Rain City Writer

General Elections, 2011

2011-10-20T10:30:00.000-07:00

I'm greatly amused that the general election in Washington State seems to boil down to Tim Eyman initiatives (which essentially equate to doing whatever he can to screw the entire state of Washington out of as much money as he can and getting it to flow directly to his campaign contributors - most of which simply funnel money to him in the hopes something he throws out to the wall will stick). And I'm also wondering why, of all things, we have to even vote this time around.

But here's the thing - even though I drive a SUV and live across the road from a liquor store, I still like the idea of this election having some merit. I like light rail and the concept of being able to use my Costco card to buy a fifth of Maker's Mark. It's kind of like my concealed carry permit - I don't actually own a gun, but I got the concealed carry permit to expedite the purchase of one if I wanted it. Because frankly the five-day waiting period is for people who test high on the "Don't Give That Idiot a Gun" scale, and if I DIDN'T have the carry permit, I'd have to fill out even more paperwork than I want.

So without further ado, my personal recommendations for voting in Seattle:

State Initiatives

Initiative Measure 1125
Vote HELL NO

Tim Eyman is a horse's ass. Straight up, no chaser. His entire political career has been focused on getting paid initiative petition signers to cheat, lie and game the system to thrust his personal political requirements into the spotlight. This time around, the Eyman initiative's full intention is to kill regional light rail for the Seattle metro area, and funded by Kemper Freeman, someone who spent a lot of time and energy trying like hell to make sure it doesn't happen. Eyman's initiative screws with the entire process, and in said process, manages to totally fuck up the state transportation system infrastructure. Which is pretty much what Eyman wants anyway. Well, that and getting paid to be a political jerk.

Vote no. If Eyman's attached, you can bet it has nothing good for anyone except Eyman's political puppetmasters and funding geniuses.

Initiative Measure 1163
Vote Yes

Elder care is one of the things we need more of, especially because the independence of older people in our state is, to my mind, vitally important. After several conversations with my parents about the requirements of old age, Mom finally looked at me and said, "It's not that I don't want to be a burden. I just don't want to live with you if it's not absolutely neccessary." Ouch. Zing. And yet true.

I voted yes on the initiative in 2008 that required basic training, certification, criminal background checks, etc, etc, etc on home health care workers that assist disabled seniors, but the dough for the program wasn't there. This measure funds those workers and requires the legislature to fork out the dough they promised for the initiative. No excuses.

Seattle Transportation Initiative No 1
VOTE NO

No. Sorry. I don't trust the city of Seattle to actually spend the money from car tabs on what they intend to spend it on. I'm not forking out another $120 for monorails in potentia. Screw that. You want money? Put a proposal together that shows me where that money is going. You want to charge me $60 more for car tabs for light rail, I'll pay for it. I won't pay for it to have a commission begin to discuss the concept of having a committee to work on possible future transportation projects in the city. Put light rail stations down on the map and tell me how you're going to make the buses in the city run on time instead of 30 minutes behind schedule, and I MIGHT pay more for car tabs. As it is, shut up.

Steve Jobs: The Anti-Hero dies.

2011-10-12T12:05:00.000-07:00

In the saga of "The World Has Lost a Genius" of the last two weeks, I feel compelled to point out that in dying, many people gloss over or ignore the flaws in a person's character.

In short, Steve Jobs died.

And Steve Jobs was, to put it nicely, one of the world's biggest assholes.

Sure, he made your phone, and commanded the design team that rebuilt Apple as a premium computer, and had an attitude of "We'll release it when it's perfect". He was a brilliant technological leader. He was a marketing and creative director without comparison in his time, and he was relentless in the pursuit of quality and function (not perfection - anyone who's tried to make Apple products play nice with other products on the market might reserve judgement).

But he also built slave labor factories in China.

He sent his critics rude, slimy emails, haranguing them into the ground, removing their access and ability to see Apple products if he didn't like what they said.

He didn't want to talk to his fans - at his own events. He blew people off who set up meetings years in advance. He routinely flipped people off when they made salient points in news conferences.

When he had a diagnosis of [X] months to live, he flooded transplant waiting lists and bumped people who'd been waiting years for theirs to get to the top of the list. He paid people off.

If he made it to an Apple meeting, he'd derail it, humiliate the presenter, and take center stage as to why it was a waste of his and everyone's time. Employees dreaded it. Conversations were recorded in the Apple cafeteria that referred to Jobs as "The Asshole".

He fired people who made simple mistakes - people whose entire careers had been pursued only to sit at the feet of the Master, to work for Jobs, to take pay cuts and do incredibly long hours just to be able to say "I work for Apple".

He routinely parked in handicapped spaces at Apple in his unplated (that's no license plate) Mercedes Benz - with no handicapped sticker, hanger, etc.

He did what could only be described as wanton, egregious cruelty and manipulation to the man who built Apple as a computer company - Steve Wozinak (and frankly, that guy is my personal geek-cred hero).

And at the end of his life the culture of Steve Jobs began to take a life of its own. For design and creative geeks who would fight to save fifty cents on a can of beans at the grocery store, he was the person who built the machine that said you were an individual. A rebel. To someone who compared the components of his computers, he was the man who knew how to spin the widespread hammerlocks on his company's technology into a badge of honor among his adherents, and took credit for the brilliant design of others' work.

Steve Jobs never designed the iPod. He didn't design the interfaces of the computers. He approved them. He browbeat his people into making perfection and being meticulous about the process. And then he sold their work.

By being the man who sold the work of his minions, he was credited with the wild success of the Apple products.

Steve Jobs was a complete asshole. He was a successful asshole, and so the world loved him, because success so often allows cover ups of the character flaws. But when the world speaks of Steve Jobs, they talk only about his miraculous success. Not that he was worse than most of the Evil People of Microsoft, that his entire fiscal policy revolved around himself, that he never gave away money, or that his entire career and life was built upon the destruction and manipulation of others. Had he been born five or six hundred years previously, he would fit beautifully along the manipulative, effective, cruel Borgia popes and slave-trading mercenaries of the Venetian nobility - not the Leonardo da Vincis, the Galileos, or Shakespeareans.

In essence, Steve Jobs was not a creative genius. He was not an icon of brilliance of design or simplicity. He was a cruel, ruthless, relentlessly perfectionist bastard who had an iron grip on his company and ran it in a culture of fear, reprisal, and retribution. He used people; he institutionalized top-down control over products and he routinely screwed people who wanted to work with him.

It wasn't likely that he'd step down or move on to other things, and so it is only with his death that Steve Jobs can longer run Apple like the Inquisition on crack.

When viewing Jobs as a professional, I cannot mourn his death. I look at his successes and I think that he made some contributions to the world, but he wasn't a genius. He wasn't a Great Man. He was a Great Flaming Asshole, and while he got some stuff done, in ten years' time his legacy shall only be that he got the world to plug in their headsets and listen to overpriced downloadable music.

I realize this isn't a popular take on his life and times, but I also think Steve Jobs knew what he was, what he was doing, and was content with that role in his life. He described the movie The Pirates of Silicon Valley as accurate and praised the actor portraying him. The actor - Noah Wylie - made him out to be a manipulative, scheming, explosively angry man who destroyed people on a whim.

In the end at our deaths we forgive many of the trespasses that we have made upon the world and those whom we have touched. It's possible that Jobs did this at his end, and for those he loved and who loved him, that may be enough. But to blind ourselves to the measure of the man who dies and to hide away the darkness of his character is to do ourselves and the person who dies a disservice.

To say this to his family and friends, and those still mourning his loss would be yet another act of an asshole, and so I can only say that I would never wish to injure his loved ones at a time of grief. I don't know if he played basketball with his kids or made ebleskivers every Sunday morning, or tucked them into bed at night, or as he lay dying wrote each of them a book about his life with them, or told them how much he loved them. That's their private grief, and nobody can share that with them.

But those who aren't grieving - who are merely commenting and lauding Steve Jobs because of the things he did - they should know better.

Jobs was an asshole, and he knew it. He was a magnificent asshole, but he is not someone whose passing is truly mourned. He was an icon - and as George Armstrong Custer and many other cultural fixtures are, will likely be viewed with rosy-tinted glasses for years to come.

But frankly, I saw the measure of the man when he was alive. And I for one do not mourn his passing as a professional. As someone who died far too young of cancer, yes, I can say his passing is sad. But those lauding him are not judging him based on his life as a man. They're judging him based on his life as a cultural icon. And believe me when I say we have much better men to look to as examples of how to both be a role model, an effective leader, and a person.

Nobody wants to speak ill of the dead, for fear that when they die, others will speak ill of them. And the sad truth is that even the most glorious, sanctified person on Earth will be vilified in the hearts of others. You can't live life without having people hate you, or love you, or ignore you. It is simply the way things are.

One line of of Joss Whedon's Firefly seems accurate - "Every man who had a statue put up of him was one kind of son of a bitch or the other." In Jobs' case, it seems to be (like many other things about him) truer than most. He may have been a great man of industry and may have had brilliant success hitting the target of design, usability, and marketing genius, but he was not a saint.

His passing is just that. The end of a life. Let's not pretend he was other than he was, and let's quiet down the Anti-Hero worship. He deserved nothing less.

Posted at: http://raincitywriter.blogspot.com

Why yes, we SHOULD eschew pornography for football.Thank you, Mr. Hasselbeck!

2011-02-03T12:58:00.001-08:00

Well, this is just awkward. I mean, nobody really wants to come right out and say it, but yes, Matt Hasselback, it is true. Porn is quite definitely the one thing we should NOT be watching this Super Bowl weekend.

Matt Hasselbeck, after a season of failing to perform the job he was hired to do (IE, throw footballs to people without dropping them) has turned his skills away from what he certainly couldn’t do and moved it to motivating people to avoid looking at naked people bumping their naughty bits.

The Seattle Seahawks’ star quarterback is joining with many, many other churches and saintly organizations out there to crusade against porn on Super Bowl Sunday.

And good on him, I say.

As someone who gladly and happily ignores societal messages, trends, and causality when it comes to damaging social issues, especially if it conflicts with my world view and/or assumptions that I’m personally, smugly right, I must agree wholeheartedly. Football is certainly less damaging than porn, when it comes to the overall effects on American society.

After all Super Bowl Sunday is a time when healthy, intelligent people abandon all sense of propriety and don the mask of the zealot, based on a two-color jersey (and/or city). This weekend, sports fans of all stripes and colors plant themselves in front of televisions across the American nation and leer at eleven men on a side running into each other like drunken goats, whistling and hooting at a sport that never, EVER created exploitative gender roles.

Truly, dedication to football and our football teams only mean we seek out and purchase harmless clothing / furniture / vehicle flags / license plates / dating circles / keychains / wastebaskets / season tickets / foam fingers / thong underwear / jerseys / stuffed animals / dedicated RVs. Certainly not an unhealthy, expensive addiction to paraphenalia dedicated to surrounding ourselves in a debauched world of consumer-related, nonessential fetishized objects that encourage our participation in deviant social behavior and enhance our ultimate, secretive fantasy lives.

Professional American football is an institution that’s been around since the extinction of the dinosaurs in the early 1870s, while pornography is as old as the carved stones. And as the Right Reverend Correct Groupthink Gospel of the American Church, Our Beloved FoxNews and Hasselback all agree, porn is still the most degrading, destructive force in America.

So why not switch to the sweet methodone of football, porn addicts of America?

What could be more American than football and apple pie? (Well, even though apple pie was technically an English culinary invention and subsequently brought to the US, it’s still a much better a metaphor than “football and Mrs. Wong’s chicken chow mein with ketchup” or “football and Mom’s Cream of Mushroom Soup with Cheese In a Can over tuna casserole with Triscuits”. Work with me here, you grammar nerd masquerading as Norman Rockwell.) Wholesome and truly uniquely American, it shares nothing with any other sport, (especially rugby, bok-bok, hockey, lacrosse or the game everyone outside of the US insists on calling football but is REALLY supposed to be called soccer). Professional American Football is our most hallowed tradition dating back to the time we figured out we could get eleven really bored guys to ram their heads together over a ball for our entertainment. (Look, if you had to listen to Woodrow Wilson talk about intelligent fiscal policy and moral American behavior, you'd invent a sport where you could bang your head into someone else's over a ball too.)

No sir, football is most definitively not as damaging as pornography is to our society, and definitely has no negative effects that last for any measurable length of time.

Not, say, the spike in violence after the Super Bowl, when more domestic violence calls occur through 911 dispatch boards than at any other time in the year.

Not, say, the football programs across American collegiate and high school programs that produce teenage man-children by the hundreds who cannot read, write, or do mathematics and science at anything resembling a literate level of the average third-grader then sent on to make complex decisions involving whether to retire after running a dogfighting ring or to just say the chihuahuas were just asking for it.

Not, say, the entitlement programs and good old boy networks that protect the darlings of the sport from their actions like sexual assault on campus, illicit fatherhood, fiscal irresponsibility, condoned narcotic and steroid abuse, and corruption in pay-for-play scandals.

Not, say, the "so-called" exploitative football gender dichotomies that place men in full-body pads and helmets and leave the only female participants of the sport clad in skirts, “spankies” and uselessly fluffy pom-poms doing acrobatics that flip skirts and show more skin than the average string bikini on a beach. That's just good old fashioned family fun! One can even buy six-year olds the same cheerleading outfits that their full-grown twenty-something blonde counterparts wear, making sure they can grow up to be splendid role models for other young women who might choose careers that don't involve flipping upside down while wearing a short skirt and looking vapidly perky. It just makes sure they too can participate in this wonderful sport, albeit by standing around looking pretty and making their boobs jiggle.

Not, say, a culture of permissiveness that encourages athletes to assume that they have rights and behaviors that trump those of other individuals, including the right of a woman to consent to sex, the right of an individual not to be run off the road, the right of an animal to keep its throat from being torn out, or the right of, say, a wife from getting cheated on by a string of unsuccessful strippers / cocktail hostesses looking for tabloid payouts.

Porn, on the other hand, is usually done with and by consenting adults who actively enjoy what they’re doing with people who happily do it with them for a living. Sure, they’re not pulling down $100,000 or more per performance, as the average football player does, nor is there a feeder economy that shoves performers into the spotlight repeatedly, over and over again, but that’s not important. What’s important is that filthy, filthy sex is happening. On film. Between -sluts-. And you're watching, you degenerate bastards. Want to know how teenage mothers happen? Porn. Not a lack of ethical guidance, or family planning education, sexual reproduction choices, or availability of reliable birth control methods.

Nope, it's porn. And according to our truly great nation’s churches intent on creating moralistic nanny-states for all of God’s Frozen People, Jesus says that’s some naughty behavior. So you better not do it.

Let's bypass, for the moment, the fact that the primary religious figure of the religion heartily advocated against using religion as a cash cow by beating the crap out of a series of money lenders in the primary temple of the old religion is completely irrelevant. As is the fact that most of the churches involved in this protest are sellling tickets (ahem; whoops, sorry, heavily encouraging $30-$35 per head donations) to see the Football Extravaganza in their Gathering Place of Worship on Jesus’ Very Large Big Screen TV.

No no, this weekend, the most important part of knowing your best options is to make sure that we value paying grown men ludicrous salaries to put on spandex, pads, helmets and groin protectors, then run onto a field and dry-hump each other in an attempt to get a leather-covered ball to one end of the field OVER watching two (or more) people make the beast with two backs / fronts / gaping orifices. (And much less arousing, unless you’re one of those dirty, sinful gays. Not that there’s anything wrong with being a dirty, sinful gay. Some of my best anti-homosexuality Republican crusader friends are so far in the closet they’re taking tea with Mr. Tumnus - lots of cream, no Sugars. Or Candys. Or Sinnamons. Totally lovely people. Excellent tennis partners, too.)

And for our sports heroes' moral falterings, like allowing the football player leniency in their personal behavior that would earn the average guy on the street four years in jail for sexual assault? Such things are simple judgements on behavior that should never be confused with the depravity of a pornographic website depicting consensual sex between of-age adults. Obviously, that football player, even though he may have torn asunder the safety and well-being of one or twenty young women, must have been forgiven by Jesus if he says so. Believe him! Especially if he promises very much not to get caught at it again, with a tearful apology and four-game suspension. After all, we replaced acting like realistic, real-life role models for our children with excessively paid athletes and media icons long ago.

Like Jimmy Bakker and Jimmy Swaggart said, “If my repentence is good enough for Jesus, it’s should be good enough for you.” Brett Favre should probably have been taking notes, and while it may not have worked out for Ben Roethlisberger, pre-brain injury, it seems to work out just fine for thousands of NFL and college football stars across the country.

Truly, watching two or more consenting adults do the horizontal (or, let’s face it, vertical, sideways, upside down, acrobatic, underwater, on-the-beach, or selfshot) mambo is much more destructive to our society than football. Football is about war. About victory. About struggle. And apple pie. Porn is about being a damned, dirty, filthy little sex monkey. And you perverts better not forget it.

While porn is about generating pleasure for both the filmed participants and the viewer themselves. Porn is obviously a dark, dangerous force for our society. Exploitative of women! Exploitative of men! Exploitative of YOU! How could you possibly watch people make dirty, dirty sexings without feeling a violent repulsion of shame for your own depravity?

And football is most certainly not that. Why, football is only a multi-billion dollar industry that requires each city that contains a team to contribute vast amounts of resources to host a stadium, a field, and up to eighty highly overpaid athletes while getting and giving little more than three hours of entertainment per week. In Seattle alone, the Highly Moral Sport still has incurred debts for the former Kingdome, with the privileged taxpayers still shelling out $124 per year in taxes to pay for the Seahawks’ demolished stadium. Small potatoes compared to the intensely damaging moral issues caused by porn.

Why, it’s outrageous the prices of a DVD - for $25,000, a four-hour pornographic film is made, actresses paid, actors furnished with pizza, promotions done, editing and soundtracks completed, and immediately released to the general public. So what if $25,000 would purchase 1/16th of a second of commercial time in the average football game, let alone a commerical event like the Super Bowl? There are much larger moral issues at stake than watching people play hide the salami(s).

Even the Stranger’s Hump! festival is a destructive, money-sucking orgy of consumnate immorality. Perhaps we should truly look at the books of Dan Savage and his minions at the Stranger and discover exactly how much those money-grubbing orgiastic enablers pull down out of their depraved amateur-filmed porno fest. Certainly, it must be vastly more profitable than, say, Seattle’s Mars Hill church, otherwise, why would they do it?

It certainly can’t be for their stated ideals - that pornography, rather than destroying the mental health of those who consume it, actually helps encourage healthy sexual expression, should be shared and made by all, and applauded for those who want to share their gifts with the rest of the world.

For one thing one of its primary proponents and organizers, Dan Savage is certainly Gay with a capital G. Therefore he MUST have a nefarious motive for helping host a pornography festival. Possibly the seduction of good, upright men who love Jesus and who don’t need porn to get off, thank you so much. Just a wife, daughter, or other domesticated, unopinionated female who would make him a sandwich without mayo. ONCE. FOR ONCE. PLEASE.

Ahem.

There are those who might point out that several of the sponsoring Christian churches advocate that women remain subservient to men, and repeat that marriages, regardless of their equality or physical abuse, remain intact. They might note the “spiritual push” of programs and “traditions” where daughters must “marry their fathers” to prevent sexual experience or experimentation prior to her being given to her husband. These naysayers might also point to the stance of these churches that spousal abuse can only be reconciled through religious teachings, and that women must always remain sexually available to their husbands, as well as providing the Christian Nation with many, many, many, many more children that their fertile little loins can produce as long as it’s not out of wedlock (you filthy, filthy, dirty, little girl /unwed mother/whore. Dirty, dirty little girl. Yeah. You like being called that, don't you? You dirty little unwed mother, you).

In short, while many of these detractors cite “implications” of these church organizations’ programs, teachings, and as being far more socially destructive to the welfare and status of women in American society, we must remind them that A) Jesus’ love outweighs any bukkake scene, and B) you MUST swallow the Heavenly Host at least once a week on Sunday to be worthy of Jesus’ love.

In point of fact, if we must respond to those individuals who continually decry the stance of these churches on matters like sex education, family planning, societal inclusion, tolerance of all, sexualities, political views, race, color, or creed, and insist on noting that more damage is done by forcing people to adhere to good old-fashioned antiquated values that have little or no relevancy to modern societal issues, the best response is always: LA LA LA CAN’T HEAR YOU LA LA LA JESUS LOVES YOU AND SO DO THE GREEN BAY PACKERS LOVE JESUS YAY. Certainly, pontification of relevant social issues that directly link to the issues at hand can always be ignored in favor of enough loud, repeated catchphrases instead of actually replying to the sinful, salient points.

And even if we don’t, we must all band together and remind ourselves of the value of Super Bowl Sunday - that even though as Americans and Christians all, we may have temptation in our hearts, no greater moral or spiritual value can be placed except in turning off the tranvestite midget webcam show, stopping the Clown Porn in mid paint-smear, and putting down the latest issue of “Hot Cheerleader Lesbians in Heat”.

Instead, pick up a copy of Sports Illustrated (and watch for that swimsuit edition!) Purchase thousands of dollars of electronics and team-related paraphernalia that’s made in China by workers pulling eighteen-hour shifts in massive factories. Don’t buy a Playboy - that’s most certainly pornographic (though morally less objectionable now that Hugh Hefner is making an honest woman of his 22-year old bride).

Instead pick up a Details, GQ, or do a run to Vegas. Throw some dollars down on a NFL pick’em pool. Eat your Doritos and watch this Super Bowl Sunday as millions of people just like you drop everything they’re doing and watch hyped-up masculine men in spandex smash into each other like sweaty, heaving, smooth-skinned and totally nonsexualized Greek and Roman gladiators with half-naked women cheering tastefully on the sidelines. Enjoy that commercial - it took Pepsi over eighteen months and three hundred million dollars to explain why Pepsi tastes really good using the latest female celebrity du jour and her barely adequate talents to mimic having a massive dopamine and physical reaction to consuming fizzy sugar water, instead of, say, thirty minutes alone with a Hitachi Magic Wand.

But no matter what, remember that while Jesus believes you will burn in Hell for all eternity for seeing Sasha Grey take it in the pooper, he definitely thinks you should buy that official NFL jersey for $150, and pay $25,000 for the privilege of sitting on an uncomfortable wooden seat instead of, say, funding a local afterschool program for a year, or donating $200 to literary programs for underprivileged inner city youth in America.

After all, this weekend, above all other weekends, we must always remember what Jesus Christ said about pornography, football, and making sure that everyone follows his exact moral teachings.

What did he say, you might ask? (After all, there might be some smartass liberal sex-positive jerkface sex columnist who actually can cite chapter and verse from the Bible to refute your arguments).

Not one goddamned thing, but certainly, we should never allow that to stop ourselves, and our deeply religious friends from espousing the very best in sheep-like rhetoric. Just remember - it's not about making sense, or adhering to the principles espoused by the founder of the religions we pretend to live our lives by.

It's about making sure Jesus and the Green Bay Packers get their win on.

You're in Bad Hands with Allstate

2010-12-15T11:21:00.000-08:00

This email was sent via the feedback page at Allstate.com.

After a heavy heavy rainfall in November, Dane Johnson and Kathy Justin's house cracked and slid off its foundation in Burien. Hundreds of neighbors hand-carried their belongings from the waterfront Burien home to storage in a massive undertaking of neighborhood support.

They bought homeowners' insurance through Allstate, believing that the moniker "you're in good hands" rang true. That Allstate would in fact take care of them. They had paid insurance diligently, on time, every time. They were good homeowners. They knew their house's location placed them at a higher risk, and they paid higher premiums for it.

Now the couple's claim has been denied by their homeowner's insurance agency, Allstate.

Allstate is known for its commercials of "being safe from Mayhem" - a character that slams bricks into windshields, stomps on the brakes to cause rear-end collisions, drops branches and trees on cars, smashes trees into houses, and a host of other dastardly deeds. Allstate's new ad campaign, in essence, is precisely what Johnson and Justin went through.

On November 23rd, a freak stormsurge undercut the basement of Johnson and Justin's house. Allstate didn't send an adjuster until November 30th, and denied the claim almost immediately.

Allstate is denying Johnson and Justin's claim for their destroyed home. Johnson and Justin are core arts community advocates in the Puget Sound region - he works for KUOW, she's a sound and lighting engineer, and both were pivotal to the Burien Art Council formation.

Your company is denying two people who did the right thing, and trusted YOU to do the right thing. They believed you when you said, "You're in good hands with Allstate". They bought your insurance with that in mind. They believed their insurance agents were actually the good guys. They listened to Dennis Haybert calmly explain how Allstate does exactly the right thing, all the time.

And then Allstate denies their claim.

If this does not change, I will personally make it my mission to tell this story to every person I know. I will give this story to people who work for State Farm, for Farmer's Insurance, and GEICO. I will explain to my family and friends and coworkers exactly what Allstate did to people who played exactly by the rules, paid the extra dollars, and still got their claim denied by their insurance agency - who have said routinely that their job is to look out for their clients.

I won't ever buy Allstate insurance of any type; that's certain. However, I would greatly like to notify and report a positive resolution of this story to my contacts within various news agencies, including Lifehacker, Gawker, Gizmodo, the New York Times, CNet, The Seattle Times, The Seattle PI, LinkedIn.com, The LA Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Washington Post, and local and national television news media. I'd also like to be able to report the resolution of this issue to my 35,000+ social and professional network.

At this moment in time, that is not going to happen. What -is- going to happen is a description of exactly what Allstate said they would do when selling an insurance policy, and what they did when that insurance policy was desperately needed during the holiday season.

For more information on the house and the incident, see:

http://www.nwcn.com/news/slideshows/House-Slipping-Toward-Sound-110268744.html

Coping with the TSA

2010-12-01T13:05:00.000-08:00

The one thing that I've realized out of all of this TSA inspection crap is pretty simple.

Commercial aviation is a privilege, NOT a right.

And damn near everyone's acting like it is.

I must put forth that I used to fly a lot for work, most specifically right after 9/11, when I was working for a company building bullet-resistent cockpit doors and bulkheads. Oh, and the places I flew! I unconfiscated my cartons of American Spirits from the clutches of overzealous stewardesses after citing chapter and verse of the installation manuals of the lavatory smoke detectors, helpfully exploded lumbar support balloons that shoved business class passengers facefirst into the seats in front of them after failing to deflate, or rather, after failing to stop inflating by using a dual-government approved and jointly-issued icepick. I helped explain to a room of very well-dressed, very insistent men in long, flowing robes why the sultan could NOT have a hot tub on his personal 777 without a serious amount of work in the weight balance and hydrodynamic equipment departments, and knew the passcodes to most of the flight deck doors for at least three major domestic American airlines.

And I got dogged in Heathrow, patted down in Dubai, politely wanded in Tokyo and aggressively detained in Beijing (where I learned if you want to write a college article in 1995 about a repressive government smacking an ethnic minority down, it's best to not do it where PRC agents might copy and see it and add it to your permanent record). I even had an interesting conversation with a couple of Israeli security agents. The ones who point the big guns not -directly- at you, but close enough that it makes your toes curl up to avoid being blown off by cheerful 19-year old soldiers who are happy to in an airport and not, say, getting rocks hurled at their heads by Palestinian kids.

And this is with me carrying identification authorizing me to fiddle around with the innards of Very Important Federal Aircraft.

But that's all completely unrelated to the issues at hand. Because it doesn't matter. Flying is not a RIGHT. It's a privilege. A luxury. Like the ubiquitous iPod, something we've cheerfully adopted as part of our pack of Essentials.

While it's true that as a member of a privileged class of people (IE, people who can afford to plunk down a couple of hundred to travel at insane speed across the sky), I can also state that I've been on many, many, MANY flights where I was sitting smack dab in the minority of skin color and economic class. Think about an albino at the Apollo theater, or Bill Gates in the middle of South Central.

I don't exactly BLEND as an expertly unoppressed class-structure privileged 6'5" freckled white boy with giant knobby knees, and on my flights to and from Dubai, this was indeed the case. Air India was also a lesson in excitement and "WOW, you have FRECKLES!". Had I dropped in painted bright green and wearing alien horns, I might have made a slightly more impressive entrance. Having to stoop to avoid bonking my head on the cabin ceiling was probably enough.

It was pretty awesome for the first two hours. The next eighteen, not so much.

So please, let's not turn this into an elder version of "One of these things is not like the others!" Sesame Street song; in any class structure or system, yes, the poor will probably not be able to afford air travel, but then again the desperately poor are probably less concerned about flying and more about not losing their health benefits because Wal-Mart screwed them over again for the holidays. If the patriarch of the family of eight Dalits (whom I kept poking in the shoulder when he kept trying to explain why they were traditionally called "Untouchables") could afford to travel from London to Delhi for Holi every year, then Joe The Wal-Mart employee can shell out some savings for a flight. It's a matter of choices made.

Nobody is bloody ENTITLED to an iPod. Nobody is bloody entitled to a seat on a vehicle traveling at 650 mph, either.

If I can't afford to be in a bar, then who CARES if I don't have the dollars to get righteously shit-faced while not being able to smoke? I can't afford to smoke or to drink in bars, so is that the problem of the people who are affluent enough to both smoke and go to bars? Should I feel guilty as I drink my $3 PBR that someone out there can't afford to come in and drink crappy beer and smoke a fifty-cent cigarette with me while huddled 25 feet from the door? No, because hopefully that person's disposable income will be going to other things.

The point (or rather, an academic's relentlessly academic race/class/gender argumentative point about poor people and people of color historically not being able to have their rights infringed like everyone else being a major cause of Social Justice) has merit, and the concept is akin to the question of the 90s of "How many slums will be bulldozed to make way for the Information Superhighway?" (namely, that the impoverished will not be able to see the benefits or have the opportunity to have their personal freedom infringed upon because they can't afford to go to the airport to have their junk groped), is not only demonstratably false and misleading, it's also a complete red herring for the issue.

I'll also admit that every time the white guilt argument comes out, I get a wee cranky, because White Guilt is sloppily applied at best and reminiscent of growing up Catholic at worst. It's the more educated cousin of "There's starving children in Africa, so you should eat your lentils", which I could figure out at the age of six to be an utter load of shite. For one thing, if those starving Children In Africa were really THAT hungry I'd happily ship my lentils to them, but I was pretty sure they wouldn't want to eat the damn things either, especially after two weeks of transportation.

But hey, it was a good straw man argument to help muddle up the argument which, namely, was "I hate lentils and don't want to eat them. And frankly, I don't give a shit about those starving kids in Africa, because at least if they die, then they wouldn't have to eat the lentils. If it were a choice between styrofoam packing peanuts covered in sea urchin entrail sauce and lentils, I'll take the sea urchin-styrofoam*."

This is a similar situation, which is, "I hate people touching my junk and seeing me naked. Seeing me NEKKID is completely different, but I can't run through the TSA counters with a rubber glove on my head and nothing else screaming, "Look! Look! I'm a SQUID**!" without getting arrested, and so I am thusly righteously AROUSED FOR MY RIGHTS."

And the reply here seems to be, "Yeah, but think about all those non-flying poor people! They can't afford to fly! Think about all the starving non-flying children in Africa! THINK OF THE HUNGRY PEOPLE!"

My reply: "No shit. I had a $8 latte and a $20 donut. I'm surprised they don't have a bankruptcy court next to the Hudson News counters."

This is very much like the people crying out that the pat-downs bring back memories of childhood trauma, molestation, WTO protest arrests, PTSD, the shingles, and that one time the Cubbies really almost made the World Series but didn't because that douchewad caught the ball instead of the outfielder. (I'm kidding about the last two. Most Cubs fans have more emotional resilience than a sub-Saharan AIDS orphanage hospice doctor. It's damn near a prerequisite.)

Thus, the cries for social justice have NOTHING to do with the matter at hand. It's just another issue thrown in to protest wildly that it's NOT OKAY AND YOU ARE NOT STANDING FOR THIS!

That's fine! There is a solution to all these problems, and they don't include stripping off in public, having hysterical breakdowns, or flexing your nuts at the TSA agents for "infringing upon your rights" when they're getting paid $13 per hour to deal with irate people who at best tolerate them and at worst want to rip their faces off with their teeth.

It's called "Get out of line, go back outside, hail another taxi, drive home, and unpack your bags."

Which brings me back to my primary point.

Flight is a privilege, not a right. It's like driving. You don't have a RIGHT to a driver's license. You have an opportunity, but if you don't pass the test, have crap vision, consider the rules of the road to be more "suggestion" than actual rules, prefer to drive tipsy and fast, consider insurance a tool of the Illuminati and oil changes to be so much frippery, then you might not get to drive. You are not guaranteed a Ford Focus as a right of being a citizen of the United States.

Likewise, flight is a private enterprise, and most certainly not included in the Constitution of the United State of America. There are NO public airplane transportation services in America. (Nope, as much as American Airlines likes to front, they are not the American airline. Air China, however, most definitively IS a government-owned airline. So a few points for autocracy there. But surprisingly they don't seem to care too much whether they're invading your personal space when they give you a pat-down.)

Airplanes are tubes of hyperpressurized air that are propelled by giant engines fueled by the fossilized remains of dinosaurs with over a quarter of a million moving, straining, expanding, and exploding parts. Any one of those systems can go wrong at any moment. If strict maintenance schedules are not adhered to, then those tubes slowly disintegrate. Making sure you do not have anything in your bag that would interfere with the miracle of shoving that tube of hyperpressurized air from Seattle to Los Angeles (a distance of over fifteen hundred miles in less time than it takes to watch a back-to-back episode of CSI: Miami) and forcing you to spend another fifteen minutes patiently waiting to get checked out seems to be a bit overblown. Hundreds of thousands of people do this every day, and it is so unremarkable that now different airlines advertise on how much suck other airlines have compared to their own experience, when ultimately, the experience remains the same - packing at least a hundred people into an aluminum tube with giant engines strapped to thin pieces of aluminum and hurling it with insane precision across the sky.

Air travel is standardized insanity, straight up, served on a platter of physical impossibility broken apart by science, physics, and a lot of dead guys in jumpsuits.

So pardon my cavalier attitude towards getting my junk checked out before I fly.

Quite possibly, my lack of modesty has something to do with this, but anyone who has to look their doctor in the eye after hearing him say "Turn your head and cough" should probably not worry overmuch about the shame of someone seeing you on a body scanner. Nobody accuses their gynecologist of enjoying their work; why the hell are we putting THAT drama on all of the TSA agents? Sure, there's a whole bunch of troglodytic TSA employees out there who get off on the petty power of making people with more money and mobility than they do go through a song-and-dance and cop a random feel, but after the first four hundred lawsuits the processes are going to get highly refined, and those douchemonkeys will get kicked to the curb, preferably with a black mark on a federal job record, a hefty fine, and a gross misdemeanor.

For the rest of them, it's like working at a strip club, a bank, a brewery or a porn store - after a while all of the stuff you're working with just becomes stuff. Yeah yeah, that's a naked chick. Yeah, yeah, that's a 60-year old bottle of scotch. Woo. Fucking. Hoo, four hundred thousand dollars. Can I get back to work now?

As for the people who decry how invasive the new process is, and point to the egregious examples of inspection: I'm positive that the guy whose urine bag broke and soaked him had a rough time of it, but come ON, people, ever hear of the Boy Scouts? If you've got a bag of pee attached to your hip, who DOESN'T carry wet wipes, a bag of spare medical kit, a spare pair of pants and a couple of gallon-sized ziploc bag with them? Hell, I took care of my cousin with severe cerebral palsy in a wheelchair for a month. After a while, you simply don't leave the house without certain things, including a spare innertube for the wheelchair and lots of baby wipes.

People, most of us air travelers are NOT on the Amazing Race. Ten more minutes to get through the line means you have ten more minutes to think about whatever you think about when you're standing in line. It does not mean the Communists have invaded, it most definitely does not mean the Founding Fathers are spinning in their graves, and a few swipes around the groinal region from someone else who would really rather not be doing what they're doing isn't a massive infringement on your "rights".

Because, as stated previously, air travel is not a "right". It is a privilege. It's our OWN personal responsibilities and choices to fly or NOT to fly, to take a cab or to drive, to ride a train, a bus, or take a ship.

Cheap and efficient air travel has become so ubiquitous (like iPods) that it's all too easy to believe that because you happen to be living in a society that has made it so easy and cheap to book a 20 hour flight halfway around the world that not a century ago would have taken a full month of travel ($781 one-way to Tokyo's Naruta airport leaving at 11PM tonight, found in about the same amount of time it took you to read this entire SENTENCE) we are somehow entitled to the convenience, and bitch relentlessly when our travel times are extended by an hour or more due to a problem found in the hydraulic system of the aircraft.

And, in some cases, to cry out, "Think of all the flightless children in Africa!" Or "Think of all the pee-bag carriers!" Or, "Think of all the people who have to conquer their personal demons in order just to be able to get on the plane!"

Really? Really. Personal demons, huh?

I'm fucking terrified of flying. Each time I step on a plane I nearly crap my pants in terror.

Surprised? So was my nearly-wife when I nearly crushed her hand on our first flight together. It's a testament to her gentle nature, good will, and grace that after the cast came off and she allowed me to buy her a metal-framed brace to squeeze, she still continued to both A) date me and B) fly seated next to me. Before flying with her, I tended to go through a lot of scotch, anti-anxiety medication and warm milk in airports and marked a LOT of airplane seat hand rests. Now I just hold her hand and tremble. Being schnockered helped press down the sheer panic to the point where my former passport collected enough stamps to raise eyebrows at the immigration counter, but it did lend a certain aroma to my clothing and person while in flight. Small children would be moved two seats back due to the possibility of getting intoxication merely by proximity. (And may explain why I kept poking my friend Tim from North London in the shoulder every time he said "Untouchable".)

So my response to the TSA bruhahaha, therefore, is usually "Learn. To. Fucking. Cope." There's a lot scarier things in the world than a bored government official running their hands around your body and looking at an anonymized image of you on a computer screen, and the rules are in place to make those scary things not happen.

Believe me, having an aggressively intent German shepherd nosing your crotch with two paramilitary guys with clean British public school accents holding automatic weapons pointed near your feet while you are politely but firmly requested not to move until he finishes his inspection, because we're afraid, really, old chap, that he smells plastic explosives in your tighty-whiteys, and you fit the profile of most American-based IRA supporters tends to color all of your future flight inspections in a different light. Not only because you don't want to move, AT ALL, but also because you have to wonder at the utter lack of perspicacity of someone who would carry plastic explosives that close to the bangers and mash, with the codicil that THESE guys, the ones with the hefty, fully-loaded automatic weapons with the safety off and the really big scary dog with sharp pointy teeth nosing around in your nether regions, have actually dealt with those people, and are probably not at home to clever jokes about how we saved their asses in World War II or the one about Queen Vicky and the donkey in Tijuana.

If you got all the way down to the end here, here's the short version: If you want to fly without getting a pat down, go buy a Cessna and learn how to fly it, pay for the gas, get your pilot's license, and use that to fly yourself around. If, however, you want to fly on a commercial airline, shut up and follow the rules, regardless of how intrusive you find the inspections. They're not there for your personal comfort and joy; they're there to keep your bitchy ass from getting blown up. If you don't like it, don't buy a ticket, and DON'T make a spectacle out of yourself to prove that you're not a fan of the new regulations. It's ultimately pointless and does nothing but keep people from doing what they are legally required to do (and legally means "by law" - IE, if they don't do their job, they can get arrested.)

The other one thing I find immensely bemusing and amusing, is that so many people don't realize that they have at least one other option. Prior to 1939, people did it all the time.

Ride the train. No pat-downs and you can move about the cabin all you like.

*Mom still doesn't understand why I like sushi.

**More fun than it sounds like. Trust me on this one; you'll probably get arrested otherwise.

On being "rude"

2010-11-19T14:02:00.001-08:00

Rudeness is one of those things you're taught about as an early child. Don't interrupt others when they're talking. Try to be polite. Ask nicely. Say things like, "please" and "thank you". These are habits ingrained in us from early childhood. It's not hard to extend courtesy to anyone.

But somewhere along the way "rudeness" and "disagreement" got jumbled up together. Even worse, now the idea of calling someone out for their behavior or statements is considered "rude".

Take my trip off to lunch today, for example. Since my break is relatively short (I prefer to eat at my desk and do a bit more writing) I usually scarper off to a local takeaway joint and get some food. To do this, you have to find a parking spot. Enter Clueless "Disabled" Guy in a BMW. For some inexplicable reason, as cars are stacking up behind us as he pulls halfway out of his handicapped spot, he decides to look down at his phone and do some jotting or texting. This would not have been a problem had six cars NOT been waiting for him to move. So I honked.

I do love my new car's horn - it's loud, and goes into harmonics if you keep it pressed. Two tones, then three. but this was a short one, just a "hey, dude. Wake up" toot that was meant to say, "People are waiting, let's get rollin' here." He rolls down his window and yells out, "You rude son of a bitch!"

My look of bafflement must have made his day, but the two cars that honked right back at him from behind me probably didn't. As I got out, shrugging and walking off, I heard him screaming at the other people who were telling him he was blocking traffic. Words like, "Veteran" and "disabled" were getting bandied about, and the argument that I heard went something along the lines of the salient, yet earthy points of: Just because you have a vet sticker and license plate, happen to be gray-haired and sporting a blue hanging placard, you are not entitled to drive and act like a douchemonkey.

This is also true for people with "Baby on Board" placards. I don't care if you have a baby on board. I have a puppy on board most days, and I still drive carefully. Somehow the idea that a sign notifying people of the cargo you're carrying will earn you special privileges while weaving back and forth in your lane got implanted into the parental collective mind, like the idea that Dilbert cartoons stuck to your cubicle wall indicates in any way that you have a sense of humor about your workplace. You must, because you have Dilbert cartoons on your wall. Right? RIGHT? RIIIIIGHT????

But this is the trend. One cannot state the obvious without being considered "rude". If I tell someone their political beliefs are complete crap and their entire foundation is based on utter lies and bullshit, I'm not cited for being accurate, I'm told I'm rude, or overbearing, or just not understanding of the situation.

Look, in some circumstances, telling someone they're wrong is not rude. For instance, when the younger Palin daughters begin attacking people by calling them "faggots" on Facebook, and saying that behavior is wrong, I'm definitely not being rude. I'm being accurate. When Boehner broadly says that he's getting rid of Obamacare because it doesn't do X, Y, and Z, and someone points out that he's being a moron and will be forcing expensive changes upon the industry and the people of America, that person is not being -rude-, they are being factual.

Somehow telling people they are wrong has become a social no-no.

That's going to suck for me, because I have no qualms about telling someone they're full of it.

This is a behavior that's coming due on a lot of levels. Having been a member of multiple online forums and arenas, I've found that discord and disagreement are no longer considered acceptable; even if someone's stated behavior happens to indicate a criminal activity, you can't out and out say, "Look, I'm sure you know your children and everything, but have you considered the fact that when you allowed your son's friend to sit with your daughter for a full hour in a bedroom put her in danger, and quite potentially a dangerous social situation where she had no escape, recourse, or ability to say "no"?" Nope, I'm being rude if I say that, and censured.

If I note that a particular individual has shown abberrant, destructive behavior, the new tendency of the social strata is not to discourage the destructive behavior, but rather to punish those who'd dare point out that the person happens to be manipulating and controlling, and is getting away with extraordinarily bad behavior in a community.

The most egregious examples? Billy Ray Cyrus throwing a hissy fit when asked about his extremely public divorce on a country western radio station interview and calling the interviewer "rude". And yet the rudest people - those who thrust themselves into prominence by being the loudest, most obnoxious, heaviest in-your-face individuals of celebrity and popularity have the thinnest skins. Bill O'Reilly, Glenn Beck, and Rush Limbaugh never permit themselves an audience that can talk back at them; the Dittoheads are their favorite constituency.

Berkeley Breathed once said that Steve Dallas, the philandering, no-morals, no-ethics, chain-smoking personal defense attorney/band manager/creepy sunglassed character started out as a buffoon in the college paper, a parody of every entitled preppy out there, and suddenly men began emulating the behavior. Breathed's most memorable quote regarding Steve Dallas: "This was not my intent."

We're living in a culture where rudeness is cultivated, and if you disagree with anyone's personal or political point of view, offer a different perspective, or want to note that frankly, you could care less about Lindsey Lohan's latest yeast infection / alcoholism detox commitment as opposed to the discovery of a new element, you're considered to be standoffish or rude.

I'm neither, I simply don't give a rat's patootey what Barack Obama had for dinner last night, or what the Real Housewives of DC thought of each other. I have my own personal fantasies and a rich, happy inner world without dealing with the enforced personal issues of people who aren't even terribly good actors. I do not enjoy celebrity for celebrity's sake; I think Jimmy Kimmel to be a moron and Jimmy Fallon a genius precisely for those reasons. I find Keith Olbermann to be an overbearing blowhard, but a necessary one in a day and age when politicos place pressure upon the media to keep mum about the mistakes, the lies, the coverups, and the intentionally misleading statements.

The whistleblower is truly becoming the villain of any scenario.

And I can't talk about my discomfiture with some family members, either, because rather than keeping the respectful notification that two sides have different perspectives that are approached differently, I see a trending towards the "you disagree with me, therefore you are rude / totally lame". It's in the "that's so gay" phrasing of homophobic teenagers, it's in the inability of any political pundit to engage in something remotely approaching discourse. The craziest people with the loudest voices are being paid attention to, and the intelligent, quiet, rational people are getting left behind.

I've always said that the secret of my success is crap humor and a loud voice. T is almost the mirror opposite - she's far funnier than I am, but she never booms it out loud. And that's gaining traction in the media. It's not about who has the right message, it's about who has the reality show, who has the TLC channel following them around, who has the best sound bites, who has the most drama.

I don't -like- drama. I don't like dramatic personae. I don't like having to get emotionally involved with someone else's life whom I have no contact with, at all. What I want from my politicians is intelligent, straightforward discourse and people who are willing to put personal ambition aside for the purpose of the public good.

But that's not who we're getting. We are getting the Donald Trumps, the Sarah Palins, the Billy Ray Cyruses, the Paris Hiltons, the Wrestling Federation Superstars, the cult of Celebrity fed and puppeteered. Our political figures are no longer the Russ Feingolds, Ted Kennedys, Robert Byrds or the Ronald Reagans, Bush Senior or the deeply thoughtful men of a generation ago. Now it's who tweets fastest and who has the most followers.

To wit, if Bristol Palin had not had her mother's deeply rabid fanbase, she would have been cut from "Dancing With the Stars" long before anyone else. How else could we explain how the teenaged single mother of a former Alaska township mayor not only managed to stay on the show, but also wound up becoming a media celebrity? There is no reason we should know anything about these people. There is no CAUSE for me to know or care a bit about who these people are outside of the ability of the woman who is active in politics.

And yet Palin is simply the most egregious example of celebrity as qualification for a position she's woefully inadequate. There's a hint: Jesse The Body Ventura did not transition well into politics. His entire political career was based around being different, but ultimately, he had no idea how to govern or lead. Now he hosts a show about how the government hates you - and he's "back" - albeit on a poorly-rated cable TV channel.

But back to the chap who, absorbed in his own little world of the telephone, refused to see how his actions impacted those around him today. He aggravated half a dozen people simply because he was intentionally unaware of how he impacted others. It mattered little what other people were doing or needing. It's the lack of a turn signal to let someone know you're going left, instead of right. It's honking because someone can't move over to let you through. It's demanding that you be served even though you have eighty items in the express lane because you're "in a very important hurry, young man." It's yelling at a cop or fireman, "I pay your salary, you will pay attention to me!"

A digression: I adore people who scream this out at someone, because due to my ability with mathmatics, statistics, and the tracking software of my brilliantly awesome job, I can in fact figure out exactly how much someone has paid as a percentage of someone's salary. Categorizing a salary means that you can take the percentile of most people who pay taxes, find the percentage of taxes they pay to the state, federal, or city government, then estimate by 10% (generous, but quibbling isn't the issue here) what that amount of money is, divide that by the average number of taxpaying citizens in the state, and pro-rate it per year. Usually, for a single police officer, clerk, or other individual, the rate comes down to something like $0.27 US, so that argument is ALWAYS fun to see in action because if I don't have $0.27 on me, I will give the person a dollar and say, "There you go. Now you have what you paid for his salary this year back, and you can kindly shut the fuck up. You're not entitled to jack or shit just because you happened to pay taxes, you stupid lobotomized llamafucker."

The reason we obey traffic laws and don't stop in the middle of the freeway is because we are expected to behave in a similar manner. Unfortunately, the sheer volume of people who choosing reactionaryism over rationalism means that entitled asshats in BMWs shall continue to pull halfway out of a parking spot; that people with more personality than talent shall get the lions' share of the attention and validation, and that for the foreseeable future, bad behavior shall be rewarded, while people who blow the whistle, or choose to walk away, will be villified for their actions.

I don't want to be "rude". But I'm going to be rude if that's what it takes to let someone know what they're doing is not okay. I'll point out that John Boehner is an opportunistic, power-hungry jackhole interested more in scoring points than actual leadership, that the Tea Party seems to be comprised of people who only want to chant along with Glenn Beck, and that the "movements" of this part of the early century are almost entirely comprised of people who have no real idea of what they're doing.

I pick on the WingNut NeoCons purposefully as well. It is as easy and intelligent to point at PETA protesters, at any left-wing elements of society, at the people who smoke Gauloise cigarettes in university college towns and rant and rave about how we must change the dominant paradigm without knowing A) what the dominant paradigm actually IS, B) what a paradigm might be, or C) whether it's actually capable of donning a corset, fishnets, and a mask of former Senator Larry Craig. That doesn't mean that they are in any way, shape or form more correct or less right than I am; it merely means that the FoxNews and Glenn Beckians have taken the art form of playing aggressively wounded victim to a whole new artistic level. One cannot attack without opening themselves up for dire criticism - and frankly, Sarah Palin, Glenn Beck, Olbermann, and many, many of our loud, obnoxious voices in the media need to be backhanded with rationalism and veracity more than a few times.

We need a return to truth, not true enough or truthiness. We need media who don't shape the message, but simply present facts and information as they happen, to provide pure and undiluted information in its best and clearest form. We need truth; we do not need the circus that has become what our media has decided it should be.

Edward R. Murrow is quite possibly the best example of someone who, under intense, violent scrutiny, was what could be best described as "rude". However, we have no Edward R. Murrow. We only have Joel McHale, Jon Stewart, and Stephen Colbert - none of whom do more than mock those who choose to attack with a hammer and defend with a thin skin.

When comics should just go away

2010-08-12T13:22:00.001-07:00

The news that Cathy, the newspaper comic chronicling the life of the single, then married, then something else female of the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s is now coming to an end made me consider the time of endings.

My favorite comic of years past - Calvin and Hobbes - ended after a long run, and with an arc that made perfect, timeless sense. Conversely, Charles Schultz's Peanuts, while a "classic", makes about as much sense in most daily events as an Alzheimer's patient with Tourette's Syndrome. Cathy, while a standard mainstay of the newspaper funnies for years, is written by a sixty-year old woman whose touch on the gestalt of American womanhood is long passed.

Perhaps the most obvious one I can think of is For Better or For Worse. Lynn Johnston has been retconning her earlier work over and over again, and while the comic may have been brilliant back in the day of Canadian and life during a time of change, the comic is overwrought, irritating, and deeply retrospective. Instead of ending the comic, Johnston (immediately after finding out her husband was leaving her) came out of retirement and began rewriting the whole thing. And shockingly, all of the character husband's attitudes have changed for the jerkier. Shocked. Shocked, are we.

The thing is, it wasn't that brilliant. It's like remaking Star Wars. It worked in the time and place it existed in, and now it's possibly the worst franchise simply because George Lucas can't stop playing with Ewok dolls and working out his Oedipal complex issues with his Jedi knight characters.

Cathy is a prime example of a comic artist who knows when to gracefully bow out of the time. Newspapers in general are sliding towards closure, and the load maintained by Johnston on the newspaper means several strips just exist when they simply shouldn't. For Better Or Worse was a family comic for us growing up, but it did not make the easy transition once Johnston decided to get all retrospective on it.

For my money, the comics that were great when I was a kid need to ease into retirement. Get rid of Garfield, Peanuts, FBOFW, and the old, aging comics - there's simply better and more relevant comics out there that could and should be placed front and center.

But man, don't take away my Doonesbury. That would just be tragic.

Daniel Schorr, last of a dying breed

2010-07-23T13:50:00.001-07:00

If you have no idea who Daniel Schorr is, he wasn't Bob Woodward or Dan Rather. Schorr was, in essence, one of my great heroes. He was a journalist and writer from the age of Kruschev through the age of Cheney. He was a journalist, and his rough, tobacco-stained voice was a crusty reminder of the news era of a bygone age.

I never met you, Mr. Schorr, but you changed my life in many ways, and you stood for truth in an era that slid to mendacity for the sake of the subject, rather than the audience. You , and your final words at the end of a commentary on the radio, were a marker of sanity in an era of insane politics. You shall be missed.

No, Steve. The iPhone 4 just sucks, no matter how many lovey-dovey commercials you make.

2010-07-21T14:07:00.001-07:00

http://www.cnn.com/2010/TECH/mobile/07/20/cnet.handsets.steve.jobs/index.html?hpt=Sbin

Sorry, Stevie. Your phone sucks. Don't try to point the finger at everyone else. If ConsumerReports recommends against your product, perhaps it's because you screwed up, not because the phone industry made a mistake. Admittedly, this is your fourth phone, and the Cult of Apple continues to bring converts, but hell, I -had- an iPhone, and used a different carrier than AT&T to avoid your monopoly. And it STILL sucked, compared to an HTC myTouch.

No matter how many times you show images of people (who need to be on a wifi connection for the video conferencing software to work, unlike, say, the HTC Evo phone available on Sprint) talking about the miracle of small children and babies on primetime TV, your technology is still sucky and I'm never again going to buy one of your crappy iPods masquerading as a phone.

Glenn Beck going Blind? Yeah, tell us something new.

2010-07-21T14:02:00.001-07:00

http://pagingdrgupta.blogs.cnn.com/2010/07/21/what-is-glenn-becks-eye-disorder/?hpt=Sbin

Frankly, if Glenn Beck is going blind, this isn't a bad thing. Although I would be willing to bet Beck is going to claim disability from the government due to his "blindness", regardless of the amount of money he makes as a right-wing pundit/entertainer for the slavering, racially-charged Teabagging movement, his macular dystrophy (eyes go bad, in a nutshell) would at the very least increase awareness of the sightless in America.

Although at the same time I'm now more or less aware that Beck, who's posed in Nazi-era uniforms for the covers of his books and raged against black Americans given "preferential treatment" now that an African-American is in the White House is going to milk this for all the sympathy in the world, I'm somewhat cheerful. After all, being forced to rely on others after spending two decades blaming everyone but himself for the problems of America might humble someone marginally less offensive than former KKK members in the Teabagging movement.

My schadenfreue is brimming over, and I can't stop my internal snickers. I'm crossing my fingers with deep and sincere hope his right-wing, ultra-conservative butt gets thrown to the mercy of the welfare state he has so often decried.

StarCraft II, et al

2010-07-20T12:05:00.001-07:00

On Starcraft II: Wings of Liberty...

I never really enjoyed a lot of the twitch gamer process gaming issues. I do like managing wars and doing the whole strategy thing, but if you asked me to put together a battle of Waterloo I'd question why you were asking me. I wasn't there - I had no idea what the men or generals were up to, and the only thing I could tell you is that Napoleon bit it there.

That said, I did love me some Starcraft. And I recall playing it when the massive games were 500mb, and you had to really load in a CD. Now I'm ashamed (well, not really, because I loved Starcraft and its expansion) to say I went ahead for the full StarCraft II. The only thing is, there's going to be a very, very limited series of games that I can go with now. The specialization of most people in a gaming genre of one kind or another means that no longer can I actually play a game and get a specified area of fun; I can only now play first-person shooters, real-time strategy, MMORPGs, or side-scrollers with any kind of specialization.

And I'm still pining for my very own Medieval Madness pinball game. (Of course, space constraints aside, the $8,500 price tag for such a machine would be an issue. My beloved books don't take that much space.)

But I really did get in on the Warcraft mania, to the point where, not seven years later, I still roll with the game every so often. I'm hoping, too, that it won't go the way of the Sims 3 - where I played for a bit, but got intensely bored after a week.

Either way, I am looking forward to the game, I'm just hoping it'll be good for the long-term, and have the traction its predecessory did.

Banning the Bodies Exhibition

2010-07-19T11:08:00.001-07:00

http://www.publicola.net/2010/06/29/without-valid-written-authorization-from-the-deceased/

San Francisco has already banned the Bodies exhibition due to the fact that some of the bodies were obtained from China, and China's current status as a country where "permission" is often synonymous with "you didn't say no loud enough" or "you were a political prisoner / murderer / mental patient, ergo you don't get to say yes or no what's done with your body". Now Nick Lacata, Seattle City Council member, is sponsoring legislation that would require any exhibition to obtain permission from the donor's bodies to make sure the bodies are exhibited with respect and dignity.

And that's definitely NOT what happens with the Bodies Exhibition.

On some level I see the Bodies exhibition as a fascinating anatomy discussion, on another a puppetry of intensely macabre proportions. The bodies that are built and maintained are plasticized in an incredibly brilliant method that replaces all of the muscles and veins, capillaries and other organic materials that allows the preservation of the musculature - on the other hand, I'm fairly certain none of the bodies shown in the exhibition really wanted to be paraded around in public. Chinese ancestor traditions means that the families cannot visit these people and provide the graveside services; and frankly, if I knew my grandfather or grandmother, my aunt or my sister were plasticized after their bodies were sold to an organization without my consent, I'd be livid. At best this is disrespectful, at worst it's the desecration of a corpse.

I've not been able to find out whether the bodies used in the exhibition were willingly given by either the families or the deceased themselves. But I also don't see much of a need to outright ban these - I don't plan on attending because of the moral issues I have with this, and I am not the type of person who likes watching the Saw movies the check out the interior body components of other human beings. The Bodies Exhibition is doing downhill; had Licata actually wanted to make a dent in the behavior, he should have set something like this in motion four years ago when the exhibition showed up in the first place.

There's also a racial or a foreign component to this that bothers me. Western societies have a long tradition of using the bodies of "foreigners" as curiosities and exploiting them for "scientific research". The Victorian era hasn't quite finished with the morbid fascination of digging up dead people and showing them in a museum. Very few pioneers of the West were dug up and shown because it wouldn't be "respectful" - likewise, the majority of bodies donated in the United States to medical science aren't used for museum exhibitions. The museums have the technology to virtually explore human bodies in 3-D without sacrificing the dignity of a human being - and the costs would be similar, if not identical to putting a corpse on display, much like Saartjie Baartman (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saartjie_Baartman) or the bones of Geronimo.

I wonder if the reaction and the fascination about Bodies would be so popular if the bodies came from Ohio, or Eureka, or the San Fernando Valley, or Manhattan's Upper West Side. Or whether the question of respect for the deceased would even come up. But since they're bodies from China that nobody knows where they came from (aside from some government officials in China who likely made a tidy bribe off of their sale), they are anonymous and we don't have to think about them. If our reaction to Mrs. Sophie Carmichael, grandmother of five, died of a heart attack is that she should be given a dignified burial and that her corpse should not be plasticized in a pose that implies she was a bit of a tramp for all eternity, then it's likely the same pose of Xia Hiu, political prisoner, should be treated the same.

For my perspective, I won't attend a Bodies exhibition precisely because I cannot see the intention of the people who built this Exhibition as being anything other than sensationalism using the cheapest and most accessible human remains they could - and that happened to be from China, with no questions asked. In a lot of ways, actively walking through the Bodies Exhibition is participating, and while I'm sure the "scientific" curiosity and experience must, for some, outweigh the moral costs, I am also quite sure that the people who "own" this exhibit have made more than their fair share of money profiting from the display of the bodies without the consent of the deceased, or their families.

iPad on the road for kids? Not bloody likely

2010-07-16T17:16:00.001-07:00

Don't get me wrong, I believe in the concept that keeping kids entertained on the road is a pretty good thing. However, the article referenced below mentions the general idea that somehow, as Mom and Dad and family rolls on down the road this summer, everyone (save the person driving, hopefully) will be poking around on their brand-new iPads, surfing along, cheerfully playing everything.

This is one of those things that makes me go "burrrhuuuuh?"

I know we're in the age of people happily and cheerfully handing $700 pieces of equipment to their kids, but I can't, for the life of me, understand what average parent would shove a $700 iPad at their kid while driving or trying to entertain a kid solely through the iPad. Sure, I'm positive someone will be able to do so, but come on. $700 buys a kid a laptop. You think they're going to be all trundling along in the backseat with a piece of equipment that I wouldn't trust my former roomie with? (Granted, my former roomie had a tendency to shake when he had low blood sugar and a view of technology that verged on the violent, but still. Even with a fourteen-year old kid I'd be locking the dang thing up in a vault.)

So while the iPad for kids marketing campaign seems to be rolling along, I hardly think the majority of people will be putting out iPads and letting their kids plug into it. For my money, let the kids do what worked for years on road trips - read books, listen to their personal listening devices, roll their eyes disgustedly when asked where they want to eat, and complain when the motel doesn't have a swimming pool.

But then, I'm one of those guys who wonders why a Toyota Sienna would NEED a dual-zone entertainment system. Not to be an annoying old man, but dammit, if I had to learn how to read and pack books while on vacation that would keep me occupied for a three-week run through the southwest, my kids should be able to do so too.

http://www.usatoday.com/tech/columnist/jinnygudmundsen/2010-07-08-ipad-apps_N.htm

Reiki for the Duwamish River? Really? REALLY?

2010-07-13T16:05:00.001-07:00

I present KUOW's own Megan Sukys, in her own radio show, about how reiki can heal the Duwamish river.

I'm not really all that into reiki as a practice, though I've had people practicing reiki work on me before, and my subsequent dizziness after lying faceup on a table while people passed their hands and focused energy on certain points of my body might have been due to the energy flow redirect - or that I'm 6'5" and built accordingly and failed to eat my cookie before lying down.

But somehow the idea that a Superfund Cleanup site could be healed by the power of reiki seems...well, stupid.

http://kuow.org/program.php?id=20796

2010-01-18T19:29:00.000-08:00

So, T and I are now officially engaged. While the story goes something like, "A romantic kiss held as we watched the fireworks bursting over Seattle's Space Needle minutes after midnight, and a heartfelt promise to hold no other in our hearts excepting the one we each kissed," the reality is that yes, I made that promise, yes, I made that vow, and then we both saw a freaked-out golden retriever scampering across the condo parking lot, hell-bent for cover. I, of course, being of less-than-sober mind and body, surged downstairs to try to capture the wee beastie and return it to the fold of its owner, or at least clap some hearing protection on the poor puppy.

Needless to say I was unsuccessful, but it's one of those things that reminds me not to leave little details to chance. If proposing any other way, I probably would have split my dress pants in the crotch trying to get down on one knee proposing at the restaraunt we'd said we should go to instead of, say, chasing a stray golden retriever minutes afterwards and slipping down four stairs to land on my butt. As my grandmother says, I was not born to be graceful.

But as a result of that kiss, that proposal, and the subsequent idea behind our wedding date, everything is a little "YIPES!" We went to the Seattle Wedding show and managed to book not only the photographer, but reserved our limo (a Rolls Royce 1963 Princess with enough leg room for a 6'5" groom), and a wonderful friend who happily said, "Yes! I'll DJ for you guys at the wedding!"

And we've been looking at really AWESOME cakes. The one thing I don't like in this world is sugary, high-fructose corn-syrup monstrosity cake slathered with a half-inch of icing. I like fondant; I like the filling, I like tasty crunchy eclairs, but I cannot stand the spongiform mouthfeel of the cake.

That said, I've been exposed to the idea of the "Groomscake", which was in the wedding planner T and I bought. Well, I say "we" bought; realistically I cringed from the wedding planning section of the bookstore that more or less exuded estrogen. (And in an excellent move of product placement, right next to the "Cooking Light" and "Diet for Success" section of books. Knowing one's audience is probably the best way to make a sale, right?)

At any rate, the Anti-Bride's Wedding Planner is what we're using. It's helpful, but there's some parts of it that make me realize that this is definitely NOT a book that the male gender is allowed to peer inside. Wedding planning seems to still be the last bastion of feminine holdouts. Walking into that world seems akin to tramping into a women's nail spa and salon in a leather outfit, your axe dripping with the blood of the Saxon horde. You might need a manicure, but dude, you're so very much not in the right place.

At any rate, we now have large chunks of our wedding more or less outlined, and I can probably say I'll be the only groom in Seattle who will have former Iraq-war embedded photojournalists snapping pics of me all day, but I still come back to the cake.

Oh, the cake. I tell you, if I had my way, I would declare soppy cake illegal. Give me brownies! Give me cookies! Give me pie! Give me cupcakes layered with creamy fillings! But for the love of god, you keep that half-inch of frosting away from me! The tradition of smashing cake in the face of the bride or groom makes me growl. Do that with key lime and I won't complain. My issue is with the cake.

That said, I still do love the Ace of Cakes and the Charm City Cakes show on the Food Network; the creativity and the insanely cool methods used to make food into art; which is one of the most important things to me. If I don't have the ability to make art in my life with the aspects of my work, it's not fun.

Which is why I still think people who wear rubber noses at formal events are a LOT of fun, that a ceremonial clown wig is preferable to a barrister's periwig, and a stretch Beetle is WAY better than a stretch Humvee.

But the additions of weddings and the excess seems...difficult to me. On some level, I keep wondering why people add things in like the "Groomscake". I don't want more than one cake; I want ONE cake that's awesome.

But then again, I'm also probably both the infuriatingly involved groom - most women if they really did want their significant others involved in the process mean they want someone to do the things they don't really want to think about very much. I, on the other hand, tend towards the less-than-helpful questioner of "Are you sure we should get this place/photographer/pie/floral arrangement/vehicle registry/clown for the wedding?" (Okay, I'll admit, the idea of the clowns was mine, but still.)

And the reality is, clowns or no clowns, I'd happily marry this woman in front of three people and a labrador retriever wearing a bowtie. I don't need frippery or excess to prove that I'm going to be with her for the rest of my life...

..but I do want it to be one hell of a party.

I'm excited, and terrified, and I have almost 342 days before I get to see her in the dress.

It's freaking AWESOME.

2009-12-05T02:03:00.000-08:00

As another side note: while doing a punishingly long workout today at the gym, I watched a daytime talk show (I think Maury Povich) talk about people with huge babies - and by huge I mean two-year olds with fat-flattened faces weighing in at nearly 80lbs, rolling arms and hips just to walk.

The funny thing is, the women who brought their incredibly fat kids on the show whined about how hard it was to keep food from their kids, because it's what they loved so much. One little boy, age three, was nearly 120lbs. At age three.

The thing is, there have been studies directly linking high fat, high sugar diets to a lack of intellectual growth, and the retardation of growth both physical and mental of the kids in the show were pretty clear.

I kept wondering why someone would allow their children to eat so much, and then the pictures of the parents - easily hundreds of pounds obese themselves - were shown as well.

The reply to the question of the talk show: "My baby is hugely fat! Help!" seems pretty simple:

Okay stop ABUSING your child. You allow your child to eat fifteen hamburgers in a sitting? That's abuse by neglect. You allow your child to drink over four thousand calories in a shake? That's abuse by neglect. So rather than ask what could be done, my question is, why aren't these parents getting CSD visits?

And the answer is usually that parents who overfeed their kids outnumber the parents who beat, humiliate, or commit various physical atrocities on their offspring by a vast amount, so CSD is probably less worried about your budding ten-year old triple bypass recipient and more worried about the three kids whose father beats them to within an inch of their lives in the name of "discipline".

The Amanda Knox post

2009-12-05T01:53:00.001-08:00

I will say only this about Amanda Knox and her family:

The family of the victim, Kirschener will never see or hear their daughter's voice or life again.

Amanda Knox's family may have to deal with Knox being "branded a murderer" or dealing with their daughter behind bars for twenty-five years, but they are most certainly NOT the victims here.

The victim died at the hands of three people that night who committed heinous acts. Knox and the other two defendants were convicted. Whether the judge and jury made the right or the wrong call is not up to the court of public opinion around a pretty white American girl who killed Meredith Kercher after helping two men sexually assault her. It is up to the judge and jury.

For me, I applauded the decision, and while I empathize with the family of Knox, because yeah, it sucks that their daughter is convicted of a murder most heinous and foul (and yes, probably drug-fueled), they're overlooking the crucial fact that their daughter is alive.

Her victim cannot say the same thing. Meredith Kercher died terrified and in fear for her life, and Knox, her co-murderers, and her family are simply whining about how unfair the conviction might be, when the people who truly are the victims in all of this have said nothing at all.

Meredith Kercher's family deserves more than to hear the Knox family rage against the unfairness of it all. In point of fact, Meredith Kercher herself deserves far more than that, at all.

2009-11-13T15:32:00.000-08:00

This is a short shot, but a forum I frequent helped me generate a thought.

Most people believe it to be an imperfect world simply because they can't understand certain aspects of the world. The only reason we call it an imperfect world is because we have imperfect perspectives.

The ant does not know what the sprawling ant colonies of the world look like. The individual transistor can't comprehend the full computing power of the laptop it sits in. The average Londoner has no clue what the city itself looks like.

Yeah. It's an imperfect world, but it's only imperfect from where you're standing. Funnily enough, that's kind of the point.

Naked Coffee and Springfield, Virginia

2009-10-23T15:43:00.001-07:00

I barely knew what was going on in Springfield, Oregon this morning. The closest I've gotten thus far to hanging out with my parents has been a short phone call doing a quick usability study on a software program I might be working with in the near future. (Which means that yes, my mother is, for the most part, my litmus test for software or projects that I work on. If she can't figure out how to use a software program or new product, then someone needs to work on the UI.)

Anyway, fast perusal of the news boards this morning netted me the fire that woke myself and T up this morning in the Greenwood neighborhood of Seattle, as well as the Odd News of the Day. And suddenly I realized that one of them was a little closer to home.

See, I grew up with wide picture windows and a lack of pretense of wearing clothing if I was staying home alone. Heck, most of the time in the summer, when I lived in Fremont, the morning sun in the living room would heat the house to the approximate temperature of a brick pizza oven, fired with the coals from Hades and topped up with a wee bit of brimstone. (More if the cat had found the tortilla chips and devoured the whole bag. Again.)

See, I tend to be a little less than cognisant when I wake up the morning. Part of that is due to the recurring insomnia, part of it is just not being able to gain full consciousness until a cup of coffee is down my throat and I've peered around the edges of information to get my brain geared up for the day. Peanut butter on toast, a massive mug of coffee or thick Irish tea, and I can theoretically move forward. That isn't to say I have a set schedule - the routine is the same regardless of wake-up time in Tokyo, London, Johannesburg or Mumbai. I travel well.

What I don't do well is recognize that other people might be around when I wake up. Which is fortunate that I live with my roommate, since our morning rituals mostly involve nods and grunts. And our kitchen window looks out onto a backyard of grass - at eye level. We live in a basement, and while it allows for a certain dark, cool atmosphere that's heaven during the summer, it also affords a bit of privacy.

But I never, ever think much of walking around inside my house in whatever state of dress I might be in at the time. Even if I was wearing an old kimono with a fine patina of wear around the sleeves or a pair of Hello Kitty swim trunks, I'm in my own house. Being at home is generally the place that you can let your hair down. I knew this walking around my parents' house in Springfield, Oregon, the home of the Simpsons, the home of the hippie. For the lack of a better pretense, Springfield was the final landing point of Ken Kesey and the occasional crash pad of Jerry Garcia, Mickey Hart, Curtis Salgado, and other minds of the 1960s and 1970s. It was also not too far away from Veneta, Oregon - home of the Oregon Country Fair, where both boobs and schlongs paraded in abundance during four or five days of festivities.

Yes, many Springfields have a long and fine history of walkin' around nekkid. Even Benjamin Franklin's later years involved a fine tradition of meandering around the house without any clothes on. Indeed, the man who gave us Poor Richard's Almanac and the basis for a vast store of the American governmental processes had a habit of standing in front of his windows, fully nude, balding pate exposed and straggling white hair dangling off his paunchy, white, pasty American colonial back. While drinking coffee. At the window.

With this, one might find that one of the original colonies might tolerate the idea of a man, standing well within his own kitchen, drinking a cup of coffee in the darkness of a morning, waking slowly. Most of us make coffee in the clothes we sleep in - so what harm if the things you happen to sleep in are the cells of your own skin?

Not so in Springfield, VA. Most definitely not so if you happen to be seen as an overzealous cop's wife walks through your front yard and ogles you through the kitchen door and window as you paw your eyes awake and make coffee, and decides to call her husband.

All reports about the incident say two things - Eric Williamson was naked in his kitchen making coffee, and a neighbor walking her son to the bus stop gasped in horror as the male form swayed in the kitchen, carbonized coffee particles swirling in a cup, banana and coconuts hanging free.

Also, the woman making the complaint was, officially, trespassing. That is, walking through the front yard of the residence she complains about, close enough to see through the front window.

Which makes the complaintant a peeping tom, and prosecutable as a sex offender herself.

Now, ironically enough, this is Springfield, Virginia. It is not Springfield nowheresville. The idea of a naked male form is not only available on the Internet, it's close to Washington DC, where much of the greater art of the nation is arrayed in public museums. Much of this is comprised of naked men.

Also, from the eyeballing of the property in Springfield simply off of Google Maps, this property is set back from the street. At the time of the night when it's dark, peering right into someone's kitchen, as they wake up, is not only mildly creepy, it's downright offensive.

The thing about this case that rubs me the wrong way is simple - the house, a rental, shared by multiple individuals who are commercial divers, is sited in the middle of a residential neighborhood, and across the street from a bus stop. A mother walking her son to school across a yard is one thing; seeing someone in there who's making coffee in his flipflops and nothing but, then calling the police for "indecent exposure" is quite another.

From every viewpoint of the camera that I was able to see, Williamson is far enough away from the street, hidden behind curtains and walking around in his house, ten feet away from any window. Williamson, the father of a five-year old girl, has reason to worry; the accusation of him "flashing" could label him as a sex offender in the neighborhood, even though the accusation comes from someone with their nose pressed up against the glass. The accusing mother, on the other hand, has the title of "pillar of the community" (which, in most cases, means an interfering busybody with pretensions of power and status).

It's entirely possible that Williamson knew that people were out there, knew that kids walked to school, and still went downstairs naked for his coffee, knowing he was flying solo in the house, figuring that the curtains would cover him. It's a risk.

But at the core issue here is not the sanctity of the children passing by his house nor the anger of the parents who choose to cut through his lawn, then act frightened and bully him out of the neighborhood. It's about personal property rights.

I live in a house that is shared with a family of four upstairs. There is a child of the age of three who lives there. I do not intend to display myself for the world to see, but as a resident of my own house, in my own yard, I own my right to privacy. I won't do the electric slide wearing nothing but a thong in the backyard but the idea that I should be able to lie out in the sun in a privately hidden area with nobody else around without worrying whether I'll be arrested for having no clothing. If I am on my own property or living space, rented or owned, I have a right to expect privacy not just from the public but from voyeurism of any kind.

Therefore, if the three-year old who lives upstairs from me is running free, turns and sees either my roomie or myself stumbling to the bathroom through the open basement kitchen window and reports this to his parents, I do not have any control over that child's exposure. The bathroom is five feet from my room. Two nights ago I heard nothing but rampant monkey noises combined with a tribal drum beat in a steady house rhythm, thumped against the top wall for a good thirty minutes, punctuated with primal scream therapy at atonal and irregular harmonics. Compared to me meandering through my own kitchen in a pair of boxer shorts, I'm not entirely sure the exposure of the naked form counts as a Big Bad. The failure of parenting strictures, education, and a child's witnessing of a parent's violation of boundaries doesn't justify any hypervigiliant judgementalism masquerading as good parenting.

Williamson's accuser probably saw a really good way to get noisy single males who live together in a house out of the neighborhood, away from a cheap rental. She probably found a way to embroil the bitter conflict into a serious note, and she managed to hit a single father in the place it could hurt him most with the suggestion that he might be a sex offender.

More is the pity. I truly hope Eric Williamson fights the charge and wins. I hope he sues the woman for trespassing, for slander and libel, for false accusation, and for lewd behavior. I hope he finds a lawyer who is willing to go to the mat for him and go after the Fairfax County police department, and settle. I hope that he requires a full public apology and demands a review of the officer whose wife called him in. I truly hope that this incident, in short, never remains with Eric Williamson.

The interesting thing is, Williamson's entire experience was the same routine millions of people do every morning - in a state of dishabille, begin one's day. But this smells and feels like an attack not on the Man Next Door Who's Always Naked, but rather a man who was simply living his life among neighbors in a suburb that didn't accept them.

In part, this is why I wonder sometimes about the city, and whether living in the urban environment has shielded me somewhat from the anger I would feel living in a smaller town or urban area, being accused of indecent exposure. No longer is that a quiet nudge from neighbors who casually say, "If you must, drop a kimono in the kitchen or close the blinds."

Eric Williamson, a single father, separated from the mother of his daughter, has to now look constantly over his shoulder for the police. His relationship to the people around him has been compromised simply because of the accusation of a vain, overbearing woman whose sole contributions to the neighborhood have been the forced exodus of people different from them.

I do not understand why Williamson's accuser has not been arrested for voyeurism. I do not understand why she has not been charged with trespassing. I understand that she is married to a responding police officer; and that the appearance of police harassment and misconduct is rampant all over this.

However, Williamson will never get that vindication. He's been accused of a sex crime. And from now until the end of his life, that will haunt him.

The woman who accused him should be placed in the limelight. She should have a full face. She is -not- a victim. She is someone who accused falsely, and the police force of Fairfax County, Virginia, should immediately disclose all information, including her relationship to the officers in charge.

This is misconduct. This is slander. And even if Eric Williamson has been found to be guilty of improper conduct with a rubber chicken and a latex glove on his head in full view of the public inside his place of residence, it is not the responsibility of the government to legislate the personal behavior of individuals within their own homes. Williamson is entitled to personal privacy as much as my grandfather is entitled to walk through his home wearing a pair of whitey-tighties and carrying a .357 to scare potential intruders (aka, coyotes that make it over the wall).

Frankly, Fairfax County should be hiring lawyers right now. Williamson has moved from the place of residence, and he's smart. Even if he is found innocent, his reputation and his personal ethics have forever been impugned. In an age when sexual crimes carry a stigma that follows long after the crime's resolution (and in many cases, deservedly so) the accusation of sexual misconduct is nothing to toss around lightly; and the woman who so accused him should be held to the same, if not stronger social stigma if her accusations merely turn out to be bald-faced lies.

2009-09-22T18:35:00.001-07:00

It's been a while since I posted, but today's exercise of being ill involving multiple trips to the bathroom and my subsequent impression of a sleeping zombie for most of the day means that I am hoping my body isn't reacting to:

A) four glasses of white wine
B) the fettucine alfredo, light salad and crusty bread
C) cat dander

None of which have been in my life much since the last time I felt ill. Being allergic to any of these things would truly make me a cranky boy. And since I was doing spiffy yesterday, today's one hundred eighty degree spin on feeling bleh means I was either hungover, had an allergic reaction, or both. Hangover I could deal with, it just means I was stupid. But since the reaction was so strong I'm wondering if it really was just the wine.

But none of that is in any way, shape or form the reason for today's post. Glenn Beck is someone who I'd happily push down a stairwell to save a grandmother, or authorize as a test farm animal not because of his politics, but because his political shows encourage mass hysterical stupidity in others.

Therefore, today's "Least I Could Do" strip made me smile, even though I'm still eying the chicken soup I made a few minutes ago with serious trepidation.

http://leasticoulddo.com/comics/20090922.gif

In Response: A letter to Corynne McSherry

2009-08-14T02:01:00.000-07:00

A senior lawyer at the Electronic Frontier Foundation wrote an opinion on her blog today talking about the intellectual property rights agreements that Burning Man places on its participants. Corynne McSherry argues that since Burning Man protects content generated at its private events and aggressively defends its trademark, the Burning Man Organization is in essence destroying First Amendment rights, comparing their actions to those of doctors who require patient warnings published on forums to remove their comments of their service and refrain from discussing any experience with the medical professional.

McSherry's red herring arguments notwithstanding, her assertion that the actions of the organization are a step to Big Brotherhood culminate in her final paragraph:

The BMO’s motives here may be more laudable than those of the paranoid doctors. But the collateral damage to our free speech is unacceptable. Using take-it-or-leave-it fine print to assert veto rights over online expression is no way to promote a “society that connects each individual to his or her creative powers.” Burning Man strives to celebrate our individuality, creativity and free spirit. Unfortunately, the fine print on the tickets doesn’t live up to that aspiration.

And, as any lawyer should know, fine print isn't -supposed- to promote the lofty ideals of First Amendment rights and free speech, nor the basic rights of the consumer. Fine print is there to make sure the slippery bastards who try to use legalese for fun and profit as an end-run around the intentions and ownership of content get hauled up by the short and curlies.

In my opinion, McSherry is acting as legal apologist for many websites and content hosting "providers" that, in exchange for hosting media on their websites, cheerfully co-opt the user's content for their own purposes. McSherry seems to pretty much ignore the idea that the only way to protect user-generated content from such an event to be abused at will by commercial interests is to place restrictions on the content generated from the get-go. As such, since Burning Man is a private event held on federal public land, the organization is legally able to act as the curator of the content; albeit the largest amount of content generated at any single point in time, simultaneously.

McSherry's position is untenable for me both as a participant and as a user. I take serious steps and precautions to prevent my information from being used, and I don't allow companies that slyly introduce "I Own All Your Stuff You Put Here" clauses access to things I care about. As a result, I come down solidly on the side of the Burning Man organization - because frankly, if I wanted to sell a picture of me wearing a bright orange Muppet vest to Facebook, I would have offered it to them for $20 a use. Since I cannot tell Facebook to remove the picture of me that someone else uploads, I -CAN- use Burning Man's legal requirements as a private event and agreements to destroy or take down unauthorized images of myself or my friends if those images come up.

In reference, I suggest folks read about the lawsuits between the publishers of the Girls Gone Wild video and their distribution of Girls Gone Wild: BURNING MAN. Most specifically, the protection that thousands of women received from unauthorized portraits of them in nude states. It could be argued that a nude person in a public space has no right to privacy regarding their image, but as Burning Man is a private event, each person who attends the event has a measure of protection from inadvertently becoming a pornographer's meal ticket.

I wrote an open letter back to Corynne McSherry, the text of which is published below.

For a full version of the article, click here.

Hello Ms. McSherry. I read your article with interest regarding the photography and video rights of the individual at Burning Man, a ticketed, private event held on public land.

While I agree that for the most part the ownership of information or content belongs to the individual, I question whether or not you did research with the individuals who were responsible for the implementation of the policy. Namely, Camera Girl of Burning Man and Marian Goodell, whose rationale behind the policy might not agree with your analysis.

If I'm to understand your position, a concert held by a popular recording artist, a writer whose blog is available publicly or privately on any server accessible via Internet, or a ticketed art opening with a strict "no photography allowed" rule posted blatantly at the door, attended by people who smuggle cameras in, should not be able to hold anyone legally accountable if someone intentionally violates the intellectual curation of that content.

If you would like to know my reasoning, I suggest you look for "Girls Gone Wild: Burning Man" - published by that guy out of Florida whose entire career has been focused around aggressively filming drunk women topless for profit, regardless of the legality.

Thus, I read the article with severe disappointment. You purport to be an advocate for intellectual property ownership, and yet you take a position that destroys any protection of the end user by commercial interests.

Your article presupposes two things: that the event is public. It's not. Burning Man is a private event held on public land. If you try to get in beyond the orange trash fence without a ticket you will be escorted away for trespassing by a federal officer.

Second: your article presupposes that companies such as Facebook, MySpace, and advertising sites trawling the Internet for image content based on keywords are doing so for purely free access distribution.

Your entire argument is predicated on the idea that Burning Man, as an organization promoting creative self-expression in a protected, private environment, is somehow crushing the intellectual freedom of its participants.

However, as a long-time participant, I can assure you on every level that this is not the case.

In the exception that proves the rule, Jones Soda has used an image of a sculpture, "The Passage", as an image on their soda, but since the image was uploaded using Jones Soda's image marketing tool, it does not fall within the category of prohibited material. Since the vast amount of images uploaded and used by Jones Soda are user-submitted with no cost benefit to the submitter, it could be argued that The Passage, originally built and shown at Burning Man, should be a clear lawsuit waiting to happen against Jones Soda.

However, the image used by Jones Soda happened to be of the public artwork as it resided in a public park in Burien, WA. As far as I know, no lawsuits are pending - PRIMARILY because Jones Soda did not label the soda "BURNING MAN CREAM SODA" or anything remotely as stupidly market-drivelled. It just printed a picture some of its consumers liked on their cream soda product, of an art installation that had at one point been to Burning Man.

Were your assertions correct, the Burning Man organization should be suing the pants off of Jones Soda for the temerity to place an image of the Passage, a returning sculpture and art installation to the event, and technically under the organizations "fine print" clause.

I've yet to hear screams of outrage over the bright blue soda with the neat sculpture picture on the front.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation would most definitively argue that I cannot take the name EFF and make it something else entirely, especially if my version of the Electronic Frontier Foundation was a nonprofit dedicated to Fantasy Wild West CyberNerd re-enactment, nor could I label my P2P file sharing software "EFF.ORG APPROVED! Download and screw the man! Viva La Electronic Frontier Foundation!" without peeing in a whole bunch of Cheerios.

It is so with Burning Man and the event. The rules as I read them are put in place to prevent users from having their content jacked by unscrupulous companies. Facebook's content rules, up until recently, placed ownership rules on the content uploaded to their site and turned those images over to their advertisers in an effort to maintain ANY kind of profitability.

One does not get to point the finger at the content license holder and say, "SEE? SEE? They're crushing all independence! They aren't letting anyone use their content!" while simultaneously defending the right of Facebook to abuse the same content.

EFF.org, nor any other organization, would ever permit the actions which you suggest. The hyperbolic screams that come out aren't regarding companies and public sites that PROTECT the intellectual copyright of the user, such as Flickr or other paid sites that have a hosting model of images, but rather over companies that co-opt the uploader's rights regardless of subject.

Therefore, regardless of what you think should or should not happen or be interpreted by the event, its protection is in place to prevent media companies that also have aggressive media ownership policies, like Facebook, from using private content for profit without recompense or attribution. As an intellectual property attorney, I would hope you understand the inherent damage that could occur.

To be clear - the image of me holding my infant nephew on a couch and napping that is uploaded to Facebook, by their ever-changing policies, is now the property of Facebook, even though it is the intellectual property of my sister, who performed the effort.

That is what the rules of Burning Man, to me, as a user and as a Burning Man participant, are intended to protect against. If I am photographed at any event that is private without consent and published, under the rules of the Burning Man organization, I have legal recourse against the publisher. Not so under the interpretation you have published.

But I am not aware of your level of depth or knowledge on this subject, or more specifically, of any other organization that acts as a responsible steward of the intellectual property shared in a private space. The images captured at the Burning Man event, to me, are no more MINE than the pictures of art that I take at a gallery for my personal use.

When those images are then commercialized without my consent, I must assume that the entity which performed the commercialization -must- be able to be stopped, just as an indie musician with a killer CD should be able to order a cease and desist from a rival organization ripping and burning his creations, and releasing it for their own profit. If I curate a gallery and images of the portraits are downloaded and sold, as a curator of a private gallery, I -must- be able to stop the intellectual property theft.

Ms. McSherry, I am sorely disappointed in your lack of research and perspective, and your apparent lack of information gathering from both key individuals within the organization and active participants. Your failure to garner primary source material regarding this issue makes me wonder why you even bothered covering this issue. In this instance, at the very least, your opinions look less like rationality, and more to be similar to those used by PETA in their debate tactics - namely, to scare people into reacting as if Burning Man is an Evil Very Bad No Good Corporation(tm) instead of focusing on the issue at hand - unauthorized use of personal imagery from private events.

In the future, I hope that you refrain from issuing opinions that enable the unauthorized dissemination of private information - something that, up until now, I believed your organization opposed, both in theory and in practice.

Ms. McSherry, this opinion piece, at the very least, makes me ponder whether your organization is truly interested in looking at the issues surrounding intellectual property and copyright, privacy, security and liberty, and more about enabling people to land-grab anything they possibly can at the expense of the artists and art. You are not entitled to my image; nor is Facebook. You must ask permission to take my image if I am in a private environment; that is written explicitly in the code of conduct of the event.

To act shocked and horrified when a private organization requires that the images taken at a private event be for personal use only and not commercially used is a little naive, especially for a senior intellectual property lawyer.

Shortest. Post. Ever.

2009-08-13T22:53:00.000-07:00

Sometimes I see hand-lettered signs shoved in median strips that say, "If You Didn't Make $30,000 last month, call 206-555-1111" and I think I need to make, carry, and post a bunch of signs right next to each one that say, "If You Made $30,000 Last Month, Shouldn't You Be Able To Afford A Better Sign?"

How NOT to speak at a city council meeting

2009-07-31T14:00:00.000-07:00

I can't help myself. Stupid people proving that Darwin was wrong in front of live television - more specifically, in front of a city council of Santa Cruz - is simply far, far too funny to not share.

Air Conditioning 101 for the DIY hackable

2009-07-31T05:03:00.001-07:00

Okay, so my general issue with air conditioners is this: the ones that go in the window are better than nothing. But the majority of windows designed for houses around the Puget Sound are sliders - not sash windows.

For those playing the home game, slider windows leave a nice fat gap of space between the top of the air conditioning unit and the top of the airconditioner. If you live on the ground floor, this means that your AC unit will be blowing hot air out the back and happily sucking it right back in.

This is where you do what I did tonight, which is:

Build a shelf for the AC unit out of plywood project scraps (though truthfully in previous years I used an aged tower computer case that perfectly fit the height of the window of my old apartment - on the balcony, and for someone more worried about redneckian style a pair of AC supports can usually be purchased from Home Depot or Lowe's)

And out of the leftover plywood, snip out a nearly perfect rectangle to fill the rest of the hole. My last place I used thick clear acrylic, but as a slice of Lexan acrylic is approximately ten times the cost of a hunk of plywood, I went with the previous option, adding window insulation foam around the edges and duct-taping the result together. My game plan tomorrow is to figure out how to secure the plywood against the frame with a carriage bolt for added security of the window, but for now I am cool enough to sleep through the night.

The other added bonus? I managed to get enough scraps of plywood to close up the back of my oldschool radio-to-computer server conversion AND have it thick enough to be able to install units that will hang off of the back. Woot, I say, woot.

Yes, I'm going to talk about the weather.

2009-07-29T21:44:00.001-07:00

Seattle's heat wave got mocked today by two people I know and love from the Midwest and the East Coast. Specifically, these are the people who mock me whenever Seattle has odd weather of any kind.

Look, Seattle is one of the mildest climates in the world - we have lots of misty rain and moisture, and two of the best investments you can make when you move here are a warm, easy-to-dry hat of wool felt and a windbreaker. The mist is one thing that most people don't understand - you go through windshield wipers but you never deal with pour-down rain, and if a pour-down happens, we slow down not because of the sheer volume of water, but because once water hits the road, the accumulation makes the surface slippery from the run-off. But we don't have massive, thumping heat and we don't have massive blankets of snow that stick around. Which is good, because we don't prepare for either of those. There's no real point.

T's old boss used to give her crap about people missing work because of snow until he came out from the East Coast and couldn't understand why he couldn't get out of the company parking lot due to the sheet of ice that ran down the 8% grade hill.

We live in a mountainous area, and one of the geographical features happens to be hills and mountains and rivers. We also live in a volcanic region, and while the moist air that comes over the Puget Sound is laden with fresh oceanic ions, it's also loaded with rain and moisture. Seattle never gets thunderstorms in the same way that a Kansas college town might - we have tsunami warnings, not tornadoes. And we do not have FLAT surfaces, except when it comes to water.

Every time Seattle gets mocked by someone who doesn't live here, I wonder why they even bother. Our weather is so moderate that when it goes to the extreme and people lose their heads completely, it's completely understandable. We raid the stores for fans. Our grumpiness and crankiness increases exponentially. The people in the kitchens are overloaded and sweaty and service in your favorite restaraunts slide.

We do not like climate change. It's why we live here. Oh, we pay for it with the rain and the mist, but when it snows, it melts. When it melts here, it refreezes into sheets of ice. Those sheets are on top of hills.

We don't have flat land and passive heat sinks combined with industrial freon blocks in front of our houses combined with intentional windbreaks of trees. We don't have flat roads with salt and sand trucks that flood our flat 0 degree plane roads to make it possible for us to drive to work. We barely have enough snowplows to do more than four main roads when it DOES snow.

So to you Midwesterners who've been happily snarking at us out here, panting our way through a 101 heatwave without air conditioning, swamp coolers, massive movieplexes and more "traditional" Americana methods of cooling off, I can only say:

Shut up. No, really. If you don't know what the feel of a forest fire on your face and the heat of a dry, crackling Washington summer at your back feels like, if you can't smell the algae blooms of the ocean water as the heat converts the promordial goo in it to slime, and if your entire experience of summer involves running straight from air conditioned car to air conditioned garage to air conditioned office or home, you get NO mockery leniency.

Of course, this is hugely influenced by the fact that I'm sitting clad in a pair of knit shorts with two fans blowing full bore over me and T, and hoping for any breeze at all to come wafting, cool and light over the Puget Sound to make us feel even remotely cooler. Tomorrow, I may well do all my work in the morning and siesta the rest of the day.

More to Love: Oh god, make the stupid stop.

2009-07-27T19:17:00.001-07:00

Hanging out with T, I periodically get reminded of why I love this girl. For one, I am NOT a pleasant person when I get overheated. Both her cat and I are sitting around in a 90-plus temp apartment, though I have the opportunity to remove layers of clothing, while the cat has to lie on the carpet meowing pathetically at us.

But with the pure knowledge that I have decisions that I can make with my opposable thumbs that help me cool down (like putting cloth between my shirtless back and the leather couch on a day where most people are running away to get an AC fix in Seattle).

At any rate, one of the trailers on the background noise that T plays while reading magazines and relaxing after work is E! Entertainment. This is normally a channel I reserve the same emotions for that one might reserve for a particularly cheap wine, left to marinate around the flesh of a raw chicken, found again in the back of the fridge, but not exactly ready to be tossed. A combination of "EWWWW" and rapid shoving away to ignore until I really, REALLY need to use that glass dish.

The metaphor doesn't QUITE work with E! entertainment, but hey, the girl likes it, and sometimes it's like watching a wasp stinging a nettle. Someone's going to get hurt, you don't care who, and it's entirely possible that in the grand scheme of things, it doesn't matter.

And she's a reality show junkie. I, on the other hand, am less interested in most of the shows on television unless they have some interesting hook or catch. I churn through movies on Netflix like mad, I collect old SciFi channel seasons that get canceled after only one season (The Dresden Files, Firefly, etc) and I happily rewatch old Star Trek: Next Generation shows as background. So I can't blame her for her addictions. (Apparently, I've just been notified that Joss Whedon's Dollhouse got renewed for a second season, which means that it doesn't make it into the library.)

But reality show junkie or not, there is NO excuse for Fox's new dating reality show: More to Love.

More to Love is apparently a dating show based on the "idea" that a larger proportion of America's population is bigger and fatter than most of the shiny people showing up on The Bachelor, E! Entertainment, or pretty much any television show that doesn't feature Kristie Alley or Monique. Starring a smarmy guy who looks like a massive chubby chaser happily ready to shove his fetish down the throats of people willing to watch damn near anything in the hope that it highlights their short, inanely shallow, pointless lives (which, fortunately, comprises 99% of Fox and FoxNews demographic).

According to the website the show is about a 6'3", 300lb dude who's interested in pursuing a girl with "real" proportions. Coming from a network that led the media charge to a general whoring out of slender, shallow, attractive women to a single man set up as a media icon (without resorting to the always-bizarre February-December 28th matches of Hugh Hefner), it seems a bit odd that Fox is billing "More to Love" as the alternative to all those shallow, cheap, plastic skinny people seeking true love financial stability with some random guy they meet in front of dozens of cameras.

There's dozens of foodie sites out there that celebrate the rotund, the well-fed, the munchied, the girls who slather themselves in slices of kiwi fruit and allow men and women to gently munch the food on their bodies, but there's also the feeders - the men and women who relish the idea and sexualize the addition to food.

Of course, before the end of this blog's writing, I have eaten 3/4 of an order of General Tsao's chicken and a goodly chunk of steamed rice, ordered from the Rickshaw - a Greenwood institution known more for its drunken karaoke and deep well drinks that glow with an unnatural sheen of blue (rumored to contain depleted uranium) while munching with T. Neither of us are svelte, slender creatures - my balding noggin, combined with my slightly barrel-like torso, and T's well-hipped exterior that she mournfully peers down at and wistfully declaims that if she only had thirty pounds down, she would be back to her skinny, high-school self.

But then again, we're not going to go on a reality TV show and expose our bellies to over 40 million potential viewers for fame and fortune. And if we did, it'd be in the T and B tradition, which is on CBS' The Amazing Race - dressed in orange kilts, jumpsuits, and getting through customs the most awkward ways possible.

I think what bothers me most about "More to Love" is simply that looking at the participants and the people involved, I see not beautiful people who are celebrating their difference, but rather fetishists and people with low self-esteem who shade their true selves by attacking that which is different from them - even if that true self happens to love a really well-padded frame.

I love T in many ways, but her physicality has NOTHING to do with why I love her, and I'd hope that my variable belly, plus my sporadic fitness regimes that have little to do with consistency and everything to do with Athletic Attention Deficit Disorder (OOO! Extreme Bocce and Golf! Wooo! Bike Jousting? WOO! Hiking with lots of photographs of girlfriend? HECK YEAH! Mountain climbing? Ehhhh, did that two days ago) won't scare her off, but I'm more than happy to plunk it on the treadmill or elliptical with her and talk for an hour while we churn out the chubby for an hour a day if it's a time that we can set to be together.

Fox's tradition of getting people with a TWIST not only makes me less enthusiastic about getting the show to market, but also much less enthusiastic about the way people, in general, treat the way we look at ourselves. Regardless of whether you're fat and shallow or skinny and shallow, the adjective in common is still shallow. People are still racist if they act, behave, or make racially-charged comments, regardless of their skin color.

Likewise, "More to Love" stinks to high heaven of a man whose fetish is being televised and the twenty women who parade in front of him, hoping to snare him for whatever supposed qualities he has makes me cringe, just like every other "Bachelor", "Bachelorette", and "Joe Average Gonna Get Some By Lying" reality show out there has.

ADDENDUM: T wishes by way of rapid pokes in my tender thigh to express that she does not in any way shape or form intend to watch "More to Love." As a requirement of maintaining a happy relationship, I now declare that my disbelief (specifically regarding her following or maintaining any kind of interest in the reality show whether she actually reads spoilers for the show on Reality Show Forum websites) is suspended for the duration of this blog post.

AND OH LOOK THERE IT IS.

Political Post of the Week (and I'm spent)

2009-07-27T14:25:00.000-07:00

I won't parse what Palin said in yesterday's "The Door is Not Hitting Me In The Ass" speech, but I maintain the whole speech of Palin's rambling resignation would have worked much better if she wasn't channeling Richard Nixon in body language and poses.

At least she steered clear of adding the middle finger to her gestures, though there's more than one person in both the GOP and Alaska legislature that pretty much believe the entire farce was nothing but middle fingers.

I think more than anything else, Palin's "Have Cake and Eat It Too" attitude towards the media, her family, and her bid to be a heartbeat away from the presidency is finally over, and while Palin can still huff and puff about what it means to be a true American, like Nixon, her final words as the failed governor of Alaska and the failed VP of the Republican nomination boil down to the same basic attitude that toppled Nixon and his corrupt attitude towards American politics:

Accountability sure sucks if they apply it to you, too, huh?

2009-07-27T14:03:00.000-07:00

I'm reminded by the utter lack of noise in the middle of the day and the cool of the basement how much I don't miss the heat, the noise, and the drunks who populated the area I used to live in.

Don't get me wrong, I loved the Fremont area. There's something about that section of Seattle that made me extremely happy that I lived there. The rent was cheap, comparatively speaking, the parking was off-street and significantly enough for my two vehicles, and I could pretty much count on going outside, walking four blocks, and hitting a really good pub for music and drinks at any time of the day or early evening. It was a comfortable place from the hours of 4AM to 8PM most days.

After that, the annoying drunks began to invade.

Oh, god, the annoying drunks. See, Fremont, and where I lived in Fremont, has been recently re-termed "Pioneer Square North". Really great bars, including The Dubliner, Norm's, Nectar, Brouwer's, and my personal favorite, the George and Dragon, meant that lesser bars like the Ballroom, The Triangle, and the mass meat-market Red Door filled to the brim with residents of the East Side immediately after work who plunged headfirst into the brine of cheap well drinks and alcohol, and didn't stop until they were hanging over the side of a car. Sometimes, that car would be MY car, and usually that's when I got miffed.

It wasn't uncommon to hear a fight breaking out in the parking lot when the bars closed, because let's face it, young men who are dumb enough to drink to the point where they decide they can take on the world are dumb enough to start fights in public spaces. The Seattle Police response time was nearly always ten minutes too late, so the only recourse residents had was playing neighborhood watch.

One example involved a drunk guy whistling sharply as he walked up and down the road, until finally I walked out and said, "Shut the hell up! It's 3AM." His response, "Dude, it's FREEEMONT. Chill out, hippie."

Of course, he was drunk, and in general hippies don't chase down the whistlers, then give the whistler a stumble, and in a no-uncertain terms voice remind them that while people who wear tie-dye shirts MIGHT look like hippies, sometimes they carry big sticks and are more than happy to use said stick to ensure silence. Watching a cocksure 21-year old drunken idiot swallow his tongue, and while losing control of certain bladder functions, promise to leave, may not be a pleasurable experience, but I didn't hear any more whistles that night.

There was the Human Sprinkler - the guy who whipped it out and began peeing in the middle of the sidewalk but whose friends startled him into spinning around.

Drunk Girls Who "Hide" while peeing - unfortunately, your butts are visible to all, honey.

Mr. "I'm just gonna sit here with the car idling to sober up"? Yeah. Don't. Call a cab. Because if you don't, we'll call the cops.

"My Ride is SOOOO PIMPED" bassthumpers out in the parking lot? Don't be shocked if those nice rims have flat tires in the morning from screws in them.

See, it wasn't that any of these things actually HAPPENED, but the problem with a mixed-use neighborhood catering to an upscale nightlife means, simply, that the nightlife goes with it. The small pub down the street within walking distance of my place never thumps; never has fights, never has to have the cops called because two women are clawing at each other over their ex-boyfriends.

And since I've been living ninety blocks north of Fremont, the biggest issue I've had was with the neighbor's kids playing baseball with tennis balls near my car, which really, on the grand scheme of things, ain't so bad. I know where they live.

But in many respects I feel almost isolated up here. My roommate and I tend to be relatively quiet folks when we're both at home, and even T's place, situated above a fairly busy street, has a park where the sounds of basketball players drift in.

Here, there's none of that, and the thumps or bumps that I can hear some days are all the more startling for their infrequencies.

And the only annoying drunk I've recently had to deal with up here was me, but that was a simple case of overindulgence in very cold Czech lager after a long day in the sun - and a cool, quiet basement with enough insulation to soundproof a cauterwauling opera initiate cures many of those small issues.

I think I'm lucky in that I don't have to worry much. It is indeed a nice feeling to stand and watch the purpling over the mountains without having to worry about pulling your car into the driveway so some drunk jerk won't mistake it for his own, or hear the loud siren beeping of the tow truck as it hauls away yet another sleek black Acura, parked illegally while its owner goes off to play Entitlement In Fremont for the night.

Yep, I've done the urban nightlife living, and while I do like the feeling of being able to walk to whatever I like, not having to step over drunken collegiate girls sobbing into the shoulders of their girlfriends while drunken guys leer at their exposed whale-tails stabbing northward from low-slung jeans a good ten feet away is a refreshing change. Sure, I can't walk to PCC or a good Thai place, but then again, I don't have to avoid the Human Pee Sprinkler to do it.

Brain Crack?

2009-07-25T15:46:00.000-07:00

I still laugh about some of the ideas that I have had and that I've talked about with people, especially in the artist community. Everything from that nuclear missile silo that could be converted into an art space/residence/rat warren to a sitting platform sculpture that allowed someone to (apparently) do a kung-fu yoga move for twelve hours without moving, each of those ideas had to take some time and energy to actually execute.

So I started writing some of the stuff down, and thus far, I have a small book of ideas that I'm floating among people I know and trust who could actually help get it off the ground, but limiting my pool of enthusiasm and "OMG, AWESOME!" to those folks - instead of Joe Random.

The thing is, this video, found on LifeHacker.com, is one of those things that you think, "Well, DUH, I don't want people to steal my ideas!" as opposed to "Well duh, if I talk about my idea with smart people, they're mostly going to give credit to the visionary as opposed to running away and stealing the idea from me."

Anyway, worth a watch (but ~~possibly~~ DEFINITELY linguistically NSFW).

Getting my Handsome on at Valentine's in Greenwood

2009-07-25T12:48:00.000-07:00

Before I begin talking about just what Valentine’s did to my head this morning, let’s take a moment to realize a couple of things. Men, in general, spend around zero to no time thinking about their hair, comparatively speaking. When I had hair down to my butt, I didn’t do anything with it. Every so often I’d get the ends trimmed to kill the split ends, but that was less at my own urging and more of the females in my life. The women I know, however, have the stereotypical acre or more of haircare products.

So it’s really not surprising that most of the guys I know take a laissez-faire attitude towards their scalp and the tonsure growing out of it. From the Bunny Faja, a DJ/Insurance Agent in the south came a recommendation of a chap who works in nothing but clippers. From another friend came a recommendation that I just have my significant other, T, attack my head with clippers.

But for me, getting a haircut on that level is definitely comparable to the kind of beer you drink. I’ve always shot for the beer on the higher shelf (comparatively speaking) and tried to steer clear of the beer-flavored fizzy water that passes for most canned American beers. While New Belgium has made strides this way, canning their Fat Tire and a couple of other decent brews, most beers worth drinking are still in glass bottles. At worst, I’ll go with PBR if I need canned beer, or if I’m still on a budget, I steer towards Henry Weinhards’ – not exactly the highest eschelon of brews, but still relatively good and drinkable. For those truly divine beers, I head to the People's Pub in Ballard - staffed with people who have no idea what manscaping is, but host to some of the most exquisite beers in all of Seattle. Also, deep-fried dill pickles. (No, seriously. Eat them. EAT THEM, PRECIOUS.)

And so it goes with haircuts. Since I moved to Seattle I’ve been getting my hair clipped, buzzed, and shaped at Rudy’s Barbershops, a chain that reaches around the city and meanders over to Bellevue. Rudy’s definitely qualifies under the Henry Weinhard’s rule of consumption. Not bad, but definitely not the poshest you could get.

The nice (and worst) thing about Rudy’s is that it’s a complete walk-in system – you need a cut, you go over, plop down, read a magazine, and wait to get your head clipped. But you’re not guaranteed to get a stylist you like, nor are you always guaranteed to get someone who focuses on your type of head, or your type of cut. Even though Rudy’s Barbershops seem to cater nearly 70% to men of all sizes, hairstyles, and gender orientations, they still manage to get populated by women who don’t quite know what to do when a male head confronts them in a barber chair. And when they don’t know what to do, they go with what they know.

My most memorable Rudy’s experience was sitting in front of a vivaciously tattooed woman with a picture of her and her girlfriend dancing on a beach, and me smarmily (and probably, stupidly) saying, “Make me look totally hot. You know, like you’d want to date me.” I wound up with a haircut that made me look like an extra in a K.D. Lang music video. Upon arrival at T’s place, she gave me the universal, “I like your…haircut?” To which I replied, “I look like I should be out protesting male dominance over womyn.” Sweet woman that T is, she began hicupping with laughter, telling me that she didn’t want to hurt my feelings when I first came home, but as long as I knew what I looked like, she was okay with rolling on the floor pointing at me and losing her vocal cords while she shrieked in the throes of hysterical giggle-agony.

At least that’s what I think she said. She began snorting and coughing, wheezing about five minutes into the experience. But the message stayed pretty clear – I wasn’t exactly James Bond material in this haircut. More like Fraulein Dietrich Von Wulfenstein, and not the slender blonde one, either. At the very least, I was able to pull her from the floor before her neighbors called in a domestic disturbance, and I’d have to worry about an accidental discharge from the responding officers as they joined T on the floor laughing their heads off.

In other words: maybe it was time to upgrade my haircut. Rudy's "It's Cheap! It's Sexy" seemed to apply to people who prefer the first over the latter, because frankly the latter, in my direct experience, was so definitively the garnish, not a main ingredient to the menu.

And don't get me wrong, Rudy's is still a great place to get a haircut in Seattle, but the barbers are definitely hit-or-miss. Rudy's still has a location with a tattoo parlor and piercing studio somewhere up on Capitol Hill in Seattle, and the all-in-one body modification system seems to attract a clientele that adheres well.

But again, time to put the big-boy pants on and go get an actual haircut at a place that knows how to 'scape a man's head. So, I tried two different spaces.

My adventures into salon barbershops began a series of misfires. One upscale place in the downtown Seattle area was substantially lacking for what I got – the stress of parking for two hours while I got clipped and shaved in addition to a less-than-cheerful atmosphere made me ponder why I even bothered heading there in the first place. The pain in the wallet made it even worse - I wound up looking like an extra on the set of Dick Tracy. I headed back to Rudy’s and my semi-Lillith Fair ‘do.

As luck would have it, every drive north up Greenwood to make it to T’s place for dinner would take me by Valentine’s. I’d driven by it for years without noting it much. It’s not really flagged in bright neon or emblazoned with huge lettering. It’s more of a subdued place with leather chairs and lounges in the background. Originally, I mistook it for a clothing shop in the same vein as others along Phinney Ridge and Greenwood – boutique, independent shops with higher-priced items.

And around June 20th, I needed a cut for a wedding. While I don’t really take much time to plan this sort of thing, I rang in and asked for a haircut from the perky receptionist. “Nope, sorry, we’re booked up. We have a lot of weddings today.” Oh, the irony.

“So, is it possible to get it next time around?”
“How far is the next time around?”
“Well, how about four weeks from now?”
T elbowed me in the side. The girl’s got some sharp elbows.
“Oh, right. Five. We have an event that weekend.” An event that I would probably return from, looking bedraggled, mussed, and generally like the night of the living dead, possibly with a minor burn injury to my hair from random sparks of fire and other combustibles after serving a lot of very happy people much whiskey and playing much blues music in a traditionally thumpa-thumpa environment. Also, scruffy. My predictions are startling accurate some days.

“Sure, Saturday at 11 is when we have open. And we’ll have you getting your hair cut by Valentine. Did you want a straight razor shave? Manicure? Pedicure?”

Wait, so the guy who's going to cut my hair is the actual guy who owns and works at the place? Not some strangely ficitious character exhorted to stop his messing around by The Specials? I had visions of an old-school Mafioso type with leather suspenders and a belly rapidly expanding. Then I remembered that this is Seattle and revised it to a black t-shirt and suspenders.

“No, just a haircut is fine.” And I promptly forgot about it for five weeks. Heck, I didn’t even look at the website. Which is a good thing, in all honesty. It truly would have fulfilled my impression that a small Mafia family ran craps games out of the back room, staffed by bubble-gum chewing women with teased hair similar in shape and structural integrity to the conning tower of a submarine. (Yes, I’ve been to men’s salons in New Jersey, and yes, it left an impression.)

The Date With The Razor Blade

This morning T woke me up playing Saturday Morning cartoons in the living room, rapidly switched to Talk Soup once she heard me stumbling into the bathroom. A none-too-gentle reminder to me regarding my hair involved, “Honey, I’m glad you’re going to get your hair cut. You look like a rumpled hedgehog.”

“The cute kind?”

“No, the other kind.”

Since the only other kind I could really think about was the roadkill kind, I didn’t pursue it and headed down the road in t-shirt and shorts and some old runners I’ve not really had much cause to throw on in a few years, managed to get parking in front of the building, and meandered in.

When His Mighty Schlubbiness entered the door, I was possibly one of three customers in there, but at that time of the morning, the place was already staffed by three women and two men – a Japanese-American stylist with a full beard, and a slender man wearing a pinch-front straw fedora. A quick look makes you think that the place is not, by any stretch of the imagination, a salon. Full leather club chairs, loungers, magazines neatly arranged on distinctly masculine topics (though I failed to see anything skimpier than a Maxim, and nothing more erudite than a National Geographic Outside). And the dresscode of the people working there (even some of the clients) was far in excess of my own, but then a guy wearing a white t-shirt, with a five-day old scruff of beard meandered in and I no longer felt like King Schlub. Small victories.

Valentine’s looks and feels like a 1950s’ men’s club with a vaguely office-type feel. The cabinetry and autoclaves fit into the décor, as opposed to occupying space or glaring out in neon blue and chemical disinfectant. It’s one of those places where you know that the entirety was designed to a purpose and the people who run it are very good at knowing what their clientele wants and expects.

Checking in at the high counter (the first one I could happily rest my 6’5” elbows on), the first thing I heard was, “What would you like to drink?”

Drink? What? Drink? Most of the time I would meander to the Fremont Coffee Company for a NASCAR Special – four shots of espresso in a single cup and a $1.50 PBR before hitting Rudy’s when I lived in the Center of the Universe. It seemed like the thing to do at the time, and often removed any lingering feelings of trepidation at my impending diesel dyke makeover. But apparently Valentine’s feels differently. I briefly wondered whether ordering a Vesper martini would be out of place. No such luck, apparently – Valentine’s doesn’t have a liquor license.

They do, however, happen to be located next to Diva Espresso, which means that they have most excellent coffee and tea. I opted for the water, which came out gently presented on a coaster with a napkin in a martini glass.

And with just enough time past 11 for my appointment to relax in what is most definitely a smooth, comfortable chair, one of the extraordinarily efficient women walked me over to Valentine, and introduced me.

Definitely not the pot-bellied Italian, Valentine, a slender, casually-dressed guy in plaid shirt and leather fisherman sandals seems to be one of those guys who has the quiet sense of humor in the background – the one that’s way, way funnier than the loud, obnoxious guy standing up on stage making strange noises into the microphone – but you’ll never hear him, because the jackass with a sound system is busy pumping a drunken audience for yuks.

Don’t get me wrong, most of the time, I am one of those guys. I have a megaphone with a sticker on it that says, “You know what they say about guys with megaphones. They’re compensating for something.” It’s best delivered through the megaphone for a triple entendre. It’s even better when someone tries to decipher the humor. But I’m much more of a fan of the guys who smarm quietly and manage to get away with it.

Valentine had a stylist shadowing him while I sat there, and so I got a basic lesson in barbering the male head while he showed the slender, well-dressed woman behind me how to look at the horizons of the hairlines and blend it seamlessly together. (Seriously, some of the people working there could have easily gone to a Seattle summer wedding with five minutes’ notice.)

Since my general theory up until now has been, “Hey, it’s hair. Eventually it’s going to fall out (THANKS A LOT, GRANDPA) and I could either try to massage hair regrowth tonics into it or just age disgracefully” I more or less handed my hair and style over to Valentine, but he more or less looked at the shape of my head and vastly improved on the zip-zap-zip job done on it five weeks previously.

Now, I’ll admit, small talk in the barber chair is one of the things I’m not a huge fan of, but the small talk of the morning wasn’t about sports, politics, or anything else – it ranged from professions, the history of the place, the fact that I was a first-timer to the shop in Valentine’s chair, my significant other, and a few other bits and pieces. Thank god for that – I managed to talk about the methods to stave off red wine-enhanced drinking headaches, and chatted a bit about the place and its history, the expansion plans, and the added services.

Digression: If you’re sensitive or get nasty headaches after drinking red wine, don’t drink heavy Bordeaux, Cabernets, Malbecs, or other richly tannined wines. Apparently my assertion that it came from the sulfites in the wines is completely wrong, but that Red Wine Headache is a pretty common thing, and it occurs with the stronger reds, though one of the reduction effects can be placed by drinking a cup of strong-brewed Irish black tea, straight, between glasses of wine. It’s apparently suspected that tannins in the red wine – both from the oak aging process and the natural tannins of the red grape are partially to blame in certain people sensitive to tannins, which would explain why lighter reds don’t have the same effect. The tradeoff being, of course, that the bioflavinoids of the black tea that seem to help reduce the Red Wine Headache are accompanied by a screaming rush of caffeine. On balance, I think I’ll stick with shiraz, pinot noir, and temperillos in the future. Frank Sinatra might have loved his Cabs, but I’m not going to risk a headache because of ol’ Blue Eyes’ preferences.

As to the history: Being a barber has been the career of Valentine since he opened his first shop on Greenwood at the ripe old age of 23. A few years back, Valentine got tired of dealing with the aesthetic. Realistically, barbershops that have the old swirling pole don’t attract fantastic clientele, and the move to more upscale digs seems to fit the nattily-dressed crew well. The whole place would not be out of sync if there was a Wurlitzer in the background bubbling away on show tunes. And I’ll admit I wouldn’t have nearly as much fun scrunched up in a metal waiting chair, or Craigslisted church pew staring at scuffed linoleum and half-assed magazine collage work highlighting as many naked pseudo-1970s images as possible. But I thoroughly enjoyed being parked on a deep chocolate leather club chair sipping chilled water out of a martini glass. And I didn’t have to sit next to the crazy lady talking about saving the hair scraps so she can take them home and compost them in her urban garden*.

Yes, yes, I know. My punk roots are fading faster than my bleach-blonde roots. Sue me. (And that was probably the third dumbest thing I did to my hair this year, behind the Lillith Fair Experience.)

At any rate, the conversation was smooth, and far from stilted. I may attribute that to the 400mg of caffeine jouncing around in my brain, or just that it worked. In either case, what would normally be a pretty rough-and-tumble morning wound up working fairly well.

The time that the cut took was the most impressive thing for me, personally. A fast-and-dirty cut at a salon or barbershop by comparison takes around twenty minutes if you’re feeling slow, but Valentine and his crew take their time. It would be intensely frustrating if you had less than an hour to kill on a Saturday morning and just needed a quick clip, but that is not what makes this an experience. And after looking at myself in the mirror like a peacock for a half hour afterwards, I’ll admit the time difference is hugely important. Again, it’s like chugging a handcrafted, lovingly poured Czech Pilsner imported at great expense like you were shotgunning a can of beer. Not really the best idea, no. Valentine and his staff seemed to go slower not to rip through the clientele, but to actually do a really good job and take their time to make sure they got the hairs right.

Valentine’s is a full-service man’s salon, which I took to mean that they deal with the guys who aren’t into the whole manscaping routine, except as a matter of course and/or luxury. What I got was the basic package – a haircut, shampoo and lather, scalp massage, styling and drying, and for $35 plus gratuity (not included), that’s not bad at all. But they offer cleanups at two weeks for $25 – exactly what it says, a trimming and quick servicing of your ‘do to keep it going till the next cut, full straight-razor shaves ranging from $45 to $75, and package treatments ranging from $75 to $275. Manicures and pedicures are $35 and $45, respectively.

Since I wasn’t able to go the whole hog on The Emperor’s Treatment (for $275), I can only go with my cut experience, though once I get over my minor issues regarding someone else holding a straight razor to my throat, I may try it out. At any rate, after a good forty-five minutes of being snipped, Valentine handed me off to a slender woman with star tattoos on her arms who led me in the back to a hairwashing station under blue lights. “Why the blue lights?” I asked.

“It’s so that when you open your eyes from the hairwashing, you don’t get blinded by the bright fluorescents. Also, I think we’d get some strange looks if we had red ones in here,” she said, fingers rubbing at my head. Shampoo or not, gentle fingers washing your hair that aren’t your own are definitely a luxury, and damned if it’s not a nice one. The fact that I didn’t get blinded by buzzing fluorescents immediately afterwards – a definite bonus. And she beat me to the obvious joke. These people know what they’re doing.

After having my head soaped and massaged over a sink with lukewarm water, then dried, I headed out to the styling chairs – overstuffed with comfortable, clean tan lines. Three minutes of stylish mussing later I looked, and felt, like I was a sexy god of men, albeit one still dressed like a complete Saturday morning schlubbie.

In other words, I think I’m a convert to the ways of Valentine’s. For those in the north end of Seattle – and by that, I mean anywhere north of the Aurora bridge – it’s an experience worth trying at least once. I’m planning on going back. Even by the slightly higher cost standards, the quality of service you get from a cut there and the laid-back atmosphere truly does make you feel like you’re there to get your handsome on.

I know that it's rare I spend such a long amount of time NOT disparaging something about the main subject of the place, but the most striking thing about Valentine's is the lack of music overlay in the place. It's quiet, but not distractingly so, and the layout makes it feel like when you're there, you're in a private world of your own. For me, that's a unique experience, and something I rather like.

Maybe I might swing by my old stomping ground, Rudy’s, once in a while, or if I need a cut in Eugene I might stop in at my Dad’s barber down on 13th Street, but I think I’ve found my new favorite place to get my ears lowered.

*No, really. Rudy’s in Fremont has some FASCINATING people who go there. Which is why four shots of espresso and a can of PBR was the pre-attendance ritual. I was told in no uncertain detail about how one could compost dead cats, rats, dogs, hair, bones, and other items of garbage, even wrapping cardboard as I steadily and unsuccessfully tried to show intense interest in Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes’ newest love spat. Off-kilter Fremonsters – crazy, but persistently so.

Racism is still racism - no matter how much "Anonymous" you put behind it

2009-07-14T10:55:00.000-07:00

This is a short one - comparatively speaking. But the folks over at the Free Republic, a conservative blog swimming in diehard Republican loyalists willing to sacrifice one and all for the Greater Good, have crossed over the line.

Actually, it really wasn't much more than a matter of time before racially-charged insults and mockery of the Obama administration came out. The Vice-President and current top dog of the Young Republican organization had shown her true colors on Facebook with racial slurs and digs at President Obama on her home page. That page has since been removed and a retcon of her statements hurriedly established.

To see the racism that was inevitable, unfortunately, had to be something that the Obama family has experienced firsthand. However, where it crossed the line was when they went after the kids.

President and the First Lady Obama are adults, and they're public figures. But their kids? Their kids are just kids. The entire rash of racist insults spewing from the conservative forums of the Free Republic weren't aimed at Obama. They weren't aimed at First Lady Obama. They were aimed at the Obamas' preteen daughters.

The best thing about Internet anonyminity is that for the most part, you can get away with saying anything. It's also simultaneously the worst thing, because anything you say on the Internet, if it's linked back to you, can and will be used against you. By employers, potential significant others, your parents, and more.

I've explained the Facebook phenomenon to several friends - look, if you have pictures of yourself humping a stuffed unicorn and/or other really stupid stuff on Facebook, maybe you should, instead of complaining that they shouldn't be judging you on the basis of that picture alone, figure out that taking the damn unicorn picture down would be a good idea. But if it's out there and someone downloaded it, you have no control over it from that point forward.

In essence, if there are pictures of yourself looking like an insensitive jerkwad and/or complete doofus on the Internet*, don't complain when someone uses those pictures against you or places an assumption on your behavior.

Likewise, the Free Republic commentators probably didn't think that their comments would be analyzed, read, absorbed, and detailed, but were I a member of the Secret Service, and threats, even veiled ones, were made against a member of the First Family online, I'd expect that my usage and ISP would be immediately tracked down, and my "anonymous" handle rapidly become not so much.

But the end of the story is simple: the people on Free Republic who made racist comments about the 11-year old daughter may be family people, may be Christian in the extreme, may be incredibly intelligent, and may have all sorts of really brilliant things they do and say that mitigate their "online comedy".

But what they said, and what they did, was incredibly racist, in poor taste, and pretty much made every person who associated with the Free Republic identified as someone who is, was, or might be a racist Jim Crow advocate. Just like Audra Shay, current president of the Young Republicans, who may, or may not be, a racist, but committed a series of statements that could not be identified as anything BUT. Shay has released a statement that tries desperately to say that she is no racist - but the Lady Doth Protest Too Much. And Hides Her Facebook Account Too Much.

I don't care if people think they aren't racist, but I strongly believe that your actions speak louder than words. Telling someone that they are "a racist" allows the person far, far more wiggle room out of it and a whole heap of self-aggrandizing moral justification. Holding someone accountable for what they did is far easier to do and less difficult.

The thing is, watching people try to justify Sarah Palin's bizarre circus show behavior as some sort of plan is mildly entertaining in a "watching a train wreck from a safe distance" sort of way simply because I don't understand why one would actually excuse this kind of behavior in a political figure (though Palin's most recent salvo in politico world reminded us that she, like W before her, doesn't tend to actually read things before she opens her mouth). Likewise, when an adult man or woman makes threats and demeaning comments about an 11-year old girl whose only fault is being the daughter of a famous black man and woman, the only thing I can think of is that perhaps the shroud of Internet Anonyminity makes these people feel safe to allow their baser natures out to play.

And the parroting of voices, conservative or otherwise, means that many of those individuals are channeling purposeful hatred and dissent from an outside source that has nothing to do with their personal morals or convictions simply because they heard FoxNews' Sean Hannity say it.

At the end of the day, I still strongly believe in the IllDoctrine methodology of combatting this kind of prejudice and bigotry. Click play to check out what I still believe to be an incredibly effective method of checking someone willing to play the "I Can't Believe You'd Think I'm a Racist" game to weasel out of responsibility for their actions.

*Yes, that links to my Facebook page, the majority of pictures, on which, make me look like a complete doofus/jerk/idiot/goofball. If I truly wanted to fill it up more, I'd upload a lot more photos of myself doing kinder, gentler, less doofusy/jerkwad things. But I don't muck around with Facebook as much as my friends do, who happen to have a lot of photos of me doing silly things in costume.

I fear the Executive Chef with the Negative Scorecards

2009-07-09T23:38:00.001-07:00

I'm not much for foodies that can't pay attention to proper holding temperatures. When people talk about the deliciousness of a raw food, I can't help but think about preventive contamination practices. People who went crabbing off the Puget Sound last weekend will undoubtedly have issues with the whole red algae that has bloomed as a result of the recent Bainbridge Island sewage leak. And while I'm still shuddering over the idea of an unwashed carrot plucked from the earth of a garden that used fertilizers from chicken manure, I get shivers when I see people eating less-than-cooked food in a publicestablishment.

That said, I thought the two chefs who made it to Bravo's Top Chef competition, Ashley Merriman, formerly of Tilth and currently of downtown Seattle's pseudo-Roma Branzino restaurant, and the former CRAVE! owner/operator Robin Leventhal were completely AWESOME choices. After all, Seattle's food industry reps have been primarily relegated to Tom Douglas and his chain of restaurants. Ask the current foodies outside of Seattle, and you'll never find the intangibly delicious hole-in-the-wall How to Cook A Wolf, Poppy, or even the hidden jewel of the Capitol Hill area, the Kingfish Cafe. You will, however, get a direct comparison to Tom Douglas. And that other guy. And the place owned by that one guy. You know, the one with the really neat...thing. That one. Yeah.

But me being me, I can't not look at the records of a King County Metro Region chef. T and I have been watching the series for the last year and the only thing I almost always wonder is what the food is really like. I grew up with amicrobiologist and a public health inspector, so I know that you can find the records of places in the King County Metro region online. The list of closures always makes for interesting (and illuminating) reading.

Crave, Leventhal's former cafe and eatery business, is no longer open. Leventhal is currently shop-less, but due to my intense lack of trust regarding kitchens (especially after reading Anthony Bourdain's Kitchen Confidential, Waiter Rant and a few other salacious reads of the seamy side of the skillet) I spent a few times tracking down her health ratings online before eating at Crave. My response was pretty much always positive and followed what I’d find on the county public health records site: clean, decent kitchen with spotless floors and good prep, with the ability to see what's going on in the kitchen. It was like a high-end Subway, except that you could seeLeventhal carefully crafting your dinner to fit your currently paired wine., usually with fantastically teased hair poking from a hat or bandanna. Leventhal loved to meander out and talk with her folks, and even when exhausted, pulling myself to a meeting in the adjoining theater, she crafted a perfect triplegrande mocha, and left an espresso bean on top for me with a smile. The kitchen was smaller than my current kitchen - though commercial, it left nothing to the imagination nor could Leventhal hide her mistakes anywhere but the round file. Most importantly, I remember peering through her county public health records and realizing that, like many other places that do artisan food in small kitchens, she passed her inspections with flying colors before I set foot in the door for some drunken figs, mac and cheese, or their chocolate dessert.

Of course, Leventhal's popularity and the sheer impatience of many a Seattle diner echo. We tend to enjoy instant gratification, and Leventhal's Crave was the epitome of small kitchen cuisine. If a list formed of customers longer than ten, there was a wait, and the residents of Seattle's Capitol Hill are not used todisappointment regarding their feeding times. Most of Leventhal's critiques on the local reviews involve the wait times in her kitchen - not surprising when one woman is doing all the serious foodie work for you. Of course, being housed in the now defunct Capitol Hill Arts Center might explain more of thefunkified atmosphere - my time spent at the Lower Level (the bar downstairs) drinking Vo-Tang in a seriously cheerful atmosphere.

Ashley Merriman? Not so much. Oh, she still passed, and her reviews online in the local newspapers and Yelp are complimentary, if not obscene (references to acts of physical love and the duck burgers at Tilth are commonplace on both). But the colors were distinctly devoid of the adjective “flying” by any standard whatsoever.

I want to like Ashley, I really, really do. I want to know that she's a talented chef who has had a few slip-ups in the kitchen. I also want to think that cleanliness is also subjective where food is concerned.

But. It's not.

An anonymous friend told me less than five minutes after talking about Merriman and Tilth online that during Merriman's tenure, quote:

Went to Tilth for dinner one night. The first problem came upon being seated: a GIANT chunk of parsley in my not-terribly-large water glass. An easy thing to notice (HAY!GUYZ! There is a giant green chud in a glass of clear liquid that i am about to take out to a table! Maybe I should not bring this particular glass to the table! OH WAIT, NOEZ, THEY WONT NOTIS. Perhaps they will take it as a hint of our earthiness!)

It definitely set a tone for the rest of the meal.

After hearing a few other stories online, I'm not surprised, and I'm not publishing the others. Really.

At the grill yesterday, prepping for a dinner cookout with family and kids, I cleaned it fastidiously with soap and water, flamed off the metal, dried it with a high heat, and sluiced it down with a towel soaked in a light lime juice and olive oil mixture. During my grill time, one single, beautifully shaped hunk of meat fell to the brick, and in the garbage it went. I can't muck around with that sort of thing outside on the brick patio; I sure as hell won't do it in a commercial kitchen. It's lessOCD and more of a phobia backed up with years of experience staring e.coli bacteria right in the face (well, through a microscope, anyway).

And unfortunately, when doing the research on Merriman's kitchens (Tilth and Branzino), a pattern emerges.

Tilth currently holds two red critical violations during the last reported inspection for food holding temperatures and for food worker cards not being present. While that’s not damning in of itself, it reflects exactly the first consultation at Branzino that cited improper cooling temperatures and a lack of food handler cards. While Merriman may not be at fault for the practices at Tilth, she is most definitely responsible for the practices of Branzino - she has had over a full years' experience working there. The similarity of the violations is also damning in many ways.

And the only commonality between the two, at the moment, is Merriman.

I don’t assume that a kitchen staff are perfect by any stretch of the imagination. My first foray into the culinary world resulted in my running in sheer terror from the filth of a kitchen that advertised itself as “kosher”, and I know that under the pressure of making and building food from scratch, sometimes things fall apart.

But I know that one of the most important things I can have from a chef who supposedly has my culinary interests at heart is to know that what comes from his or her hands is clean food that is well-prepared following the minimal guidelines of public health.

Do I care about the flavor, the presentation, the panache, the ability of the chef to combine foods in dazzling combination? Oh, absolutely. But I also want to know if the chef merely rinsed off that delectable lamb chop after it fell to the ground, that the internal temperature of the food has risen to a safe temperature that kills any unknown microbes or holdover bacteria. I want to know her food prep staff are licensed and were able to take a class that requires a bare minimum of food safety instruction.

Merriman's only independently objective assessment shows a track record that says she is incapable of doing the bare minimum of responsible behavior as a lead chef in a kitchen. Her artistry with food is not my concern. The potential for her food making it feel like a team of howler monkeys are trying to claw their way out of my lower intestine for eight hours straight most certainly IS. For one thing, I live with a nurse, and he's quite capable at leaping towards me with a needle, prepped to give me an injection that will make the bad monkeys go away.

As for the competition? I know that every single chef out there has at one point brushed off an egg and served it to a customer. I know that soup has been chilled in five-gallon buckets instead of shallow pans, making it a breeding ground for the bacteria responsible for most “food poisoning”. I know that cremebrulee might have a little extra "flakiness" to it. But I hope they both know that first and foremost, I better not see a damn thing, and second, if they get busted by a public health inspector, on a scheduled visit, they're DOING IT WRONG.

But the establishments Merriman has worked at as “top chef” have been busted several times. They’ve never been closed, but it’s obvious that Someone Is A Slow Learner.

Even a quick dance over to the New York City Public Health Inspection website, which carries (like most others) a record of two years in public health inspections notes that Butter, Merriman's alma mater kitchen, hasn't had the same kind of issues that Tilth and Branzino have had. So it's not like Merriman hasn't had an opportunity to know where to put the spoons after you finish using them, or what it takes to keep a sink stocked with clean hand-washing tools for her staff. Repeat offenses, to me, are an implication that she simply doesn't place a priority on the safety of the eatery's food.

And perhaps that's unfair. I know that if I tracked my own mistakes in a work environment over the last three years I'd be wondering what kind of slacker I actually am. However, when I screw up, it's a period out of place. When a chef screws up, it's a potentially dangerous health issue. I pay to have my food cooked well, and to have it cooked safely.

I also know that Tom Douglas is able to run multiple food establishments in the city of Seattle, none of which, in two years, have had a red critical violation or a citation above “you’re out of soap in this dispenser” - with Douglas rumored to drop everything and get the issue corrected before anything else happens in the kitchen (unconfirmed, but it might explain why I've seen him more than a bit huffily preoccupied at a local restaurant supply store, twice).

It’s not just attention to the food. It’s attention to your work environment. I know Bravo’s going to gloss over most of these things, but in the simplest of things that a public eatery MUST succeed at passing – a government inspection –Merriman has lost both my potential custom and my respect. Simply put, I'm afraid of eating her food for what it might contain, and I'm afraid of endorsing her business because she seems to operate outside of the legal requirements for her employees (which is like failing to learn why one should wash your hands). Getting a food handler's card is not terribly hard, and even the busiest kitchen staff should be able to find a test time within their schedule, so one wonders why Merriman's crews aren't doing it. If I have time next week, I might even do it just to see what it really takes. I'll even do it without studying.

But, in the meantime, I'll be watching Top Chef on Bravo and hurriedly collecting all the episodes I can on whatever service I can (Hulu, TiVo, YouTube, VCR, whatever) to keep up with my Seattle culinary crew. I have a feeling that Bravo's producers collected people from around the country with an intention to develop this season with strong, differing flavors and regionalcompetitions, to see how people shine. But to quote a friend who checked my reservations about Merriman before I published this article, "That's so very Seattle."

Indeed. I know. I'm whinily concerned. It is nigh on our city's pastime to analyze, bitch and then moan (sometimes in a reverse order) about someone else's efforts at artistry, talent, or skill. But I do take my art seriously; if art kills, or the culmination of that art makes someone very ill, it's not something I think should be celebrated and/or slid under the rug.

Regardless of whether Merriman or Leventhal win, or find themselves Top Chef of Season Six, the half-apathetic nature of the Seattle residents will find reservations and increased revenue of their respective businesses increase, regardless of their past, or their performance on the show, or how many people have mouth-induced orgasms over their food. Seattle loves our losers and our winners regardless; but we'll happily wave, and let the door hit you on the ass on the way out if you leave us.

As a side note, I am planning on working up pre-premiere bios of at least four of each of these folks prior to the release of the show, if only to give a bit of balanced coverage. Watch for future updates and/or snarkasaurus tracks.

I don't often post chinese cookie quotes, but...

2009-07-09T18:45:00.000-07:00

This was kind of a good quote for the end of a long, yet very warm and deeply personal three-day holiday.

Thanks to rosephase (over at rosephase.blogspot.com) for posting this.

Although I'd kind of like to know who said it.

Tonight it rung true. On many levels. Presciently.

Update on Sanford and his "ain't putting up with your philandering ass" wife

2009-06-26T17:28:00.000-07:00

Okay, I'll admit it. I love seeing self-righteous people eat a faceful of dirt. It's glorious fun. It's why clowns exist in the world, because if the clown bites it, you expect that. It's not funny when a clown walks into a wall or trips over his own feet or takes a banana cream pie to the face. It's -hilarious- when Rush Limbaugh does. Likewise, when Anne Coulter begins raging against the liberal Democrats who are destroying society and demanding that women stay at home and abdicate their careers to their husbands, I love seeing intelligent women step back and say, "Hey, weren't you a liberal pundit before they realized you weren't entertaining? And don't you have a career you put before cookies and staying at home with kids?"

But man oh man, do I like seeing someone who raised his entire concept of being a guy who put family, kids, wife and country first stand in front of press conference after press conference to a candidacy for Presidential aspiration in the GOP stumble his way through a speech without his wife standing by his side.

In point of fact, she booted his butt out, waiting until the kids hit summer vacation so the news, etc, wouldn't interrupt their schooling. And rather than stand behind him at a press conference with clenched jaw and plastic stony eyes as she "supported him" in his decision for his political reasons, I have visions of her simply putting down the phone and walking away from it the minute the subject was breached.

Look, how people handle infidelity is their own lookout, but I can assure more people that after being on the opposite ends of that coin several times during my dating career, if infidelity occurs in a relationship, it's pretty obvious I'm going to not feel terribly tied down myself.

And men in power have a magnetism about them that some girls just really dig, but when one attaches the identity they've self-created to an image of God, Momma's Apple Pie and the Flag, with a white picket fence and the American Dream, to convert to philandering Latin playboy on the sly just won't end well.

I mean, don't get me wrong. Part of the reason I happily and cheerfully voted for Obama was the disclosure that they had discussed it as a family, and without a commitment to his family in the form of the grandmother living with them in the White House, they weren't going to seriously consider it. Truth be told, how could you?

I greatly respect Ron Sims, the former King County executive and current Deputy , because at one point someone called in on a local talk radio show and lambasted him for not attending what the caller said was a vitally important meeting. Sims replied, "That meeting was on a Wednesday. I have dinner, every Wednesday night, whatever else goes on in my life, with my wife on Wednesday. There is no compromise on that." When asked if that was her rule, he said, "No. That's my rule."

I'm currently hanging out in T's flat with her cat, who seems to enjoy the common feline protest method of gorging oneself and hurking it up on my shoes. He's doing this because she's in eastern Washington at the moment doing family stuff for the next few days, and I'm here because he's neurotic enough as it is without being left alone for four days. (Also, she has cable. And Food Network.) And as far as that goes, having to spend more than two days away from T is annoying as hell.

Sure, I happily enjoy the summer dresses and the steady realization that there's a LOT of blonde chicks in Seattle who seem to appear more often when the weather changes for the better, but would I throw a wrecking ball into my current life and love just to try a new sexual smorgasbord? Not a chance. I miss T a stupidly large amount at the moment and I know part of that is remembering that there are reasons I'm with her and not with, say, Slutty Summer Dress Chick Number 12, ranging from the fact that No. 12 was carrying Bud Light and talking about Dolce and Gabbana's product placement in the new Bruno movie to the fact that T's perfectly okay with me hanging out on her couch on some random evening just poking at the keys on my Mac while she pokes at the keys on her new PC.

We probably wouldn't do that on, ay, any given birthday/celebration/holiday, but it's a pleasant feeling when you realize you can let some of the barriers go.

With Sanford and his wife, I feel deeply for the fact that they grew apart, like I do for any couple who find themselves in a strained relationship, but it's kind of like people who jump on a refinance deal for their Jumbo Loans by borrowing MORE money. Really, the idea that if you can't pay your current mortgage that getting yet MORE debt is going to solve your problem is a very 2001-2008 sort of economic solution.

I suppose that's not out of character, though. The running gag of the Republicans in Congress has been "more more more more" for the last ten years and scooting out the door before the check comes. When it happens in a marriage, though, the aftershocks of the selfish bastards out to squeeze whatever they can ripple to the innocents more than they do to the people causing the problems in the first place.

But Sanford could take heed from the late Michael Jackson' reported conversation in the car on the way to his final court appearance of "Why Me? Why Me? Why are they targeting ME?" the day of his jury decision in his sexual abuse case, the answer is pretty simple.

You. Slept. With. People. Who. Were. Off. Limits.

That's not a terribly hard concept to grasp. Sure, Sanford admitted to schtupping an Argentinian MIHF and MJ was acquitted of trying to do the same to a prepubescent boy, but the action that got both of them in trouble was the same. Sanford, consensually, MJ acquitted, but accused of nonconsensually.

But eh. People in powerful positions are interesting. On some level I think it would be incredibly cool to be on TV and be a contestant in X, Y, or Z reality show, but on another level I've seen the supermarket tabloids, and I'm fully aware that there is no human on the face of the planet who is protected from that media spotlight once it lands on them.

Sanford, sons, and polyamory

2009-06-25T01:20:00.000-07:00

I'm fairly sure that the three chirping crickets following the occasional update to this blog are A) intelligent not to click on links about polyamory or sex or relationships at work B) probably my significant other and/or a limited audience who've found their way here via my half-hearted links via the web, or C) both.

That said, I'm about to delve into NSFW categories of information. The following is probably not kosher reading material, but I'm always curious about the way people approach different decisions.

For instance, I'm both delighted and astounded that during the Iranian presidential election, President "No Really, I'm Not an Unstable Puppethead Dictator Who Enjoys Non-Alcoholic Pina Coladas, Long Walks on the Beach and Crushing All Political Opposition" Ahmadinejad used the Persian equivalent of "Yes, We Can" for his campaign slogan. Delighted, because it's terribly fun to watch hypocrisy in action. Astounded because it's questionable if he realized how much of a bonehead move ripping off the election slogan from the current leader of The Great Satan was going to be at the time.

I'm also fairly certain that President Nutsy didn't really think people were going to whine about yet another thrown election in his favor, or that by using Twitter to try to round up Iranian dissidents based on time zone he discounted how many people from San Francisco to Berlin would cheerfully set their local time to Tehran. But it is Iran, and they are very good at rounding up and kangaroo-courting dissidents. Of course, "fully democratic elections" in countries headed by dictatorships often result in political testiness when the people don't shut up and vote like they're told to, but in thirty years or so I'm sure the Iranian revolutionaries will all look back on this and laugh. Or cough in their prison cells. One of the two.

But politico-topic-of-the-day aside, I'm always fascinated on some level with the decisions someone makes that I'm fairly sure I would never make myself. For instance, an eighteen-year old Belgian girl who got 56 star tattoos on her face and blamed the artist when her father went nuclear. Sometimes these little white lies work in your favor, but telling people you passed out under nine needles injecting stinging liquid under your skin, on your face, is less likely to work unless you've a genetic disorder (like your brain being missing) that skipped a generation.

And I am very sure that teenage pregnancy, for most, is more about making decisions that have a critical effect on the rest of your life and for the life of your child and way less about using your new-found fertility as a path to fame and glory.

For instance, I'm fairly sure that if Jesus was born today in an "immaculate conception", Mary might try to be the Appointed face of Abstinence Only Education, while Joseph meandered back to play hockey....er, I mean, try to be an involved parent in the life of a child under the media spotlight who happens to have no actual marketable skills outside of the ability to complete wood, stone, or ice carving. And that he was told in a dream to take (wink wink, nudge nudge) Mary to prove earthly birth legitimacy prior to the actual wedding ceremony that would have made that whole angelic vision unneccessary. Oh, and he's rumored to be half Mexican. Er, Babylonian. What was I talking about? Riiiight. Use condoms and/or think about what one would do to obtain condoms, kids, or you'll wind up with a kid of your own who might grow up to found a new religion analyzing your every move from his birth to your death. Or be a political icon symbolizing teenage pregnancy. Your choice.

In some strange way I completely understand the mental acrobatics we go through as well. The question I asked multiple times to teenagers who had questions about whether it was okay to have condoms in your wallet was simply, "No".

Upon further explanation, my reasoning was this: if you're going to have sex, you're going to do it safely and accurately with a minimum of fussing around. To that end, getting condoms, lube, and practicing both the adornment and removal of the contraceptives isn't by any stretch (heh, heh) of the imagination a preplanning for sin or sinnerdom, it's basically figuring out ahead of time how to drive safely. Nobody flicks us crap for knowing how to do CPR even if you never hang around people with quadruple bypasses and/or poor swimming skills, but it's useful information to have in the event you ever do. Admittedly, nobody walks around with a CPR faceshield in their back pocket, either. The phrase "time and place" factors in immensely, and is also specific vis-a-vis stupid places to fumble with said condoms: broom closets, backseats of cars, long grass, poison ivy, camping trips, the fifteen minutes her mom's going to be at the store, etc. If these kids who know how to use condoms never actually enact that knowledge until their wedding day, who cares? The removal of that information from their arsenal is as intelligent as leaving loaded pistols around, saying NO TOUCHY and not mentioning why you should not juggle them or try to spin them on your fingers.

I like to think that at the very least when I give awkward teenagers the advice of "who cares about marriage? Wait until you have exactly the right time, the right context, the right setting and have enough condoms and lube to make latex animals afterwards" they cognate the connection between "accidental sperm in vagina" and "baby come out". How they term "accidental" is purely up to them - via fuckup in condom or the heat of the moment of teenage naked lust monkeys on some snowbank in Alaska near the Russian border.

It's easy to take what seems cuckoo to the majority of people and label it with a swash of prurience as "deviant" or "decadent". Heck, even, articles about Jon and Kate's recently announced divorce have begun questioning whether or not their divorce is "unChristian", to which I have to ask, "Did you even WATCH the show? I'm pretty sure Satan lives on Earth and has taken the form of a hyperfertile blonde chick in Hershey, Pennsylvania." I've taken the precaution of crossing myself each time I pass the checkout stand with all those devilishly chocolate goodies, just in case, but again, I find it fascinating that there are still people who believe in some unnamed, undefined "sanctity of marriage" when a cable television channel shows hours of incredibly shallow people enthusiastically violating it more than an Iranian protestor's human rights.

I'm actually wondering why the "unChristian" questioners are less concerned for the safety and home environment of eight children born to freaky reproductively greedy parents who barely tolerate each other living under the glare of a hundred cameras and a train of babysitters. Oh, and more paparazzi than your average nude beach hosting Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie. But hey, if God didn't want you to suffer through a marriage made in hell compounded by insane reproductive technology choices and half-assed cable network TV stardom, he wouldn't have founded the modern bedrock laws of the institution of marriage, right? Or maybe that was, say, the Roman Empire. In either case, whether Yahweh, Jupiter, or Zeus codified the institution of marriage into the traditions known today, I'm fairly sure whatever deity currently approves or disapproves of human partnerships would be fingering thunderbolts, rivers of blood, or a plague of toads. (Unless "toad" is mistranslated from the ancient Aramaic scriptures and truly means "scribes and sculptors who shalt follow you everywhere, lo, writing upon thy foibles and critiquing how fat thy clothes makest thou look".)

And the thing is, when someone holds up a highly biased example of what NOT to do in a generalized type of relationship, I tend to scramble for another example, even though I'm fairly certain that the next example is going to be fraught with near-identical issues. It's like finding out that the McDonald's down the street found e.coli contaminated meat and running to the next nearest one instead - the probability factors don't increase in your favor.

But the thing is, "Oh, my goodness, how unChristian this whole divorce thing is!" sounds to me less like a protestation of the needs of the people involved and way more cover-your-ass condemnation from the people who can't stop themselves from telling you how much your afterlife is going to SUCK if you don't give them 10% of your income.

And I will fully admit it, I once was in a stage of my life where I would think the whole "Jon and Kate" mucky divorce/religiously-inspired baby factory saga would be limited to monogamous couples in Christian-church sanctioned marriages.

But oh, no. No no no. See, monogamy carries its own burden of issues, but polygamy and polyamory are even MORE fun.

Truly, as a guy who would be best described as a serial monogamist, happily ensconsced in a monogamous relationship, I comprehend what a pain in the ass it's got to be to juggle the emotional lives and needs of more than one person at once. When I wasn't in a committed relationship, I called that "dating". I came to the fast realization that I'm simply not an emotional multitasker above two, and frankly some days I'm rated only to handle my own. Trying to maintain more than one physically and emotionally romantic relationship at a time is exhausting, and I'm not making an oblique reference to Cialis. God help you if you're trying to run a large institution, company, country, or state and screw up so badly you go missing for five days while your staff scrambles for excuses. "Hiking in the Appalachians! Yeah! That's WAY better than the Emergency Defense of Marriage meeting off the coast of Argentina!" Ah, no, Sanford. Not really.

Anyway, in a very long ramble, I've come to the spark point of this post, which was the local polyamorous advocate's blog a friend of mine recommended. http://rosephase.blogspot.com/ is written as a blog dedicated to the philosophy behind one person's personal choice to have open relationships.

And by and large, I agree with many of the philosophical arguments most evanglists of polyamory espouse. Had Sanford discreetly approached his wife about having an affair with a mutual Argentinian friend and figured out a way to bounce the peso, so to speak, in the governor's mansion with full permission, I'm fairly sure this whole scandal he's now in wouldn't have found itself anywhere near the front page. However, by vanishing off the face of the earth for five days sans anyone knowing where he was headed, it became a full-blown sex scandal, replete with the now-banal, "I have been unfaithful to my wife" describing a relationship the Bible-thumping, "get morality back in government now" governor had with the woman who, eight years ago, advised him to stay with his wife for the sake of the kids.

Eight years ago a divorce would be career suicide for a rising star of the Republican party (okay, any rising star of any American political party), so it's a tad misleading to beat Sanford too harshly, and the obvious joke that the Edwards' estate in Chapel Hill has expanded the doghouse to include Minority and Majority suites is, well, obvious, now that I've made it.

But what I think our reactions to on so many levels with this kind of insanity generated around whose genitals conjoin with whose is not that the organs are doing anything out of the ordinary, but rather the hypocrisy and the mendacity that surrounds them.

Had Jon and Kate simply said, "Screw it, you're a bitch and you're a bastard" early on prior to trying for kids to salvage their relationship, and gotten divorced, they'd have no more cause for celebrity than your average hyperfertile-with-the-aid-of-fertility-drugs/surgery people. No harm, no foul, and it's possible that the two of them might not have pulled five seasons of television from a cable network known previously for its dedication to estrogen-laden made-for-TV-movies.

I'm fairly sure I personally know (and adore) the writer of rosephase both for their warmth and their generosity of spirit, but I'm also fairly full of stories I can tell of polyamorous individuals and the more libertine examples of their ways. Contextually most of those stories involve massive amounts of booze and controlled environments, but the actions speak incredibly true to stereotypes of young hipsters running amok nekkid, and while I know that indeed, there are warm, generous, healthy, happy polyamorous individuals and couples out there, the ratio of those folks to the maniacally callous Swingers of Hipster Love is few and far between. These days, polyamory is polyfuckery - the use of the word love substituted for a simple fix of moral flexibility for someone unable or unwilling to compromise their own needs in partnership for another.

But you know, the straight-and-narrowists who vigorously defend pestle-and-mortar marriage at all costs are simply losing the battle when it comes to bastions of Faith and Devotion...to one's wife or husband. And I can hear the self-ascribed freaky-freaks cheering in the background as once again, Republican and Democrat Soapboxers alike admit to the inability to keep it in their pants. I'm not exactly sure what they're cheering, or why someone breaking a promise of trust is cheerworthy, but I get it. Watching someone self-righteous and haughty get it in the nose with a cream pie of their own making is comedy gold.

Likewise, when Sanford pleads with the press not to interfere with his wife, it doesn't ring true. As a political figure, he knows that ain't going to happen, and as a husband, he OUGHT to know that his betrayal of her is all the more painful because damn near -everyone- with an Internet connection on the planet now has an idea of what he did to her. I am positive that on many an Internet Blog promoting the many benefits of uncontrolled polyamory, the cry, "Well, that just shows how much monogamy is unnatural and fails to keep people happy" will crop up.

Hell, I'm pretty sure they were out in front of the Christian apologists noting that Jesus forgave him long ago and it isn't up to the masses to critique his ways.

But Jon and Kate? Now them's a rich, juicy target for The Lord.

In a large way I think the writer of this blog misses the point of "marriage" as a written concept in much the same way opponents of "gay marriage" or proponents of "opposite marriage" miss the point when discussing the actuality of it. And while it's good, solid argumentation, it's misleading, nonetheless.

"The whole premise behind marriage is exclusiveness? The whole premise is keeping other people away from something you have to give, like love or sex? And exclusive love... LOVE? If you are married you can’t love your friends? Love your children, love your family?

Yes, yes but those are different kinds of love so they don’t count. I dare you to try and love two people in the same way. You can’t. Love is like any other connection it is individual and unique for the person you are connecting with.

But really the thing that bothers me about this is - I don’t want to be a part of any institutions that are about exclusivity. I don’t join golf clubs.

Marriage is about commitment, it’s about celebrating a relationship, it’s about bringing people together. Families, friends, and yes sometimes lovers. It’s about sharing your love with the community. Marriage, as I choose to see it, is about opening your relationship. It’s about inviting people into your life and your love.

Love isn’t about keeping people out; it’s about letting people in. Marriage is a celebration of love." - rosephase.blogspot.com

Well...kind of? What marriage as a word has meant for centuries was "legalization of a relationship involving two sexually and romantically involved persons of differing gender allowing rights of inheritance and co-ownership of property for said persons of differing gender except for the one with no Y chromosome." Only in the past century has that Y chromosome gained some status, but not universally, and the expectation that the social acceptance of said partnership will show up any day is still kind of silly, what with the continuance of White Power organizations and neo-Nazi movements fifty years after the American Civil Rights movement and not fifteen after the racial genocides in Rwanda.

That marriage SHOULD be defined as a partnership between two individuals who have chosen to join families isn't in question; the indignant outrage that the society's acceptance of marriages that add "forsaking all others except the ones we think are hot and/or unlikely to challenge my/your place in your/my sexual and emotional hierarchy" hasn't quite caught on yet seems kind of odd, if not misplaced.

And yes, I'm fully aware that polyamory as a personal choice is not that stereotype, but I'm also aware that the unique challenges facing most polyamorous couples regarding the issues of jealousy continue, as always, to converge on a pecking order hierarchy of sexual preference - if not between genders, then between sexual partners.

I am fully positive that many people in marriages that are marriages of political and financial benefit conduct their sexual lives out of the spotlight, and would not be shocked if Condi Rice and W had a thing going on the side under Laura Bush's nose. Woefully chuckling and waiting for the tell-all tapes from the Oval Office to be released forty years from now, but not terribly shocked.

And honestly, why not compare a marriage or a long-term partnership to a golf club? Why not compare a personal series of relationships in your life to an exclusive club where you, as the property owner, get to decide who plays and who doesn't? I have had divots and mulligans a-plenty, and only through my admission of who gets to play on my fields and who doesn't did I figure out that I'm perfectly fine and I'm willing to close my gates to all other players once the right one walks on the course. Most golf clubs are like that - admission is limited based on attributes. Love can be as well. But someone who declares themselves open to all is going to get a lot more damage over the long haul.

Or, as I found out at the age of seventeen, "public golf course" doesn't actually mean "public and open to anyone, more specifically horny teenagers who decided that the private spot over by the ninth hole would be perfect for two people to have their initial sexual experience". It does, however, often connote a greenskeeper with a sense of humor and a set of well-timed sprinkler systems. In other words, the public versus private golf courses still cost a good deal of money, time, and energy, and with the public ones you have to deal with all kinds of secondary issues you don't neccessarily have to deal with at the private ones.

But I can't really see the idea presented by many polyamorous evangelists that by being polyamorous, one rejects the sexual stereotypes pushed to us from the media of one man, one woman. If anything I think the media tends to be more schizoid than that - the best example being Neal Patrick Harris, a gay man playing a man's man getting all the ladies, or straight men playing gay men, or straight women playing man-to-woman transexuals.

I am truly not shocked that sexual relationships are complicated and people use elaborate naming conventions and tracking systems to try to make some sense of them, but the simple reality is this: people are complicated critters, from the asexual to the amorously uninhibited and everywhere inbetween, and the idea that any one mode of human sexual behavior is "right" or "wrong" or can fix everything that happens to be wrong with people and/or society is narrow-minded zealotry, whatever flavor it actually happens to be.

Every single one of the indicators that the writer of Rosephase states in the post on June 6 apply equally to monogamous or nonmonogamous relationships. Well, for the most part. The two that talk about individuals who are involved with monogamous others are designed more for the poly community, but someone who wants to be the primary emotional and romantic focus should probably watch out for that kind of person as well.

What it comes down to is not that Jon and Kate's divorce is unChristian, or that Governor Sanford's marriage could have been saved by polyamory and/or a tactic bootycall understanding. Or even that the Alaska branch of the governors have taken more than their fair share of crazy but rather that these people done screwed up their lives, publicly, letting their greed overtake their other needs.

Because frankly, even though I've gleefully desecrated via chapter-and-verse quotation more than one official Xian Church doctrine throughout this entire post, I'm a firm adherent of the mantras of Jesus: namely, love one another and be open to love in return. Be kind to those less fortunate than yourself. Be a child of God and the world, and be true to yourself and those whom you choose to love. It's a pretty simple system of action and behavior that doesn't get adhered to very often primarily because of the issues of greed in their way.

The issues of polyamory, monogamy, Christianity and basic human decency are still one and the same - to earn, and deserve the trust of those you choose to keep in your life is the driving force behind most, if not all of human interaction. Whether you choose to share that openly with many or privately with one, it matters ONLY that you stand fast and never violate the foundations of trust that your relationship, your belief system, or your political constructs are founded upon.

And if you fuck that up on national TV, we're all gonna laugh at you.

2009-06-12T00:24:00.000-07:00

Meghan McCain published a recent blog about what it's like to be the daughter of a political candidate in the GOP and female. More to the point: she said what pretty much every single person with half a brain who isn't a FoxNews correspondent or pundit believes, and that is that Bristol Palin should step down as the self-anointed abstinence education spokesperson for America.

It's kind of like saying Rod Blagoyovich is perfect as the anti-corruption spokesperson because he's got that whole corruption experience. And while Bristol Palin's ex-boyfriend, who ditched out faster than Palin's speechwriting team the minute she started talking about foreign policy in the 2008 presidential campaign is probably citing the most important part of being daddy to the central figure in the current War On Unwed Baby Mammas to his hockey buds, you have to wonder why the hell Bristol Palin even matters.

After all, this is the daughter of a woman filled with hypocrisy and idiotic manuevers. She's "down-home" and "homey", but at the same time trying to run a large financial institution, and failing harder than Boss Hogg at a speed trap for the Duke boys. And poor Bristol never asked to be front-and-center in the debate over teenage pregnancy, family planning, and abstinence education, but she sure is stepping up to Mama's game and rolling with the punches.

That's the thing. Both Palins put themselves front-and-center into the controversy by simply walking forward. They could have done the classy thing and kept the personal lives of the Palins out of the spotlight, but instead they chose to highlight the Palin family as an all-American tribe. Unfortunately, it was an all-American tribe filled with high school dropouts, unwed mothers, and welfare recipients, and nothing plays worse against two men of deep education and passion than a corrupt family of hillbillies. McCain's worst mistake of the campaign in 2008 was bowing to the pressure of the GOP, and not bringing Joe Liebermann on board as his VP - and the crazy bimbo from Alaska is letting him know it, one stupid publicity stunt at a time.

The Palins have nearly surpassed the Spears' family - you know, that family of incredibly brainless, talentless singers and media moguls formed out of the bowels of Disney - as the new family to watch of How Not To Do It. Palin's new crusade against unwed motherhood comes just four months after her son was born - and if an 18-year old daughter whose passions included standing behind Mom in a photo op for the presidency for the last year isn't being led around by the nose of a handling crowd, I too am a marshmellow sandwich.

What deeply offends me the most about the Palins and their most recent hop-skip-and-jump into familal celebritism is that Palin (the governor) demands privacy of her family, but then flaunts them publicly when it suits her. Unfortunately Palin hasn't learned the game - you can't have the cake and eat it too. Her grandson cannot both be the apple of her eye and a cherished being while simultaneously being held up as the Worst Thing EVAH for a teenage mother.

The Palins are, in essence, using and abusing the child they have in order to score political points with the GOP cadre that hasn't dismissed them as the wacky hillbillies that tend to play Gomer Pyle to the rest of the GOP's Atticus Finch. The sheer volume of hypocrisy regarding family issues that has developed around Bristol Palin and her child is staggering, and on some level I just want to tell her to shut up, get a real job, go to college, get a degree, and raise that kid out of the spotlight.

Because one of these days that little boy will grow up and realize that for a good long time in his life, he was a symbol - the symbol, in point of fact, of all unwanted and unplanned children. Every political hack that speaks in favor of the Palin plan, every individual who listens to the Palins talk at any length on the subject increase the meaning of this child as a symbol of "I done messed up, don't you mess up too."

You cannot have cake and eat it too. I honestly don't care if GOP daughters are getting it on left and right; I couldn't care less if the Palins have twenty out-of-wedlock kids, I simply don't want those children being used as props in some misguided political stumping. When I see billboards declaiming that children are precious, I wonder how many dollars were spent putting billboards up instead of feeding young children in poor neighborhoods by self-righteous people intent on running other peoples' lives for them.

In short, the Palins are a circus of incredibly silly people, and I truly hope they stop and go back to the business of being just people again, instead of clamoring for media attention. They came on the scene as fast as they could - it's time for them to go back.

Mac / Microsoft Wars. Again.

2009-06-11T17:14:00.000-07:00

After a day of mucking around in Seattle, dealing with emissions tests, licensing, getting my tabs renewed (and license plates changed), and then dealing with insurance, I came home to run tests on the parental units' new computer, which I'm going to be running south to Eugene at some point next week. Now, in the midst of cleaning up the bloatware on their admittedly fast and awesome new machine, I did come across this little gem on Wired.com regarding the prices of new Macbooks, and the knowledge that what I use daily is called a "premium" machine.

Microsoft's ad campaign, conducted in a neo-sleazy advertising "reality" show format, has bothered me for multiple reasons - namely, that if you actually know what the heck you're doing, an Apple laptop is just another machine, albeit one without a laptop button. Microsoft, on the other hand, picks young women shopping with their mothers and/or young attractive women with a slightly ditzy air to them fast-tracking to different machines and making disparaging chicky-type comments about the machine's surface appearance.

The Apple format on their laptops is pretty basic and standard - silver keyboard layout with backlit keys, comfort, and a trackpad. What I'm writing on at the moment is a simple, basic one I pulled from the Apple Refurbished Store for an incredible deal when the new Mac lineup came out - and it's still miles ahead of any PC out there on the market simply in terms of processing power and markups. Plus, it's a Mac, so I know that if I need it rebooted so that someone more competent than myself needs to muck around with the innards, someone has the capacity to do it.

Now, this ad from Microsoft has two women meandering through Best Buy - which is a multiple-unit store with limited range in computers and limited specs available on each machine. And what I find so disingenuous about the ad campaign is that Microsoft is impugning the hardware of a Mac - not the software.

The funny thing for me is that Mac really is a machine supplier with a boutique OS. I use Mac OS X not only on this machine, a Macbook Pro, but on the Hackintosh used in the living room which also has the capacity for Ubuntu and BeOS - neither of which is used very often. To build the machine in the living room cost very little - and yet this machine still outperforms the PC-built computer in many functions.

The little blonde soon-to-be law student and her mom are the epitome of "just plain folks" - the pair for whom buying a pair of shoes on sale is a major score. And yet when you're buying a machine, you want something that's durable over the long haul, not just capable of looking good with a summer dress.

Ultimately Lauren and Sue, in the Microsoft commercial, go for the $900 Dell laptop - more specifically, the Dell laptop that has been rated "better used as a frisbee" on multiple computer component rating sites. Sure, that battery is going to last as long as you need it to in a lecture hall, but what lecture hall doesn't have a power supply? What lecture will you ever need to spend more than five hours a day running your computer on? And last - a Dell computer that tends to overheat is exactly what you pay for.

The thing is, Microsoft is advertising for their operating systems, not the machines that other companies make, and yet they're doing it by sponsoring female shopping sprees into large chain retailers. I say vaguely creepy, because the money handed to the two women at the end of the show reminds me all too much of a techie version of a "Girls Gone Wild" video, complete with "real live women" instead of the paid actors who are running through the motions.

I know why they're doing it this way - because Apple happily says, "I'm a PC, and I'm a Mac" and note the stability of the Mac system and the ease of use that is built into the Apple system. And so help me, Mac built in the shiny of their design long ago to make sure that the sexy factor continues. But Macs, for all their slick ads and clever humor, are advertising brand identity - not software. PCs are advertising their software by trying to hit up Mac on their price point.

I guess I'm biased, because Nipper, my roommate and friend, has a Mac that he has owned for over seven years that still runs, still does what he wants it to, and doesn't have the issues that plague seven-year old PC laptops - two of which are currently under my surgical screwdriver in this room at the moment to see if I can shock their systems back into a semblance of a life. The idea that if you buy a Dell laptop now and in two or four years must buy a new one is annoying to me - though I like the upgrading challenges of a PC, I'll never really go back to a PC hardware. But that shouldn't matter to Microsoft.

I run Windows 7, Windows Vista, Windows XP, and Microsoft Office on my Mac. I am a happy consumer, and even as I write this, I'm doing it in a legal boot copy of Microsoft's product. I have Silverlight, I play and work in Microsoft's world a lot, and it still is one of the more comfortable systems I use on a daily basis.

But I'm working on Apple hardware. If Microsoft wasn't a software company, and instead built an incredibly cool desktop system and laptop line with the same style and edge to them that Apple currently has, I'd be all over it. I have Microsoft up the wazoo - they're the only company that makes keyboards comfortable for my hands and a trackball I can deal with for long periods of time. I am a dedicated Microsoftie and view the quirks of the operating systems as...well, just that. Quirks. Most PC meltdowns are due to bad design by the PC manufacturer or user error, not the operating system, in my experience, and so each time someone whines about how expensive Macs are or how frustrating it is to use a PC, I laugh my head off at them.

As it stands? I'll happily boot Windows 7 and Vista on my Macbook Pro with insane battery life that I got for (ready for the price tag?) $850, plus tax. From an Apple retailer. And it runs Windows most of the time. That whole "one button" thing? I remapped the keys. It's not hard. It just takes a wee bit of brainpower and the willingness to go outside one's comfort zone.

The key is knowing what you're purchasing, when you're purchasing it, and not relying on salesmen and advertising to make the decision for you. And the market of PC users have glutted themselves on machines that simply are far too powerful for what they need them for. A gamer might need 120 frames per second on their video card - my mother, who intends to use her new machine to surf the internet, work on her bookkeeping, plan gardens, and keep track of volunteers - does not. Yet she had the impression she needed a really good video card and a power supply capable of powering a microwave - thanks to misleading advertising.

Honestly, I think what bothers me most about the ad linked above is not so much that the women involved were happily bouncing around Best Buy looking at computers, but that the women who made the purchase was going into law school, and hadn't done any research at all.

One only hopes she doesn't become a public defender and screw up the defense trials of any serious criminals. I also hope she takes the money and makes legitimate purchases of the Microsoft software she had "installed" to her machine. One can dream, I suppose.

I'm a Mac. And A PC. And a Linux. Shut up already.

2009-05-16T10:16:00.001-07:00

Penny Arcade makes good calls on advertising most days, and one of their favored targets are the shills that attempt to sell a new product to a public that's increasingly jaded. On some level with a marketing ploy like Microsoft's Zune player, you can easily see which way the wheels turn. Subscription-based software is nothing new; last year I landed a gig writing documentation for Etelos.com, a firm that does nothing but SaaS. But Microsoft is one of the more juggernauted companies out there working hard to maintain their superiority rank, and the Mac vs PC ads that Apple put together using two comedic actors - straight, mellow Mac and uptight, suited PC - show the stodgy side of Microsoft.

But the thing is, the advertising on both sides is disingenuous. Mac's claim that there are no viruses for Macs is wrong - there are, they target machines, and they don't stop until they worry through the protection. While the basic Mac file structure is intended to keep viruses at bay, there is no claim that "Macs don't get viruses". Or crashes, or headaches. Sorry, that just ain't true. Macs are a relatively simple, idiot-proof, fine operating system, it's true, but as someone who's worked with computers since the day of command-line interfaces, I can assure the general public that a Mac can be as annoying as any other system out there, and it's the level of the operator, not the operating system, that determines whether or not the machine decides to crap the proverbial bed.

The second part of it is Microsoft's lazy consumer routine. The latest ads showing a young woman who claims to want really good hardware because she's a graphic designer means very little - to anyone who's actually serious about graphic design, the first rule is: steer the hell away from a laptop with a 15" screen and low pixels. There's so much to pick apart in her ad, it's not even funny. Her eyerolling over a Mac Powerbook that "only has two gigabytes of RAM", for anyone who has done a tiny bit of research, is not only misleading, but also stupid.

The hardware competition between the two drives me up the wall, even though, right now, I'm working on a Hackintosh - a PC with a small dongle that emulates the chipset of a Mac. The dongle is an aftermarket addon that enables a dual-boot system, meaning I can work in both PC and Mac on this machine. I built the machine for under $600 not including the $240 dongle, and used the skills I have (and the software) to make it possible for me to work in dual environments on the same system. Sure, I could have used Paralells on a Mac and run Virtual Machines left and right to get what I needed, but the reality is, I find it easier to work natively on both operating systems with both OSes - and the cost was nil compared to both a high-end PC laptop and a basic Mac system.

Arguably PCs are the cheap option - they're around, you can build a system for a relatively small dollar amount. I built a media PC for my home theater that arguably could beat the pants off of most computers on the market, but again, that's because I know how to hook up components. For $800, you can build a computer for yourself, for your own home. $700 from now this computer will be dancing in the same realms as most high-end Mac Pros - but for far less money.

But I guess what drives me bonkers about the whole Mac vs. PC thing is that the ads aren't talking about the way your computer looks or acts or feels - it's talking about the type of person you are. From the Microsoft ads that target "just plain folks" to the Mac ads that gently poke fun at the stodgy image of the PC, the users depicted in the Mac ads are usually, "I just want the machine to work, I'm competent, but I don't want to deal with crap I don't understand". The PC users depicted by Microsoft range from 4-year olds taking pictures of their fish to an art student who looks dumber than a box of hammers and displays an amazing lack of research capability on her hardware - talking to the guys at a major box store to get her computer.

I know I have a higher aptitude towards machines, but at the same time I want to see people understand that it's not about what your machine is or is not. I use my media PC to do pretty much anything I need to do in the living room except watch cable television, and that's only because I didn't plug the TIVO card into it yet. And it is true - for less than $2,000 and a copy of Windows 7, downloadable from Microsoft, you can have a kickass system running whatever it is you want to run.

But we live and work in a world where increasingly, the platform system doesn't matter. Tara and I spent twenty minutes trying to get a GPS to work on our trip out to the coast a few weeks ago, and after she stabbed it in the face with the stylus she growled at it. The interface on that sucker isn't very intuitive - whereas the Garmin interface on every Garmin GPS that I've used is nigh-on infallible. But both get you to the location you want; the difference (and why I bought a Garmin nuvi 760 instead of its counterpart) is in the usability and enjoyment.

I suppose that's the thing. Mac, if it just sold its operating system and made it compatible with Intel systems across the board, would be far more competitive in the marketplace. It wouldn't allow much in the way of clones to be made, and the competition for its sleek, pretty laptops and machines would rapidly price their manufacturing out of business. But then again, knowing that my Hackintosh, running happily on a PC architecture, is ensconsced in a Lian Li computer case makes me very happy.

I just find it mendacious when advertising doesn't tell the truth. And the truth is, you no longer need to be bound to an operating system in order to get work done. You don't need to be on a Mac or a PC - you can have both. And Linux. And BeOS. And that legacy operating system you never use any more. The real crunchers are in the hardware, and at some point, both Apple and Microsoft are going to have to ditch the rivalry, and just go make it work.

A three-part post before departing the Insomnia

2009-02-19T04:46:00.000-08:00

A quick three-note post this Thursday morning as I wait for the insomnia to drop from my brain. After a really good weekend with Dad, I spent the next two days in bed drowning in fever from a cold picked up last week on a run to Olympia with T to hang out with her friend and friend's daughter in the hospital. I don't know if it was really a cold I caught there in the emergency room or remnants from the cold snap of February in the Northwest, but I was fighting off something that made yesterday's blue sunny skies a pain in the rear.

Really, I'd rather be one of many Northwesterners bundled up with a touque on top of the head, sunglasses in eyes, and fingerless gloves arrayed against the cold as I type merrily away from the balcony on a Northwest sunny spring day. I'm not worried about the cold, so much, as getting the Vitamin D from the weather gods that atypically grin on the Sound. But since yesterday I spent most of the day hacking and coughing, a simple burrow under the sheets fully dressed in jeans and t-shirt with the window open and the sunlight streaming in was what I had to settle for. It is days like Wednesday that make you want a dog - in my case, a West Highland White Terrier (seriously, these things sound like Irish Wolfhounds if they're woofing it up) and in T's case, a "cute dog" - which I've taken to mean a dog that would be outclassed in size and weight by her current other male, a black-and-white feline named "Man" in Greek and prone to perching on my hip when I'm snoozing on T's couch (and thus acting like a lead balloon to my back. Thanks a lot, cat). You want the dog because running after frisbees is a really pleasant way to spend a day like Wednesday - and doing it yourself seems silly.

It is also the day I finally retired my very first "Talk Nerdy To Me" t-shirt, purchased from T-Shirt Hell. I felt kind of bad about it, but hey, the hole in the armpit couldn't be explained away any longer, and the black had fully faded from black to green-black to green-gray to gray. I was going to hang on to it, but really, I see no point in giving any money to T-Shirt Hell, or having any sentimentality to the products they sell any longer.

Which brings me to part one. Apparently, T-Shirt Hell was never going out of business. The guy who runs it decided that sending up huge sob story posts as a "prank" against the people who bought shirts from him would not only send business through the roof (which it most likely did) but also be a funny way of seeing how many people actually buy shirts from him. Thing is, it worked. He got marketing attention and a lot of free publicity from the circles of people who buy products from him.

And now he's never getting another dollar from me again. Nah, not because I can't take a joke, but because in the uncertain times of the economy, I don't feel terribly compelled to spend money at any vendor who acts like a retarded chimpanzee with a minimal amount of action/reaction comprehension. Act like a jerk to your customers, and customers generally don't return to your store. I was wobbling on them to begin with, having once ordered three shirts from them and getting two with the third sent a full month later, but absence (and long-term memory) tend to fade out the negatives. Now I remember - they're jerks both to their customers online and when they screw up your order - and you have to call 'em on it.

But hey, some of those shirts were funny, and it was going to be a pain to find a local t-shirt maker who'd be willing to do a single runoff of a shirt for me. So I held off. And like at any other funeral for a former acquaintance, you hold off on some of the coarser language. I have yet to hear "Yeah, Mikey sure was a mean son of a bitch when he drank, and not very good with kids" at a funeral. So it goes with Internet companies which view customers as things to abuse and lose packages for.

But, again, my original post holds true - I don't have the dollars to kick down for overpriced Made In China funny shirts any more, and I don't think I'll be adding many of those to my wardrobe. I have lots and lots of shirts, and www.dieselsweeties.com still has a huge portion of smarmasaurus shirts that I will cheerfully don to meander out to the bars. Or not, since I've more or less cut all boozahols from my diet for the next ninety days.

Which brings me to the second portion of my post for the day - the Republicans of the Senate and House seem to be sneering at Arnold and the rest of the gang who are working across the aisle with Democrats and the President to bring an economic stimulus package to the table, and Arnold is making some cutbacks in his state of California.

Now don't get me wrong, I actually like Arnold. I think out of all the states, he's done the best turnaround so far, and while my California-residing sister and brother-in-law will likely disagree with me on that one, I see in Arnold a willingness to compromise and work things out that was rare in the past decade. Say what one will about the Guvernator, he is and always has been a proponent of his own state.

But now we're looking at a new playing field, and Arnold and Crew have to make some serious cuts and compromises. His administration needs to bring in some serious cuts and raise taxes to make the paychecks go out. And I don't think that many of the people who fought for years to keep spending the government of each state and nation into debt really thought about who was going to pay the tab.

That's the thing - the last eight years were an orgy of spending and financing, and the party ended right at the right time for the Republican majorities - when the Democrats came on board. Like it or not, the pattern of the last two series of Republican majority Presidencies spent the United States into recessions and left nobody there at the end to pick up the tab. It's small wonder that the economy hyperinflates during a time of immense government spending and deflates when it's obvious the free rides are over.

And now the lawmakers who are watching George and Company run out the door are eying each other carefully and making protests against paying the bill (IE, raising taxes and limiting spending for things we can't afford - like two unfinished wars).

And that's the thing. Most of these men and women who protest higher taxes and complain about hardworking Americans who work hard for their money and don't want to be taxed voted unanimously for the vast blank checks written to the causes of George W. Bush and the Republican majority. It's not a bad thing, it's just that they should remember the first rule of credit 101 - you have to make the minimum payment, and if you don't, you need to find a way to pay the money back you overspent.

I don't know, I find it disturbing that there is still a high percentage of men and women in the establishment of the GOP that don't seem to grasp the idea that the United States has a checkbook, and if those checks bounce, the economy is going to be in serious trouble. The best way to get out of it is to put money down NOW instead of later, because those insufficient fund fees really are a killer.

And third: speaking of taxes and taxes that have full conservative backing, the infamous Porn Tax of Washington State was repealed before it even got wings. For those not in the Rain City Region, a Democrat from Federal Way proposed a porn tax - a tax on salicient items sold in Washington State to the tune of 19.5 percent. Anything and everything in the state sold to, as one sad strip club up on 15th Avenue puts it, "stimulate body and mind" would have had a twenty percent sales tax on it. Which, ironically would have been counterintuitive - during times of recession blue businesses and liquor store sales skyrocket while bar sales dwindle and strip clubs go begging.

I still find it funny that a guy from Federal Way decided that the most intelligent way to fund a program that helped people under the General Assistance - Unemployable was to tax sex toys, tapes, and DVDs, when the likelihood of those sales being able to support said program was laughable in the first place. But, of course, what sounds good on paper rarely turns out to be so - like several other taxes on specific goods and services (the ten-cent per cup of coffee tax in the city of Seattle springs to mind), the fairness of the tax didn't make sense, and I'm sensing that State Rep. Mark Miloscia, D-Federal Way, is likely going to make it into the annals of Puget Sound ridicule as the guy who wanted to make more money off porn.

Though frankly, I do wonder - I've been to Federal Way, and there really isn't a lot going on there in the later hours outside of sports bars. Maybe Miloscia saw a vast untapped pool of sales taxation in the region and thought, "Hey, why aren't we taxing the hell out of that?" But that does call into question A) how much time Miloscia spends outside Federal Way porn stores calculating revenues from a 20% sales tax on naughty toys and B) what kind of support his re-election will have from the local business community if indeed Federal Way's Adult Entertainment businesses are that successful, even in these economic times.

Lily Allen - Still uncomfortably real

2009-02-15T22:33:00.000-08:00

Lily Allen's second debut album rounded me out like her first one - a singer songwriter whose lyrics and music weren't terribly original and her voice not completely unique to the sound of girl pop, but her biting sarcasm against her exes and discussion of their failings a uniquely MySpacian, LiveJournal-esque diatribe against people who she'd dated from nineteen on.

I heard her first song "Alfie" rolling down the road on KEXP, picked up the import and listened to the whole thing in one go, and it took me like a butternut squash soup - overly sappy with enough backbite bitterness and out-of-sync realism that made me think it was actually well-written.

I really don't know that much about Lily Allen's songs or her abilities, her personality, or the fact that the British tabloid press seem to lunge at her every time she goes out in public with the paparazzi (of which I'm a little frightened, wondering if, at any point that I become famous in one form or another whether I'd have Nikons pointed at me 24/7 in the streets of London. I suppose having a good defensive strategy employed would work - a fully-charged D90 with giant cards available to shove my face behind and start taking pictures of everyone taking pictures of me might seem less interesting. Or, rather, demanding press credentials from each one and posting them plus home addresses on my personal website with a thanks for the picture taking. My motto: in Soviet Russia, celebrity stalks YOU, paparazzi).

What I do know is that I'm cringing at the rawness of the lyrics of Allen's new album. I will admit I have reveled in the misery of emo-rock wannabes for years. The teenage MySpacians at a Dresden Dolls show whose glamming self-portrait was ruined by my screaming, "PLAY FREEBIRD!" at the Dolls at a quiet moment - and the drummer and pianist breaking their serious face to laugh quietly before pulling it together and launching into "Girl Anachronism". The teenagers exchanged a look of horror at the guy in pink upturned polo shirt and tightly-belted jeans, Converse sneakers screaming for music from THEIR band playing THEIR music in THEIR sacred Showbox and slunk off to take their picture elsewhere. I snickered the rest of the night and I was bought more than one drink as a result. Like my friend Michael Holden says, you can get away with so much if you just call it performance art.

And on some level I see that in Lily Allen's music. Much has been made of Allen's musical style and intentional rips on other women. The men she sleeps with must wonder if their masculinity will be ripped to shreds in verse and lyric; her feminine side the brassy-in-your-face British pop rock cigarette-and-torn-clothing emo rock of the British. Chords pulled from 1980s hiphop and played with a backbeat or urbanity don't hide the pissed-off chick lashing out at men who hit on single women in bars, or the ex-boyfriend she gets revenge upon, or the whole vengeful giggle at those silly boys.

It tempered Allen's popularity with the women who buy CDs from singers writing passionate, deeply personal songs about what it's like to be misunderstood or excluded from the game. Frankly, Allen looked like a bitch, and a nasty drunk one as well. Even Elton John was quoted at one point cheerfully catting about Allen during an awards ceremony where Allen, sloppily drunk, slurred into the microphone.

On some level Allen's bad-girl vibe was what she had going for her - the sweet, lilting lyrics chanted with top-high lyrics and lyrics that described in tiny little chirps the myriad ways her exes failed to satisfy her in bed. For the men described in her music, it must have been like being patiently mauled by a sparrow with a sharp beak while the subject can't quite either believe the sparrow is A) doing it or B) really going to keep going as long as it can, nipping off triangle-shaped pieces of flesh.

But the music she just dropped slams into the latter category. Allen's freshman debut was the equivalent of a precocious teen - vicious, hormonal, angry, sweet, demure, and tart with a background of urbanite London behind it. The second is the bar girl who comes out of the girl in the uniform on the streets, charred with cigarette smoke and too many pints of lager behind the bar, the wisdom of feeling too many hands in too many bars and eventually finding oneself sick of the cattiness of others.

Admittedly, Allen's sophmoric debut is again filled with angst - the kind of angst found in the Strangers I, Anonymous but without the satisfying rebuke of a comments section. Allen has the ability to revile her former lovers in song; her own reviling comes in the same album. With her aging as an artist came regret and the maturity to admit that there are mistakes in brashness. But there's something in Allen that just doesn't ring true to me. The Mockney accent. The clothes. The flashiness. The attitude. The devil-may-care attitude about her life and where she came from - her success based very little, in many ways, on her own precious talent and more in the revolutions of success built by her mentor (and one of my favorite musicians, Joe Strummer) and her other somewhat famous relatives. The ironic nature of the push many Britishers seem to have in adopting the Thug Life from 1980s and 1990s Los Angeles to formfit to 2009 London - complete with tricked-out bikes and the hipsters who shove it into the forefront.

Hell, Allen's 23 and brassy, a chick with an attitude and a full docket of success based entirely on her being young, attractive, and counterpoint to the saccharinity of the USA's exports of Jessica Simpson, Brittney Spears and Kelly Clarkson. The irony being that Allen didn't get to where she was through being successful. An Alanis Morisette a decade later, Allen's bad-girl, biting, angry, vicious lyrics will fade with time into a mellower, tea-sipping girl who looks back at her wild years and wonders if she really was such a flaming bitch.

The album, if not her last, still tastes like a standard sophomore debut - holding onto the anger and the crash, reminiscent of what propelled her sound forward once the cast of helping hands shoved her to the forefront and the MySpacians fawning over her, but with that edge of sadness and regret. Allen's figured out that pubs and making fun of overgrown adolescents have a limit break, and after this, it'll remain to see if she fades into struggling popularity ala that one chick with a beehive that periodically shows up looking like a strung-out heroin-addicted transvestite on a hangover or she'll find her niche, find the balance between wryness and linguistic sweetness that hallmarked songs like "London" and "Alfie" and dips into that same realm of tough-chick songwriting. The problem is, Allen still looks and sounds like an overly-made up teenage girl trying on the ripped tights and giggling over the pilfered whiskey, whining about how much boys suck and diving into as many chemicals as possible.

It sells, because yes, that fragile, bitter, angry girl (and boy) capable of lashing out at anyone still exists in most of us. But it is nothing more than popular songwriting in the vein of the current generation whose instant description of exes can cut to the bone on networking sites. It panders to the crowd loving mediocre poetry loving how much the music speaks to them and envelops them in its own emotional trainwreck.

And god help me, I love it because listening to Lily Allen is like peeking into a journal full of tawdry, dirty secrets - stained with the last sips of vodka, smashed with the sweat from a two-days worn bra, the smell of cheap perfume sprayed over all the clothes and hair held back in a club outfit worn both as armor and attractant to the right kind of boy, the Mockney accent betraying the expensive education as surely as a Harvard Law graduate finds slang easing towards diction in the south of Texas among the "honest folks" who have lived, and learned that language by actually living there.

Allen's sophmore album is more of the same: false, tawdry, bitter, angry, and exhiliratingly dirty. She's the chick you meet in a bar and buy a drink for, but never take home to meet Mom and Dad. And she isn't the girl you'd ever play except when you wanted to mull over old relationships you never thought you'd want to remember. But as a guy who still loves peering into the LiveJournals of favored drama queens and kings whose writings and meanderings run the gamut of venting anger, illogical frustration and clear ass-in-head decisionmaking to get a daily dose of Schadenfreue, I'll gladly listen to Allen's music and wrap myself up, again, in the reality that strikes each and every night as drunken bargoers from my digs in Seattle stumble up the street, cursing heaven and earth about their failed relationships.

Allen just puts their ramblings, bitterness, and self-righteous pityfests into lyrical form, and for the same reason I love leaning off the balcony with a megaphone to yell, "Because you smell bad, you wear too much cologne, you have acne and you have no sense of humor, ya pighead" at the sobbing drunk guy plowed across my complex's porch, I love listening to her lyrics and music - because if her songs aren't a front, then simply plugging her CD in is like peeking at an ex-girlfriend's diary of thoughts from the former breakup - and laughing at her.

But then, I'm male. And kind of a jerk when it comes to this sort of thing. But I also can't stand emorock males who whine about how much their lives have been destroyed because of some emotional betrayal or breakup.

Which is why I'll still happily scream, "PLAY FREEBIRD" at any concert populated by emogoth rockers and MySpacian tweentwits absorbing atttiude and asshattery. Because hell, if the band finds it funny while their teenaged fans immediately screech about disrespect to THEIR music, I'd say someone out there needs a little bit o'reality.

PETA and the SuperBowl Ads

2009-02-02T15:38:00.001-08:00

I used to love watching the SuperBowl, but not for the football. It was always about the ads. The only thing is, in the evironment of media connectivity these days, I wound up playing World of Warcraft while my laundry ran and I had the advertisements of the game playing in the background. This year, the only ad I was really fascinated by was the ad that DIDN'T run - placed by PETA.

It's weird, really, when a media event takes up more of the time with commercials than the actual game does. And on many levels, since my collegiate days when the convergence of technology and advertising revenue streams were meeting up for the first time, the ads have gone far, far downhill.

Advertising is no longer about the ideas of creatives, because showing a series of one-second Miller Lite ads seems to be more effective than placing a thirty-second spot in the middle of the show. All the shows that are out there simply don't tend to hold revenue as much as they used to.

Specifically, newspapers are the first hit by the technology change. The quality and content of many regional and national newspapers have changed for the worse as advertisers flock to online advertising more than they do print and television media. Even radio is shifting - when I can create a 24/7 media stream online as a radio station and place my voice on every single person's desktop who simply clicks on a link, the old guard of radio programming is slowly moving by the wayside.

I think I'm more concerns about the quality of the SuperBowl ads because not only did I not watch them in context (IE, for the SuperBowl) but I didn't care, and I didn't watch the ads as commercials, but as entertainment. The notorious (and still crazily wacky in the head) PETA threw out a commercial (NSFW, depending on where you work) scantily-clad women doing things with vegetables that didn't show up until 3AM on Cinemax until recently to promote veganism. The fact that PETA's ad didn't hit the airwaves didn't matter as much - their political pressure points, while sophmorically attempting to be "edgy", really don't do much for the "cute fuzzy widdle animals with faces" cause.

I'm dating a farm girl, and one of the things I still can't quite get over as a city boy is her family's attitude towards animals. I freak out whenever I see a horse-drawn carriage; she sees it as more or less a natural extension of the animal's physical purpose in our current society. I still believe in ham, bacon, and other pork products coming neatly packaged - she's raised and slaughtered chickens, pigs, cows, and sheep, including cute little baby lambs (and turkeys). I do my hunter-gathering at Safeway.com or Amazon's Fresh when I'm feeling particularly lazy, she still digs out packages of white butcher paper meat from the freezer on her parents' farm. And yet I am POSITIVE that the animals on her family's farm live healthy, happy lives that are fulfilling and rich - as far as any cow or pig's life can be without dying of old age.

And while PETA's political argument is, and continues to be, "You are a bad bad man for munching on a hamburger and we have sexy chicks dancing around vegetables who WON'T if you keep eating those baby back ribs", the shock treatment of the audience is fading away. Had NBC broadcast the ad, I doubt it would have generated much more than a prurient salivation of most of the male audience. It's not because PETA didn't hire sexy girls to gyrate on pumpkins - it's because sexy girls gyrating on pumpkins doesn't have as effective a selling point any longer in the massive market of advertising and information.

The disassociation of the smaller, core group of advertisers using the SuperBowl as a realm to play the best work of elite teams for both entertainment and the satisfaction of their clients is something that just bothers me for some reason. It's the same reason I like reading articles by journalists based in Seattle at the Post-Intelligencer and don't like the Seattle Times' heavy reliance on Reuters and the AP for content.

I get the feeling that with the advancement of advertising avenues, the SuperBowl's relevancy and the subsequent viewing options are going to reduce dramatically. When you need to put together SEO options, AdSense ads, print, radio, television, Internet Video and meme-style advertising, the quality of your presentation drops dramatically. Hell, I'd rather post a picture of a movie from 1921 in my apartment than the most artistically detailed computer-generated CGI - regardless of how much craft the CGI takes simply because the artistry of the original is far more real than the mass-generation of items.

I also find it difficult to believe that with the push towards the SuperBowls ads and the shock value PETA went for with their ad that we're not going to find an improvement in the entertainment of the ads any more. They're just not there. And Miller's Ad campaign of one-second commercial spots simply isn't going to be a one-off - I have a strong feeling that such ads will continue on both cable and network television.

Anyway. I keep thinking it's entirely possible that in 2010, the SuperBowl may be a webcast-only event, with advertisers using targeted ads, and the experience of each user customized for tailor-made ads. Cheaper, and less of a show. But then again, maybe that's what we're looking for in our media these days. One day or another, we might just return to straight text news.

2009-02-02T15:07:00.000-08:00

One of the things that I noticed recently is the acceptance of many people to use the software they have, instead of the software that they need. For instance, my parents still use Internet Explorer, rather than Safari or Firefox because, as my father says, they know the software. Even with the volume of errors and breaches that the software such as IE has and can harbor, they choose to keep using it because they know the software.

Which is funny to me, because even if I know a documentation program isn't the right tool for the job, or I'm looking at doing a specific task, the cost behind making the change to the right tool is often prohibitive for me to get it done. I can't use FrameMaker on a Mac, ergo, I look for an alternative that is Mac-based unless I wanted to get my PC up and running. And while I can (or could) install Vista on my Mac with Bootcamp, I've found that it's usually easier and less painful to use one machine at a time with the programs you need on it shared.

Which is why I still find it weird that I'm seriously considering getting my PC fixed so that I can not only get all my materials from the hard drives on them, but also so that I can load up IE and play the online version of Settlers of Catan. It's ridiculous. Utterly and completely ridiculous. I am contemplating replacing motherboard, processor, and RAM not because I need the information on that PC but because I want to play a game that I can't play on a Macbook.

Admittedly, I'm planning on converting the PC into an entertainment system and NAS server anyway, capable of hosting both my files and keeping my movies organized on the hard drives, but still. On some level the idea that I'm just going to take a chunk of hardware and put it in the living room to play a virtual board game online is a little silly, when it comes down to it.

But then that's technology. Nobody thought, "Hey, you know what would be awesome? To take this collection of over eight thousand vinyl records and put it into a device that I could carry with me that's no larger than a deck of cards." Nobody thinks "I need to drive a vehicle capable of driving offroad through insane conditions on a very specific style of pathway originally specified by the chariot makers of ancient Rome."

Technology is often one of those things that people think of as a "must-have" but the energy coils that make my toast brown in the morning have been around in one form or another for over fifty years. My stove - while a shade of hideous mustard yellow - is still functional for heating foodstuffs. While the technology of magnetic induction exists, I still do know how to cook over a charcoal fire or wood fire - both to bake and to boil.

The shift in technology as a communications vector really does make it interesting for me, thinking about the ways that people use and live. So much of our lives are promoted as a value of active consumerism in technology, but without the common sense push towards its innate value.

For someone who intends to reduce his own footprint of possessions, I find it more interesting that I'm slowly paring back the number of items I actually own, and reassessing the technology that not only would allow me to hang on to the stuff I have now (CDs, cookbooks, favorite stories, old vinyl records) but also to seeking out the nontechnology - the things that if I recycled or simply let fade away into used bookstores and junkshops, I wouldn't be terribly upset about.

One thing I have been doing and am interested in is replacing the heavy, heavy albums of photographs on sticky paper with a printed version of my family album. I don't think this is going to be too hard, but I will have to remember to hang onto the originals in one form or another. Of course, I -could- simply recycle all of these old photographs into a paper pile, but at the same time, I keep thinking that even though the film negatives may crack and fade, I still want to keep them. Even if they do take up more space than their digital counterparts on a saved hard drive.

Update Schedule

2009-01-28T16:14:00.000-08:00

As a goal, I'm also trying to adhere to a MWF posting schedule, which is a personal challenge. If you are following this blog, look for posts on each of those days any time after 5PM, PST.

Farewell, T-Shirt Hell

2009-01-28T15:20:00.000-08:00

I'm so sorry to say one of my favorite online merchants of offense and hilarity is closing. T-Shirt Hell, the fine purveyor of over-the-top, offensive joke shirts that pioneered the whole indie t-shirt business, in my opinion, is going to sell its last shirt on February 10, 2009. And that's it.

I loved this place because it sold me the one black shirt I always wore out on dates when I was single - the plain black trekkie-font "Talk Nerdy to Me" long-sleeve. I'd crack up on the completely inappropriate shirts that I'd never wear, but the beauty of that kind of humor is that if you actually take the shirt seriously, you're probably doing more to harm whatever cause you're fighting against than the people who are wearing it.

I saw people in Gay Pride parades wearing some of their shirts. Clowns wearing their most offensive clown shirts. And their less-offensive site, TorsoPants.com, gave me gifts to hand out to musician friends with "Accordion Hero", "Harp Hero" and "Kazoo Hero" labels on them. And they made fun of some of the worst traits in political correctness.

Specifically, the tendency of people who harbor strong racism in their opinions and speech who thought, somehow, the fact that they voted for Barack Obama mitigated their commentary about black people in general. The one shirt I loved was simply Obama's face with "We Cool Now?" underneath it. That, more than anything, is a commentary on hundreds of thousands of white Americans who sincerely believed that paying lip service to the issues of race in America solves the problem - or that listening to hiphop somehow branches across the spheres of prejudice and fear against The Others.

George W. Bush is possibly the best example of that kind of ditzy racism. Without actually saying anything, Bush's attitudes, policies, and behavior towards people of color in the past eight years was anything but equal. And while many people of all colors harbor a xenophobia towards The Others, I still believe the worst kind is the racism that exists alongside a friendly, cheerful demeanor of pretend acceptance masquerading as diversity and tolerance.

Honestly, that's why I couldn't handle half of my college university's diversity trainings and seminars that we were forced to attend. 95% of those, in my opinion, were classes and trainings that separated the gulf of the American experience between the colors of our skins and encouraged those separations.

I love Blue Scholars - a local Seattle socially-conscious hiphop group. I love their music and message. I've heard Notorious BIG once. He was a crappy artist with no message other than "I am a man with attitude." The difference for me was always listening to the words and lyrics and poetry of the artist. And yet Blue Scholars, a musically-sweet group with lyricism and positive social message that crosses gender, politic, and racial lines, is overshadowed by the industry of rap and hiphop that promotes and glorifies xenophobia, racism, misogyny and personal responsibility over social justice and personal change.

I'm generalizing here, but rap artists who talk about money, cars, women, drugs, and being a thug have traditionally sold much better than the artists who talk about wanting to improve the lives of the people in their communities and get ahead. Maybe it's because of the standard thing that happens in most poor communities - I can't go home to a small town I spent a lot of time in without affecting a slight drawl and drop articles from my sentences - even though that small town is in the foothills of Oregon. Perhaps that's what made middle America love George W. Bush - he talked like he was a redneck from a small town in Texas instead of what he was - the scion of a Maine political family whose net worth was based primarily on foreign, not domestic oil.

I still love Avenue Q's song "Everyone's a Little Bit Racist", because the truth of that song is inherent in every day life. People truly are racist not because they judge on the actions of someone else, but because they assume patterns of behavior. I played basketball and soccer at Green Lake in Seattle many times, and I was always bemused by the concentration of ethnicity at the basketball court and the soccer field. And there were days where playing basketball or soccer felt like I was an albino at the Apollo Theater in Harlem. But the reverse was true - if you went two hundred yards up the road to the fields of kids playing on the swingset, it was almost like a period in the middle of a single sheet of white paper.

Anyway, the proprietor of T-Shirt Hell is closing its doors not because the site is losing money, even though that's the first reason I'd predict. One of the key indicators of an economic downturn in America is that men stop buying underwear for themselves, and that reason is fairly simple - for most men, underwear is an item of neccessity, not vanity, and the running joke that men will wear a pair of boxers until the elastic has entirely ripped from the waistband is not entirely untrue, whereas women's fashions tend to reduce the amount of material and increase the price during economic recessions. T-shirts targeted at the male demographic with disposable income aren't likely to sell well, especially at $25 with shipping and tax included.

What the guy who runs T-Shirt Hell says killed his drive for business was the harassment of other people and the threats made against his company and his employees. I don't doubt it. There are thousands of ordinary people who cheerfully convert themselves into flaming jerks on the Internet with the simple addition of complete anonyminity. But that's an easy shift. Most flaming jerks on the Internet don't take the time or energy to do anything about their cause du jour. And simple security alone will usually take care of the most random jerks who mostly just feel like a site that offends them is the place to vent all of their life frustrations.

But frankly, I'd say the economic downturn is real, and that whatever you want to attribute the loss to, it's possible.

One of the things that I've found so interesting about the election of Barack Obama is not the color of his skin, but rather his attitude towards the years ahead. Bush was a party animal in office - spending huge amounts of money and living lavishly, running up the nation's credit cards and willing to bankrupt the country to accomplish what he wanted to do. He failed, but not before the explosion of cash hurt the entire country. Obama's way forward is blue collar - the kind of spending that gets a loan to expand a family business so they can do more work, not to get a loan so the business can get the latest gadgets and go to conventions.

And let's face it, the Bush years were perfect years for the tongue-in-cheek and satirical. With the departure of 43, it's entirely possible that the business, built on the perfect storm of political ill will, satire, fiscally liberal spending and fake affluence Bush and Company created, the fact that Obama steps in just as the Bush Party's check comes in makes so many people realize that the years ahead aren't going to be the years of bacchanaliaic revelry that Bush promoted in America. Obama's plans are, in all seriousness, to roll up the sleeves and get to work, and to do that work well, a drastic counterpoint to Bush's economic policies that could be best summed up by "Money For Nothing and Your Chicks for Free".

It isn't lightly ironic that in the decades of the hard-living, hard-spending, fiscally diarrhetical policies of both Reagan and the two Bush administrations the same difference between Notorious BIG's music glorifying Thug Life and the Blue Scholars' message of social advancement for the disadvantaged come into play. Both Notorious BIG and the Bush administrations popularized at times when the idea to spend money to enrich one's own personal life at all costs, to protect a lifestyle was more important than enriching one's living environment. And the popularity of the Blue Scholars also marked a shift in the attitudes - their rise and art coming to play as a reaction against the lawlessness of the early years.

Anyway. On some level I'm sad to see T-Shirt Hell go away, but on another level, I'm glad to see it go. It means that there's a time to play games and a time to get serious about what you're going to do to move forward. If I don't have to wear a shirt and tie into the office and can save money by wearing plain black t-shirts, jeans, white socks and a pair of slipon shoes, that's an awesome thing for me. At the same time, I'll also focus less on what I'm wearing than the things I need to do to get my work done.

Times are tough, but when times are tough, the trappings of society fall away and the people who remember that men don't buy underwear during recessions are the ones who make it through. Those who reach to get quick - like Bernie Maddoff and the administration whose removal of regulation made his Ponzi scheme possible - are those who fall into the dust. In some ways, I think T-Shirt Hell is just fading away into a more responsible printing and clothing manufacturer - the front of the store merely closing once the joke shirt stock goes away. In eight years, I doubt anyone will remember them.

The Second Amendment - as polled by USA Today

2009-01-26T01:06:00.000-08:00

Back in November, USA Today had a poll up on their website that asked what would seem to be a question most people would say, "Well, DUH" and answer in the affirmative. For whatever reason, I got it in my email this morning and had to reread the question. It was so strange that I actually began thinking about why USA Today would even put such a poll up on their website in the first place.

The question is: "Does the Second Amendment give individuals the right to bear arms?" Yes, No, and Undecided.

And I had to stop and think before running a bit of fact-checking on the all-you-can-read "totally true and totally unbiased!" Wikipedia. And I voted no. (On a poll that's over three months old, but still.)

And here's why. The Second Amendment protects the right of the People - not individuals.

From Wikipedia:

There are two versions of the text of the Second Amendment, each with slight capitalization and punctuation differences. The Second Amendment, as passed by the House and Senate, reads:[1]
“ A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed. ”

The original and copies distributed to the states, and then ratified by them, had different capitalization and punctuation:[2]
“ A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the People to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed. ”

Both versions are commonly used in official government publications. The original hand-written copy of the Bill of Rights, approved by the House and Senate, was prepared by scribe William Lambert and resides in the National Archives.

The Second Amendment says, "Right to bear arms", but they don't say what kind of arms those are. It doesn't say, "Right to own and operate a 128mm howitzer" or "Right to sharpen a shovel" or "right to have a breech-loading musket" - it just says, "arms".

The USA Today question is wrong on two levels: "individuals" is a generalized term with no outside specifics. "Individuals" means any one person. The right of a convicted felon (who is an individual) is not guaranteed nor is permitted to own a firearm - but that same convicted felon can carry mace or non-firearm weaponry with them, thus "arming" themselves, even if that "arm" happens to be a baseball bat.

The Second Amendment, therefore, specifically gives "The People" - meaning citizens of the United States of America - the right to keep and bear Arms. Arms meaning in most contexts the weaponry necessary to mobilize in the event of a national emergency or crisis as a state militia. Since Bush's presidency is possibly the only one that has used the National Guard as secondary soldiers in foreign conflicts to any great extent, one could argue that restrictions on citizenry purchasing and using automatic weapons for world combat should be lifted, but only for members of the National Guard.

So for those people who vote yes in the poll, I'm not seeing a great deal of actual remembrance of what the Second Amendment is actually written to be. I vote no, because the Second Amendment doesn't give individuals the right to bear arms, it gives the People (capital P there) the right to bear arms. The fact that arms are being borne isn't the question - it's who is doing the bearing.

The specifics of the Second Amendment give "The People" the right to keep and bear arms. It does not give each individual in the American society a guaranteed right to keep and bear arms. In the context of "the people", that is a legal term. Most specifically against people who have committed crimes against the body politic or others. The People Vs. Joe Murderer is a generalized concept; NOT a admonition for all-inclusive rights to every person. One can't carry arms on an airplane or in an airport - weapons are forbidden in schools and many public places. That's not an infringement on individual rights - it's a limitation on when and where those weapons can be carried.

A three-year old is an individual. A serial murderer is an individual. A parapalegic vegetable is an individual. "The People" are an abstract concept of society at large that is able to determine what reasonable limits one might have on the definition of "arms" and what the phrase "keep and bear arms" actually means. When we see the NRA scream bloody murder at not being able to carry firearms in National Parks, it really doesn't have much to do with the Second Amendment - it has everything to do with not being able to carry things you want to carry into the park with you.

It's inconceivable that at the time of the writing of the Bill of Rights that such items as the atomic bomb, laser-guided munitions, flechette shotguns, compressed air weapons and flamethrowers, napalm and biochemical weapons would have been included, but under a technical definition, all of those items fall under the category of "arms", yet none of those things are ever considered in any discussion of the Second Amendment as falling under the definition of arms, for the purpose of the debate.

I guess I'm hammering this point to absurdity because so many people assume (or tend to rant and rave horrifically about those nasty big terrible restrictions) again and again about how guns just aren't accessible enough or are so accessible. But you don't hand a hyperactive chimpanzee a 9mm with a full clip in it and set it loose in a daycare - likewise, there are "individuals" out there who I wouldn't trust to handle a dull spoon correctly.

The NRA, a generally pro-gun lobby originating with firearm manufacturers in the United States designed itself as a marketing tool to promote the consumption of personal small-arms in the United States. As a result, the NRA tends to shape the conversation around small-arms manufacturing and describes it as one's RIGHT to own a fully-automatic pistol to protect one's home. However, the NRA also tends to shy away from the question of whether or not laying claymore mines throughout one's front yard to keep that damn neighbor's chihuahua from pooping in the grass is also protected under the Second Amendment.

We talk about the ownership of handguns, shotguns, and rifles more, but that Second Amendment's shape and linguistic form is intended to be vague to allow the present society and the present standards of that society to choose the correct mores that frame the appropriate use of that Amendment. It means that Americans should never be penalized for having the equipment to fight for their freedom, their homes and their families.

Because really, when it comes down to it, using the Second Amendment to justify the manufacture of a biochemical agent in your home to "keep and bear arms" against the threat of a foreign invasion is just plain stupid. On the other hand, using the Second Amendment to demand that one is absolutely allowed to keep and bear a fully automatic Uzi subcompact or a FN S2000 chambered with armor-piercing rounds on full-auto for "home defense" is kind of silly, as well.

And I am still quite happily a holder of a Washington State concealed handgun carry permit, licensed to keep a concealed pistol on me at all times - except in certain buildings, parks, schools, environments, and modes of public transportation. But the simple fact is - I don't own a handgun and wouldn't be likely to carry one. It's partially because yes, I believe that I and most others should have the right to keep and bear arms - but walking down the street packing heat 24/7 to push the envelope of that right seems ridiculous to me.

Anyway, I'm sure the poll came out at some ridiculous number of 99% yes to 1% no. But the question wasn't accurate. And the query was the wrong query. The question should have been: "Do you believe all Americans should have the right to own and carry guns?" Because really, that's what the NRA pushes. It's not about bearing arms - it's about consuming a product. If it really was about being able to bear arms, there'd be a lot fewer battles fought to be able to own whatever deadly weapon you wanted.

So maybe I'm pro-Second Amendment and anti-NRA, but then again, I'm also pretty sure that there's people who also fight for the causes of the ACLU that really wished the ACLU would just...maybe...possibly...consider toning it down a bit.

As a side note: after voting, it was more accurately 97% yes to 2% no, with 1 million respondents and 1% saying "undecided".

Remembering Mac Hall

2009-01-23T17:21:00.002-08:00

I wish I had a happier way to wrap up the week, but my brother-in-law's father, Mac Hall, died this week in Quito from a sudden heart attack. For those of you looking for the manga-style, now-defunct college life comic Mac Hall, I'd be willing to trade damn near every one of those pages to be able to have Mac Hall laughing again over rum drinks and food with his family. Honestly, I don't know what I WOULD give on any level of sacrifice, but I'd give a lot. Mac was a good man, and he'll be missed.

Mac was one of the rounder guys. I can't give any other impression of him than "round" - his features were always warm, comforting, and he gave the impression of both sturdiness and intelligence. Conversations with him were always intelligent and fun, and though I didn't get to spend much time with him, I saw the family that my sister married into, and he was a strong, deep part of their lives.

Mac was sixty-eight, but he wasn't "old". He'd remarried, moved to Quito and lived at 12,000 feet, happily living his life with his new wife. He spent time with his kids and grandkids when they could get together, and we spent time over Christmas on Skype chatting with him.

I think what saddens me most about Mac's passing, and the reasons I'm thinking more about him these days, is that we've spent thousands of dollars in our lives trying to recapture youth and energy, and the lives we lead are targeted always towards the assumption that there'll be a tomorrow.

Sometimes, there just isn't. The good news is, Mac, when I saw him, lived his life completely - that he didn't leave something off until the next day. The important things, I mean. Telling someone they're loved - if they are - is one of the most important things you can do.

Live life today, because tomorrow, you may be in Valhalla.

iPod and personal life post

2009-01-23T17:21:00.001-08:00

About a week ago, my girlfriend (who's not terribly technological at the best of times) and I went shopping to pick up an iPod and associated stuff that goes with it so she could have a music station in her living room - which would allow her to download her record collection into the ubiquitous "deck o'cards" and free up space on her shelves. I, of course, being her pocket geek, went along with her to work out the technology bits here and there.

We wound up spending less than ten minutes shopping for the items themselves, and spending more time driving around to get the different components. And when I went to her house a few days later, I was almost horrified to see the stuff we'd bought still lying about, not converted or changed, not packaged and sorted out. Even the little speaker set we'd gotten still lies on her floor, unopened and untested.

See, T isn't the type of girl who has a huge set of speakers in the living room. One of the first things I noticed when we started dating was the fact that she has the television (usually turned to a reality show regarding cooking or crime dramas) on and running in the background. Being a writer and someone whose friends work in public radio (KUOW.org and KEXP.org - best stations in Seattle), I tend less towards having television on and more towards having either electronica, celtic Americana, or public radio running either in the car or at home.

I find it interesting - mainly because I follow the geek stereotype of getting to play and sort out the technology and toys you just got when you get home. If I get a new GPS or a new cell phone, I'm spending six hours getting the thing to do what I want to do within minutes of unpackaging it. I'm reading the manuals. I'm doing the research I couldn't do before. I'm even wondering how I could void the warranty on it within minutes of purchasing it. When I bought my first Xbox, I cracked the case and soldered a chip into the board, replacing the original hard drive not two hours after the ink was dry on the receipt.

Whereas T loves spending time riding her horse, I keep eying ATVs that I could convert to a biodiesel ride. I geek out on the idea that I could use methane to power a system, that I could put up microfine solar panels to power my house of dreams, or that I could use a windmill to create power on a farm. The financial cost of these dreams are secondary to the concepts.

So when my significant other hasn't opened the new, neat technology toy we got, my inner geek begins to twitch a little bit. And with the idea of new music just waiting around on her computer to be listened to, even more so. Partially because when I moved to Seattle and got involved in the music scene, I spent a lot of time hanging around with guys (and girls) for whom the Ikea Expedit bookcases were a neccessity for their vinyl collections. Hard drives full of music running into the terabytes, and standard living room equipment that wouldn't be out of place at a nightclub are partially the reasons I can't spend much time in a club in downtown Seattle listening to a trainwreck set by a "paid" DJ - I've been horribly spoiled. I have listened to people make music from Garth Brooks and Depeche Mode mixes. The unfortunate part is that my music eclecticsm means I also have nearly two terabytes of legal music I own sitting around on my hard drives - and I have at least two backups of that music elsewhere.

You know how nobody thinks they'd fill a 120GB iPod of music? My old PC had over nine hundred gigabytes of music on it in a playlist. iTunes simply couldn't hold all of it without crashing. My collection shattered iTunes and reduced what should be a robust player into quivering bits of code. It didn't help much that I was also usually following at least six or seven podcasts (my addiction to NPR's Wait Wait, Don't Tell Me notwithstanding, Marc Gunn's Celtic Podcast and the Splendid Table keep me more entertained on the treadmill at the gym than, say, the spandex-clad behinds of my fellow gym-goers. At least the Splendid Table can use the word "lard" as a positive noun instead of a description one's thighs).

So when I migrated to a Macbook, I found myself severely limited by the volume of data I could parse, and realized that my collections really didn't have much use. I have copies of Barbara Streisand, for the love of pink triangles - a musician I not only can't stand but have spent much time and effort purging from my collection - and yet, like ants in the Pacific Northwest, can't seem to quite get rid of entirely.

And I came to that realization - being able to sort through information and music to find new bands and new realms of music is fun for me. I'm still contemplating putting together music podcasts and commentary and running it through this blog as a downloadable for the people that might find me here - though truth be told, my audience is not terribly large to begin with. I have a slew of videobloggers I listen to and download. I like hearing opinions. I like listening to political speeches (though the past eight years of having small conniption fits in the car when Dick Cheney opened his mouth on radio may point to the contrary), and I can listen to television instead of watching it without being distracted.

But it's not the thing of everyone out there.

In point of fact, the drive to find new things and discover new methods of getting data, information, or even taking a new hike isn't neccessarily the cup of tea of everyone out there. I like to think that I have the ability to move beyond that personally, but realistically, each of us have vaguely different focus points in our lives.

As for T's iPod - she'll either pick it up and scruffle through the playlists of music she likes, or she won't. My collection - gigantic, confused and organized in a system of my own devising that has a quantum relationship to both music choice, when I first heard the song and whether or not I could play it through my balcony's outdoor speakers to annoy the Fremont Street drunkards at 1:55 AM (Bach, Mozart, and sometimes Beethoven work best for this) isn't the same.

I find it funny, because I know my innate reaction to someone driving a $45,000 SUV one mile to work or play classes every day is, "Why would you buy THAT, when you could get a Scion for around $15K and...you know, not be piloting a M1 Tank?" But, some people buy 52 inch plasma screen TVs to watch poker tournaments on television - I cringe at the knowledge my 32" Sony gets used for the guilty pleasure of Doctor Who episodes and bad sci-fi on cheap Chinese food and B-movie dates with the girl.

So I'm going to wind up quietly and happily sneaking over some music to T's iPod and finding new ways to load her up on some stuff I think she might like. I may even burn some CDs for her on my own computer and transfer them to her. I might even put together a few playlists of music I think she'd like of some artists that I know I do. Because my level of adoption of the technology isn't everyone else's.

But I am going to make her put The Paperboys' full discography on there. A pocket nerd has SOME standards.

2009-01-15T15:24:00.001-08:00

I keep seeing and hearing people talk about how horrible it is that American-made weapons are being used in conflicts they don't agree with. Israel, for instance, is using American-made munitions during their incursion into the Gaza strip.

The funny thing is, most people look at this as an active decision made on the part of the Americans who make those weapons. And in some ways I understand the concept - that if we weren't making or allowing the weapons to be made, then there would be some kind of mitigation on the action, that somehow our involvement would be seperated and we'd be free to sit in moral judgement on someone else's actions. We wouldn't have anything to do with it and happily be able to sit back and bemoan the fact that, for instance, Israel is invading the Gaza strip.

Unfortunately, that's not really the case any more.

In most of the world conflicts, the United States is a key player on all levels, diplomatically and socially. I hate to say it, but the Americans are still key in smacking someone down if they're coloring outside the lines. Although our diplomatic cred has been substantially weakened by Boy George and Company, we still have an immense amount of pressure that can be brought to bear via diplomatic means on actions we deem unacceptable.

And the reality is, if the weapons were not being purchased by Israel from the United States, Israel would likely buy weapons from another, intending fully to use those weapons to defend itself and its borders. If USA-made weapons were not currently being used in the Israeli conflict, then those weapons would be Chinese, Russian, French, or Czech in origin. Those weapons' country of origin has no direct bearing on how Israel chooses to use those weapons.

One thing I've always wondered about was the logic of a lawsuit aimed at the manufacturer of a firearm used in a crime. By the same logic, a manufacturer of a machete used in a crime should be sued as well. There is no culpability in the auto manufacturer when someone drives a Chevy across four lanes of traffic and plows into two carloads of soccer moms. So why the emotional connection?

I understand that the NRA and the gun lobby have cheerfully trotted out the right to bear arms and the machismo of swinging your .357 magnum around like Dirty Harry for years, but trying to place moral culpability on Charleton Heston for the death of a six-year old (thanks, Michael Moore) is like trying to blame the rain for the suicide of the guy who jumped off the Aurora Bridge in Seattle last week.

Similarly, while we can focus on the fact that American-made weapons are being used in the Gaza conflict as a side show to the actual issues at hand between Hamas and Israel, we eliminate the causality and focus instead on the little details, which means we miss accomplishing the big mission at hand.

It's entirely possible that both Russia's bravado against the Ukraine and most of Europe regarding their natural gas supply and Israel's push against Gaza are coincided with the transition between presidencies in America - and by the time Obama takes office, both conflicts will have resolved without much American "interference". Maybe that's the idea.

Weapons exist, and the fact that they're used to settle conflicts is an ugly truth. Where those weapons come from and the sale of those weapons are a continual shade on the economies of many nations, but those weapons and that supply chain will always exist as long as humans feel the need to defend themselves or attack each other. Removing the refined ability does nothing to resolve the conflict.

Anyway, I see the reaction of many people who are anti-gun, anti-weapon, anti-American armaments as that visceral reaction to something they don't like, but that antipathy towards a tool seems misguided to me. Rather, I think the focus should always be on convincing the person holding that tool to use it in an intelligent manner, and to make sure that the use of that tool is always reserved for the most neccessary of actions.

Rather than labeling the tool as "evil".

Will The IRS Tax Warcraft / Second Life virtual currency?

2009-01-14T17:39:00.000-08:00

In the theme of "All Things Warcraftian" this week, apparently the United States Internal Revenue Service is looking into taxing online transactions between sellers of online currencies.

For those who aren't initiated into this secondary world of MMoRPG gaming, gold is what you can use to buy reagents, items, potions, food, or other items that your character might need and/or want. For a lot of players who don't have time or energy to spend running around getting thousands of pieces of silk or mining ores for your character's development, it's simply faster to go online and buy these things through the Auction House or marketplaces in game.

However, the "gold" is a complete fiction. It mirrors the decimal metric system of most modern economies, and like anything else, when there's a supply, there's always a demand.

There are countless stories of players who use the "sell high and buy low" mentality to increase their personal wealth, watching for when trends or changes to the game drive a price increase or decrease in one type of item for sale or another on the Warcraft auction houses. Likewise, in Second Life, there are people who make decent amounts of money by generating Linden Dollars by doing services (in one case, a virtual escort in Italy picks up the equivalent of a cocktail, one virtual customer at a time).

But most of the gaming companies that create this kind of virtual online currency aren't making the currency a financial opportunity. Blizzard, World of Warcraft's creator, has specifically punished both players and sellers of the currency, eliminating huge amounts of gold currency simply by deleting it from their servers and the sellers' and buyers' accounts.

The issue at stake in this review by the IRS is not that companies making money off of the sale of virtual goods should or would get taxed. The legality of these organizations is one thing. Much like a website selling components that allow you to hack into your own Xbox and modify it to copy games, the actual legality of the transfer of goods from one customer to another is in a questionable gray area.

For instance, Blizzard retains the rights to the character and to the account that each player "owns" - allowing access to that account for a flat monthly fee. The license agreement of the Blizzard software means that the servers, the characters, the items, the gold, and everything else is owned proprietarily by the company - not the person playing the game. Which means that an independent third party selling gold is actually selling the transfer of in-game assets from their account to another account. They're not actually "selling" property that they themselves own; they're making a profit off of what Blizzard owns.

That nebulous concept is what has kept gold selling websites like IGN.com and IGE.com in business for years - that the gold sellers and gold buyers are just transferring immaterial things. However, Blizzard's operating procedure is still fairly clear - gold sellers and buyers screw up the game's mechanics and warp the economy as surely as a Ponzi scheme or Bernard Maddoff's stock market shell game have done to Wall Street.

In some ways I truly hope the IRS doesn't get into this sort of thing, although I do believe taxing the people who make money off of the gold sales is the most logical thing to do. The money is income; and regardless of whether that income was gotten through approved legal methods, the transaction histories of most of those sellers (usually through PayPal or other electronic funds transfer systems through the Internet) should still remain onboard.

The biggest issue (and possibly the stickiest of them all) would be the foreign companies that have comprised so much of the gold seller market - companies who have outsourced the gaming and the wealth generation to, of all places, China and Korea.

Which begs the question - if you're selling a nonexistent product using a bank account that doesn't have a physical address and a buyer who doesn't pay you any recognized currency of any kind, can you actually tax it?

The answer is no, so Warcrafters, don't worry. You don't have to shell out 30% of your WoW profits from killing those three hundred spiders in Goldshire to Uncle Sam. However, if gold sellers who are intentionally violating the Terms of Service of Blizzard are making money by working their keyboards to nubs, then yes, it's likely they'll need to fork over a chunk of their change.

Which, in strict economic terms, means that if you are one of those people who love to plonk down actual money for virtual currency, regardless of its legality, expect that in the near future, your gold may well cost you a few more real greenbacks.

Video Game Torture - More or Less

2009-01-12T15:43:00.000-08:00

Back in December, Wired Blogger Clive Thompson penned this article. I read it, thought about it, and let it percolate for a long time in the back end of my brain, then forgot about it, until members of my Burner World of Warcraft guild picked it up and started talking a bit about it.

I've been thinking about this concept for a while; not just due to the torture quests of Warcraft when I began playing the new expansion from Wrath of the Lich King. As an active player on the Silver Hand server and a lacksadaisical player on Doomhammer, I've run the quests the writer talks about, and in all honesty, I recall my reaction being less of a shocked feeling and more of a: "Oh, really? I have to go stab a captive prison guard with a shockstick to make him talk? Okay, this might take a little longer than I expected. Gosh, I wonder if I have enough health to do this; I'm hoping he doesn't enrage or anything and attack me in the middle of the interrogation." Pain, suffering, torture of prisoners by agencies of "good" - didn't matter, really. I was far more concerned about whether or not my resurrectable character was going to get smacked around if the interrogation didn't go well.

Many of the themes in the game of Warcraft are dark, but they're also tracked with a yes/no acceptance of the mission. We're talking about a game that specifically talks about an entire world being ripped apart by magical energies (Outland) and destroying half of a world with its refugees taking shelter on another world. It's fantasy fiction in gaming and while I agree that the reflection of the themes can be violent, I can also say that the tendency of most "soft" games to go a-hunting giant rats gets old REAL QUICK. Hence, the creative guys at Blizzard find new and interesting ways to pull characters along a single-track storyline.

Part of the reason I find Warcraft so appealing is not that you have a great deal of choice in your character's arc. The quests to be accomplished don't allow moral choices. You either complete the quest line, or you don't, and gain experience and gold as a result. Everyone has the same questing experience; though the rewards from the quests are different. There isn't much leeway in this, so the social significance of the torture as presented by the writer doesn't really grab me.

In the game, I ran through the quest three times on each character. Because I knew if I zapped the guy four times, I could finish the quest and move on to my wholesale slaughter of poachers a little to the north for a druidic organization bearing a significant resemblance to the militant group PETA. I didn't care, overmuch, about the moral issue of the quest when I did it. I just wanted to get it done so I could finish the quest line and log off for the day.

It's funny, too, because I'm sure that many people who have been employed as professional interrogators and torturers throughout the ages of time don't, or didn't think about their jobs that much. It was just a job. Something to put food on the table and take home some extra at the end of the week. The fact that the people who were on the other end were dying probably didn't matter. It was just a job.

Humans have been cannibals since time out of mind; it's an open secret that during the siege of Stalingrad during World War II meat appeared on tables with no non-human animals around to provide the meat. Torture, prior to the 20th century, was a time-honored tradition to extract information / confession from individuals, including the Inquisition. The darker corners of the human psyche exist, and denying that they exist (or, in some cases, that they're fun - horror movies where teenagers who drink and have sex are killed are successful because they are enjoyed by the people watching them) simply doesn't do anyone a service.

Yes, people are beautiful creatures with love, intelligence, beauty and wisdom, but people are also hateful, stupid, ugly, and crass. Screaming out "Is it so much to ask to skin a tauren" is hilarious - I will happily admit that I made my undead rogue instead of a blood elf rogue because he's ugly and evil, and playing ugly and evil in a game is a way for me to enjoy that aspect of human foibles.

The more complex we make our games and the more involved we become the rarer it is that there are black and whites in the decisions. Checkers is a simple game; chess more so than checkers, but we don't accuse the board of violence when one checker makes it across the board through strategy to be "kinged". Parables of human violence exist in virtually any artificial construct - from the stories of Peter Rabbit to Gears of War - the format of the video game allows people to see and shape that in a much more refined, sharp format. It focuses the nasty aspects of humanity down to a small core to make a point about the cruelty of humanity, and it can make people react viscerally - not to the agony or the causality of what they're seeing - just the visceral aspects of it.

The impulse for a heroin addict to switch to methadone, then to cigarettes, then to coffee, or for a former brawler to focus on tai chi and beating the crap out of an Everlast bag, or for people to immerse themselves in true crime novels and roleplay demons online to exorcise or let their darker natures come out to play in a safe environment is one of the things that enables people to release that tension.

The need I have to create a painting or a detailed written script or comment on the darker aspects of human nature, or pour out my feelings for someone into a written letter and seal it into an envelope are able to be channeled into something else. The running joke that a writer who spends ten hours a day in front of a computer will come home and work for five hours on a story or a novel or even just catching up on email isn't untrue. I know that everyone has their methadone in one form or another.

Caffeine-free Diet Coke didn't just invent itself. People wanted something that tasted similar to Coke without the sugar, and without the caffeine. Without Coke as a basis for their desires and their needs, those same people dropping $10 on a case of fizzy carbonated water would simply sip tea.

When we are angry or furious or frustrated, so many of us go for a run or a walk or clear our heads in the streets, breaking ourselves out of the default world and moving us to a new environment. We act to divert the dark energies into something else - a grounding of sorts that keeps us from becoming something hated by ourselves and others. We work out in sterile gyms on plastic-and-metal machines powered by electricity and facing televisions that blare out more information to take our minds off of what we fear cleaning out in the corners of our own heads. As any teenaged kid will tell you, just shoving everything in the closet to sort out later is the fastest way to look like you have your kit together.

It's very easy, I think, to judge a game, or art, or a story, or a fictional work, or a musician that reflects the savageness of humanity's past and to accuse that work of art, fiction, or music as the culprit behind the human gestalt it portrays. In the 1980s, Jack Thompson made his entire career based around that accusation and created an idea in the conservative consciousness that you could point at the straw men of 2 Live Crew for the decisions of hundreds of thousands of urban teenagers without addressing the real core cause behind the human ugliness.

Young men who kill because they thought it was just like "Grand Theft Auto" still chose to kill, regardless of the reflective mirror they looked in that spurred them to that act. It could have just as easily have been a bunny death Flash Animation. Since "Grand Theft Auto" is a videogame, and still the favored scapegoat of many who simply don't understand the phenomenon or the technology, the blame is still laid to rest by many at the feet of the people who mirrored the reality of some aspects of humanity.

The reason I go to the desert and to Burning Man every year is that in the desert, I can play and do things that I never could in the default world. In Warcraft (or any other computer game) you can shoot the terrorist, murder thousands of bunnies hopping through Teldrassil, annihalate undead legions, munch on Taurens, crack jokes about farming dwarves for beard hair, skin yetis and take down the King of all Stormwind. In CounterStrike, you can kill terrorists with no repercussions.

One of the most telling aspects of the game for me is that I routinely roll my eyes, when the current Big Baddy, the Lich King, shows up, and starts monologuing about my character's feebleness, and how mighty he is all up on his Frozen Throne, watching me from afar. Every single time he shows up, I keep wondering why he doesn't just zap me and every adventuring character into icicle oblivion once his inept minions screw up his chances to turn me into warlock soup. It's almost to the point of ridiculousness - I half expect the Lich King to show up wearing a Dr. Evil suit at the end game fight and make references to one million gold pieces in ransom.

In order to get there, though, I'm going to have to slaughter hordes of giants, kill thousands of enemy players, cause geopolitcial strife among blue and red dragons, hunt hundreds of endangered species in a subtropical rain forest, travel back in time to correct time alterations by shadowy conspiracies, sort through myriad piles of fecal matter (for some reason, in this version of the game, processing animal and character waste is a primary component of many, many quests and subsequent poop jokes) and probably fall into lava.

None of those things are things I feel compelled to do in real life. None of the adventuring, questing, arguing, insulting, bantering, or yapping that gets done ingame spills much over into real life, and sometimes I do wonder if my creativity has been hampered by it, or honed. One thing I do know, though, is that as a direct result of playing the game, I don't feel compelled to torture random people with a pain receptor stick, slaughter orcs with black magic, or ride a mammoth across the plains of a dying world.

In a Schroedinger's Box frame of inquiry, I'd ask whether playing World of Warcraft channeled that energy away from the experiences I might have without the game as an outlet. Likewise with my experiences attending Burning Man - whether the energy I've poured into that event might have been spent at home in my community building similar expressions had I not chosen to go to the desert for a week out of every year.

But humans aren't a black box like that, in many ways. Adding torture, or murder, or deception, embezzlement, theft, or assassination to a video game, novel, or movie doesn't cause the behavior. Rather, I'd say the mirror held up to the darker aspects of our souls sometimes simply reminds people of the devil inside them. It's up to the individual who acts upon their darker human nature, not the maker of the painting, the sculpture, the video game or the novel, the pornography, the performance art or the dance to be aware of its incitement.

Or, in other words: people just do stuff, sometimes. And they don't think much about it. I'm sure if I went through and read every quest that I've ever done, or thought about every decision I made yesterday - from my purchase of gas at the slightly cheaper station to snacking on a Payday candy bar, some infinite number of possible decisions branch from each of those choices I made that have shaped my future life.

Sometimes, you're just trying to finish the quest by the time you have to go home.

More reasons why Twilight should never have seen the light of day

2008-11-22T16:20:00.000-08:00

I've hesitated about writing anything about Stephanie Meyers' novels for a couple of reasons। The first, primarily that Meyers writes about my adopted area of America - small town America, based in lumber and timber and local agriculture. We love our farmers - organic and otherwise - around this area and it doesn't behoove anyone to speak ill of them. But Meyers' popular fiction crapwads have left me little choice.

I understand the concept. Hell, Meyer's works aren't more than the literary equivalent of Britney Spears and the Pop Princesses of Disney. Take hackneyed concepts and shape them into a classic narrative that could have been pulled from any number of tropes about vampires and humans, slap them together with a High School Musical cast, and you've got the next Bridges of Madison County - except in the rainforest. With vampires. Oh, and they're teenagers who get preyed upon by vampires. Did I mention how sexy vampires are?

Truth be told the early success of the novels wasn't that they were novels at all. I picked up two of the books and read through them for my mom, mainly because she was looking for fiction to give to cousins, who just now cracked the ages of 12 and 14. I grabbed a copy and churned through the pages in less than two hours at Barnes and Ignoble. And my first impression was, simply, that I'd watched B-Movies starring Pam Grier that had more believable, deep characters and less banal plot lines.

Sorry Twilight fangirls and bois, but it's true. Your heroic characters are flat, devoid of emotion. Plant a stick in their asses and some white face makeup and you could run amok in kabuki emokid theater. I'd go so far as to say that the reason they ARE so memorable for you is the same reason Barbie and Ken dolls work their magic - to be able to mirror one's self, dreams, ambitions, and importance upon these bits of plastic means, simply, that you can happily go about your life, living out the dreamworld of fantasy while edging quietly back into "normalcy". Simply adding "And he's a vampire" does not make a character more entertaining. While I do admit if Stuart Little was converted to the Dark Side of the Cheese Suckers before he met his family, it would make for a much more fascinating storyboard, it is still just Stuart Little, Vampiric Mouse.

But I know that's what sells these days. The carryover fandom from Harry Potter and the growing-up with the superhero genres of movies that have converted from the movies of the 1990s to the early 2000s means that superhero movies, or movies about people learning to live with the alienated powers they have, are the most common movie theories out there. Iron Man is a badass, in my book, not because he's a superhero, but because he's got a suit that he puts on. However, Meyer's fangirls and fanbois are drooling over Vampiric Sweet Valley High novels. Cheap romance smut for teenage girls is not quality literature.

But I will give it to Meyers, she's got quality marketing, or at the least, is backed by someone who really knows how to squeeze lemon juice out of a rock. I keep wondering if the Twilight series is really as popular as it is because of the beautiful covers the books come in, or if her audience really does dig it that much. The novels are clothed in "serious literature" images that don't look out of place on an adult bookshelf. Hell, they fit pretty close together next to Anne Rice's "Sleeping Beauty" series. If I threw in five bondage scenes into the Twilight series, it might get an R rating. Meyer's success is still based on the success Rice enjoyed - beautiful androgynous boys who allow latent bisexuality to creep into the equation are still commercially viable with the pimpled demographic.

I'll also admit that as much as I love Tolkien's The Hobbit, I didn't buy a copy of the book because the old paperback copy I had was tattered, worn, and ugly. I didn't touch it, even though I know and love the story, simply because it was an ugly book. Now that I've got a leather-bound, green copy tucked safely away next to the hard copies of the Lord of the Rings series, I'm much more likely to read it. Lesson learned - hire someone who can do some serious artwork for your book and people will read it because it's "pretty" on your shelf.

But that doesn't strike away from the fact that the scent I just found wafting through the breeze had rare sulfic notes with tinges of apple, lemon, and lime, and a backing of oak and floralness. It might be the prettiest description in the world, but when the dog rips a fart in the middle of the night, I still wake up choking.

In other words, wrapped in a beautiful cover, shiny and pretty, Meyer's writing is still trite, hackneyed, uninspired Sweet Valley High with Vampires.

On some level I know that in the world of teenage girls (and it must be stated, some boys) that the Twilight series and Meyer's foray into popular fiction means that there's a character that young women of today can truly identify with. The actress who plays the lead, Bella, in the movie adaptation takes the book's character and injects a flood of life into the character that Meyers couldn't have done with a Frankensteinian authoring set. And yet, the only notion I can come away with in the entirety of the book series, movie, and fandom is still the same lesson learned from the annals of Grease: The Musical: if a woman truly, totally, and completely desires a man, a beautiful, shiny, gorgeous man above all other things, she must act like a two-dollar whore.

That's pretty much Meyer's message to young women through her novel - that girls find themselves only by giving up life to a male figure, and that the male figure will sweep her off her feet. Throughout the stilted, adolescent writing (and yes, while one can write a novel targeted at adolescents, it doesn't mean that the novel itself needs to be written like a Buffy slashfic), the essence of Meyer's writing is clear - teenage girls in small towns like Forks are gonna give it up, and if you're gonna give it up, you might as well do it to the guy who's going to protect you from all the other bad boys out there on the block.

Meyeres' writing always bothered me for that reason. Her characters are flawed, but flawed in the finest traditions of Beverly Hills 90210. Her settings of moss and oak and pine and forest ring true, but only because I live in the state she writes about. In point of fact, anyone who shows up on the peninsula gets a real sense that something spooky lives out there in the mountains. It's called the rain. More rain falls in the Olympics than any other place in the Northwest, and those who live there completely know why we call it the rainforest.

Now that I'm aware that Meyers is not a Northwest author, and used Forks, Washington as the basis for her stories, I'm positive of two things - one, these books are utter and complete crap, as well as the movie. Tinkerbell has better role models for young women than this garbage. Two, it truly is the trappings that have made this a success. The beauty of the young man playing the vampire, Edward, is the primary draw for most of the women who have slavered over the Twilight series. I am hoping, however, that the commercial success of the series will go the way of so many other movies that have involved flash-in-the-pan authors like Meyers, and cease here.

Because, let's face it. The reality of the 2008 Presidential Campaign is still true today. The books are utter crap. The plots are pulled right out of tropes from daytime television. And putting lipstick on a pig, even if that pig happens to be a vampire, does not make it any more pretty.

Even if it is a lipstick-wearing pig that's also....A VAMPIRE.

Google Chrome, RIP

2008-10-31T16:39:00.000-07:00

I wish I could keep you, Google Chrome. I'm a fan of your browsing capabilities and all, and I understand how convienient you are with all of my other Google toys. But I just can't see us staying in this relationship.

I spent a good two days importing bookmarks to you. And I was using you as my primary browser for a nice long while. But your functionality is crappy. You shut down if I try to use Hulu.com or YouTube.com - and YouTube is your company's own damn site. Your Flash player support is shoddy, your bookmarking exportation is nonexistent.

I almost feel as if I'm going back to the old girlfriend, the one who knows that I like to hang out on the couch Friday evenings and eat bad Chinese food, the one who isn't afraid to keep herself from wearing makeup. I feel like I'm trading up the martini-swilling, svelte, smooth chick for the one who loves her sweatpants. Yes, I've gone back to Firefox. She's a bit chunkier and a little less streamlined around the middle, but she has all the thing I remember that I like.

I'm a little sad, though, because Google's Chrome browser was many of the things that I like in a browser. When it was fast, it was FAST. But when it was slow, it was pokier than an armadillo on the highway wearing tar booties. Well, lesson learned. This computer is about to be overhauled yet again - the components changed out and the old system put into the Media Center computer out in the living room, so I can't say that I'm terribly disgusted with it as a system, but it's still a bit irritating.

I do wonder how Hulu.com is going to work out for me with the new system. We'll have to wait and see.

2008-10-26T10:57:00.000-07:00

I went to the Hive Mind Halloween last night - dressed as one half of Waldorf and Statler from the Muppet Show. Hilariously, the other half who'd agreed to do it was a little exhausted from the previous night's activities, so I wound up doing half of the surly heckler act by myself.

Believe me, terrible jokes continue to be terrible even if you're funny. At any rate, I realized that I've got a strong group of people who I know and completely respect in this city that do things that aren't considered normal. I found that the sheer volume of things I do have somehow connected me to this city in a lot of ways, and not least of them is the parties that I help create.

I'm off in a few minutes, wearing stinky clothes and scruffy jeans to go clean up from the party's aftermath with the rest of them - all of them straggling in, slightly hungover and less-than-thrilled to be blinking the daystar out of their eyes. But it's still fun to have those experiences...

First Post - Limoncello

2008-10-23T04:17:00.000-07:00

I will fully admit, I love the flavor of lemons and limes. Galileo had a passion for the citrus fruit, as well. His daughter, in a nunnery, made him candied citron fruit all the time - from the moments of his first theories to the incarceration and trial.

One of the things I loved most about California (aside from the Northwesterner's awe of being able to buy liquor at the grocery store - with a Club Card) was the fruit. Whenever I make a run to Goleta to visit my sister and her family, I almost always want to capture the scent of Goleta in the air, bottle it, and bring it home. The unfortunate part of this is that I can't, but I do manage to find ripe lemons nearby.

The lemon orchards outside of Goleta are what saved them from the fires over the summer, actually. It's amazing, how often we convert farmland into tract housing without thinking of the problems inherent in doing so. When you convert land that had been used for years to grow crops into tinder-rich houses with pools, wood frames, and plenty of natural gas, you're looking at unnatural disasters waiting to happen. It is sad to see beautiful lime, lemon, avocado and olive orchards that have lived for decades in the foothills vanish in flame - sadder still to see and smell the lack of flowers, hear the dying of the honeybee, and wonder what lime honey will taste like in the future years.

I think I could be happy in a place where I could have land and grow lemons, limes, and other citrus. Avocadoes, too. There's something about the flavors of all three that almost always make it into my guacomole. Two big, black Haas avocadoes, a lime, heavy shakes of salt and pepper with fresh garlic over cilantro and I can almost imagine the Seattle skies parting and the soft Santa Anas coming in over my head.

Of course, the reality is, my three-year old nephew "helps" me make the guacomole, so we usually need to roll four into the mix. By the time he and his Crazy Uncle Brian finish making it, we both have green fingers and telltale rings around the mouth. We're lucky anyone else gets any at all.

But I digress. Limoncello, that Italian, sweet, lemony apertif drink served very cold, is what got me thinking. Actually, a handle of Everclear got me thinking "What the hell am I going to do with this?" I couldn't convert it into an alcohol lamp. I couldn't drink it (Everclear, for the uninitiated and those who weren't flaming idiots in college, is 95% pure ethanol). So what do you do?

Well, if your local produce shack has a sale on organic lemons, you buy thirty or so of them, find a jar that fills only 1/4 full when you dump your leftover vodka, Everclear, and flavored orange vodka in it, and settle down to watch Return of the King with a veggie peeler and a citrus juicer.

Limoncello is supposed to be drunk after fish or pizza, cold, with the bottle kept in the freezer. It's supposed to be an extremely cold, extremely fresh recipe. In theory, this is like the applejack of Italy, but I'm pretty sure the natural sweetness could be changed up from the cane sugar flavoring to lemon honey - if I could find fresh lemon honey up here. Unfortunately, the honeys I have access to (clover, fireweed, blueberry) don't lend themselves well to citrus flavors.

Here's the evening's recipe, done Irish-style*. I suppose I could try this with limes at some point, but using the limes, I'd need to double the number of fruit to get the same volume of peel.

25 large lemons, thick-skinned
1/3 750ml bottle Stolichinaya Orange, leftover from Burning Man
2/3 1.75L bottle Everclear, leftover from Burning Man
6 cups sugar
6 cups water
6 tbsp cane sugar syrup
2 one-gallon jars (approximate)
citrus juicer
very sharp veggie peeler

Carefully scrub and wash all the lemons in the sink, using a brush and hot water with a mild soapy rinse. Pour all the alcohol into a gallon jar with a lid. Using a very sharp veggie peeler, scrape the zest from the lemons into a large bowl. Put two-thirds of the zest** in with the alcohol in one of the jars, and one-third of the zest in the other.

In a largish pot, combine the sugar and the water and bring it to a boil. Keep it boiling for a good five minutes, then shove the whole thing into an ice bath in your sink to bring down the temperature. Pour the cooled mixture (it should still be fairly warm) into the jar with one-third of the zest in it. Cover, cool to room temperature, and seal.

Juice the lemons. Reserve most of the juice from the lemons in a pitcher. If you decided that making simple syrup was a good idea, now's a good time to pour two cups of the fresh lemon juice into a pitcher, add two cups of simple syrup, and top it off with six cups of water. Voila, you made lemonade. Adding whiskey to this concoction makes possibly the best whiskey lemonade I've had in a long time - and it's not bad when you're trying to get over a cold.

Irish-style refers to the way my great-grandmother made soda bread. She never measured any ingredients with spoons or cups - she just took handfuls of ingredients, mixed them together, and it usually came out all right. I mention this because I really don't have any idea how much everclear or vodka I put into the jar. My typical handling would measure it out precisely, but since neither peels nor booze are 100% accurate, I figure it's easier to just scrabble it down as "Fill the jar as full as you can with peels. Cover the zest with booze. Forget about it for a few months."

But the funny thing is, I did at one point get the measurements from my mother, who took each exact handful and measured it out from my great-grandmother. But the taste was simply not the same. There's an art to winging it, and my GG had it in the kitchen. I bring this up because according to every limoncello snob out in the world, I committed heresy and felonious assault upon the limoncello name - I added juice to the mulling jar.

Everyone said, "don't put the lemon juice in there". So I didn't. At first. And then my natural "don't waste it" inclination kicked in. Seriously? I'm not sure why everyone kvetches about pith and lemon juice and not using certain parts of the fruit. And the fact that I didn't have anywhere near enough liquid to cover the peels in the alcohol jar made the decision easier. I mean, most of the kahlua recipes I have tell me to use instant coffee and vanilla extract instead of ground beans and whole vanilla beans. Lemons are intensely sour because of the concentration of citric acid in their juice and the high vitamin C concentration in their peels. I love the flavor of pickled lemons - the uniquely Mediterranean flavoring where small lemons with thin peels are brined gently and then sliced thinly to give a completely different flavor. Since I don't have a canning setup and I also didn't particularly want to try naked lemon pickles (no zest) I went with Plan B for saving the lemon juice from the garbage - I juiced the whole lot and used it.

Again, if I'd had enough foresight I might have hunted down a recipe for lemon jelly or marmalade on the Internet - and if I had a canning setup for the same. I don't. So, now I have a large batch of premade lemonade concentrate in the fridge, complete with simple syrup added already, and a limoncello muddle jar with mostly peels and an intense amount of lemon juice added.

Another digression: recipe purists annoy the hell out of me precisely because a recipe purist will always be precise in their kitchen, but they'll never know the soul of a recipe because they're too afraid of fucking it up. It's like the guys who drive a Porsche back and forth to the grocery store without ever opening it up on a long stretch of highway and polish it with diapers every Sunday without fail. I try recipes using alcohol with experimentation because I know what alcohol does with fruit (and that amount of booze as well). It's the same way with people who can't stop poking at things.

The first lesson of winemaking and booze is to let the damn thing sit. You'll screw it up if you look at it before it's ready. Patience isn't the virtue per se - it's forgetfulness. Simply don't remember that you put the thing in the closet six months ago and you'll remember it the next time you need to hunt for your gloves - and about that time, you'll have to strain it and clear it to keep the aging process going.

So, there we go. It took me all the way through the final movie in the Lord of the Rings trilogy to peel, scrape, juice, clean, compost, and annihalate both the volume of lemons and the two giant bottles of booze I never touch and never would touch to convert them both into something I might actually drink as a summertime flavor and memory of California - handmade in the Seattle autumn.

Oh, sure, purists might complain about the lack of organic lemonyness from the tree, but the way I see it, I'd rather have two jars full of citrus, my apartment bathed in fresh lemon zest and the air reeking of that peeled citrus scent than have two giant bottles of booze that I still stare at every time I open up the bar and grumble.

Tomorrow, we're going to do the first task in getting the limoncello to drinkability - swirl it round in the jar for the first time, then leave it alone for a week.