Entries Tagged 'thoughts' ↓

…or something. There has been some discussion in the tech-aware world about a major step in the process of de-Americanizing the internet: non-Latin characters have now been approved for (eventual) use in domain names. This is a much bigger deal than it seems on the surface, btw, and it seems like one of those areas where things could go either very wrong or very right. Like the Marshall Plan after WWII. In fact, some guy named David Coursey at PC World has some comments that echo some of the sentiments from that time period:

is there any doubt that if another country had “invented” the Internet–say the Russians–that we’d all have had to learn to type Cyrillic characters by now? Moreover, do you think they or the Chinese or Japanese would have changed the Internet just to suit English-speakers. [pic]

Indeed, had the Internet been developed around a non-Latin character set, would it even exist today? Has the success of the Internet not been linked to the role of English as the global language of business and popular culture?

Ignoring the chicken-egg problem Coursey seems to miss, it is, to my mind, fairly clear that the “invention” and development of the internet were initially driven by the U.S., as much as anyone ever invents anything (strongly tied to the U.S. military, actually). Believe me, I feel the same urge to hold onto something I consider “ours” as the next guy. It’s a rabid, jealous, strangely fearful feeling, actually. But I’m not sure those feelings should always be listened to.

Mr. Coursey has a lot of “what if” questions in his little rant on pcworld. Let’s ask some more: what if the U.S. had said “Screw Germany, screw Japan; they started the war; let them fix their destroyed economies and infrastructures themselves”? Would the world now be a better place to live in? What if, somehow, inventors of automobiles, telephones, vaccines, bicycles, steel-reinforced concrete, etc. had been able to keep total control of their creations in perpetuity? And what do we now do about situations where pharmaceutical companies lobby to retain control (and forced high prices) of life-saving drugs they have developed for ever-increasing lengths of time? While we’re at it, we can wonder whether human genes should be patented.

This area can easily become a classic Prisoners’ Dilemma situation. Do we do what’s best for us and ours, at the expense of everyone else — and, in the long run, even ourselves — or do we sacrifice something in order for everyone to benefit? It’s not clear that this internet thing fully fits that definition, but it’s certainly conceivable.

I don’t deny that there is a huge potential for unintended consequences if the internet is “given away,” especially if the process is done badly. However, I also feel that part of what has made the U.S. a great nation (yes, it is still great) has been our habit of sharing the benefits of our labor. Often, international situations like this are not a zero-sum game; it is actually possible for everyone to win sometimes. I still have a basically optimistic belief that the internet, as a means of providing unfettered communication, can be a force for good: education, empowerment, economic regulation, political transparency, etc. It might turn out that giving it away is the right thing.

Mr. Coursey apparently feels at least a little similar, ending his post by saying this is a bad day for the English Language, but “…a good day for the billions of people who do not speak my mother tongue. They have rights, too, even if I am not always happy about what that means.”

Rukhsana Kauser is my new hero(ine). When the leader of a roaming band of terrorists and some of his thugs barged into her home and started beating her parents, she grabbed a hatchet, surprised the main guy, killed him with his own AK-47,  wounded another thug (with the help of her older brother), and sent the rest fleeing. She killed one of the most wanted men in Kashmir, a leader of one of the most dangerous terrorist organizations in the world.

I’ve found this story on the BBC and other international news sites. Since no Americans were killed or heroized, I can’t seem to find it in any American news feeds. However, it is on certain American blogs: gun rights blogs. After the story is summarized or linked, there are comments like “Hell yeah!” or “Tell THAT to the gun control wonks!”

To overused a phrase of the day… wait, what?

How does Ms. Kauser’s story support the cause of personal gun ownership rights in the U.S.? Ms. Kauser did not stop the terrorists with her concealed-carry Smith & Wesson. She did not stop them with her father’s venerated Remington twelve-gauge. The only gun owners were terrorist criminals. The only guns in this story were probably used in numerous horrific crimes before one or two of them were turned on their original owners. I’m a supporter of a “personal ownership” interpretation of the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, but apparently this has not scrambled my grasp of logic to the point where this would make any sense to me.

I suppose maybe the American gun people are arguing that she should have owned a gun, and I could see that point, but then the story ceases being a very good demonstration of either the benefits of gun ownership or the dangers of a lack of such. She defeated the militants without owning a gun, which is not how these pro-gun stories usually turn out. Still, this is perhaps the only argument I could see as supporting U.S. gun ownership. I mean, if we had roaming gangs of terrorists with AK-47s who regularly took over suburban homes by force.

I have a nagging feeling that’s not the real reason this story keeps appearing on gun ownership blogs, though. I wonder if it isn’t just because there’s a potential victim, and then there is gun-related violence done to a Bad Person. Maybe the bloggers and commenters don’t look any farther than that. If this is the case, it says some small little volumes about the mentality of some of our gun-ownership advocates.

Rukhsana Kauser is not a good choice as poster girl for gun ownership advocates. Feminists, on the other hand…

I am becoming ever more cynical. Recently, it seems to me that ingroup/outgroup distinctions, along with ingroup loyalty and outgroup derogation, are stronger for most people than the things those people say they believe. Examples (callously lumping people together and ignoring exceptions for my own evil rhetorical purposes):

If the Democrats really believed their “save the planet” schtick, Democrat public servants would have drastically lower personal resource consumption than the average US citizen.

If Conservatives truly cared about reining in bloated programs and reducing the power of the Federal government, they would have been leading the charge against our military buildup since WWII in general, and against our two most recent wars, more specifically. Or at the very least they would have felt kinda conflicted.

If Conservatives were really opposed to giving social and political power to wealthy entertainers, to those with family, interpersonal, or criminal issues, or to those with and substance abuse problems, people like Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, and Bill O’Reilly would be unknown.

Most obviously, if certain among the Hollywood elite truly cared about justice (social or any other kind), there would be absolutely nobody defending Roman Polanski.

I think these (and many other) disparate ideologies/actions are examples of people supporting their ingroup and slamming the outgroup, rather than doing what their belief system tells them is right. What we do and what we say — maybe even what we think –are deeply at odds. The immediate rewards and punishments we get from our peers continually overwhelm the future rewards we may get from holding fast to the things we believe are true. We could (and do) argue about what we should think; but I sometimes despair of that mattering, because what we think seems to have so little effect on what we actually do.

In an effort to illustrate my conflicted feelings about Kim Stanley Robinson’s extremely preachy style of Sci Fi writing, I present a hypothetical conversation between him and his research assistant:

KSR: I’m working on a novel about the rational obviousness of science, its role in all of human progress, and the stupidity of Judeo-Christian belief systems.
ASSISTANT: Yes, sir.
KSR: I’ll need you to get me some texts to study: physics, astronomy, planetology, geology, climatology, chemistry, quantum theory, biology, systems theory, and so forth.
ASSISTANT: Yes, sir. What about the social sciences?
KSR: Social scientists are just people who didn’t have the SAT scores to get into the hard sciences. Their so-called “theories” are unscientific mumbo-jumbo with no demonstrable usefulness or effectiveness. Human behavior is so complex it can’t even be studied scientifically.
ASSISTANT: Actually, sir, there are quite a few well-validated predictive models of various aspects of human behavior, and empirical research from the social sciences has been responsible for huge improvements in the human condition. Besides, human behavior is certainly no more complex than, say, an ecosystem or a planetary climate. Why, if we simply look through the list of Nobel Prize winners from the last half-century—
KSR: I said it’s mumbo-jumbo and too complex to study.
ASSISTANT: Yes, sir.
KSR: And Buddhism is awesome.

So now there’s some dirt on ACORN, and what dirt it is! It’s like an episode of Law & Order; the kind where you shake your head at the TV and say, “This wouldn’t happen in real life.” ACORN leaders (and Nancy Pelosi, FWIW) claim the nastiness was only a few people in low positions, and that the organization itself would never condone such slimy tactics. Exactly like the response of the military and Presidency in the Abu Ghraib prison abuse debacle, actually.

The ever-vigilant GOP has demanded (and the Democrats are on the bandwagon almost as fast) that ACORN be punished. One of our great American traditions is to punish organizations by taking away their federal moneys. And I think that works. For organizations, money is like food and water; removing it gets them where it hurts. Awesomely, however, some overzealous Republicans, who apparently didn’t realize they were not supposed to upset the status quo, drafted a bill that would withhold funds from ALL federally-funded organizations with fraud complaints against them.

As anyone who pays attention might have predicted, this broad criterion turned up a nearly comprehensive list of military industrial contractors (i.e., Haliburton, Lockheed-Martin, Northrup-Grumman, and so on). Some of them have literally dozens of fraud charges against them There’s an unofficial list here, created at the behest of a freshman Congressman from Florida named Grayson.

Naturally, I don’t believe any of those massive, multibillion-dollar corporations will have any of their money cut, even if their fraud amounts to thousands of times more than ACORN’s. The Republicans will howl, and the Democrats will get all conciliatory, and everyone will work out a deal whereby the corrupt community organizers are cut off from the Federal teat, while the corrupt weapons manufacturers will get a maternal nip on the nose and then be ushered back to the privileged sucking spots. The military-industrial complex is implicated in the careers of quite a number of our congresspersons on both sides of the aisle, and (in a not-unrelated note) we Americans, by and large, are more tolerant of organizations that build bombers than of those that build communities, all frauds being equal.

Still, even if the consequences of this little drama are painfully predictable, stupid human tricks like this give me unwholesome giggles of political amusement. It’s nothing more sophisticated, really, than the thrill of watching a 5-year-old get pwned on the playground when he realizes that for every finger pointing at the other kid, three more are pointing back in his own face.

People are sometimes stupid about communism. Maybe the word serves as such a useful blunt instrument of verbal assault (with a nail in it) that they forget communism has a reality outside their witty repartée, and is therefore subject to logical thought. I am not a fan of communism, and I think it is/was a Very Bad Idea, but can we get this one thing straight, please? Pay close attention:

Sharing is not bad.

No, seriously. Communism had lots of problems: the belief that totalitarianism would eventually lead to its polar opposite, the huge means-ends problems, the bizarre insistence that giving a small number of people a huge amount of unrestricted power would lead them to voluntarily go back to farming potatoes, the massive imperialist expansion…

But the sharing was the good part. Sure, forced sharing is a different issue; I understand that; but even there, it’s the forcing, not the sharing, that makes it problematic. Remember kindergarten? Sharing GOOD. Selfishness BAD. The fact that sharing was a key principle cited by a crashed-and-burned misguided utopian movement doesn’t make sharing itself bad.

This “Obama is going to indoctrinate my kids” flap has provided marvelous political theater, especially given that it recapitulates the issues surrounding a similar speech given by GHW Bush in 1991. I think there are some real issues raised, by it, though not of the catastrophic caliber suggested by the Rightest of the Right. I am still researching the issue of the “altered” portion of Obama’s speech (quotes used because I still haven’t found credible evidence that he changed it significantly after the furor started; but I’m still looking).

On some of the conservative blogs and news sites I visited in trying to figure out this controversy and its highly tenuous connections with Oprah’s “Pledge” video, I found some reasonable comments. However, I also found comments that strayed from Reasonable, ran through Questionable’s back yard, and hopped the fence right into Idiotic. Since those are much more fun than intelligent comments, here are some of them (from this blog post, about the “pledge” video):

“… Did you see the two Cubans in the Video-Cameron and Eva? Well screw them! I pledge to keep using plastic at the grocery story and driving an SUV!”

“I pledge to add a few more minutes to my really HOT showers.

“I’m with you. Today I tossed a plastic bottle in my trash in honor of the disgust I felt for this hair raising filth.”

“I pledge to throw perfectly good paper right into the trash.”

“I pledge to walk past the recycling bin at the gym and put my water bottle into the trashcan while horrified people look at me. And I will smile.”

Wow! How awesome is that!? “I disagree with the President, so I’m going to do something generally antisocial, like make my country a little big uglier, a little bit trashier, and a little bit less energy efficient.”  Why stop there? Express your displeasure with others’ ideas through this interesting tactic in other domains, too!

“Did you see the President trying to prop up the American auto industry? Well screw them! I pledge to never buy another American car or automotive accessory!”

“The President thinks he can indoctrinate my kids to do better in school, does he? Then I pledge to have a heart-to-heard talk with each of my kids, on the topic of how stupid school is, and how awesome it is to drop out. Also, I think I’ll keep them home one day a week, playing video games.”

“Obama is still fighting terrorists? Well, I pledge to stop my monthly donations to the United Way and instead give my hard-earned charitable cash to whatever shell organization will launder it and give it to Al Qaeda, while horrified people in the human resources office look at me. And I will smile.”

All joking aside, the most painful comment on that site was the following, perhaps so poignant because I believe the commenter really could not imagine any other point of view:

EXCUSE ME! For 8 years, and still today, our troops (under POTUS GWB) FREED over 50 MILLION people in two wars. Not only that, but we lost many of those troops being patient for those freed people to understand and trust their newfound liberty.

Here’s the situation: The President is going to give an address to the nation’s schoolchildren. Initial reports say he will emphasize the importance of taking their education seriously, staying in school, etc. He’s a controversial President. There is an outcry from the other side of the political continuum. There are fears he will push his political platform through the nation’s children. It sounds like Nazism, or Communism, or some kind of scary -ism.

This happened in 1991. The President was George H.W. Bush. His Department of Education encouraged teachers to broadcast the speech and use it as a teaching opportunity. Bush encouraged students to write him letters, with suggestions on how he could better achieve his goals. The Democrats were upset. The party leader called Bush’s address a “paid political advertisement.” Bush’s supporters said that was ridiculous.

So now we come to the current hullaballoo, suspiciously similar to the above, except the players have all flipped sides. Now the Conservatives are accusing the President of indoctrinating the kids. Some school districts won’t broadcast the speech. Many parents will keep their kids home, rather than risk them hearing it.

Somehow (I am seriously not sure how), this has become confused with the paranoia about “pledging allegiance to Obama.” Here’s my synopsis of both issues, after some internetz researchz: Continue reading →

I was recently referred to a blog post so I could understand better why some parents are concerned about allowing their children to hear the upcoming education speech. I also read about a dozen others, trying to get a handle on all the facts (as much as one can do so via the interwebs).

A long time ago, in a galaxy called High School, a teacher taught me that people who use underhanded rhetorical techniques quite likely got nothin’ else. Of course, it’s possible to use nasty debate tricks and have a good point, but I think the presence of the former does reduce the probability of the latter, overall. There are definitely liberal outlets (*cough*HuffPo*cough*) that use these ridiculous tactics on a regular basis, but I think I find them even more from the Right. Perhaps I should do a structured study to test whether this is just a perception issue.

Anyway, here’s most of the dumb tricks from that blog post.

Why Parents Don’t Trust Educator-In-Chief
By MICHELLE MALKIN | Posted Thursday, September 03, 2009 4:30 PM PT

the sneering defenders of Barack Obama – can’t fathom – the cult of Obama – activist language – Obama’s bureaucrats – whitewash – the taint of left-wing radicalism – the Educator-in-Chief and his “comrades.”

The bulk of the post is actually about William Ayers, and is composed of quotations establishing his leftist views. Standard.

All the hip kids these days are debating the whole healthcare crisis thing. And I agree it is a crisis. Yes, we’re living longer than ever before — so one might argue that we have no crisis, because we should just be happy with the way things are — but I would argue that the crisis is not really physical; it’s moral.

As usual in the American political world, the two sides are throwing accusations at each other, packed with unspoken and inflammatory assumptions. Like-a so:

GUY 1: Opposing the President’s healthcare reform clearly indicates that you think it’s okay for people to die just because they’re poor and because the pharmaceutical companies are greedy.
GUY 2: Supporting the President’s healthcare reform clearly indicates that you think the Federal government should take away taxpayers’ freedom to keep their own property and make their own decisions.
GUY 1: You obviously believe that only spoiled rich people have the right to a healthy, pain-free life!
GUY 2: Well, you obviously believe that victims and lazy people should be able to demand honest, hard-working people’s money at the point of the IRS’s gun!
GUY 1: You, my friend, are apparently a Fascist.
GUY 2: And you, sir, are a Communist.

The problem as I see it, as in many political issues, lies ultimately in our oversimplification of the issues. Well, some of us. Others don’t do this. But pretty much anyone on TV is leading the oversimplification army over the cliffs of doom every freaking day. Continue reading →

I basically like Flickr, and use it. However, they’re going the way of other large “communities” that are actually just private corporations with a veneer of community, by practicing aggressive in-house censorship. The story of the above photoshopped image of President Obama, the suspicious timing of its being pulled from Flickr (along with derivative works), and the apparently duplicitous explanation Flickr gave for this can’t be discussed conveniently by Flickr users, because Flickr killed all related discussion threads, after pulling the images. This story is happening more frequently online, mirroring similar historical trends: “Hey, everyone! Join our happy open community! But we’ll kick your butt out if you question us or our arbitrary actions.” If Flickr is a community, perhaps it is located in circa 1970 Czechoslovakia.

The rub is that Flickr isn’t a community; it’s a private company, and can do whatever the heck it wants (within some basic guidelines) with the data on its servers. Users don’t really have any rights, a fact that more than one previously-happy customer has discovered the hard way.

I think carrying on our interactions in private online communities amounts to a collective decision to give a little of our freedom to corporations. Once users are invested in such places, the companies have great power to stifle dissent when they shut down discussion. Since few people in the conversation will be able to contact each other outside the site, it becomes difficult or impossible to maintain coherence or momentum once that happens. It’s kind of like a government raiding the secret meeting place of a resistance movement, only the resistance people are all wearing ski masks and don’t know each other’s real names. Once the meeting place is off-limits and the members have been scattered, they will have a hard time finding each other again.

Users can just go elsewhere (and they should), but there are other possibilities, too. Here’s one:

Non-corporate (nonprofit, public, or grassroots) discussion sites, completely separate from the large “communities” but dedicated solely to discussion of issues relevant to them. Maybe these already exist; if so, they need to be heavily advertised (probably by word of mouth), and they need to be as monolithic as the “community” they are set up to discuss. Everyone knows how to get to Flickr, Facebook, and YouTube online; everyone also needs to know exactly which site to visit if you want to discuss Flickr yanking your photos and canceling your account with a flimsy rationale, or Facebook banning you for having too many friends, or YouTube killing your anti-Scientology videos.

In other words, there needs to be a way to keep the discussion going if the “community” tries to kill it: DiscussFlickr.com, or YouTubeThreads.org, or YahooIssues.net. I would personally prefer that we simply gravitate, as consumers, toward sites that are true communities — sites owned by communities of people, rather than by a CEO and some shareholders — but that’s probably not going to happen, because the true communities would not have as many pretty colors, bells & whistles, or catchy advertisements. We consumers are ridiculously weak in the face of even mild temptation. Therefore, the next best thing might be a “safety net” for each commercial site, a place to keep conversations alive when the private sites shut them down.

Please express your gratitude in the form of checks and cash sent to my usual address.

No, not one of my undergrads; me. I am cleaning the filing system, especially old school and personal documents, and going through an emotional rollercoaster (consisting mostly of the “down” parts as everything I find seems to scream terrible choices and squandered potential). Among my old college materials, I found some blue books from tests I took during my senior year at BYU, 1993 (eek!). Some of them are hugely reassuring. Not all the answers were great, and I didn’t get A’s on all the tests, but it’s nice to be reminded that (1) I’m not an idiot, and (2) it’s OK to expect my own students to learn how to think. I was almost 20 years dumber back then, and my answers reflect that, but I’m proud of my historical self anyway, given his limitations.

The essay transcribed below came from an exam in a capstone class that we non-honors students took (oh, how I wish I’d just sucked it up and done honors…) instead of writing a thesis. The prof (Harold Miller) was not exactly warm and fuzzy, but he was brilliant, and committed to teaching effectively. He had a strong sense that students must be taught critical thinking and encouraged to question assumptions. He might have fit in at Berkeley or Harvard, which explains the rumor that he had resigned from BYU in protest before I met him. My essay answer is after the cut. Laugh all you want, but it’s about as good as my essay tests ever got. Continue reading →

Bullfrog on Biggar Lake, Algonquin Park

…aaaaand to spoil the effect, a little rant from one character in the book I’m listening to in my current workouts:

“Let’s see… you work every day of the year except for three lousy weeks. You make about a hundred thousand dollars. Your boss takes two-thirds and gives you one-third, and you give a third of that to the government. The government uses what it gets to build all the roads and schools and police and pensions, and your boss takes his share and buys a mansion on an island somewhere. So, naturally, you complain about your bloated, inefficient Big Brother of a government, and you always vote for the pro-owner party.” From Kim Stanley Robinson’s “Forty Signs of Rain”

Of course the character who says this is ignoring some things (like the fact that the government can, indeed, be bloated and inefficient, and not all executives can afford mansions); but the point it makes is acute: we complain more about the small percentage of our paychecks we give to the government — for which we receive some benefit — than we do of the much larger percentage that goes into corporate profit, for which we arguably receive little (or certainly much less) benefit. We feel the visible loss in our monthly paycheck more than the much larger one that happens before the check is even cut.

I use Blackboard (formerly WebCT) for managing my courses, especially the online ones. I’m getting really sick of ongoing issues with it, though. It’s the only choice we have for a course management system at UTPA, currently. Here we see how Bb (like many other kinds of products) maintains its little local monopolies: if I switch, then students taking my class will have to learn a system that’s different from every other class they take, and I’ll have to go through the obnoxious process of importing or rebuilding all my content.  But I’m tellin’ ya, it’s gettin’ on my noives. I might just do it anyway, and here’s why. Some of the following issues have been going on for years (I’ve been using WebCT or Bb since about 2001): Continue reading →

Last year (maybe at Christmas?) Alex gave me Ann Patchett’s novel Run. Inspired by Alex’s example, I shall blogify it. And my love for Patchett’s fiction, in general. Short version? It’s awesome.

Continue reading →

Review of Sue Grafton’s T is for Trespass (SPOILERS AHEAD)

Alternate Titles: A very special Kinsey Millhone Mystery. T is for Tedious. Sue Grafton Discovers the Collective Values and Book-buying Power of the AARP. Ow My Ears and Brain Judy Kaye Please Watch a Detective Movie and Take Notes Before Reading Your Next Audiobook.

Final Grade: C- or maybe a D+. Past Alphabet Mysteries, though inconsistent in quality, were all entertaining, and with just enough offbeat quirks to set them apart from the crowded field of mystery fiction. They were slightly goofy, occasionally unpredictable film-noir detective novels, in which the femme fatale just happens also to be the hard-boiled detective. With this latest installment, however, Grafton has written a plot that could easily be discussed for 30 minutes on The View. That’s right; it’s one long, drawn-out, carefully politically balanced domestic dispute.

Continue reading →

Dear Ms. Grafton,

I am having… let’s call them “issues”… with your most recent novel, T is for Trespass. For a while, I’ve been listening to your books in audio form. True, I have to suffer through hours upon hours of Judy Kaye’s near-butchering of your work, what with her penchant for breathless melodrama at even the most mundane moments, but I can still see the quality through her vocal rollercoaster. As I lift weights and trudge on the elliptical machine in the morning, I see Kinsey nosing her quirky, semi-antisocial, incorrigibly curious way toward the resolution of yet another mystery.

We all know you’re not Jane Austen or even Connie Willis, but you’re good at what you do. And that is to write solid, entertaining hard-boiled (despite Ms. Kaye’s antics to the contrary) mystery novels about a protagonist who is described by her actions instead of her narrator; whose psychology is revealed more by accident than by introspection. The mysteries are entertaining, and the character is compelling. The rest ranges between excellent and palatable. Overall, good books.

This brings me to my point, which is: WHAT. First of all, I admit that S is for Silence worked well enough, despite your disturbing experimentation with a parallel historical narrative that had nothing to do with Kinsey. And what didn’t work wasn’t terrible. No hard feelings, for Kinsey’s sake. But with this most recent book, what is going on? Alternating chapters probing the psychological depths of a psychopathic nemesis? If that weren’t enough, NO MYSTERY? I mean there is one, more or less, eventually, but it really didn’t show up until CHAPTER TWENTY. Yes, over a week of workouts listening to Kinsey go about her winsome life, chatting up her lovable landlord, serving warrants on deadbeats, witnessing her friends’ uncomfortable relationship disputes, eating inedible Hungarian food at the adorable local pub — basically doing nothing. In your other books, this sort of detail provides a wonderful context, character glimpses, contrast to the action, etc. and I understand that you’re building suspense, and probably some other stuff, but holy freaking cow. Twenty chapters before the mystery rears its deliciously ugly head is too much. And even then, we’re headed for an unintentional mystery, in which Kinsey doesn’t know there is one for quite a while. This is dull. Why? Because following Kinsey following her nose is the best part of every book. I’m going on faith here, because of your last books. Don’t let me down.

I’ll finish this one, but when U is for … hits the shelves, I’ll be reading the reviews carefully before I invest.

Maybe I’m really just cranky because a third of the chapters are stolen by someone who isn’t Kinsey and is nowhere near as interesting. But isn’t that enough? I submit that it is.

Dear My Butt,

I know we don’t often speak personally like this. Ours is a relationship between gentlemen: we coexist, we do our jobs, and we rarely talk. However, I must tell you how much I appreciate what you do for me. Day after day, there you are: protecting my tender bits and raw bones from hours and hours of being crushed by my upper-body weight. Sofas, hard floors, dirty ground, grass, concrete, my bicycle saddle, and never forget the office chair. Ah, the office chair. If it weren’t for you, Mr. Butt, I would have the synthetic fabric pattern of this chair permanently impressed into my colon. But there you are.

We are men of inaction; lies do not become us. You and I both know you are more corpulent than you have been in the past. I take full responsibility for this. Instead of climbing glaciers and swimming ocean swells, I have been overusing you, in this chair and others, for decades. And I have eaten — oh, how I have eaten! Despite all this, you valiantly work nearly every day to expel as much of my gluttony as you can. But Mr. Stomach and the Intestine Brothers do their jobs too well, and my fat layer grows. And still, under even these circumstances, you manage to grow only in proportion to the rest of me, always perfectly sized to cushion my increasing bulk.

I know you get sore from being sat on. I know you occasionally suffer other maladies brought on by my occasional unwise eating choices. I’m truly sorry for this. Please accept my sincere apologies, and I ask you to remember what we’ve gone through together, especially the two years in Mexico. You remember the two or three weeks of salmonella/typhoid/whatever? Do you remember the horrible “restroom” we spent so many of those days in? The outhouse on the hillside, with crumbling walls and no roof? I certainly do, and you were there with me through all of it. You’re a trooper.

Thank you for doing what you do,

Me.

Hooray! I have phone and internet again! And it only took a FRIGGIN’ WEEK! As I had begun to suspect, the cable modem was fried. Interestingly, so was my little Belkin 802.11g router, I think. Hm. Adding to the mystery, when I boot into Ubuntu (the machine the modem is physically hooked to dual boots), the clock now says something like, “January 8, 12:42 pm” or such. Counting backward, January 1 at 12:01 a.m. would have been sometime last Thursday morning, which is when I lost service. So, power surge killed modem and router in one blow? But they’re both plugged into surge protectors, and the protectors did not blow a fuse or trip off.

Anyhoo, $70 later I have a new router that’s way faster than any of my receiving equipment can possibly take advantage of. But it works, and here I am. Of note, this would have been fixed faster if the first 3 days of phone calls hadn’t gotten me repeated (and vague) reports of an outage in my area. I’m not sure there ever was an outage. If so, it was never really acknowledged or explained. On Monday, the CSR finally said, “there’s no outage; your equipment just doesn’t seem to be working.” So that’s frustrating. Was there an outage? Grrr.

In honor of feeling all internetty, here are some joyful Star Wars parody doohickeys just for Alex. Warning: one is Robot Chicken, and though it’s not the MOST offensive one ever, it has some, um, content. A little bit.

1. Comic based on a recent forum moderator’s comment, “there’s no homosexuality in Star Wars.” ORLY?

2. Teh Robot Chicken – Star Wars Episode II.

Finally, a comment on a news story I saw just now: The NYT calls Obama’s recent deal with Chrysler (in which the car maker declares bankruptcy in return for federal moolah and the ability to perhaps save itself in an alliance with Fiat) “…yet another extraordinary intervention into private industry by the federal government.”

Okay, I’m not going to argue the general fact that our President has pursued a very pushy — perhaps unprecedented — agenda of government interventionism in this economic crisis. But singling out this case as “extraordinary intervention into private industry?” How does this even possibly compare to the bazillions of taxpayer dollars flung willy-nilly at the banks and insurance companies over the past months? Here, Obama is intervening to make them declare bankruptcy. And isn’t that what they were going to do anyway, if they hadn’t gotten any government money?

Sometimes the media misses the boat. Me, I want to hear more about the extraordinary interventions into my friggin’ pocketbook, driven by massively over-lobbied financial institutions paying off congresspeople. Since that little ongoing debacle has cost this nation crazystupidtimes more money than the car manufacturer deals ever will, I want to see it front and center, with the critical tones the media seems to have reserved for the car industry.

And now that I’m all riled up, time for work.