondness for Philosophical Brevity:

I’ve described the clash of Islam and Christianity – everything from the Crusades to the war on terror – as “The people who think a guy walked on water versus the people who think a horse can fly.” I submit that anything you add to that description is unnecessary for understanding the global clash of civilizations.

How mean am I?

2006-11-20T10:21:00.001-06:00

Here's how mean. I was disappointed to hear the final score of yesterday's Chiefs game: Chiefs 17, Raiders 13

KANSAS CITY (AP) -- Trent Green led a late touchdown drive in his first game since opening day, lifting the Kansas City Chiefs past Oakland 17-to-13.

I guess it's probably fortunate for me that nobody really cares what I think. I find it hard to hide my contempt for pro sports in general and football in particular, and if that opinion mattered to anybody it would only make my life harder.

Maybe being a true fan is all about giving the object of your enthusiasm more emphasis than it really deserves. You can't fault the fans for that. But it irks me to hear a football or basketball fan talk about how boring they think soccer or cricket is, when I think football and basketball are just as boring.

In any event, being a sports fan allows for two benefits that some people find important. One, they will never lack for entertainment, since the media caters to sports fans. And two, they can always have half-baked opinions to contribute to the conversation.

To me, the benefit of having a losing local team is that it keeps to a minimum the amount of loose sports talk you're randomly exposed to.

Look! Behind you! [Runs other way]

2006-11-17T12:18:00.001-06:00

Isn't this what happened when John Bolton got nominated as US ambassador to the UN?

Dan at Gone Mild points out that

Republican Family-Planning Chief Doesn't Believe in Family-Planning

I'm not the first or last person to point this out, but if the Bush White House ever announces an initiative to promote teen pregnancy, it would be the best thing that ever happened to family planning.

American Science & Surplus

2006-11-17T10:49:00.000-06:00

I've got to make a note of this place before I forget. It's called American Science & Surplus and it's like the home office of every surplus/outlet store on the planet. Sure, Archie McPhee carries a lot of this stuff, but AS&S carries the biggest and most insane assortment of stuff I have ever seen. If you ever saw something for sale at some roadside souvenir stand or theme park gift shop, they probably have it. And the item descriptions are at least as entertaining as McPhee's.

Wha hoppen?

2006-11-09T09:01:00.000-06:00

Actual real-life conservative John Cole* says what he thinks happened and is about to happen.

There will be a long, nasty, brutal bloodletting within the GOP, with social conservatives convinced the reason we lost was in part due to the fact that “We kept abortion on demand the law of the land for at least another seven years because we had to try to fund the use of human beings as research matter” and other such nonsense. We lost because, as the oft-perceptive Baseball Crank notes (although, I think, drawing the wrong conclusion), the country got a taste of big-government conservatism, and they didn’t like it.

*As opposed to posers who like to call themselves conservative as long as they don't have to actually conserve anything, like money, resources, constitutional rights, or the country's philosophical foundations.

One more thing

2006-11-07T10:55:00.000-06:00

Jim Macdonald is right. I dearly wish he wasn't.

Today it’s important to go to the polls and vote.
Vote straight-ticket Democrat.
A vote for a Republican, any Republican, is a vote for torture.
A vote for a Republican, any Republican, is a vote for corruption.
A vote for a Republican, any Republican, is a vote for cronyism.
A vote for a Republican, any Republican, is a vote against habeas corpus.
A vote for a Republican, any Republican, is a vote against our troops.
A vote for a Republican, any Republican, is a vote against liberty.
A vote for a Republican, any Republican, is a vote against the Constitution.
A vote for a Republican, any Republican, is a vote against being secure in our persons, houses, papers, and effects.
A vote for a Republican, any Republican, is a vote against Social Security.
A vote for a Republican, any Republican, is a vote for “preemptive” war.
A vote for a Republican, any Republican, is a vote for incompetence.
A vote for a Republican, any Republican, is a vote for Bush.
Go out today. Vote Democratic.
Today is the first day of the struggle to take our country back.

More on voting

2006-11-07T10:25:00.000-06:00

Patrick makes a case for voting a straight ticket.

I’m voting the straight Democratic line. Not because there aren’t Democrats who are hypocrites, cowards, idiots, and fools. But because the Republican Party, nationally and locally, is in 2006 nothing more or less than a criminal conspiracy to destroy our democracy and loot our country. Their candidates, for every office, need to be defeated wherever they run. If you don’t see that you don’t get my vote.

I'd only add one more point. I can't believe that there are no decent Republicans, in or out of office, just because that seems so staggeringly unlikely. They've got to be out there, and many of them deserve to be elected. But right now the criminals are in charge of the GOP, and the good guys are afraid to break ranks and speak up. So there you are. You can't vote for a Repub even if you want to because you can't identify the ones who aren't members of the GOP HiveMind. You can't vote independent or reform because it's a meaningless gesture. Your decision is pretty much made for you.

Election day thoughts

2006-11-07T09:07:00.000-06:00

Okay, this is it. Today may be the last time I vote in an election.

How much patience do I have with our country's political process? As it turns out, about 12 years' worth. Around 1994, when the Republicans came out with a steaming chunk of marketing doublespeak they called the Contract With America, I thought the country was collectively too smart to fall for it. It turned out my optimism was misplaced. Since then, I've been keeping a close eye on things, trying to gauge the fall of the national IQ. In 2004, the voters spoke again, and what they said was, "Please, GOP, lie to us some more. We love it."

Last time, I thought that the intelligence of the electorate had surely hit rock bottom. Today I'll find out if I was right.

I'll definitely vote today. I want to give the election every chance to come out the way I hope it will. If it doesn't, if it comes out the way it did two years ago—and this is going to sound petulant, I realize—I don't know if I can work up the will to take part again. If my fellow citizens still aren't tired of being lied to, after all these years, then there's very little that my vote can do about it.

Gore Vidal said, "Half of the American people never read a newspaper. Half never vote for president. One hopes it is the same half."

What He Said Dept.

2006-11-02T12:43:00.000-06:00

Today's winner of the "That's What I Was Thinking" Award goes to Bill Maher:

The Constitution specifically says you can't torture people, and we can assume they meant: Even if you really, really want to. Because you wouldn't make a rule against something people didn't want to do. The Eighth Amendment protects terrorists. The same way the First Amendment protects Dixie Chicks. The Framers thought protecting people from the government was more important than anything - even than protecting them from a mythical bomb. You can disagree, but that's not what our Constitution says.

I don't believe for one instant that people are "all the same inside." You can't believe that if you're paying any attention. But all people do seem to have one thing in common. They don't like rules that say they can't do something they'd rather do. They like rules that say some other guy can't do something you don't want him doing. Murderers, if they give it any thought at all, think that the laws against murder are oppressive, because, see, there was this one jerk who really needed killing. Well, yes, there are a lot of jerks that probably need killing. That doesn't entitle you to kill them. We have rules about that.

I doubt that there's any real disagreement about whether it's okay to kill people. The only disagreement is in who it's okay to kill. One guy thinks it's okay to kill the crook who cheated him out of a sum of money. Another guy thinks it's wrong to kill somebody over a property crime but okay if it's a violent crime. Yet another guy thinks it's okay to kill Iraqi insurgents and by extension okay to kill whatever innocent civilians happen to get in the way. There are any number of complications you can toss into the mix, until you make the situation just complicated enough so you can lean the argument in the direction you want it to go.

This is where statements of principle can come in mighty handy. And that's what the Constitution is supposed to be.

I'll have to come back and read this entry again later, to see if it makes any sense. If you have an opinion on the subject, I would love to hear it.

Ignorant Question Dept.

2006-10-31T16:17:00.000-06:00

I keep hearing the phrase, "Freedom isn't free." Meaning, I guess, that people (in the military) are willing to fight and maybe be maimed or killed in order to win and/or maintain our freedom.

But here's what I keep wondering about.

What if we pay that price for freedom and still don't get any? And if you were in the military wouldn't that just enrage you?

Me so scared

2006-10-31T16:16:00.000-06:00

What I'd really like to do is go to bed, right now, in the middle of the day, and stay in bed, preferably unconscious, until about two weeks from now, when the election will be long gone, the recriminations will be mostly over with, and my anxiety about what the hell is going to happen will be easier to let go of. I used to have respect for the voting process. After all, it's the only time we can express our opinions to those in power and they have to listen to us. Now I know that a highly organized expression of the collective will is no guarantee that the resulting actions of government will be anything to be proud of.

Plus, I am heartily sick of all the political ads. They're showing up in our mailbox and on our answering machine now, there's so many that the TV can't contain them any more. It's hard to know for sure if a candidate has her heart in the right place, but it's a sure bet that the people she hired to do her advertising are reprehensible swine. Advertising people are of questionable character anyway, and having chosen the specialty of political ads does nothing to improve their characters.

So, I expect this election to go one of two ways. It could go fairly well and turn out to be the first swing in the opposite direction from the nasty unpleasant trends of the last several years. Or it could be the final proof that the system is broken, a chaotic rodeo of subverted expectations that demonstrates that representative democracy is a good idea and somebody ought to attempt it some time.

Wake me up in a couple of weeks.

You Said It Dept.

2006-10-27T14:56:00.000-05:00

Rush Limbaugh has always been an embarrassment, although he himself seems immune to embarrassment, and yet he continues to be popular among the ignorant. Right now, instead of examining Michael J. Fox's motives, everybody should be debating why Rush still has a job. And once again, somebody says what I'm thinking better than I ever could. In this case it's Tom Tomorrow:

The depravity of conservatives, and the willingness of the media to indulge it, never ceases to amaze me. In a rational society, when a drug-addled gasbag radio host mocks an actor with a debilitating disease, the ensuing discussion would revolve around said drug-addled gasbag’s many, many faults as a human being, not least of which being his ready willingness to mock the handicapped. Rather than treating his uninformed speculation as beneath contempt, however, people are actually discussing whether Michael J. Fox’s symptoms are as bad as they look in these campaign commercials.

As far as I'm concerned, Fox had justified his existence on the planet long before he started doing charitable work. Rush still hasn't justified his existence, and the world remains poorer with him in it.

Not my kid

2006-10-26T09:57:00.000-05:00

I had a little bit of a shock last night while watching the CBS Evening News. During a story about Iraq war casualties, they interviewed the family of a local soldier killed this month. I found the story in the Lansing Current:

Belden-Sexton-Sumpter Funeral Chapels said services for Army Cpl. David M. Unger, 21, will be at 10 a.m. Friday, Oct. 27, at the Fort Leavenworth Main Post Chapel. Burial with full military honors will follow at Fort Leavenworth National Cemetery.

And the transcript of the CBS story is on their web site. Here's the part that froze me in my tracks while making dinner for the kids:

"My son died in a country that I have no idea, really, why we're even there," Diana Unger says.

Her son, Cpl. David Unger of Leavenworth, Kan., was married to his high school sweetheart and was the father of two kids — including a baby just 20 months old. He had a mom, a stepdad, two brothers and a l3-year-old sister who adored him.

"It's different for every person to handle," says Jeremy Unger, David's brother, with tears on his face. "He was my older brother. I looked up to him a lot. It's just hard."

And it was also hard, they said, listening to President Bush this morning.

When the president said he understood how tough the Iraq battle was, some of Unger's family had a physical reaction.

"Unless he puts his daughters over there and he has that real fear everyday of not wanting to turn on the television, that fear that gets into your heart and your head, he can't fathom what that means," Diana says.

I wonder if Bush has asked any of the young people in his family, the ones eligible for military service, if they'd be willing to sign up and go to Iraq so they can help out the cause a little bit. I kind of doubt it. Anyway, none of them have decided on their own that joining the fight on behalf of their country would be a good idea.

Listen to reason

2006-10-20T13:03:00.000-05:00

Ordinarily, the books I read, whatever book I'm reading at the moment, and books that most people have never heard of, or maybe have heard of but aren't really aware of. The Demon-Haunted World by Carl Sagan. Dance of Death by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child. The Tale of Despereaux by Kate DiCamillo. Ask any Joe or Jane in the mall about them and you'll get a shrug and a blank stare. Who reads, anyway?

The last "celebrated" book I read was The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown. Other people who read it seemed to enjoy it, and a few really took it to heart, this in spite of its being goofily conceived and only competently drafted. Why did people take it so seriously? Because it dealt with religious themes that people feel seriously about, and it did so irreverently. Also, people who are not widely read in fantasy fiction often do not appreciate the idea of "alternate history" that mixes real people and events with invented ones. It's a mental block. In a sense all fiction that's set on a recognizable Earth is alternate history, but some people are so inadept at suspending their disbelief that they can't entertain notions of "what if" when they know or believe that it never happened that way.

Anybody who ever objected to The Da Vinci Code on factual grounds probably couldn't read one of those books where the South wins the Civil War or Germany wins World War II -- not without their heads exploding, anyway. When the Da Vinci Code turmoil was at its peak we got to see a lot of exploding heads.

Right now I'm reading a book that got a lot of attention about 37 years ago: The Godfather by Mario Puzo. For once I can tell someone what I'm reading and they won't say, "Huh?" Even people who haven't read the book, or any other book, know this one. I understand it even got turned into a movie at some point. But The Godfather, decades old and taking place decades before that, holds up great as a dramatic story with interesting and deeply flawed characters struggling with the world and their own circumstances.

I think it's a shame that the book is so totally overshadowed by its offshoots. In reading it now I can see that there's very little in the movies that was original with the filmmakers. It's all in the book. If you Google "godfather" the way I just did, most of the links refer to either the movies, the recent video games, or the pizza franchise. The only other reference that stands out is James Brown, the Godfather of Soul; does that nickname predate the book?

Big chunks of The Godfather are written in a narrative style like nonfiction, just as if Puzo were telling about some real-life big business venture or political dynasty. Also, while the characters are always hiding their thoughts from each other, Puzo spells out for the reader what everyone is thinking and why they all feel justified in doing the horrible things that happen throughout the book. I guess that explains what's so compelling about the story to me. It deftly stimulates curiosity and then even more deftly satisfies it.

Scenes I'd like to see

2006-10-20T12:51:00.000-05:00

RJ Eskow at the Huffington Post implies that the real reason Republicans brewed up the original "Contract with America" was that the actual CWA, a/k/a the Constitution, was not entirely to their liking. Recent developments demonstrate a certain antipathy to the concept of true democratic freedom. He thinks Democratic candidates should shine a spotlight on the issue:

Wouldn't it be striking if, in every electoral debate between now and November 7, the Democrat turned to the Republican and said "Why did your party surrender our freedoms to the terrorists?" They could follow up by saying, "If you guys can't defend liberty without giving it away, turn the country over to people who can."

Meanwhile, as the election edges closer, I'm still on the lookout for a reason, any reason, to vote for a Republican, and I'm still coming up empty. It's a variation on the vigil I took up in 2000 for any concrete evidence that Bush isn't the stupid jerk he appears to be. He's had every chance to redeem himself in my eyes, and he's left me hanging every time.

Esky pipes up

2006-10-18T09:40:00.000-05:00

Esquire has an opinion, evidently, about things besides hard liquor, expensive watches, and the relative sexosity of various movie performers. This month they're endorsing candidates in every state. Here's what they say about one of our little dust-ups:

District 2
Jim Ryun (R)
Nancy Boyda (D)
Ryun is an ultraconservative evangelical Christian, but his moral superiority didn't stop him from purchasing a townhouse at below-market price from a sham family-values organization that served, in reality, as an Abramoff-DeLay slush fund.
Esquire endorses: Boyda

Why did I have to read about this, purely by chance, on the web instead of in local news election coverage? This is the kind of story the local media should be talking about—if we had local media. I know, we barely have national media.

And another thing. Is there a single Republican anywhere that ISN'T embroiled in scandal right now? Phrases like "scandal-plagued Bush administration" and "scandal-plagued Republican party" should have become cliches from sheer overuse, except that nobody seems to have the clarity to use them.

The whole thing stinks

2006-10-05T10:17:00.000-05:00

Jamie Holly at Crooks and Liars has it right:

There are now reports that Republican members of Congress knew about this 11 years ago. That would put this in 1995. Now what other "sex scandal" has happened in Washington since then? Oh yeah - Monica Lewinsky. So the Lewinsky incident was so severe to merit a multi-million dollar investigation and the attention of both halls of Congress, yet a Republican congressman having possible illicit contact with pages under the age of 18 doesn't get any attention by the GOP? There you have it - the perfect definition of hypocrisy.

Republican Hijinks-O-Rama

2006-10-02T15:22:00.000-05:00

I am SUCH the evil person. I must be. I'm getting far too much entertainment value from the Congressman Foley sex scandal. If it's such a terrible situation, in so many ways, why do I find it so funny? I guess there are several reasons.

Some years ago a commentator smarter than me laid out the rule of thumb for political scandals: Democratic scandals tend to involve sex, and Republican scandals tend to involve subverting the Constitution. Foley has smashed that template by serving up a sex scandal that involves neither a Democrat nor a clergyman.

It's too late to remove the congressman's name from the ballot. This isn't funny because of the confusion it will cause; that's likely to be minimal, after all the publicity. Everybody will know who's been chosen to replace Foley on the ballot. The funny part is that, in order to vote for the replacement candidate, people will be forced to cast their ballot for Foley, after seeing his name in the news every day between now and the election.

The Republicans are being left with an alarming lack of spin room on this story. They'd like to plead ignorance of the whole situation, which is difficult when the news is full of Congressional pages who say they were warned to avoid Foley or minimize contact with him—and those warnings had to have come from someone. They'd like to claim that the fact of the scandal becoming public shows that Republicans keep their own house clean, but that's hard when the guy was running not for election but for RE-election. They'd like to claim that Foley's evident predatory nature is a necessary consequence of his homosexuality, but they know that their opponents will be calling it a necessary consequence of being Republican, and they fear that it might not be difficult to produce an example of a straight male congressman who has sexually pursued female pages. Nobody wants to say that straight sex predators are somehow less evil than gay ones, even if that's what they truly believe.

So, unless you're a Republican, it all adds up to a veritable Oktoberfest of Schadenfreude. Whatever side you're on, it's clear that some horrible stuff happened here. There is no up side to this. I must be a terrible person to be enjoying it all as much as I am.

P.S. I don't mind when other people call them "Repuglicans" or something like that, but I don't find it necessary. "Republican" is sufficiently insulting all by itself.

Hope for the best, expect a severe beating

2006-09-27T13:22:00.000-05:00

Matthew Yglesias and I have had our disagreements in the past. He's always been gracious about it, though, and not merely because he has no idea who the hell I am. But yesterday he said something I have to share with you.

Does anyone -- anyone -- on the right genuinely believe that those of us who favor withdrawal from Iraq do so because we don't think it would be a good idea to turn the country into a shining success? Of course we don't think that. We favor withdrawal because we don't believe that indefinite continuation of an open-ended military presence in Iraq is likely to generate success. The country has been doing this for three and a half years now and things aren't improving; they're getting worse. Nobody disputes the desirability of success; we dispute the notion that continuing to do the same things that aren't working now, and weren't working one year ago, and weren't working two years ago, are going to magically start working if we give it another year.

Now. At this point somebody is likely to trot out the old quote about how it's crazy to keep doing the same thing and expect the result to change. I hate that old quote. It probably fits here, but I still hate it. If you keep doing something the same way, over and over, eventually the result will change. My point is that it won't change because of anything you did, and it won't change at a predictable time or in a predictable way. The only thing you can reasonably predict is that, since the change will be random and chaotic, it'll probably be a change that you won't like very much.

So, if that's the kind of change our leaders are hoping for in Iraq, then maybe they really are as stupid as everybody says they are.

The value of science

2006-09-21T14:42:00.000-05:00

People often don't trust science, because they don't understand it, and any random scientific point is often something that can't be explained in a couple of minutes. But astronomer and author Carl Sagan, who died in 1996, had a talent for explaining things. In this talk from 1994 he explains, not a particular point of science, but the value of science in general:

There is a reward structure in science that is very interesting: Our highest honors go to those who disprove the findings of the most revered among us. So Einstein is revered not just because he made so many fundamental contributions to science, but because he found an imperfection in the fundamental contribution of Isaac Newton. (Isaac Newton was surely the greatest physicist before Albert Einstein.)

Now think of what other areas of human society have such a reward structure, in which we revere those who prove that the fundamental doctrines that we have adopted are wrong. Think of it in politics, or in economics, or in religion; think of it in how we organize our society. Often, it's exactly the opposite: There we reward those who reassure us that what we've been told is right, that we need not concern ourselves about it. This difference, I believe, is at least a basic reason why we've made so much progress in science, and so little in some other areas.

These days it's easy to find examples of how we've made the wrong choices because people were quick to support our leaders no matter what, and because the people who pointed out where our leaders were wrong got shouted down and tagged as "traitors" and "terrorists" instead of rewarded. If I were someone that anybody was listening to, I'd probably be marked as an enemy of the state just for bringing it up.

The weird part to me is how clearly Sagan saw where the country was headed, long before 9/11 caused too many people to lose the capacity for rational thought:

There's another reason I think popularizing science is important, why I try to do it. It's a foreboding I have—maybe ill-placed—of an America in my children's generation, or my grandchildren's generation, when all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when we're a service and information-processing economy; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest even grasps the issues; when the people (by “the people” I mean the broad population in a democracy) have lost the ability to set their own agendas, or even to knowledgeably question those who do set the agendas; when there is no practice in questioning those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and religiously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in steep decline, unable to distinguish between what's true and what feels good, we slide, almost without noticing, into superstition and darkness.

That hits home for me, at a time when our leaders have pretty much given up on providing us with leadership in favor of stirring up our hatred and suspicion, appealing to our fears and prejudices, discouraging us from independent thought, and in general building a bridge to the 14th century, in the apparent hope that we'll cross that bridge and then burn it behind us.

A short burst of reason

2006-09-12T12:03:00.000-05:00

Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) has the kind of opinions that you only see in military officers these days after they have retired. Of all the 9/11 comments I've seen over the last couple of days, his essay at Pen and Sword makes the most sense to me. He says in part,

But the truth is, as Murtha has stated many times, the longer we allow ourselves to be ground into powder in Iraq in a civil war/insurgency that no longer really concerns us, the more we weaken ourselves and the more we strengthen adversaries and competitors like China, Russia, Iran and, yes, Osama bin Laden.

And the best way for Americans to aid in weakening their country further is by continuing to support a bad war started bad reasons by bad men who ran it badly. At the end of the day, the only real reason to back continued U.S. presence is to save the face of one George W. Bush, and that's not a face worth saving.

George W. Bush is not America.

A lot of people seem to have placed their reliance on Bush because he professes a strong religious belief. Never mind the question of whether belief is a good or bad thing. They forget that sometimes people lie about what they believe—politicians in particular. And what people do is almost always a better indication of what they believe than what they say.

"Me and Tony here think that—Tony? Tony?"

2006-09-07T12:18:00.000-05:00

It looks like Bush could be losing his biggest international ally:

LONDON (Reuters) - British Prime Minister Tony Blair pledged on Thursday to quit within a year but declined to give an exact date to mutineers in his Labor Party who want a speedy change of leader to revive its fortunes.

I wonder if this worries W at all. The mental picture I conjure up is the scene from Blazing Saddles, with Blair telling Bush, "Son, you're on your own."

Of course I feel guilty

2006-09-05T10:19:00.000-05:00

I made my share of jokes over the years about Steve Irwin, and how likely he was to come to his end by being eaten by something while on camera. I know a lot of other people did the same thing. I feel bad about it anyway.

What surprises me is that, if I had to guess, I would have thought that Irwin was maybe not as wealthy a celebrity as everybody assumes he was. And I would have been wrong. But at least he's been putting his wealth to good use.

Practical approach to wildlife protection - National - theage.com.au: "The money he made as the Crocodile Hunter was put into conservation projects, including establishing the charity Wildlife Warriors Worldwide with wife Terri and buying huge tracts of land in Australia and abroad to protect and restore habitat for native species."

I give Irwin credit for fighting the battle against ignorance in ways that drew the most attention and therefore did the most good. It's getting hard to watch people die who have been trying to help the world out a little bit, while the ignorant, arrogant and selfish people in charge just keep going on. It seems like we've been dealing with the same bad guys for a long time now, but a lot of the good guys who helped balance the scales in years past are gone now.

On a personal note, Steve Irwin was a couple of years younger than me, and his kids are a lot younger than mine. I don't know why that matters to me, but it does. My heart goes out to his family.

One less thing

2006-08-22T09:14:00.000-05:00

I guess I can stop worrying about Bush. That guy is living under some kind of magic charm. Everything that goes wrong around him just magically skirts his vicinity—he's like the baby in Baby's Day Out who wanders in and out of mortal danger without ever being touched by it.

And there's no longer any argument about whether he's a failure as president or not. Never mind my standards, which I admit have taken a severe beating so far this century. Bush is a failure by his own standards. Every single course of action he's taken in office, he did based on what he said would happen as a result. And that hardly ever happened. Other people disagreed with him and said something else would happen, and the result would be a lot worse than Bush thought. And those other people were mostly right. In fact, Bush's critics have turned out to be optimists.

But to this day Bush seems to make no connection between his actions and their consequences. Which supports my theory that he isn't so much stupid as he is irrational. Okay, well, that and willfully ignorant. And arrogant. A tragic combination.

The thoughts I'm currently clinging to

2006-08-16T10:17:00.000-05:00

I have a new goal in life: to justify my existence. If only I can figure out how. Somehow I let myself get sidetracked and neglected to do that. Any minute now the space creatures could land, and one of them could ask me for one good reason why he should let me continue to exist, and if that happens, frankly, I'm sunk, because I got nothin'.

Maybe there are two kinds of atheists. One, the kind who are comfortable with their point of view. And two, the kind who go through life in pain because they have no comforting delusions to hold on to.

Sometimes I find quotes that I think are worth remembering. Here are a few.

Whether we are talking about gods, miracles, UFOs, or connections between Saddam and Al Qaeda, there are a great many people who don't even understand the basic concept that some things are true, some things are not true, and as individuals we don't get to pick which is which.

—Jeff Hester, Professor, Department of Physics & Astronomy, Arizona State University, jhester@asu.edu, eagle.la.asu.edu/hester

Humanity has advanced, when it has advanced, not because it has been sober, responsible, and cautious, but because it has been playful, rebellious, and immature.

—Tom Robbins

It isn't given for us to know those rare moments when people are wide open and the lightest touch can wither or heal. A moment too late and we can never reach them any more in this world. They will not be cured by our most efficacious drugs or slain with our sharpest swords.

—F. Scott Fitzgerald

Maybe getting the puppy wasn't a mistake

2006-08-03T15:37:00.000-05:00

Nora Ephron says: "When your children are teenagers, it's important to have a dog so that someone in the house is happy to see you."

Oh, if only ...

2006-08-02T09:30:00.000-05:00

You know how to tell when society is doing really well? I mean really really well? It's when you wish that the news stories in The Onion were true and the stories in the real newspapers were made up.

Ken Lay's Corpse Sentenced To Prison:

HOUSTON—A U.S. district court judge handed down the maximum sentence Tuesday to the body of former Enron CEO Kenneth L. Lay, who was convicted on multiple counts of securities and wire fraud when alive last May. "Mr. Lay, given the severity and scope of your blatant disregard for the laws and ethics of business, this court has no hesitation in posthumously sentencing you to rot in a maximum-security correctional facility," Judge Sim Lake said while addressing Lay's decomposing corpse Tuesday. "May God have already had mercy on your soul." Lay's remains will immediately begin serving a 45-year sentence, but could be eligible for parole as early as 2026 if they exhibit good behavior.

I guess we'll always wonder whether it was something more than too many trips to Ruth's Chris Steak House that precipitated Lay's intriguingly timely heart attack. Something that belongs on the last page of a Tales from the Crypt comic book.

Question of the day

2006-07-31T12:25:00.000-05:00

GOOFYBLOG » “I was not with Hezbollah, but now I am!”: "Perhaps someday the Right-Wing sheep in our nation will finally realize there are consequences when you blow the shit out of innocent people.

Think about it. If a foreign Nation destroyed your home and your family, and you were all that was left, what are the chances you would do whatever you could to strike back at that nation, and the nations that bankrolled the bombs that killed your family?

Every day in Iraq, Afghanistan, and now Lebanon, hundreds and thousands of future terrorists are being created by the pure stupidity of our actions."

Making Light: Political heat

2006-07-27T12:55:00.000-05:00

Making Light: Political heat: "As always, I'm haunted by the number of people in this country who think that George W. Bush & Co. is on their side, when there are so many clues to the contrary. Wrecking FEMA, for instance. Large-scale disasters can strike anywhere. Katrina hit a city that voted Democrat, but a major disaster could just as easily have hit a red state, and the response would have been just as inept. Bush didn't care. The election was over. He didn't need their votes any more."

This just in—

2006-07-21T09:34:00.000-05:00

Okay, here's the update on my ailing computer. Maybe now Newsweek, CNN and Burrowing Rodent Monthly will stop calling.

A couple of nights ago, with no other options available, I bit the bullet and reinstalled WinXP on our machine. It was not the complete, format-the-hard-disk and start from scratch reinstall, it was the repair-an-existing-installation option. It's still a full install, but all your programs, files and settings are preserved.

To my shock—after reading various prophecies of doom on the net—this seems to have worked pretty well. I was lucky to have a separate CD with Service Pack 2 to bring the system mostly up to date.

Then I logged on to catch up on Windows updates. 41 MB worth, as it turned out. Those installed without any error messages at all. Very encouraging, but then encouragement is not always your friend.

Now all I have to do is figure out why every time I log in, Windows Explorer starts up in the Windows\system32 folder. I suspect some rogue game download has left its scat in my Startup folder. Time to clean up another mess.

Cone of Silence

2006-07-17T08:44:00.000-05:00

Finally, I can blame my failure to post on the weblog recently on something other than my own tragic lack of resolve. My home PC has been ailing since last Thursday. Right now it will only boot Windows in "safe mode" and that does not allow an internet dialup connection.

So it goes.

We have a ragtag technical team of fugitive misfits working on the problem around the clock, adnwe will keep them supplied with Hot Pockets and Vault Zero until the issue is resolved.

Meanwhile, stay frosty and well hydrated, everybody.

Bad news and good news for Mr. L

2006-06-27T11:54:00.000-05:00

This story is blasting through the net with the speed of a bogus terror alert, but only Teresa finds the pony buried in the steaming pile of crap that Rush Limbaugh's public reputation has turned into: Limbaugh busted on drug charges (again!):

Supposedly he got hooked on painkillers on account of having a bad back, though given the quantities he was caught procuring, last time around, one has to wonder whether there wasn't some recreational aspect to it. Or perhaps, since he's now smuggling Viagra, his back has improved.

There, you see? There's always a bright side, something we reality-obsessed liberal naysayers tend to forget.

Head Cracking for Dummies

2006-06-20T09:51:00.000-05:00

John at Whatever gives us his take on head-cracking activity in Some People a Helmet Wouldn't Help:

You know what? If someone believes they shouldn't have to wear a motorcycle helmet because the accident is someone else's fault, the fact is I don't want that person to wear a helmet. Because that person is clearly too damn stupid to live. For the rest of you, I'll merely remind you of what you no doubt already know, which is that your brains will splatter themselves across the pavement just as readily when the accident is someone else's fault as they will when it is yours. You don't wear a motorcycle helmet because you're a moron on the road. You wear a helmet because everyone else is.

I don't really care if Florida reinstates its motorcycle helmet law; I think overall people would be safer and somewhat less dead if there was one, but if there's not it's no skin off my nose (and cheek, and forehead and jaw). The way I see motorcycle helmets is that they are just one of life's stealth IQ tests, and when I see someone driving a motorcycle without one I know I'm dealing with someone who one of three things: A moron, delusional ('I'm too good a driver to get in an accident'), or a delightful optimist concerning the driving skills of every other single person on the road. I am none of those, myself, but it is always good to know when someone else is, and that they advertise themselves so clearly as being so.

And once again, my thoughts have been crystallized perfectly by someone who isn't me. This is why he is the Actual Writer and I'm riding a wave of obscurity. I especially like the way he weaves in little graphic references to what happens when head meets pavement.

My own theory is that people who don't wear motorcycle helmets are people who didn't play hopscotch as kids and didn't make sidewalk chalk drawings. They can't make a connection between the way pavement quickly eats up a piece of chalk dragged across it and what will happen when you replace the chalk with your skull.

Senile ramblings

2006-06-02T09:44:00.000-05:00

Why would Army want to beat Navy? Aren't we all on the same side?

American Idol: Why should I give it any thought? Any at all?

If only they'd find Jimmy Hoffa, I could sleep a lot easier. His killers are still at large.

Last night I dreamed of a new sport: Elevator Demolition Derby. Two elevators in one shaft. Winner take all. I theorize that the elevator on top holds the advantage. If so, the sport could be hampered in popularity by an undue emphasis on the coin toss.

I think I have a problem with Memorial Day. It's definitely a good thing to remember the dead. It's even better to avoid the sort of stupidity that gets people killed.

Have you noticed how you never hear people accused of being arrogant, aggressive or ignorant any more? I think it's because those things are no longer considered insults.

Why do I have to know who Paris Hilton is? There must be some other more useful piece of information that could be occupying that space in my brain.

The truth about saving gas

2006-06-02T09:18:00.000-05:00

According to an article at Edmunds.com, you can save a lot of gasoline if you'd only stop being such a jerk. Okay, what the story actually says is this:

Test #1: Aggressive vs. Moderate Driving

This is gonna hurt. Our tests showed that the most significant way to save gas is: you. And we're talking massive fuel economy gains. Think you need a hybrid? Chances are you've got hybrid-style mileage in your gas pedal foot. Don't mash the gas when you start up. Take the long view of the road and brake easy. This tip alone can save you unbelievable amounts of gas. If you slowed your 0-to-60-mph acceleration time down from your current 10 seconds to a more normal city pace of 15 seconds, you'll feel the savings immediately.

No matter how much people bellyache about high gas prices, I suspect this is the advice they are least likely to follow. Let's face it, driving is a power trip for a lot of people, and anything that doesn't play into that power trip—like moderate driving habits, using turn signals, and knowing how right-of-way works—are nothing to those people but admissions that they can't do as they doggone well please.

Sometimes it feels good to be the jerk. Sure it hurts when you're buying gas, but that only takes a few seconds. The rest of the time you can drive around and be the star of your own movie. Everybody else is just extras.

Reality vs. Fiction In All-Out Megabrawl

2006-05-17T15:50:00.000-05:00

From the BBC: Muslims join Da Vinci criticism

I completely don't understand this.

Years ago, there was an episode of Columbo where the murderer was a world-ranked chess player. All the other chess players on that episode were a little nutzo too. Should I, as a chess player, have been mortally offended by this?

I've only read one Dan Brown book, Digital Fortress. The plot involved computer security and cryptography, and a reader with even a layman's understanding of those issues could recognize that it was mostly nonsense. That's no big deal, though, because the story and characters were fictional. Like in completely made up. That is the fiction writer's job, to make up stuff, tell you it's made up, and then somehow get you to care about it anyway.

That's what Brown did when he wrote The Da Vinci Code, which, like his other books, is made up. Some people are still, at this late date, having trouble grasping the concept. They're saying the movie and book are "blasphemous," offensive and filled with lies. Well, yeah, maybe so. Novels and movies are by definition filled with lies. What part of "fictional" don't they understand?

Trying to get the book or movie banned gives either one way too much credit. Sure, some people will see the movie or read the book and take the whole thing way too seriously, just like some people take Star Trek, or The Lord of the Rings, or TV shows like Lost or 24 way too seriously.

Maybe the church is hyper-sensitive to criticism of any kind because so much of theirs over the years has turned out to be totally well-founded. Maybe the church has grown unbelievably thin-skinned over the years. They'll just have to get over it. Today even many of the authors are themselves fictional characters, and even a good portion of the non-fiction section can't be taken seriously any more. Getting all aerated over a work of dramatic fiction is foolishness, and trying to get other people upset about it is a waste of everybody's time.

Great Moments in Hucksterism

2006-05-17T15:48:00.000-05:00

Hollywood writer and master namedropper Mark Evanier highlights a thriving haven of the art of creative writing—cereal boxes:

Then one day, the word "sugar" began to fall out of favor with parents and maybe even with some kids, too. Sugar Pops became Sugar Corn Pops and then a few years later, they were just plain Corn Pops. [...]
And now it's come to this: [...] The exterior of the container just says Pops on it. Nothing about sugar, nothing about corn. It's just a box of Pops. [...]
It's not a great trend. If people are going to eat sugar, let them be well aware it's sugar. Don't help them pretend it's something else. Why they're doing this, I don't know.

I can hazard a pretty good guess. If I remember right, the most recent slogan they used is, "Gotta have my Pops." They kept the one word that helps them sell the product—to relatively guileless, unsophisticated children, not incidentally—and they eliminated the words that weren't pulling the marketing plow. No mystery here.

Living in America makes you sick

2006-05-11T10:39:00.000-05:00

Malcolm Gladwell, whose blog photo makes him look like the love child of Simon and Garfunkel, talks about an interesting new medical study:

[...] The point was to compare the health of the United States and the United Kingdom. It’s an interesting question for a number of reasons, but principally because the United States spends $5274 per person, per year, on health care and the United Kingdom spends $2164, or substantially less than half as much. The question is—what do we get, in terms of health, that for extra $3100 a year? [...]

The first conclusion is that Americans are really, really sick compared to the British. In every socio-economic group, for instance, the prevalence of diabetes is roughly double in the United States than it is in the United Kingdom. Rates of hypertension, heart disease, heart attacks, stroke, lung disease and cancer are also all higher in the United States. And not just a little big higher. Much higher. [...]

[Paul] Krugman argues that this is evidence of how much more stressful living in America is than living in England. I think that's absolutely right.

So let me see if I understand this. There's something about just living here in the U.S. that's—what, toxic? Evidently so. I would expect that if it's stress-related, there should be a greater incidence of mental illness, too, but the article doesn't mention it. It takes no more than a familiarity with current events to conclude that we're living in some kind of Golden Age of Insanity, with America leading the way.

I'd like to know what this study really means. Some of the diseases they mention are known to be linked to stress, but cancer? Lung disease? Diabetes? Not so much, as far as I know. Are we living in a toxic culture? What the hell? It's a real noggin-scratcher, as Flanders might say. he's always so cheerful, so he'll probably be fine.

I think I can wait

2006-04-28T16:26:00.000-05:00

You've heard all about United 93 by now, because nobody will let you not hear about it. Reading the review by Roger Ebert may be as close as I get to seeing it.

At least, until somebody asks this one question and gets a good answer: How much of the movie is made up?

You know, even when an event is scrupulously documented, the movie based on the event will have a lot of made-up stuff in it. That's how they make movies. And this movie is about an event where there's still no way to know whether any particular incident really happened the way we think it did.

My problem with that is when some people watch the movie, well and convincingly made, and then feel as if they have concrete knowledge of what went on. My guess is, some of what's in the movie happened just the way they say, based on verifiable records like answering machine messages and account of cell phone calls. And by the same token, other parts of the movie are almost certainly made up.

I wish more people were wondering how to tell the difference.

Two things I normally avoid

2006-04-20T16:17:00.000-05:00

One is Playboy magazine and another is Baylor University. Co-inkly-dinkly, they both figure in this story cited by Obscure Store:

Baylor U. warns students about appearing in Playboy

Playboy is looking for Baylor women to photograph, but the school warns that “associating with a magazine that is clearly antithetical to Baylor’s mission would be considered a violation of the code of conduct." Possible sanctions for students at the religious school could range from a warning to expulsion, says a Baylor spokesperson.

I assume that the Baylor "code of conduct" is a written document, available to the student body, or else how can they conscientiously abide by it? Surely the administration doesn't just pull this kind of restriction out of its ... hat. So if it's a genuine violation of the code, where does it say so? "Would be considered" sounds like the kind of weasel phrase people use to intimidate when the facts won't back up their case. I'd like to know what part of the code prohibits takin' it off for Hef.

I also assume that students attend Baylor voluntarily, obligating themselves to adhere to school rules. But if that's the case, why would there be any intersection at all between female Baylor students and aspiring Playboy models? Either the whole thing is a non-issue, or some of the students disagree with school policy, in which case Baylor may not be the haven of chastity and virtue its administration would like us to believe. No, that would be crazy.

Favorite weight loss tips from a fat guy

2006-04-18T09:12:00.000-05:00

Honestly, I'm in no position to give advice on dieting. What I can do is reveal the secret of losing weight. The catch is that knowing the secret doesn't make it any easier.

A lot of the weight loss programs you see advertised will tell you that with their help, you can diet without being hungry. "Without being hungry" is the part I think is misleading. Because the secret of losing weight is simply to remain hungry all the time. That's all there is to it.

It's not the same as starving yourself. That will make you sick. You have to eat enough to keep from getting sick, but you have to stop eating while you're still hungry. And by the same principle, you don't start to eat because you became hungry—if you're trying to lose weight, you're always hungry, and if you eat enough to stop being hungry you will not lose weight.

On the other hand, if you can stand to walk around with that little (or big) knot of hunger burning in your gut all day and all night, then you're all set. As in so many areas of life, your abilities are determined not by what you can do, but by what you can stand to do.

Now, a lot of people get cranky when they're hungry. I think I am one of those people. I don't know for sure. I get cranky so much of the time anyway, it's hard to say. But being hungry all the time will make you a grouch, and I hope you can enjoy your weight loss as a form of compensation. Because by the time you hit your target weight, everyone will hate you. Now you know why willowy supermodels go ballistic so predictably.

I'm not trying to lose weight because I think it will make me happy. It won't. I'm doing it because I reached a point where extra weight starts to cause serious health problems. My doctor is too diplomatic to tell me that these health problems will kill me if I stay fat. What she strongly implies is that if I die before I get old—too old to die young—then these obesity-related problems will be what kills me.

That's what it adds up to, and I know it has none of the optimism of a shiny happy weight-loss-program sales pitch. The Secret of Weight Loss doesn't leave room for that. I don't like it any more than you do, but the difference is, I'm stuck with it and you're not. You can just say, "Hey, what does that idiot know? He's still fat."

News gets me steamed—again

2006-04-11T13:04:00.000-05:00

I was watching Good Morning America again this morning. I honestly don't know why I bother, except that it's no bother, really—it's just what comes on when the local news is over, and the ABC affiliate has some of the least objectionable newsdroids in town.

Anyway.

The GMA report was about rising gasoline prices, and how they're expected to keep rising from now until the prohibitive cost of transportation forces Barbara Walters off the Manhattan party circuit.

There I fumed while they belabored the obvious. Does anybody who drives not know what's happening to gas prices? Maybe the GMA anchors were caught unaware. My guess is they haven't needed to pump their own gas for a while.

What we all want to know, of course, is why? With oil company profits setting records, how do they get away with raising prices so much? The answer, says the GMA economics spokeshead, is simply supply and demand. If you think about it too hard, you'll get caught up in a tautology. (Hey, look it up. I had to.) How can they charge so much? Because they can.

Although I'm no economist, I know enough to appreciate how morally foul the concept of supply and demand is. For one thing, it's the engine that drives price gouging. Charging what the market will bear is not in itself a justification of anything, nor is it an adequate answer to the question, How do they get away with it?

But it was enough to satisfy Charlie Gibson.

Reporters are supposed to be curious

2006-04-07T12:12:00.000-05:00

Complaints about the way the news media have shirked their journalistic responsibilities are no longer limited to their coverage of political issues. Now we're getting half-assed reporting on serious public-health issues.

KCTV5 - Officials to Update Mumps Outbreak

LAWRENCE, Kan. (AP) -- Health officials from the University of Kansas and Douglas County plan an update this afternoon (2:30) on the mumps outbreak in Lawrence.

My wife, a nurse, after seeing various reports on this, points out that they're leaving a couple of important questions unasked and unanswered.

1. Were any of the confirmed mumps patients vaccinated against it? This should not be hard to find out, and if nobody wants to say, that ought to be part of the story.

2. Are people who have been vaccinated protected? And if not, why not? This will be a lot easier to find out if we can get an answer to number one.

I can't imagine being a parent and not wanting answers to these questions. But the local crop of broadcast journalists hasn't shown any curiosity, and we're left in the dark while the situation worsens.

Keep your stinky ash to yourself

2006-04-05T14:16:00.000-05:00

Follow the link for something I wish I'd said.

Three O'Clock in the Morning: Butt out

Chinese technology leaps ahead

2006-04-04T16:11:00.000-05:00

Here in the U.S., fake food almost always cost more than the real thing—a lot more. Compare the price of sugar with sugar substitute, or those meatless meat products with actual meat. There's even a local furniture store selling—for what reason I can only imagine—a fake coffee pot half-full of fake coffee for around $90.

But in China, they can keep costs down enough to pass off fake food as the real thing and make a profit from it.

Boing Boing: Egg piracy in China: fake, toxic eggs lead to dementia: "Evil food pirates in China have developed a way to make fake eggs out of gelatine, benzoic acid, alum, and other ingredients of varying toxicity. The eggs are sold at a very low price to unsuspecting consumers and can be cooked just like the real thing. The good news: no cholesterol. The bad news: eating too many can lead to dementia."

I'm not sure what I can add to that. Next thing you know, we'll be reading stories about ... well, hell, I don't know, but I never would have predicted this one. This proves I have no idea what might be coming up next.

Let's Stay Home From the Lobby

2006-03-31T09:37:00.000-06:00

Slashdot points out this story at Yahoo! News about movie theaters' complaints when DVDs are released too quickly.

Slashdot | Theaters Unhappy About Faster DVD Releases: "As movie studios such as Walt Disney Co. have pushed for more rapid DVD releases of movies to combat piracy on the Internet, executives of movie theater chains such as Regal Entertainment Group and National Amusements Inc. have countered, saying that seeing a movie in the theater is a 'fuller, more entertaining experience' and that the time window between movie and DVD releases should even be extended."

I can't imagine that there's anybody who wouldn't prefer to see a movie in a nice theater, with great picture and sound, over watching it at home, even on a high-end home theater setup. The problem is, that choice no longer exists.

A lot of the time, you can't count on the presentation at a local theater to be any better than you get from a DVD at home, and that's if you have modest video equipment. And you definitely can't count on having a pleasant drive to the theater, or decent popcorn and a quiet audience once you get to your seat.

You can be sure, though, that going out to the movies will take longer and cost more, that you'll be expected to sit through advertising and marketing material unrelated to the movie, and that the theater will not adjust their showtimes to suit your convenience.

So I guess my point is, yeah, quicker DVDs releases probably do hurt movie theaters, but not as much as the theaters hurt themselves, and it's hard to imagine why anybody who isn't in the theater business should care.

Paging Dorothy Parker

2006-03-29T10:10:00.000-06:00

I don't know about you, but I've been waiting anxiously for the critical reaction to the theatrical debut of Larry the Cable Guy. He has a lot of fans, and every one of them looks at Larry and sees something that I just don't or can't see.

If there's one comment worth repeating, it's from this review in the Onion A.V. Club:

It'd be tempting to call Larry the Ernest of his generation, but that'd be a grave insult to Jim Varney's enduring legacy. Compared to Larry—a grating, baby-faced butterball with all the magnetism and charisma of an Applebee's night manager—Varney was the second coming of Jimmy Stewart.

Larry is the reason I can never seem to make it all the way through the so-called "redneck comedy" shows. Part of the way through, sure. Bill Engvall seems like the least oxygen-deprived of the group, which is not to say he's the funniest. I'd say that would be Ron White, who paints himself as a booze-soaked guttermouth—and may well be one, for all I know. But White tells stories that make him come off worse than any of the other people he talks about, and that's too consistent to be an accident. Even Jeff Foxworthy is not entirely unamusing, as much as some people seem to hate him.

All those guys at least reach the bar when they don't clear it. Larry TCG lowers the bar all the way to the ground and then crawls under it.

Remarks like the ones in the Onion review always remind me of Dorothy Parker, who is supposed to have said in one book review: "This book is not to be tossed lightly aside, but to be hurled with great force." Unfortunately, today most people probably don't know who Parker was. Meanwhile, LTCG's movie is being hurled with great force against movie screens all over our enormous land.

Skepchicks

2006-03-24T10:18:00.000-06:00

The least important thing you need to know is the thing you have to be told first: Rebecca is not the Skepchick.

She is, however, in charge over at Skepchick.org, where the future is being made today—sorry, that would be Muppet Labs. And since she is a skepchick, one of many who hang out there, the nickname sort of stuck. And she doesn't seem to be putting up much of a protest.

Skepticism is mainly about maintaining a scientific, naturalistic world view. When you talk about how few prominent skeptics are women, you're looking at the larger issue of women in the scientific community, and how come there aren't more of them?

In any event, you may not be interested in all that, but it's still worth checking the web site for a good laugh every so often:

Plenty of happy news this morning, Skepchickal readers. For starters, the battle of girl vs. machine has ended at last, or at least hit a lull, with girl on top. Did I just type “girl on top?” Yes, and I’ll be damned if I didn’t just do it again. Google hits are about to quadruple.

I could say more, or maybe I couldn't, but either way you'll find your time better spent by going over there right now for some eye-opening reading.

Another blow for the chronically self-amused

2006-03-14T09:20:00.000-06:00

Every weblogger who thinks they're funny—and that's surely every weblogger—now has more competition from people who are considered funny by someone other than themselves. By Ken Levine is written by an actual well-known gets-paid-to-be-funny TV writer. Ken has worked on several of my favorite shows, and on at least one highly popular show that to me was always nothing short of harrowing and disturbing. But what do I know?

Critical Condition Department:

2006-02-27T15:18:00.000-06:00

Our Literary Jab of the Day comes from Mary Forrest at Monoblog:

It's called The Unconsoled, was written by Kazuo Ishiguro, and was without contest the most infuriating book I've ever read. I'm glad I finished it. I didn't hate it. But for some reason, passage after passage would just confound me with a mixture of impatience and frustration. If there is a city in the world where people actually do behave and talk like they did in this book, I hope that it ceases to exist before I ever stumble upon it.

One of my favorite combinations in a human is irritated and articulate.

I share my shame with you

2006-02-24T15:49:00.000-06:00

These days, Mike McIntee at the Wahoo Gazette makes me laugh more than his boss does.

My advice to any one of the 8 lucky winners of the $365 million Powerball Lottery—put your money in the bank and don't do anything with it for one year. After a year, take a look at the mistakes the other 7 winners made in the past 12 months, then act accordingly.

I am ashamed to admit that I hate lottery winners. Part of it is sheer jealousy and avarice, feelings I'm not proud of but have come to terms with.

But you know, the way lotteries are set up, they exploit the fact that people like to brag when they win and pretty much clam up when they lose. That creates the impression that more people are winning than really do. You'll hear a lot about exactly how much those winners will receive, but reports say they've been buying tickets for years, and nobody's going to bother adding up how much they lost during all that time.

I'm not sure what I'm driving at here, but I spent five dollars on Powerball tickets a couple of weeks ago, with five random sets of numbers, and I was amazed when I got ZERO matches. Not a single number came up. I think that's got to be some kind of illustration of the kind of odds you're up against.

And considering that the latest jackpot was the highest in history, it looks like the odds aren't improving any over time.

Can you keep a secret?

2006-02-15T15:36:00.000-06:00

Mark Evanier at news from me points out that you don't have to be a weak-kneed daffodil to object to some of the things the Cheney Gun Club gets up to:

Good to hear that the gentleman who was on the receiving end of Dick Cheney's
shotgun blast is doing better. I frankly don't understand the appeal of
"hunting" as he and the Veep practice it...and I put that in quotes because a
friend of mine would have wanted it that way. He's a championship hunter with a
whole trophy room into which I will not go because I can't stand to see all
those mounted animal heads. On the phone the other day, he said (approximately),
"What these guys were doing was not hunting. Hunting requires some skill and
stamina and in some cases, a little personal risk. These guys were at a club
where they arrange it so anyone can kill some birds and pretend it's hunting."

M.E. writes the kind of blog that makes me wonder why I'm wasting time writing mine. I can only think of two reasons: (1) I do it for my own amusement, and (2) I need a safe place to write things where I know they will never be seen by another living soul.

Profiles in Courage

2006-02-15T15:18:00.000-06:00

Braving a firestorm of personal criticism, after it became clear that he would not be able to deflect responsibility for his hunting accident, Dick Cheney stepped up a mere four days after the fact and took his medicine:

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Vice President Dick Cheney took the blame on Wednesday for accidentally shooting a friend while hunting quail and called it "one of the worst days of my life."

"And it must have been nearly as bad for the guy I shot," he did not go on to say.

Cheney was persuaded to accept responsibility once he was reminded that he would face no actual consequences resulting from the admission. "I got so caught up in the aftermath of the incident that I forgot the most important thing about working in the White House: We don't do aftermath."

Look out, he's going clerical!

2006-02-03T13:03:00.000-06:00

Security expert Bruce Schneier shoots down another widely-held belief that isn't true:

There is a common myth that workplace homicides are prevalent in the United States Postal Service. (Note the phrase "going postal.") But not counting this event, there has been less than one shooting fatality per year at Postal Service facilities over the last 20 years. As the USPS has more than 700,000 employees, this is a lower rate than the average workplace.

What's so intriguing about the idea that Postal Employee = Gun-Toting Loner on the Edge? Here's my half-baked armchair theory.

Postal employees are poised to go full-goose nutso with little or no warning.
I will spend as little time as possible at the post office.
Therefore, I can keep myself slightly safer than I would be otherwise.
Since I feel better believing (3.), I will not question the truth of (1.).

You could argue that it's the media that creates a false impression by harping on postal worker violence, but that only means that TV reporters find the whole scenario weirdly compelling and believe their viewers will too.

The Art of the Overheard

2006-02-03T12:52:00.000-06:00

Two of my favorite web sites are Overheard in New York and Overheard in the Office. Both sites feature snatches of dialogue from real life, and the only rule is that the submitter is not a party to the overheard conversation.

It's amazing how many of the New York quotes sound like something you'd hear on Seinfeld—which I guess is another way of saying they sound like they're fabricated. And I'll bet some of them are made up. But I wouldn't be too sure about which ones are which.

Here are a couple of gems from Overheard in the Office to make you feel better about wherever you work:

10AM Department Meeting

Boss: This is not an interactive meeting, so no feedback of any kind. Every customer who gives a commitment today will get a $350 Home Depot giftcard. This is only until the end of business today.

Loan Officer: But I got a customer commitment yesterday. Can I tell her that we will send her one?

Boss: Didn't I just say that this meeting is not interactive? I won't answer your stupid questions.
Loan Office: ...So what's the answer?

The boss storms out.

Loan Officer: I'll just ask him later.

4PM Order Crystal Ball

Department Head: I need everyone to let me know a day ahead if they want to use the car and that means whether or not you'll be late because of traffic.

Worker: But how will we know we are stuck in traffic until we are actually stuck?

Department Head: That's why I need to know a day ahead of time whether you'll be late because of traffic.

So remember, kids, if you can't feel good about your own situation, at least you can find comfort in the misfortune of others.

I'm suing my guardian angel for malpractice.

2006-01-27T08:32:00.000-06:00

News stories make me wonder sometimes.

For example, take this headline from CNN: Hoping to adopt, mom instead has to bury toddler.

I see a story like this, and I wonder. Maybe there is a higher being watching over us, but would we even know the difference if there wasn't? If there were two Earths, and one had a God and the other one didn't, would we be able to tell them apart?

Sorry if I sound cranky. Got some bad news in the family today.

Books I Wish Everybody Would Read: The Series

2006-01-25T14:30:00.000-06:00

See, it's not that people are stupid. At least, that's not their natural state—in general, that is. Some people are born stupid, and some people achieve stupidity by defending their ignorance against all comers. But mostly people are surprisingly smart, considering that all we are essentially is glorified apes with car keys.

People only seem stupid because all most without exception they are easy to deceive. I don't think that's related to stupidity, I think it's just a matter of the way people are wired up and the consequences of making our way through the world based mostly on our skills at pattern-matching.

Teller said once on a TV show that the interesting thing about magic is that it's possible to fool people even when you tell them ahead of time that you're trying to fool them. Think how much easier it is if you're careful not to plant the idea that you might be up to something.

Cut to the book, probably the most universally relevant magic book ever, and one I didn't even know existed until a week ago: Abracadabra!: Secret Methods Magicians and Others Use to Deceive Their Audience by Nathaniel Schiffman.

Here's how the publisher describes it.

Magicians use more than just mirrors, string, and sleight of hand to deceive their audience. Those who are masters at this trade have developed an arsenal of techniques to manipulate people. Every action and utterance on stage and off is precisely planned to achieve a specific effect. Abracadabra! is an insider's look at what goes on at a magic show, behind-the-scenes, and in the mind of the magician. Nathaniel Schiffman explains the principles of deception, exposing those seemingly innocent motions that conceal vital actions from onlookers. Also explored in detail is the world of offstage "magic" as practiced by advertisers, politicians faith healers, psychics, and others. These "magicians" work every day to make you buy their product, believe in their cause, and influence your thinking. Lighthearted and informal, Abracadabra! will fascinate anyone interested in knowing how one person can control many. Included are hands-on experiments, magic tricks, and reader-participation segments.

I can think of a lot of problems we all have in common right now that either would not exist or wouldn't be as bad as they are, if only people would pay a little more attention to all the ways we're exposed to deception every day. I know that goes against the popular notion that we should assume the best about other people, but I don't much like other people, so at least I'm being consistent.

You're a doctor of what, now?

2006-01-20T11:09:00.000-06:00

There's a lot of talk around about scams, hoaxes and fraud, and how to avoid them. A lot, but not nearly enough, if you ask me. For instance, you take the case of—and get ready, you might not see this one coming—chiropractic.

What? Chiropractic is a scam?

So says magician James Randi, who received this message from one of his readers:

I do not believe I will ever practice chiropractic again, because I see no ethical way to practice. Spinal manipulation has limited uses at best and some forms of manipulation can be dangerous, cervical manipulation, for example. The problem is that I now have over $150,000 worth of non-dischargeable student loans and it looks like my credit is ruined for the rest of my life.

Visit the link to read more about this and other forms of monkeyshines, chicanery and colorful lies of all kinds.

Easy to be wrong, hard to admit it

2006-01-18T14:28:00.000-06:00

The Book Blog provided me with my biggest laugh today in a post called The Housewife Turned Feminist:

Terry Hekker became an overnight success in 1980 with her book Ever Since Adam & Eve, which advocated women not working and just being the perfect housewife. But when her husband divorced her for a younger woman on Hekker's 40th birthday, she wised up. Her new book's working title is Disregard First Book. It addresses a growing segment of society: divorced older wives who don't have the skills to support themselves.

I'm always interested in the spectacle of someone realizing that they were wrong. Some people won't do that, and don't like other people who do that, because they think it makes a person seem less reliable and serious.

I think that admitting your mistakes makes a person more reliable. Why stick with bad information just to avoid embarrassment? Wrong is wrong. (The Bush White House is the best example of this—and the worst.)

A Personal Note

2006-01-17T10:20:00.000-06:00

I need some help. I don't know what kind, or who from. The list of things that I can't deal with is getting longer all the time. The number of things I feel competent to manage is dwindling.

Somebody once said that 90% of life is showing up. I've mastered that. Beyond that I'm lost.

Hullabaloo

2006-01-12T11:41:00.000-06:00

In the absence of any original creative thought on my part today, let's take a peek at what Digby is saying over at Hullabaloo:

"This Republican party is crooked. And despite what George Will says, it's not because of big government. Government spending has exploded under the allegedly 'small government' Republicans while delivering less and less to average Americans. They have proven that they are completely full of shit on that issue and anyone who votes for them on that basis is an idiot. Judging by their performance the only things they actually care about are padding their own pockets and protecting their own power. If there are a hoard of 'reform' Republicans out there who have been objecting to this pillaging of the treasury, they haven't exactly been speaking up. All I've heard is 'praise God and pass the contributions.' "

Please note that this is not an issue of whether the Republicans are more corrupt than the Democrats. These are separate—but related—issues. Republican corruption is what we're dealing with now because they're the ones who have been driving the bus for the last five years—and not only driving it, but working the traffic signals and adjusting the street signs to suit themselves.

What's got them bugged right now is that we all have a clear picture of what they're capable of when they operate unimpeded, or as nearly unimpeded as any party short of the Soviet Communists. Anything they say publicly in the light of this plague of scandals is just an attempt to tell us we're not seeing what we're seeing.

You just landed on my—OW!

2005-12-19T08:59:00.000-06:00

With our attention so focused on the issue of video-game-related violence, have we neglected the tragic inevitability of board-game-related violence?

KANSAS CITY, Mo. -- A man was taken into custody Monday morning after a Monopoly game led to a stabbing, police said.

It happened in the 5200 block of East 29th Street at about 2:30 a.m.

The victim, who suffered a cut to his shoulder, walked to a police station a few blocks away to report the attack.

Investigators said two men were arguing over a Monopoly game when one man stabbed the other. Police said alcohol may have been involved.

Alcohol? Maybe it was a factor, but a more likely contributor could be the shifting rules that govern the use of the Free Parking space.

GPF for Dummies and Bloggers

2005-12-15T11:03:00.000-06:00

How do you get people to read your blog? Are you asking me? Clearly I have no expertise on the subject, judging by the underwhelming response I've been getting over these months.

One suggestion blasting around Blogistan is the idea of the Gratuitous Personal Fact. Even if you're writing about business or technical topics, you insert some personal detail or observation now and then. You give the reader a hook to draw them into your world. Then you can get a little traction for your haywire political notions, or thoughts on the PC/Mac wars, or brownie recipes, or whatever.

Today's GPF is a random thought from one of the voices in my head that keep me company all day.

You know, sometimes my confidence fails me when I need it, and I'm rarely sure exactly what I'm capable of, but I'll bet that finally, after a college education and years of gainful employment, my personal development has reached the point that if I had the chance I could create a really good science fair project.

Either that or what they call in our school district an idea fair project, where they don't restrict the entries to science and include projects on culture, arts, politics, or whatever. I think that's the kind of thing a lot of people have in mind when they decide to start a weblog—contributing to the giant net idea fair.

You either laugh or you don't

2005-12-13T10:19:00.000-06:00

Here's something you don't often see in the internet.

I have inexplicably become a fan of the NBC Monday night television programme Las Vegas.

By most measures it is a truly dreadful show; it’s more like a “sexed up Love Boat in the desert” than anything else.

On the net, just like in real concrete life, I'm sort of used to hearing people defend their likes and attack their dislikes. Very rarely do you find someone who says they like something and then goes on to talk about how lousy it is. In fact, if you say you like something, others will assume you're defending its virtues and not just expressing a personal preference.

Aren't they really two different things? You can apply standards of merit without getting emotionally invested and see that something has value. But with likes and dislikes, you either do or you don't, and I think it's mostly out of your control. My guess is that people feel more like they're in control if they can cobble together a rationale for their opinions, instead of simply saying that they feel the way they feel.

Roger Ebert—who I suspect may be nuts, but that's another post—always says that you can't argue about comedy. You either laugh or you don't. Seems like that rule applies way beyond comedy, or movies.

By Any Other Name

2005-12-07T09:48:00.000-06:00

Often it's not enough to think of something on your own. Sometimes you have to think of it first. You get zero extra credit for an idea if it turns out later that somebody else had the same idea, like, five years ago.

And if somebody else had the idea and subsequently threw it out for being too stupid, you might even get negative points for being dumb enough to have that idea to begin with.

A couple of weeks ago I had the idea to rename my blog "Rocket Surgery," thinking I had thought up the phrase all on my own.

Noper nope nope. Here's how far ahead of the learning curve I am: "rocket surgery" has been in use for at least ten years, according to the web site I just found, Double-Tongued Word Wrester Dictionary.

I knew a girl in college who had a knack for coining new phrases, without apparent effort. If you were doing something to get on her nerves, she'd yell at you to "Quit it out!"

In times of stress, I have been known to exclaim "Oh, for cryin' out sake!" I think I must have picked up the phrase from some comic immigrant character in an old cartoon.

If I'm scouting for a new blog title—and the one I have at least has the virtue of being original—maybe something like "Senile Ramblings" would, as they say on the BBC, strike a bit closer to the mark.

Your Call is Important to Us

2005-11-28T13:24:00.000-06:00

No, not the book by Laura Penny. It's a good book, but that's not what, or who, I'm talking about today.

Here's the deal. Paul English is my Hero of the Day—or as they say in the Church of the SubGenius, my Short-Duration Personal Savior (ShorDurPerSav). He's maintaining a list of the different ways to escape from voice mail hell and get yourself connected to an actual living breathing space-occupying resource-consuming real human.

Just look for the company in question on the list.

Even if you're like me and prefer to avoid speaking to real people when possible, this is handy stuff to know. My suspicion is that, by the time most reasonable people have decided to risk a phone call to some company's "customer support" line, the situation has escalated way past the point where an automated system would be capable of offering any constructive guidance. Automated systems being what they are, i.e. stupid.

In at least a couple of cases, AT&T Wireless and Compaq, the list claims "no easy escape" from voice mail.

Get out of the kitchen

2005-11-03T11:51:00.000-06:00

While I don't place all that much faith in my own half-baked political opinions—the whole Washington dog-and-pony show resists rational analysis—it's gratifying when someone comes along and finishes baking my opinions for me.

John Scalzi puts matters in terms even I can understand:

I can't imagine that the Bush approval rating could possibly get any lower than it is at the moment, but then again, that's what I thought when it hit 39% a few weeks ago. Considering that there's probably 33% of Americans who would rather chew on jagged glass than to show disloyalty to a sitting Republican president, a 35% approval rating basically means that no one outside the ranks of the ideologically paralyzed right-wing approves of our president. No one. The rating couldn't possibly go lower. Could it?

What do I think about the Bush's approval rating? Well, I think it's exactly what he deserves. He's a terrible president with an incompetent administration, and it's gratifying to see the large majority of the American people coming around to this fact. Would that they would have come around to this conclusion a year ago, when the vote was on.

[...]

Noting that this is a mess of his own making is cold comfort indeed. Bush may have made this bed, but we all have to lie in it.

Yeah, I know how he feels. In that long, dark tea-time of the soul between November 2000 and January 2001, I still harbored hopes that Bush would not turn out to be as useless as he has proven to be. The most surprising thing is that he still holds on to his die-hard fans even though he's a failure by his own conservative Republican standards.

I keep wondering why we don't hear more phrases like "scandal-plagued Bush administration" and "failed Bush policies" in common use. Although it looks like that may be starting to change.

How dumb do you want to feel today?

2005-10-26T14:20:00.000-05:00

Jerry Seinfeld used to say that he hated magicians because their whole act was based on making you feel stupid: "Here it is. Now it's gone. You're an idiot." I sometimes think that recreational puzzles were invented for the same reason.

If you're not any good at something like chess, for instance, you can blame it on the complexity of the game. For those of us still trying to preserve a few remaining shreds of self-esteem, though, somebody invented Sudoku, a puzzle with rules so ridiculously simple you can probably teach them to a reasonable sensible hamster. I will let you follow the link if you're interested in learning about sudoku. That is not my point today.

My point is I'm a cheapskate.

You can go into any store that sells magazines and buy a book of ordinary pencil puzzles for just a few dollars. You can find sudoku books, too, but they seem to all cost nine or ten bucks or more. The portion of my brain that's controlled by the rogue spirit of Milburn Drysdale says that's too much money.

Comes to the rescue Jim Bumgardner, who whips up these little puzzles for fun and gives them away on his web page for free. He also displays some of the printed books available.

Or if you'd like to try generating sudokus yourself you can use Simple Sudoku to do it. It's better than good, it's good AND free.

Tales of the Easily Amused

2005-10-20T20:18:00.000-05:00

This is the kind of twisted little puppy I am.

Let's say I have a package of cookies. About twenty or so. If I'm taking them in my lunch that week, I will put exactly four cookies in the bag every day. So it comes out even, you know. This is important to me. If I get to Friday and there are only three cookies left, I feel let down.

But! If I pack my lunch on Friday and I have five cookies left, well ...

I get a secret thrill out of it.

I'm sure there is a term for that, and I'm equally sure it isn't a flattering term. Either way, when I have thoughts like this, I feel shame, and that can't be good either.

Religion Update

2005-10-02T09:42:00.000-05:00

Those of us still searching for a religion we can call our own are frequently baffled by the wide variety of beliefs available in the spiritual marketplace.

I dabbled in The Church of the Subgenius for a while until my dedication was found lacking. Plus, there was no way I could keep up with their requirements for liquor consumption and partying.

Mainstream Protestantism wasn't too horrible until it became a wholly owned subsidiary of the Republican Party.

Buddhism seems rock-solid from a philosophical perspective, but it does require you to be nice, pretty much on a daily basis, to people and things that you can never hope to get anything back from, and man oh man, is that HARD.

Now I think I've found a religion I can really get behind: the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, also known as Pastafarianism. Finally, a religion that offers comfort and a vague sense of menace in roughly equal measures.

Check out the FSM website for evangelizing materials. Contact your school boards and your politicians. This thing could really save us all, unless it doesn't.

Airhead Apparent

2005-09-05T21:57:00.000-05:00

Smarter-than-me guy Mark Evanier at news from me has noticed that the federal response to the hurricane damage has been somewhat lacking:

Tim Russert, who ordinarily is about as tough on the Bush administration as I am on members of my immediate family, is among the newsfolks who seem angered by how little has been done for the injured and displaced in the Gulf Coast. Today on Meet the Press, he interrogated the Homeland Security Chief, Michael Chertoff, who's out there spinning his little heart out, saying things like, "There will be time later to assess blame." That's what I always say when I'm worried about being blamed, too.

Look, Preznit Bush is not some blameless, holy creature. Can we at least agree that he and his henchmen have bobbled the ball in this case? It would not be a blasphemy to make such a suggestion, and I'm speaking as someone who is all in favor of blasphemy when the situation warrants.

When the blindered pro-Bush people are ready to admit that he is capable of making mistakes, if not that he is in fact quite accomplished at making them, only then will I be willing to entertain the possibility that Bush just maybe may not be the thoughtless, arrogant political dilettante he gives every indication of being. Every day I'm willing to look at hard evidence that he is not the person his bad reputation makes him out to be, and every day I am disappointed.

Inspired or Undead?

2005-08-21T19:04:00.000-05:00

Okay, which of the following would you find more spiritually uplifting: A Jesus action figure with soothing brown eyes and miracle-weilding hands that glow in the dark with divine power? Or the same action figure with bad-snapshot red eyes and weird green translucent hands like a character out of The Exorcist Meets the Ghostbusters? Archie McPhee wants to know, preferably before the end of the month if you want to buy the Production Error Jesus.

Follow the Uranium - New York Times

2005-07-17T09:27:00.000-05:00

Frank Rich says: "This case is about Iraq, not Niger. The real victims are the American people, not the Wilsons. The real culprit - the big enchilada, to borrow a 1973 John Ehrlichman phrase from the Nixon tapes - is not Mr. Rove but the gang that sent American sons and daughters to war on trumped-up grounds and in so doing diverted finite resources, human and otherwise, from fighting the terrorists who attacked us on 9/11."

This is where it gets fun.