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April 01, 2005
 Boom, baby!
I am back. Lo, I have wrestled with and vanquished the clustered demons of fixed - drive storage media; I have divined and mastered the secrets of arcane OS installation lore; I have saved hapless data from the ravaging grip of wretched and malformed partitions. I stand in triumph atop a smoking pile of charred plastic of beige and melted motherboards of acid - green.
Which is a bit unfortunate, because I needed that machine.
But no matter! I, the Head Most Astonished, have returned victorious!
However, so exhausted am I from my daring technological labors, that I have nothing to say to you.
More, perhaps, on the Moon's Day.
April 05, 2005
Erm, maybe not so much with the "being back" and the words on "the Moon's Day" and all that.
Because the Nature, she has risen up and kicked our asses.
Shortly after our Exodus from New York two years ago - - led by a smoky column of realtors by day and a flaming bed and breakfast by night - - I stood out on our deck one post - unpacking evening and thought, Ah! I can hear the creek, murmuring in the distance. The fact that there was a sodium arc - illuminated carwash between the creek and my ears mattered not a bit. It was a moment of non - urban delight.
On Friday night, the creek was in our basement.
Not all the way. Just a bit. But enough so that the washer and dryer are under a tarp on the front sidewalk, and our brave little utility pump is still spouting creekwater out into the street in front of the house. Two houses down from us, the fire department used its mighty pumps to empty basements four feet deep with creekness, and the waters actually closed off the end of the street entirely, surrounding the last house on the block on all sides.
But: there was neighbor bonding, the late - night moving of appliances, motorcycles, and other durable goods through the mud to slightly higher ground, followed by light beers and tales of the Great Flood Of '84, which was apparently much worse, resulting in the designation of this section of the surveyor's map as part of a 100 - year flood plain and our current required payment of $800 a year to protect the mortgage bank's investment in our property. That still irks me - - it's their investment; let them protect it if they want. Bastards.
All in all, not as bad as it could have been. Nothing but mushy cardboard boxes to clean up in the basement, all major appliances remain functional, the cats didn't drown, and now we feel less like interlopers from The City and more like residents.
So, I've been a bit busy, what with the being rained on and the hauling of air conditioners up to the dining room and the piloting of small remote - control hovercrafts in my flooded basement.
OK, that last one wasn't much of a chore. However, it remains the sort of activity you might as well engage in if you have the opportunity, as opposed to one that you'd choose to do just for kicks.
And now it's late and my brain is sopped along with everything else.
To bed! And my increasingly weird dreamscape.
April 08, 2005
This week's onomatopoeia is:
Brought to you by Buggerly's cigarettes. Available in Regular, Menthol, Buggerly's 100's, and Pork.
April 14, 2005
 No, I'm not. Back, I mean.
I was sort of back, but then... well, then my Mac Mini showed up, which means my music studio is mostly set up (sneak peek here, open for business as soon as the domain name propagates), and then Doom 3 for the XBox happened, which is like crack only you don't burn your lips so much, and I also got The Most Rocking Kick - Ass Light In The Entire Friggin' Universe for my recumbent, which means I can take long rides at sunset (as shown) that turn into night rides during which I swoop down country roads at 50 mph in the dark. No, I'm not kidding.
So while on my inter - job hiatus, I've had all these other things to waste my time on, see?
And thus the website, it languishes.
Which is a shame, really. It's got some miles on it, but all in all, it's not too shabby.
April 19, 2005
Shiny spiders in the dark!
With a doctor's OK, I took the recumbent out for a night ride despite a tear in one of the cartilaginous bits of my left knee, possibly caused by doing three 22 - mile sunset rides last week after a winter on the couch with Doritos and medication. The knee feels fine while riding, but sit me in a chair for an hour and it will flare up with peculiar pain, as though some connective band of tissue has slipped from its moorings and would really like to be put back in place, thanks very much, sort of nowish would be good. Cycling isn't a problem, apparently, although I'll have to watch the knee to see if it balloons up like a clown on smack.
(No. I don't know what that means, either. Let's just move on.)
Ordinarily, I wouldn't have gone for a ride, but I have to test an alternate version of The Most Rocking Kick - Ass Light In The Entire Friggin' Universe, to see whether I like the lamp with a ten - degree beam spread or an 18 - degree beam spread. This will ensure that the light is, in fact, Perfection Itself. Bill over at Gretna Bikes responded to my e - mail fretting that I might have made a mistake in choosing the 18 - degree lamp by just sending me a ten - degree and writing, "Let us know which one works best for you, and send the other one back." Didn't even charge my card against the return of the lamp, which I was entirely prepared to do. Lupine lights are manufactured in Germany, and Gretna is the sole distributor in the US. Good choice. That's proper service, that is.
About half an hour after sunset I headed off into the twilight, stopping on dark stretches of road to swap the light heads back and forth and see whether I preferred a slightly wider bright spot or a longer throw on the beam. More testing will be required - - there's trade - offs for each, which I won't go into because the portion of my readership that gives a pickle's mustache about such minutiae is vanishingly small. (Move on.)
But both light heads illuminated the spiders equally well.
Heading downhill in the dark, I kept seeing what I thought were brilliant blue - green flecks of mica or some other reflective mineral in the road surface. Then one of them moved. I stopped, and watched a jet - black wolf - style spider scurry away in the neon blue light of my Down Low Glows. I rode on, and came to a section of the road that was covered with dozens of the little sparkles - - black spiders of all sizes, glinting like tiny motile jewels in the dark.
Some folks don't care much for spiders. I generally don't mind them. But this - - this was a real Rural Wildlife Moment. I didn't see them on fall or winter night rides last year, and their numbers suggest that it's sparkly spider spawning season. I wondered, as I rode, whether there was some insect evolution at work here - - the arachnid equivalent of Kettlewell's Peppered Moths. If you're a small black spider who frequents dark country roads, do you gain some advantage from being really shiny when illuminated by a high - intensity light source, such as the headlights of an oncoming car with giant tires of spider - crushing death? Do some drivers avoid the shiny ones, perhaps mistaking them for glass, so that some slightly greater percentage of the less - sparkly are killed before breeding?
I'm no naturalist. Maybe all the black spiders are sparkly because it's neat to be sparkly.
This is why I moved here (in addition to the fact that maniacal assholes blew up some buildings that were uncomfortably close to me). In the city, the sparkly stuff in the road is glass, and you have to have Kevlar - banded tires on your bicycle, and spend a few minutes every week digging the stuff out of the treads with a knifepoint.
Here, the sparkly stuff is fauna, and all you have to do is avoid squashing them, if you're so inclined.
Vastly preferable.
Speaking of maniacal assholes blowing up buildings, go read this account of the Oklahoma City bombing.
A couple of details I find particularly striking:
"I was busy at 9:02 am when we heard it. Or more accurately, we felt it. A jarring "thud ... thump" that rattled the frame and glass of our building. It felt like someone dropped a heavy load that bounced once on the roof of the building, jarring all of us inside.
[... ]
He spoke of the heavy smoke that filled the air, people running frantically, not knowing where to go, and the debris cloud that swarmed over downtown, filled with what seemed like thousands of sheets of paper."
I was three blocks away from the World Trade Center, and I, too, experienced these things: the thick columns of paper billowing from the towers before they fell; the physical "thump" when the first tower came down, which I once described as "someone knocking over a dozen full bookshelves all at once in the attic of of a small house, only I was in a 60 - story building at the time"; and, of course, the cloud of debris, thick and flowing through the canyon streets of downtown Manhattan like a 500 - foot high flash flood.
When the Murrah building was bombed, I was working at a copy shop in Princeton, fresh from heartbreak in Mexico and rehearsing for a summer theater production of Much Ado About Nothing. I remember thinking that it would actually be better if the bombers turned out to be the Middle Easterners in the van, because the prospect of homegrown terrorists seemed much more troubling.
Stupid me.
How very strange it is to look back now at my younger self, oblivious to the future and the terrible experience I would eventually share with those in Oklahoma City that day.
[Via Mr. Sensing.]
April 20, 2005
Is today Wednesday?
OK. Got it. The passage of time seems to get parsed ever more finely the older I get... after I left school, I lost track of things like summer and President's Day. Now that I've been out of work for a bit, I lose track of days of the week. Eventually, I will lose track of day and night, and dribble pudding into my lap. Then I will diminish, and go into the West.
Or something.
Gawd, I am so bored. I've always regarded boredom as a measure of my own mind, but right now I'm just stalled out. Lots of things to do, no desire to do them. I just want to ride my bicycle, ride it where I like (hoo!), and not much else. It may be the whole spring is springing the leaves are budding and the cat gets obnoxious if you don't let her out thing. I just can't seem to focus the creative lenses very well, which leaves body - centered activities, only I can't do too much of that either, due to the wounded knee. So: bored.
And now, you are too.
So there.
April 21, 2005
In fact, I'm so bored that I can barely rouse myself enough myself to comment on the ridiculously small blogospheric mote that is the Coulter Leg Bias flap (see, oh, here, and here, and maybe here, and, what the hell, here too.)
And I should probably just ignore it, like I ignored the Pope. However, I think I feel a good half - dozen neurons firing, so off I go.
Judging by various comments to various posts which may or may not have been linked to a few short lines ago, some folks actually seem to believe that there is some sort of real problem, here... something that must be corrected, in some way. In fact, there's a whole slew of people from all sections of the happy funtime political rainbow who are just downright indignant about Media Bias in general, if not Ms. Coulter's freakish legs in particular.
So. Here goes.
ONLY PEOPLE WHO ARE ACTUALLY STUPID WILL BE SWAYED SUCH THINGS.
If that's not clear enough, allow me to obfuscate. (On second thought, you allow nothing here; this is my circle of HTML hell, and you do not rule. So, I shall obfuscate. And you'll like it.)
Often, people of any political hue who bemoan "media bias," or "corporate media," or "liberal media" as a phenomenon they find ideologically distasteful or morally wrong are actually saying one or more of the following three things:
1. I fear that Americans are, by and large, stupid, especially those who don't think like me.
2. "The Media" has a responsibility to be objective so that my positions - - which are of course correct in fact and in intent - - will be properly presented, and thus reveal their self - evident superiority to even the thick - witted who dwell among us.
3. The individuals who comprise "The Media" are, by and large, capable of such objectivity.
These three conveniently numbered and indented items comprise what is essentially the Bi - Partisan Media Affirmative Action Plan: the information deluge is too complex for people, so we must maintain a pious information priesthood to correctly distribute it so that those of lesser faculties will not be unduly moved by the other side's propaganda.
Bull dung, I say! Great, heaping, flyblown piles of it.
One of the key components of a classical education in 5th - century Athens was rhetoric. The study of the verbal bow, the accompanying shield and quiver of arrows, and the techniques of their proper use allowed an educated person to spot the aforementioned bovine fecal matter when it issued forth from the mouth of a politician, an orator, a philosopher, or the local loudmouth at the baths. Such study served as a defense against infection by bad ideas and allowed for escape from poorly - constructed logical traps. In short, it equipped the student with much of the intellectual arsenal that he required to think for himself.
Those who argue today for a reduction or elimination of media bias, to be somehow carried out by the media itself so as to maintain its illusory independence, are the equivalent of a 5th - century Athenian arguing that anyone who made a speech had a duty to present only the undisguised truth and make no attempt to sway his audience with any rhetorical tricks.
I've written before about Plato's depiction of Socrates' mistrust of the written word. Part of this mistrust, I believe, stems from his belief that the written word deprived the reader of the use of a very powerful arrow in the rhetorical quiver: dialogue. Interlocution was a vital part of Plato's entire philosophical process and, thus, absolutely vital for the pursuit and discernment of truth.
He lived in an age when the almost all libraries were small collections of manuscripts privately held by wealthy patricians. The single public library at Alexandria held 750,000 scrolls at its height, a significant portion of which must have been duplicates because there weren't that many written works in the known world. The primary mode of information exchange - - and thus, the primary method of intellectual influence - - was verbal.
But Plato didn't Google. He couldn't imagine that I, a person of no great means, would have access to a tool that could put the contents of several million Alexandrian libraries on my desk. He couldn't conceive of an informational landscape where ideas can sprout, blossom, and wither in a matter of days after discussion and debate by millions of people scattered across the entire globe.
Plato's Republic was famously hostile to poets and artists because the former produce only images, "phantoms" which they are unable to tell are "three removes from reality," [599a], and the latter produce only "phantasms" that are "far removed from the truth." [598b] Imagine his horror at a world where moving images are intended to influence the political process, entire arguments are expressed through the use of still photography, and the primary mode of rational discussion is the written word.
Plato's hypersonic grave - spinning aside, his basic premise still stands: it is the responsibility of the listener to determine the truth of a proposition, not the speaker. It is Socrates who must insist on dialogue; it is Socrates who must define the rules of dialectic; it is Socrates who, in the end, always admits that ultimate truth may be approached but never reached.
Similarly, today's media consumer is responsible for his own intellectual development and the fine - tuning of his own discernment. If someone is foolish enough to be affected by Time magazine's photographic choices, it does not then become that magazine's duty to change its ways in order to better accomodate the readily confused. Neither is it Dan Rather's duty to perfectly muffle his own ideological predilections so that the viewing public can trust him and the all - seeing eye logo. It is, instead, the viewing individual's duty to keep himself informed enough to be aware of the debunking of a particular media fraud, or, failing that, to educate himself in general using information beyond that provided by The Media.
Hidden within any harangue against the biased media is the implication that people are too dumb to figure it out, and, worse yet, that "figuring it out" is simply too much to expect from them.
This may be true of some Americans, but I don't think that it's productive to operate from the assumption that it's true of all or even a simple majority of us. It lowers the bar of public debate and treats The Media as the powerful master of the semiotic process while condemning the people as passive intellectual victims of that process.
Thus, as I write this, I am assuming three things:
1. Americans are, by and large, not stupid.
2. "The Media" is not the sole distribution channel for information, has no responsibility to be perfectly objective, and is to be regarded with the same skepticism as any other rhetorical source.
3. The individuals who comprise "The Media" are not, by and large, Socratic philosophers.
This is not to say that mostly non - partisan fact - checkers such as the now - defunct Spinsanity or FactCheck don't provide a valuable service; they do. However, in the end they are just another informational source, and their authority counts for nothing when compared against an individual's working familiarity with the rules of good argument and keeping a loose grasp on what he is "certain" is the truth.
It seems to me that agitating for the elimination of Media Bias is a fool's game. Why not agitate for improved educational standards in the areas of critical thinking, logic, and rhetoric instead? That would go a lot farther towards blunting the Media's influence, as well as mitigating a host of other problems.
We should never cede responsibility for the discernment of truth to anything that can be spoken of as a collective... be it The Media, The Government, The Party, or The Church.
That is a task for the mind of the individual, and can never be the end - product of an organization.
April 22, 2005
 As many of my longtime readers know, I am enormously fat.
Well, not enormously fat. But fatter than I oughtta be. Hence all the moonlit bike riding and so on.
So, naturally, when Mr. Reynolds pointed me towards this article about the CDC's inflation of the numbers on obesity - related deaths, I was innarested, very innarested indeed. I read it, and then went to Google to find a site that would calculate my Body Mass Index.
After I got my BMI (which told me I was fat), a pop - up window appeared: choose your favorite french fries! I am neither kidding nor photoshopping with you. I took a full screenshot that you can see by clicking the thumbnail image.
It's bad enough that they're starting to figure out how to defeat Firefox's anti - popup magicalness. But, I ask you: is that really what you want popping up on a Body Mass Index calculator page?
Then again... clearly somebody knows their market. Chances are if you give a rat's fat patootie about your BMI, you've had more than a passing acquaintance with a french fry or thousand.
April 25, 2005
Ah, the joys of the Tiger Saw. I've always been impressed by the voiceover talent that Porter - Cable got to do their sponsor's bit on This Old House: Porter - Cable. The Woodworker's Choice. Spat with such bass authority that I always said, "Yes, sir!" to the television, and vowed that one day I too would have Porter - Cable tools so that I could enjoy their obvious testicle - enlarging benefits.
So I bought a Porter - Cable reciprocating Tiger Saw a couple of years ago, and this evening I used it to cut up a gas dryer.
You heard me.
It's one of the many things we learned when we bought this house: if the previous owners have an "extra" appliance stashed somewhere, it leaves when they do, no matter what kind of "good shape" it's in. We've had their old gas dryer next to the furnace for over two years. It wasn't worth fixing to us, so it just hung out, taking up space and being too much of a hassle to get rid of. Awhile ago I took a hammer to it to relieve the stress caused by the troublesome installation of a new dishwasher, but beyond that and the disciplinary effect my savage attack had on the other appliances, its utility was limited. Our annual Large Item Trash Day Pickup doesn't accept appliances. We don't have a pickup truck, so we can't haul it to the dump and even if we could, it would cost us money. Now, during a sudden burst of post - flood basement reorganizing, I wanted to reclaim that space. What to do?
Chop it up into small bits and send it out with the ordinary trash over several weeks, that's what.
It's amazing how little there is to a dryer. A big rotating drum, a motor, some wires, a few solenoid switches, a pipe for the natural gas to burn in, all in a sheet - metal enclosure that was no match for the Tiger Saw's 2,600 strokes per minute of 10 - amp reciprocating fury. Our new washer and dryer shuddered in terror as the blade shrieked through the sides of the doomed appliance and the stench of hot metal filled the air. I wrenched the drum bearing from its socket and smeared the spattered grease on my face, so that our aging refrigerator would see me and know that I am to household appliances what Hannibal Lecter was to crass people.
Now, all is quiet... screws and stray bits of wire and plastic litter the floor. The dismembered dryer corpse leans up against the wall of the electric abattoir that is our basement.
I'm telling you: Porter - Cable. Nothing like it.
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