Entries from April 2009 ↓

Grrr. Arrgh. I signed back up with Time-Warner Cable for internet and VOIP phone this past year becauase AT&T (literally the only other game in town for me) was so horrendously bad with the customer service, and charged the same price for a lower internet speed. But TWC has its own problems, as evidenced by the past four days:

Thursday – No internet, no phone. Tried all the tricks I know, with the modem resetting and the hey hey hey. Called TWC. Was told there was an outage in my area, but no word on what it was or when it would be fixed.

Friday – Still no service. Called again. Same answer.

Saturday – Still no service. Called again. Same answer.

Sunday – Still no service, but able to at least leech some WiFi from  a neighbor (thank you, unwitting benefactor of internets!). Did the online chat with a CSR at TWC’s homepage for the Rio Grande Valley. He had me reset the modem, etc. I did so, as I’ve done a dozen times since Thursday. No dice. He tells me he can’t do anything else, and I have to call the customer “service” number (my sarcastic quotes just slipped right in there. Huh). Not having any phone service, this is not feasible.

Monday (now) – Still no service. On the phone with CSR again. This guy tells me there is NO service outage, and my equipment must be faulty, because they’re getting no response from my modem. Soonest appointment for a technician: Thursday afternoon.

I have not heard my wife’s voice in a week. All work and no Alex makes Darrin something something.

border wall under construction - Hidalgo, TX

Flickr has a weakness: it allows photographers to title their own photos. This is often a bad thing. Let me demonstrate:

Exhibit 1: a lovely photo. Simply great. It’s got a wonderful balance of color, some excellent use of depth of field, and really nice composition. Title: “Enchantment.” Now I’m forced to experience intrusive images from bad fantasy novels when I see the picture. Not even good fantasy; bad fantasy.

Here’s another one. Not as stunning as the first, but still, interesting point of view, nice visual lines, etc. And then a title that wrenches my mind toward bad 1990s Lifetime Network movies: “Follow Your Own Path.” Plus, in the description the artist says s/he “literally kissed the sun” in that spot. No, you did not. Back to my original point, the title is not good.

This one I really like, too. Great plant shot. While you’re enjoying the juicy green, look at the title. LOOK AT IT! Now wash your eyes out at the hazmat station for a minimum of five minutes. Follow workplace standards for contamination with caustic substances.

It goes on and on. Titles like “Freedom,” “Faerie-House,” “True Enigma” (these are invariably self-portraits), “Indescribably Luscious,” “Ultimate Escape,” etc. etc. etc. (got tired of sifting through the bad titles). And I’m not even talking about the pictures people take of their pets and children. No, these are good pictures, art-wise (IMHO), that have horrendous titles. I breathe sighs of relief when I see titles like “Jan 27, 2008″ or “IMG_2452″ or the ever-appropriate “untitled.”

People should maybe think of hiring someone else to do their titles. Also, Flickr should let me browse title-optional. Yes, I crave no-title browsing. Because this hurts my brain.

Watching Bill O’Reilly (why do I do this to myself? I do not know) “interview” two alleged experts on interrogation has been a frustrating, fascinating few minutes. He’s asking, of course, about torture, waterboarding, etc. One is an eggheaded intellectual, while the other is more of a pragmatic policy man. The intellectual was clearly chosen because he was predicted to oppose the use of torture in interrogations, while the other guy was supposed to support it. But neither of them would unconditionally sign on to the idea of using torture to get intelligence about terror. Bill went around and around, making his question more and more general and gotcha-esque, trying to extract some commitment from these two (or at least one of them) that waterboarding et al. would be the best national security choice in some undefined scary situation. He gives up in exasperation when neither of them will take his bait (probably guaranteeing an out-of-context sound byte later on).

Once again, and more forcefully, I’m struck with the sense that party politics in America is a game of cliques. The in-groups come first, with the dogma, policies, and even values and beliefs, coming afterward. The entertainers (masquerading as newspeople) like O’Reilly, Limbaugh, Maddow, and Olbermann understand this, and feed their audiences a steady diet of self-confirming sugar water. But it’s the clique first. The ideals serve the cliques.

How else to explain the supposedly “Christian” right’s insistence on supporting any war waged by a fellow conservative? Or demanding that concealed handguns be allowed on Texas university campuses¹? Or supposedly-fiscally-responsible party members calling for increasing expansion of prisons, the military, and police forces at taxpayer expense? Or the antagonism to environmentalism in any form not sponsored by hunters and fishermen? How else to account for the “progressive” left’s protection of endangered species, sometimes at land- and business-owners’ expense, while insisting on the right of choice in even late-term, convenience-motivated abortion situations? And what about the mainstream left’s emerging opposition to nontraditional environmentalism and feminism? The illuminating factor is group loyalty and identity.

The most telling points are the flip-flops whenever the regimes change in Washington. For eight years, conservatives lambasted anyone protesting any of Bush/Cheney’s policies as antipatriotic, while the liberals crowed about the patriotism of dissent. Now that Obama’s in charge, we have John Stewart et al. ridiculing the Tea Party folks² while the right-wingers remind us that our Founding Fathers were protesters. This pattern holds with the expansion of executive power, as well (Obama has decided it’s not so bad, while the Republicans have discovered a taste for restraint). We are true to our school, before all else. And if the ideology fits within that, great. If not, we’ll twist it around until it does. This explains, I think, a huge amount of what goes on in U.S. government.

And now, a picture of some flowers:

1. but notably not in any legislative buildings [↩]
2. you will note my amazing restraint in not calling them Teabaggers [↩]

The photo and my comments are unrelated, today. The comments are about the Swedish movie Let the Right One In. Holy creepy awesome, Batman. I have been sick to death of the stupidity, self-importance, and adolescent inanity of most vampire movies, but now I concur with the comment on the poster: BEST. VAMPIRE MOVIE. EVER. There’s absolutely no reveling in power while pretending to be humanitarian. There’s no “tee hee I know so much more than you mere mortals.” There’s no vicarious power-tripping at all, really. There’s no moralizing with the lips while contrived plot devices make a bloodfest inevitable. By dodging the pitfalls of teenage mentality that infest most vampire movies like vermin, this film acquires the power to be simply a good film.

Why is this movie so awesome? It’s real. The vampires (the two we see) are real, gritty, sometimes-hard-to-watch humans. The painstakingly slow scenes as Eli’s middle-aged partner drags the body of a man he’s killed to satisfy Eli’s hunger, step by grunting step through the snow on a child’s sled. The horrible scenes of bullying and violence as Oskar tries in vain to assert himself with his peers. The painfully tender scenes of the romance (or whatever it is) between Oskar and Eli, two twelve-year-olds (though Eli has “been twelve for a long time”). It was eviscerating to watch at times, but I could not take my eyes away. To call this movie “horror” is to insult the movie and create unrealistic expectations for the genre.

Today: Cool picturey things. First: CORRELATION TOTALLY DOES IMPLY CAUSATION.

This one is extra awesome for being an example of what it illustrates:

And then:

Tectonic plates show up nicely when you plot thousands of earthquake epicenters on a globe:

This little want ad sets new records for the proportion of what’s-wrong-with-our-world that can be fit into a space the size of a postage stamp:

Finally: a video of a guy with a Samurai sword slicing a BB in flight! Half my 12-year-old dreams come true!¹.

1. seriously, it’s pretty freakin’ cool. But then, maybe that’s my 12-year-old self saying that. [↩]

As a kid, patriotism was all around me. You couldn’t have too much of it. Bad things might happen if you were suspected to be deficient in it, but you weren’t supposed to question what it was. Since then, I’ve thought about it frequently, and my ideas have both changed and remained the same. This post isn’t to bash patriotism or patriotic people, though. I believe that the factors that lead to being a good human are often the same as those that lead to patriotism. This post is because my life and development have  followed a path, and led me to places, that will not allow me to hold an uncritical position on this issue. Hello. I have been in college since 1987. I have met people who consider “patriotic” to be a swear word.

My thought process in this area has largely been one of ideological reduction; an unrelenting pruning of ideas acquired sometime in childhood. I’m now much less certain than I was then of what patriotism is (or should be), but I have ideas about what it’s not (or shouldn’t be). So here are my thoughts, so far: Continue reading →

A central tenet of rabid nationalism (erroneously called patriotism by some) is a blind insistence on the superiority of the nation one happens to be born into, over all other nations. In the U.S., this usually involves an assertion of economic and military superiority, along with a vague “better in every way” attitude about other domains. I have always felt extremely fortunate to have been raised in the USA, which had (and still has) serious claims to greatness in several areas. Objectively, there are some pretty awesome things about the USA, nationalistic fervor or no.

Unfortunately, data are starting to roll in suggesting that we may have spent the last many years shooting ourselves in the foot, greatness-wise. Over the last half-century, we have increasingly structured our political and economic systems such that our previous wealth has been redistributed away from the large number of middle- and lower-class citizens, and toward the few wealthy. This is no longer just an angry assertion of the Left; it’s a clear pattern in the data. We have granted greater and greater rights to what is now undeniably a corporate oligarchy, selling them protection from open market competition and government regulation alike. We have granted our executive branch the power to govern in an ever more autocratic manner (Obama might end up being just as bad as Bush in this area), and we have steadfastly resisted real progress  in reducing the corrupting forces of monetary influence in Washington.

The Land of Measurably Less Opportunity
Now the piper is getting paid, in pieces whittled off the American Dream. Social mobility is now lower in the United States than in other Western nations. That is, it is more difficult to succeed here, economically (compared to, say, Western Europe), unless your parents have already succeeded. The rich stay rich, and the poor stay poor. The gap between them is getting larger, and there are fewer people in the middle than there used to be. This is bad. Recent data show that citizens in nations with greater income disparities have poorer mental and physical health (apparently even for the wealthy citizens) and worse education. Continue reading →