People Need Less Publicity

Lists are easy to write. Well, easier. Actually, not that easy. I can't really think of anything to list.

Lindsay Lohan

I don't know what the world ever saw in you, frankly.

Paris Hilton

You really do have a lazy eye. And a lazy brain to match. I hope you just get your money and go away. It's not much to ask, really.

Nicole Ritchie

I had no idea your father was Lionel. You don't look like him at all. Other than that, I don't know anything about you that I'm sure the tabloids haven't already covered, and I'd like to keep it that way.

Oprah Winfrey

You are a two-bit hack. I guess you do some good in the world, but your show is terrible schlock masquerading as meaningful message. That's pretty bad. It's too bad you don't have the guts to admit what you actually are, which is a sensationalist talk-show.

Dr. Phil

You claim to be doing good in the world, but I doubt it. You're a voyeur and an enabler, and psychiatry is not televised material. Since your show isn't even psychiatry, it's even worse. People don't watch your show to have their awareness raised about mental illness or social problems, they watch because we'll watch anything that involves other people. I wish I could say that you sicken me, but that's giving you too much influence over me.

Jerry Springer

On the other hand, I have a fair amount of respect for you, Jerry. You don't pretend to be anything other than what you are. You even have a sense of humor about it. Unlike all of your "betters" who have gone on to be "serious" and "reputable" journalists, you continue to be what you are. I don't really approve of your show, because it takes advantage of people and panders to the public's appetite for stupid television, but no one is making them watch, and you don't pretend to have any deep charitable bushwah.

Network News Programs

Network news falls into three categories: daytime, prime time, and extras. They are all universally crap. They manufacture the news. I'm not talking about some Big-Brother-esque conspiracy; there is literally not enough news to fill all of the time spent on it, at least not news which people are interested in hearing, so the networks make stories longer, or bigger than they really are, or whatever. And the reporting is crap too. Moving Katie Couric to prime time really doesn't change her position at all; she was an anchor before, and she continues so to be. And stop reporting on reporting.

And now for ten seconds of sex.

All right, you can stop counting. Thank God for Monty Python.

Disprove Me Right

There is a lot of Creationist-bashing going around these days by right-thinking people out there, so I'm going to add to it. You know my stance on evolution, or at least you should. It's a fact, not a theory. You can believe that God created the world yesterday morning, but you can't deny that, if he did, he created it to give us the idea that, factually, there is such a thing as evolution, gravity, and all sorts of other groovy scientific things.

When it comes down to it, there's really not much to argue. Either you believe that scientific fact is scientific fact, or you don't. If you do, then you can argue about what theories fit the facts. But if you don't, then all the theories are wrong because there are no facts to fit.

Creationists are not alone in their delusions about logic; many people seem to feel that belief is an acceptable thing to argue about. Sorry, beliefs are axiomatic; they are the points we take for granted at the beginning of the proof. I begin to wonder whether I am the only person in the world who had to take geometry without a lot of algebraism. So if you believe that God created the universe yesterday, you can either attempt to justify your belief with facts that don't fit (for instance, I have left-overs in my fridge from several days before creation, by that reckoning), or you can simply take that belief as an axiom and posit that all facts of the universe were likewise created yesterday as part of a perverse plan by God to make people think that the universe is older than my left-overs.

Creationists like to try to poke holes in scientific theories. They say that Darwin doesn't fit the facts, so evolution must be a fraud. Sadly, it doesn't work that way. If I say that I have a theory of gravity which posits that our observations of gravity are actually caused by a giant magnet, and you think that my theory doesn't fit the facts, that doesn't make gravity any less of a fact. If you can prove that gravity is not a fact, you are probably crazy or too advanced for us common mortals; take your pick.

So creationists take a favorite cause célèbre like carbon dating or Darwin, and they poke holes in it, all the while saying that, "since science was wrong about this, we must be right." Sorry genius, it doesn't work that way.

Simply proving someone else wrong does not make you right. It makes someone else wrong (and I have my doubts about a lot of the proofs anyway, especially since proving anything conclusively is much more rigorous than many creationists seem to believe). "All men are mortal. Socrates is not mortal. Therefore Socrates is a cow." It doesn't fly.

So the creationists ought to be forced to prove themselves right, rather than simply poking holes in other theories and claiming victory. And when you get right down to it, the basic argument for Creationism is based on belief, which as I said before is notoriously difficult to prove (right, wrong, or lengthwise). I have a great deal of respect for people who can simply say, "I believe that God created the universe, and science merely reinforces that belief because only God could create something so wonderful." I don't happen to agree (I think the wonders of the universe are largely overrated) but I respect.

Prove me wrong.

Baby It's Cold Outside

Before I begin the actual purpose, I just have to say that coming up with stupid titles is simultaneously fulfilling and depressing. Sometimes you go with what you write about; viz. the last few titles hereunder. Sometimes a beautifully silly title springs to mind, like the current little number. Usually, I have to think about it, and with my attention span being what it is, that means I don't think about what I'm writing and subsequently get bored and wander off. It ain't healthy, yo.

That said, it has finally gotten cold, no thanks to global warming, and we are once again in the season where people turn up the heat. I love the cold weather; give me a brisk cold day and I'm happy as a clam. I'm not crazy; I'm not going to go out in the snow and dance around in my underwear, but I do enjoy cold weather.

What I do not enjoy is the fact that people turn up the heat indoors. I don't enjoy this for several reasons. Firstly, people begin turning up the heat when the least acclimated person feels cold, which means that the person happiest with the cold gets it in the shorts. This situation is flip-flopped during the summer, when the person happiest with warm weather controls the thermostat. Fie on them. There are many things one can do to become warmer besides turning up the heat or turning down the air conditioning. Putting on more clothes is an obvious but often overlooked example. I cannot strip more clothes off, because at a certain point I'm wandering around naked and looking to shave all my hair off, and still it's too hot. Dilbert had a great cartoon on this subject.

Secondly, it's our patriotic duty to consume less fuel, so turning up the heat is un-American. If that logic doesn't work for you, it's also bad for the environment. And if neither works for you, it's more expensive. All hail the dollar, king of the world!

Thirdly, and perhaps most importantly, it's unhealthy. The shock to your system when you go from 75 degrees to 20 degrees is significant. But the one which people consistently neglect to think about is the shock to your system when you go from 20 degrees to 75. Most people don't think they get sick from going in to a nice warm house after being outside, but it's a real problem.

The thing which gets me the most about this time of year is that people turn their thermostats to temperatures which are ridiculous. I'm not advocating turning your heat down to 40 degrees; like I said above, I'm not crazy (like that). Keeping your house at roughly 60 degrees year round seems like a good solution to me. But people turn their heat up to 70, 80, 90 degrees, and the colder it gets, the higher they turn up the heat. This is foolish. Whether it's 50 outside or -10, it's still the same temperature inside.

By increasing the heat inside the house as the cold outside increases (I realize that cold really can't increase, since it's just the absence of heat, but whatever) you increase the differences in temperature, creating worse shocks for the system whenever you pass from one extreme to the other. And people set their heat to temperatures which, if it were during the summer, they could never stand. In the summer, many people complain if the weather gets above 70 degrees, yet these same people are setting their heaters to 80 once the winter comes.

I suppose the lesson is that we should moderate our heating, in order to make lovers of cold happier, as well as keeping lovers of warmth happy. But compromises make everyone miserable, in real life. So the hell with making anyone else happy. I love the cold, and I want my living space to be cool year round.

Objection

You cannot plead not guilty to charges which stem from your civil disobedience. Civil disobedience is not simply protest; it is the public disobedience of a law which the protester feels in unjust, for the purposes of bringing the law to light and showing that the protester does not agree.

You cannot civilly disobey a military order. If you joined the military, you gave up many of your rights. Sorry, but if you disobey an order, you violate your contract.

You cannot civilly disobey by secretly breaking the law. It must be public, and the intent (this is the important part) must be to be caught. The biggest part of the protest in civil disobedience is the part after you are arrested from breaking the law. You cannot then go to court and plead not guilty. Just because you disagree with a law doesn't make it any less of a law. Until the law is changed as a result of your protest (perhaps I should say, "Unless the law is changed..." but you get the point) you must suffer the consequences. That's part of the protest.

You cannot civilly disobey wars. They aren't laws. If you are arrested from protesting a war, you are not committing an act of civil disobedience. The law you broke had to do with protesting (if in fact you broke a law at all), and you were not attempting to protest an unjust law against protesting (how meta can you get).

So for those of you who regularly use civil disobedience as an excuse to do things you shouldn't, prepare for a wake-up call, probably in the form of some sort of punishment, if you in fact wish to participate in civil disobedience. If you don't wish to participate, then shut up.

Profits Profits Profits

Evidently oil companies aren't hurting. I'm sure we're all glad to hear that, since I know that my biggest concern when I get up each morning is the thought that, perhaps, a massive oil company might not be making as much money as it used to. So thank goodness for that.

What a pile of donkey shit. Oil companies claim that they need to raise the price of oil because they aren't making money, and then we learn that they are making money, money hand over fist in fact. And while I'm sure that this money is enriching the common man through the stock market, it's mostly enriching already rich people. So if oil companies are making record profits, why is gasoline still so expensive? Sure, the price of oil has gone up, but that should cut into profits, not into the price of gasoline.

Well, I'll tell you why, if you didn't already know. There is a saying in business: "If you're not growing, you're dying." The truth of the basic statement can be debated, but let's just assume, for the sake of argument, that it's true. So growth is necessary.

The problem is that companies don't measure growth like normal people. A normal person thinks that if you make a profit, you must be growing, right? If I take in more than I spend, I can afford to save for things which will improve my life, or if I'm a business owner, I can afford to spend more money on business expenses, hopefully improving the quality of my business and thus maintaining that favorable level of profit.

But company growth doesn't work that way. See, if you make the same profit every quarter, your profits aren't growing. So you must make more profits each quarter, not just make a profit. So if a business makes a profit and funnels that profit back into the business (which it probably doesn't, in the real world, since CEOs have to get paid), the next quarter, increased spending should mean that, to simply maintain the same profit margin, a larger amount of money must be made. But you can't just maintain the profit margin; it has to grow, which means that increased business expenses must translate into greatly increased revenue. Expense to revenue can no longer be a linear equation, and that's just silly.

If your head is beginning to hurt, imagine that I, a lemonade stand, spend $5 in my first week of business. In return for this expense, I make $10 (it's a thirsty town). I turn around and next week I spend $10 dollars. Return is $20. I spend $20, it returns $40. My profits, by week, were $5, $10, $20. Plot the curve; it's not a straight line. Or don't, and take my word for it. Consistently doubling profits is growth, in the profit sense, and it will, if it continues, eventually make a lot of money.

The problem is that it doesn't continue, because eventually I buy several thousand dollars worth of lemonade and there is not enough demand. So I have to cut costs to keep my profit margin going up. I start making the lemonade out of fake lemons. Then I reduce the amount of lemonade per glass. Then I buy cheap water from the sewage treatment plant. I can also increase revenues by selling sewage for $2 a glass. Then when no one buys it, I can tell the government to illegalize all other forms of beverage because they create unfair competition. Then I can shaft my stockholders while maintaining a healthy salary for myself. I think you see where this is going.

The best part is that maintaining profit growth is only phase one. If the amount by which your profit grows remains constant, you're still not growing. So in the example above, since my profit is always equal to the money I put in, that's not acceptable. I should get more money back from my investment each quarter, even if I maintain or reduce my expenses. I'm sure that students of calculus could tell us that even that isn't the end; there's another derivative to be taken, then another, and if all of them have to result in something other than a straight line... well, suffice it to say that this way madness lies.

And this is all assuming that companies are strictly on the up-and-up, and aren't interested solely in providing hefty bonuses for the top echelon. It would be naive to assume that.

I won't get into my opinions on distribution of wealth, but it seems to me that making money is fine, but continually making more money is madness. There has to be a ceiling somewhere. When we all go broke because gas prices become obscene (which they certainly aren't now) maybe the ceiling will be reached. Maybe not. Maybe we're all so addicted to gasoline that we won't care.

On the plus side, high gasoline prices might spur innovation and possibly save us from destroying the environment and depleting our entire energy supply. It might, but I'm not making book on it. And there's no reason why a few unscrupulous people should grow fat off that tragedy.

Education, Stupid

My views on education don't seem to be shared by most of the rest of the world, if the educational system is any indication. Well, to be fair, I have views on my own education which cause me to be miserable in scholastic atmospheres for the most part. I spent a long time trying to avoid this, trying to find the better school, or the better teacher, but I probably could have saved myself a lot of trouble and just soldiered through, since that is what eventually happened anyway. But my views on other people's education are divergent from the common curriculum, so to speak, and that's really the important part.

Writing on a topic so all-embracing as Education (with that capital E) could fill a book, and I'm not capable of focusing on the topic for that long (maybe another reason why I'm unhappy in school). What I'm interested in purveying this evening (or morning, or afternoon, or whatever) is the importance of understanding why you learn something. It's amazing just how much more useful education can be if you just understand its purpose.

In hindsight, most of us realize that much of what we learned was either preparation for further learning or seemingly useless. Very little of our education beyond a certain point is immediately useful to us in everyday life. Much of the time, I believe (and I have no hard facts to back this up at all) people who grow frustrated with education do so because they look to the future and see no benefit from the things they are learning. If you look to the future and expect to be a construction worker, literature is going to seem less useful. Contrariwise, if you want to be an astronaut... well, literature is going to seem less useful. In point of fact, unless you're planning some career intimately involving literature, it's hard to see the use.

Literature is just an example, and really too broad at that. A better example would be essay tests. I can think of no one I know who is paid to go into a room and write essays on random topics in a given amount of time. If I did know this person, I would kill them and take their job, because I am a master of blue book tests (albeit that I, contrary to my teachers' prognostications in high school, never had to take a blue book test in college, which shows you either how much they knew or how hard I tried, ultimately unsuccessfully, to avoid my intense dislike of traditional schooling). So what is the point of learning to take timed essay tests?

That's a question many students ask, and I think they deserve an answer. So too do the students who ask why things must be done a certain way in school, like style guides that must be followed in footnotes (I loathe the MLA), or laboratory experiments which must be written up just so. Why do we shelter students from the truth?

The truth is that we are, for the most part, training students for higher learning. Most things which have nothing to do with our (eventually) chosen field have no immediate utility; school, up to a fairly high level, is simply training for more school. We are supposed to be teaching students to think on their own, as well as to learn more effectively and to communicate ideas they have learned. Those skills are important.

In the specific, tell students what you're really doing. Essay tests are not job training; they teach you how to think on your feet. Teach the shortcuts; any successful essay-test-taker will tell you that the biggest part of writing in crunch time is organization of thoughts, but what most people won't tell you is that coming up with a few choice introductions, even whole template essays, which can fit almost any topic is a huge step toward being able to worry about nothing but ideas.

If we're teaching children how to think, why not strip away all the distractions and let them think? Why not explain that things must be done just so because it removes a barrier to thinking. Why not call a spade a spade? Teach kids to cheat (not plagiarize, but cut the corners that don't matter). Innovation is all about finding easier ways to do things.

Okay, now that I've said that, I feel the need to state that it's a small part of my view, not really all that happy outside its natural habitat, and that I also believe in intellectual rigor. But I am perfectly willing to attempt to explain why the rigor is necessary. I guess that's all I'm saying; show all your cards.

Oh, and if anyone has a job which involves taking essay tests all day that they'd like to offer me, my salary requirements are very reasonable.

The World Bank Has No News

When I swear that I won't be writing about current events, just as reaction to stories, I am eliminating a huge wellspring of thoughts I have every day. I read the news, see headlines, see sections of television news, and all that good crap, so I am constantly bombarded with things desperately in need of comment. I could just write a blog wherein I did nothing but link to news articles and then comment on them. It would be brilliant, innovative, and easy to write, because there's no paucity of topics. The fact that every single person on the planet already writes a blog like this should be no deterrent.

But I'm not doing that. So when I mention the fact that I have seen, in various shapes and colors, at least three feature stories about Paul Wolfowitz wearing socks with holes in them on the Internet and TV, I am not mentioning that because I want to comment. I could care less whether Paul Wolfowitz is an ugly, penny-pinching creep who makes me want to send him to Iraq to serve on the front line. I don't care. It's really not that funny.

That's actually the crux of my comment; it's not that funny. So why is it huge, capital letter news? The news media, of all stripes, seems bound and determined to report things that don't matter. Paul Wolfowitz has holes in his socks? Hold the presses! Woman fights off puma? This just in! People dying the world over? Meh.

We all know why this is; the news media have to be entertaining, and people dying isn't. When a war goes on for longer than our attention spans (and no, I'm not talking about Iraq, I was thinking more along the lines of Chechnya or Darfur or various other forgotten conflicts) we don't want to read any more about it, because frankly, it's all more of the same. People killed. Bombs. Victories, defeats, turnabouts. The papers could print the same story on a war every single day and it would probably still hold true.

News isn't entertainment. But entertainment is what sells. So we get lots of hole-y socks and celebrity news, and we also get self-fulfilling prophecies. The news organizations feel that we have forgotten about a topic, so they push those stories back, and as a result, we forget about the topic. Where are the investigative journalists? Where is Watergate now? It's not that our new scandals are incomprehensible, it's that no one bothers to inform the public about them.

I'm not saying that the Almighty Dollar buys silence. I don't think it's as calculated as that, which is, if anything, more alarming. It should worry us that trends, controlled by no one, are pushing us away from transparency, from actual news. I'm worried.

And for the record, I have holes in my socks too, so I hope I'm not photographed going into a mosque. Actually, in our current climate, I hope I'm not photographed going into a mosque for a lot of reasons.

People Should Take Themselves Less Seriously

The title pretty much says it all, doesn't it. Yes, people really should. Following are some people and my not-terribly-serious views.

Donald Trump

I remember when you had your brain put into Bill the Cat's body in Bloom County. I remember that you didn't think much of that. Frankly, I don't think much of you, and while your hair is your business and I don't really care, it's ugly. Calling yourself "The Donald" seems to be catching on with most sycophantic news media outlets, who are taking you terribly seriously these days, but it's crap. Shut up.

Rosie O'Donnell

I didn't think your name was spelled "O'Donald" but I had to look it up. I don't care if you're fat or not, or ugly or not. People really ought to stop criticizing you for your appearance just because you are a woman. They should be criticizing you for being on The View because that show stinks out loud. You're kind of annoying, and that would be true even if you were the most attractive person on the planet.

Kelly Ripa

You are a walking corpse, a horrifying lich-queen of daytime talk-shows. I can't tell whether you haven't aged well or what, but seriously, you need to get someone else to give you style advice. Regis is prettier than you. I don't say this because you are a woman. I say this because you look like hell.

Isaiah Washington

Actually, this is addressed to the entire cast of Grey's Anatomy. I'm tired of you. You are not really doctors. I don't think that much of doctors, so that puts you mighty low on the totem pole. McDreamy, McSteamy, McShut the hell up. Mr. Washington, I don't know anything about you, and frankly, I'd like to keep it that way. If you have gone this far in the entertainment industry without revealing your homophobia, what the hell made you start now? Success? Drinking? Shut up.

Mel Gibson and Michael Richards

Ditto. Mel, you made a few decent movies, but you're really not a great director, and you're not a great actor, just a movie star. Michael, Seinfeld is universally proclaimed as great television, but it's only television, and I don't really think it's even great television. I'm sure people will probably forget that you're both racist assholes, and if they don't, what of it? Maybe they'll remember the racism and forget that you're merely mediocre celebrities who will undoubtedly pass from national consciousness soon enough.

Kevin Federline

Pass.

Britney Spears

You could at least have spelled your name Brittany so it would have had vague historical significance.

Eminem

What a fizzle. Does it make you sad late at night to know that you just aren't shocking any more?

Marilyn Manson

Ditto.

I think that's enough people for the moment. Maybe I'll do another some other time.

New Vistas

I am not a technology columnist. I have no interest in debating the relative merits of Microsoft versus Linux versus Apple. The fact is, I use Microsoft because that's the computer that I've always used and I know how to make it work. I am savvy to the ways of Microsoft. If I had grown up using an Apple, I would no doubt even now be using a PC, because PCs are obviously better. No, only kidding, I would be using a PC because that's what Apples are now, with fancier colors. Okay, I'm lying. I would be using an Apple. I know they're called Macintoshes now, but they would have been made by Apple.

So just because I might seem to be bashing Microsoft here doesn't really matter, because I'm not interested in bashing Microsoft for the reasons people always bash them. I'm interested in bashing the computer software market, of which Microsoft holds a large part. So sorry Microsoft; you all just happened to be releasing a product when I was thinking about this.

What was wrong with XP? Really? I don't mean in the sense of how buggy it is reported to be, or how slow; I mean what was wrong with XP that a new user interface and slick bells and whistles is going to fix? In fact, how is releasing a new, untested product onto the market going to solve the problem that you don't seem to test your products before you release them onto the market?

Okay, that was Microsoft-bashing, and I'll own up to it. But it is merely a symptom of a bigger problem; software seems to be released simply to be released, not really to fix any problems. We all want the "perfect operating system" whatever the hell that is. So we keep buying (or downloading, in the case of various people who are adherents of an operating system which begins with an L) new products in the hope that this new version will be perfect. And this motivates the industry to keep producing products.

Why is this a problem? Well, if you don't stick with something long enough to make sure it works properly, to work out the bugs, then you can't make it work properly and work out the bugs. And don't everyone in the world write me at once and tell me that Linux is better; it's not. New versions of Linux are released which have nothing to do with making things better, and since the Linux user-base is fragmented into millions of sub-groups, these new versions get released more frequently.

Why do we need bells and whistles? In DOS, I could make the computer sing (figuratively and literally, actually). I don't use the vast majority of fancy features in my operating system because they annoy me or they have little or nothing to do with what I want. Why do we need "paradigm shifts?" What's wrong with menus and toolbars and buttons? Why does it have to be three-dimensional? If it's not broken, don't fix it, and to my mind, it's not broken. I'm sure I'll get used to the new features, and undoubtedly there will be features which I will love and start using, but why should I pay several hundred dollars for a few nice features? And why should I upgrade to something which, in exchange for a few nice features, will slow my computer down and will be untested.

Okay, that last stuff was also about Windows. And you know why? Because I and the vast majority of the world use Windows. Sorry everyone else, but it's true. I'm not saying it's a good reason, but it's true. That's why I can't use Linux; there aren't enough of the programs I use developed for Linux, and the security and bells-and-whistles situations aren't much better. Reality check there I know, but sorry, it's true. And I don't get Mac OS, so I can't use it because I would rather be able to use my operating system to the best of my abilities.

I know why new versions are developed: money. And I know why the new versions are full of bells and whistles: no one will pay for something which is essentially just a fixed version of something for which they already paid. And don't tell me the Open Source community is any different; they have bells and whistles and new versions too, and I'm sorry, the support is worse in many cases.

I just wish that people could be satisfied with a program that works, and keep providing support for it to make sure that it keeps working. I say this as I type on a Windows 98 machine and wish the Microsoft would focus on keeping things working rather than making gargantuan new programs that I don't really need. Please don't tell me to switch to Linux; I'm not interested in doing that because I can't make it work for me.

Montage

Rather than potpourri, today we'll have a montage, because it's mostly all about the same type of thing. I'm also feeling filmic rather than jeopardized. If you don't get the joke, welcome to the club. I'm usually funnier. No, that's a lie. I'm just sick.

A long, long time ago in a galaxy very similar to this one, I went to Catholic school. As a part of my graduation requirements, I had to take Religion class every year (big surprise there, I'm sure). Therein, I was told that it is a Mortal Sin to break any of the Ten Commandments.

Now I'm not Catholic, so for those of you who are and who have forgotten, sins fall into two categories in Catholicism: venial and Mortal (I'm going to continue to capitalize Mortal Sin because it's fun; I'm tempted to put it in bold or a different color or something). If you die with an unconfessed sin, if it's venial you go to Purgatory and sweat it out for a while, then straight on to Heaven, but if it's Mortal, straight to Hell, do not pass Go, do not collect $200. Understand, I'm not a Catholic theologian and they've wimpy-fied the rules somewhat, but that's the way it used to be.

Now the Ten Commandments are very popular despite the fact that no one seems to know what all of them are, largely due to the fact that different religions, and even different translations of the text, put the Commandments in different orders and leave out bits (or, if you'd rather, add on bits). We all know "Thou shalt not..." and then it starts to get a bit hazy. Graven images feature, of that you can be sure.

Aside from the fact that the Big 10 aren't set in stone (contrary to Cecil B. DeMille), it's hard to argue with some of them. Murder - out; adultery - out. Theft is only a mortal sin if it's over a certain amount, I'm led to understand, but it's probably a good idea not to do it at all. Bearing false witness doesn't mean lying; it just means lying when asked to bear true witness, as in a court case. So perjury is out, but as far as lying goes, lie away, the good book says nothing on the subject (in the Ten Commandments, mind).

Now we get to the tricky ones. Honor your parents: good idea. What is honoring your parents? Ask someone else. Hard to call Mortal Sin on not taking the trash out like your mother asked you to. Do not covet: most people have no real idea what the Hell "covet" means anyway. There's a lot of baggage there. The Catholics distinguish between sins of thought and sins of deed, so simply coveting seems a bit penny-ante for a Mortal Sin. But I'm not the man in charge (and I don't mean God, I mean the Pope).

No other gods before me? Well, if you worship other gods before the one writing the commandments, it seems like you probably aren't that worried about the distinction between venial and Mortal sins. Next.

Honor the Sabbath Day. Lord help us all. Which day is it? Can we eat meat, or do we eat tuna during Lent? The Catholics aren't really together on this one either. Tough to call a Capital M.

And now, the one I really wanted to talk about. Our Religion teacher claimed that taking the Lord's name in vain is a Mortal Sin. Straight to Hell if you say, "Jesus Christ!" right before the bus hits you. By extension, she posited that any cursing was Mortal. So even just shouting, "Oh shi..." before you fall off the cliff is out.

Now I know it's not true. I'm pretty sure that Catholics should all know it's not true. Swearing is not a Mortal Sin (for those Catholics in the audience, the appropriate response is not, "Hell yeah!" but rather, "Thanks be to God."). But I'm not Catholic, so why do I care?

Because it hearkens back to the days of the Cult of JHVH, I Am That Am, Jaweh, Jehovah, whatever you want. You can't say God's name because it has great power. In fact, all written words have great power; translating the Big Ten from the original Hebrew is a big no-no, in the Cult of Etc. Catholics would like to appropriate a little of this mystical foohah, I think.

But God is not a demon to be summoned and controlled through the use of his true name. And if God's true name is "God" then our universe is significantly more stupid than even I cynically believe. Catholic God has more important things to do with his time than listen in to make sure Catholics aren't using a word to refer to a divine power in vain. Give me a break.

And lastly, just what is, "in vain?" I think if you get hit by a bus, saying, "My freaking God!" is a perfectly acceptable use. Maybe it's a prayer. It's not in vain. If you just say, "God damn it," all the time, well, if you're a Catholic, maybe you should investigate other exclamations.

As I said at the outset, I'm not Catholic, so I don't really care. But I know that it's not a Mortal Sin to take the Lord's name in vain, and it is a Mortal Sin to do many things which don't come up in the Ten Commandments. So to my old Religion teacher: you're an idiot. Thank you.

Prepared

Preparation; that's the key. I'm not talking about over-preparation either. It is very important to be ready for things.

Obviously, the level of preparation needed for various activities (get this) varies. I know people for whom it is impossible to do much of anything without preparing for every eventuality, planning each event months in advance, and generally being a massive kill-joy. Some of these people are mentally ill. I make allowances for that. But some of these people are suffering under the delusion that being prepared means never being spontaneous. These are people who should perhaps be pitied, because they are living in a fantasy land where everything can be foreseen and anticipated through planning. Perhaps we should look into going to this fantasy land ourselves. It doesn't sound altogether bad.

There are also people of another stripe who don't prepare for anything. They are children of chaos, free and formless. They may also be mentally ill. Usually, they are almost as tedious as over-planners to those of us who don't agree.

But both of these types of people should acknowledge who they are, or they become the third, least pleasant type of person: someone who isn't prepared when they say they will be. If you commit to a certain level of readiness, especially when people are counting on you, not achieving that readiness is unkind and far worse than never committing to readiness at all.

Now we all make mistakes, or commit to too much, or whatever, on occasion. When it happens, we apologize. If it doesn't happen often, people forgive us. But when people make it a habit of promising preparation but not delivering, that's not a good thing.

What can we do? Well, consider trying harder to keep promises, even ones we know people don't care about. And don't make promises you can't keep, or are unwilling or unlikely to keep. It's better to have to look for someone else to do something than have someone promise to do it and fail to deliver.

I sound like an advice column, but I am guilty on occasion of reneging on my commitments, and I feel guilty, but nowhere near as often as other people I will not name. Do us all a favor; take a commitment seriously enough to follow through on it. Doesn't have to keep you from having fun, but it does mean you should do what you say.

Album as Art

What happened to the album? I recall a time when people actually purchased entire albums, be they record, tape, or CD, because they wanted to own the whole thing. Artists who put out singles were Top 40 (I realize that I am making sweeping generalizations, and in the interest of getting as many complaints as possible, I shall continue so to do) and not to be respected, or they were one-hit-wonders, or the singles were off an album which people would actually buy in total.

I'm not lamenting the past; the rise of Internet music isn't all that different, in principle, from the mix tape, or indeed the radio. It has never been the case that all musicians made albums, or that all albums were worth having for more than one song. I myself have purchased several albums for singles on them because at the time the songs weren't available as singles.

I also won't subject anyone to my version of musical history and The Rise of the Album. But they used to be much more important than they now are. I think that's something upon which most of us can agree.

This is a pretty short essay because we all know why albums aren't as big; they don't sell. Either you believe that it's because You (with a capital Y, as in the person of the year from Time Magazine, a conceit so hopelessly ridiculous I won't touch it, but point you to this gem) have thrown off the shackles of the recording industry's hegemony and blah blah populist blah, or you believe that it's because artistry and construction of albums has been sidelined because they don't mesh well with radio play requirements and the corporate automaton blah blah rage against the blah, or some facsimile thereof (write me and tell me about your personal opinion, why don't you, since I'm mocking it). Whatever the reason, people download songs to their iPods and burn mix CDs and no one seems to care.

I miss albums. I own music that doesn't belong outside of its album, that doesn't make it into the rotation of random MP3s (see previous article if you're wondering why I didn't use an apostrophe to pluralize MP3) because it doesn't sound as good without its surroundings. Maybe that's a sign that the music isn't as good, because it can't stand on its own. But I don't think so. Most of it is just as good on its own as the random rotation, but it's substantially better as an album.

And an album can improve lower-quality songs as well. A weak song outside can be just another link in the chain inside. A properly-constructed album doesn't need to include nothing but great music; it is greater than the sum of its parts, and it makes its parts greater by their inclusion. It tells a musical story, or is a musical artifice, or a tone poem, or whatever. A good album needs to be listened to from beginning to end. There aren't many great albums, and the number grows fewer and fewer.

I'm not going to wax rhapsodic; I'm just mourning the passing. Maybe we're better off. Maybe the idea that mix CDs and iPods allow you to make your own albums isn't totally wrong. Anyone who appreciates music does it; now maybe we have greater control. But I don't rerecord old songs I love; I listen to them just the way they are.

I like movie soundtrack compilations sometimes though. And sometimes, when I had to buy the album to get just one song, I wound up liking the whole album.

Apostrophe

This blog is not entitled Nobody Cares About My Gripes for good reason. I did not begin writing these silly things because I wanted to vent. I could have done that. It certainly seems like I spend a fair amount of time complaining about various things. But it just happens. I did not set out to find a new thing about which to complain each day; I don't need any help in that regard.

By the same token, I didn't name the blog Nobody Care's About My View's. Why? Because I'm not a complete fucking moron. Yes, I will swear on that, because it needs to be said. It does not take rocket science to realize that plurals do not take apostrophes.

I can understand that some people (the feeble-minded, but a larger population of them) don't understand apostrophes in certain applications. I admit that the rules for "its" and "it's" could be a little clearer (but they aren't rocket science). But for the most part, apostrophes serve two purposes: contractions and possessives. Notice that I did not list plurals back there. Why? Because there is NEVER a reason to use an apostrophe in a plural. Never. That's an easy rule to follow.

The vast majority of the population don't have much to worry about; they aren't expected to be smart enough to understand basic rules of grammar. The fact that emails, text messages, chat, and other methods of communication which have recently taken over the world do not expect perfect English means that once most people leave school, never again will they be required to think about those pesky grammar rules. I am also not perfect, and I don't always do things which could be considered completely grammatical. Don't accuse me of hypocrisy. This is all about apostrophes.

If you are a professional who is required to write, one would hope that you would hold yourself, if no one else holds you, to a higher standard of writing. And if you are a professional writer, or one who sells written text as part of their product, aside from typographical errors, it strikes me that you should be responsible for producing a product which does not have obvious, trivial problems. Whether you are a novelist, a reporter, or indeed a cartoonist (it's not all about the art unless you don't write any words at all) your words are a product which you are selling.

Apostrophes are not complicated, nor are they things treated differently by different style guides (unless you count the use of apostrophes in the pluralizations of acronyms, which I still say is wrong, confusing, and unnecessary, but which continues to be a matter of style, and which I am not referencing in the current discussion). There is a right and a wrong way, and far too often, people do it the wrong way. If it's an honest mistake, something the editor didn't catch, that's merely careless. But if it occurs time and again, or even if every single instance is caught by an editor, one has to wonder why. Why can't people learn a simple, stupid rule, and follow it? Are they all too stupid?

I think not. It's laziness, reinforced by a lack of accountability and poor education. No one calls people on these mistakes anymore, because they think it's either too picayune or it doesn't make a difference to anyone. It should. Good writing is not instant messages or advertising copy, and unless we want all of our literature to degenerate into such, we need to make a stand, even at the risk of seeming overly sensitive.

There are no plurals which use apostrophes. Period.

Third Life

Second Life? Oh God. I cannot believe this raft of crap. I cannot believe the huge amount of time people waste having anything to do with it. I cannot believe that anyone does it.

Okay, so real, actual, or as we like to call it, First Life isn't all that great. It needs money time, interpersonal relationships, work, pain, loss, and all the other unpleasantness that life entails. I can see why you might want to retreat into a tiny room and hide from it all. Really, you have no idea how appealing that idea begins to sound to me daily.

And I once was a junky of various online communities (not Second Life because I'm oldschool, yo) so please don't think that I speak from lack of knowledge. It seems like it might be fun at first. You start slowly, and then it sucks your life from your body and you become a hideous walking zombie, only alive to continue to participate in this drek.

I call it drek for good reason (drek means shit if you're at all surprised) because it's not fun. It starts out being escapist, but then it gradually becomes just as much work and pain and suffering as real life. Possibly more so, because you have to pay for the privilege, whereas in First Life all you have to do is be alive to play. It's supposed to be liberating, a throwing off of the shackles of our common life to live in a virtual world. That, like Web 2.0, is faded crap. It's just another world, significantly less realistic, more difficult to navigate, slower, and more expensive.

Then the jokers start. Whenever people begin to take things seriously, other people react to this by attempting to joke about it, which is healthy. But then the jokers begin to take their jokes seriously, until they are spending just as much time playing what they decry as a stupid game as the people who are simply playing it.

I'm singling Second Life out because it's not just a MMORPG; it is billed as Second Life, as if it were an alternative. But chat rooms, forums, MMORPGs; anything which will suck you into a world which winds up being as tedious as the real one is bad. Don't do it. They sound great, but they aren't.

How can people take this crap seriously? Who gives a damn? Why do the media report on it like it was anything more than a stupid game? Um, I'll answer my own question: money. Jesus H. Christ.

After Demarcation

I spent much of my childhood learning historical dates, which I have now successfully forgotten. For instance, today, Benjamin Franklin was born (at least in the Gregorian Calendar). There are numerous days during the year upon which various things were supposed to have happened in the past, but since the past apparently used a terrible day-reckoning program on its Blackberry (or something like that; isn't that the reason for it?) we can't really be sure whether we're fooling ourselves.

Now, I can't remember people's birthdays who were born last year, so the fact that I can't remember that the Battle of Waterloo was June 18th is hardly surprising. In fact, I can't say as I care that much either. As long as I know a general period of time (Napoleonic Era) for certain events, I'm satisfied. But occasionally one likes to be able to trot out a date in terms of year (1815), and the closer we get to the modern era, the more important those date-trottings become.

As I said at the outset (let me go back and read what I said so I can remember) I spent much of my childhood learning dates. We learned years too, and we learned them in the BC/AD style. Then, of a sudden as it were, everyone decided this was no longer politically correct, and it had to be changed. This just made dates all the more confusing, since I could no longer remember what two letters to trot out after a date, so I pretty much stopped trotting out dates at all and reverted to my old habit of simply mentioning a period (World War II) and, if necessary, another event as a demarcation (after Operation Overlord).

My system is a fair one, even going as far as to be tremendously specific (a year after Pearl Harbor). But I eventually realized what was going on with dates. Historians pulled a fast one on us. BCE is just BC with an E on it. CE is just a BCE with a B left off... no, wait, it's just AD in disguise. They did this because BC and AD are Christian, hardly surprising since the Western Calendar (Julian, Gregorian, or Modified Gregorian) was popularized, if not invented, by Christians.

I'm not a Christian. I don't expect anyone to be Christian to use a calendar. The AD/BC system doesn't offend me, because I can see what it really is: it's my system. I could just as easily say, "1982 was a very important year for the world, so I will refer to everything as pre-1982 or post-1982." Then 1 AD would be 1981 pre-1982, which I would undoubtedly shorten to write 1981 PN. Hey, I could just save myself the trouble and write BN for Before Nineteen-eighty-two. And then I could call 1982 the start of the Common Era and write BC for Before Common-era.

My point is that BC/AD or BCE/CE, we're using arbitrary names to denote an arbitrary demarcation date (0, which doesn't exist). And it's the Western Calendar; there are several others, and they are (guess what) religious too. Since scholars now debate whether or not historically Jesus was actually born when the calendar says he was (and he wasn't born on January 1st, which raises all kinds of fun logical problems for literalists), the BC/AD switch seems arbitrary enough. We keep the dates anyway in BCE/CE.

My problem is the names. BCE gets shortened to BC often enough anyway. Why change it at all? Similarly, as my title suggests, why not call AD, After Demarcation Date? We're keeping the system; why change little details?

Incidentally, 1982 AD is a very important year, and not because Benjamin Franklin turned 277 today in that year (except if you follow the Julian Calendar).

Following the News Updates

In an update to the previous, the child was named (by his mother), Noah. And the BBC does not keep archives of old content, so if you click on the link to the story, you will not see the same story that I had hoped you would see, which is why it's even more important that I managed to give you a summary, rather than just say, "Read this! Isn't that stupid! Gosh, how stupid!" It wouldn't have made much of a post, anyway, which is what many bloggers seem to forget.

I have made this a separate "article" because I just wanted to decry the practice of not archiving content. If I make a minor change to content, it's fine to pretend like that was the original intention. For instance, I mistyped several words in Following the News and had to fix them after it was published, and I didn't simply start a new post. That would be silly (although there are some more-archivally-minded people in this great world of ours who would disagree and believe that everything should be handled as a CVS, which, if you're unfamiliar, is a content-management system which preserves a record of even the smallest edit, usually used for computer programming but also for wikipedia).

But if you change the entire story (for instance, when the baby is born and not named Nitro) it isn't fair to simply delete the old story as if it never existed. It makes you seem more prescient than you actually are, for one thing, and lets you go back and delete embarrassing errors or statements which later turn out not to be true. So I could have simply gone back and edited my previous article (I really hate calling them "posts" because it sounds so... well, just stupid really) to read differently, since the kid was not named Nitro (or Duke) after all.

I think the biggest lesson we can take away from this, however, is that the mother of this child is smarter than her husband. How much is unknown, but she's definitely the better of the two. And if she has the sense to name her child Noah rather than Duke, I guess I'll give my sanction to them both and call off the Federal Child Relocation Bureau, of which I happen to be the secret head.

No, that's a fantasy. But congratulations to Noah and his mother, and a big raspberry (but a teasing, rather than nasty, one) to his father. Better luck naming your dog, amigo.

Actually, Amigo would be a terrific name for a dog. Maybe that last sentence should read, "Better luck naming your dog Amigo." I'll go back and change it.

P.S. No more following the news, I swear. I'll keep to my ivory tower from now on.

Following the News

It was never my intention in beginning this blog to be a mere reactionary force, as some blogs are. I don't want to post links to news stories and then comment on them. That's not terribly interesting even if millions of other blogs weren't already doing it. But I am going to make an exception.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/6265997.stm

You really need to read the story, but since I also hate when bloggers post a link and say nothing about it, I'll give you the gist. A woman is about to give birth to a baby arising from a frozen embryo which was among those rescued from Hurricane Katrina in 2005. That's my first issue. This is news? Woman gives birth! Whoopee!

My second issue is with the fact that police boats rescued these embryos. I am not going to get into "life begins at conception;" whether or not these embryos were alive, it seems to me that police had better things to do in the aftermath of Katrina than rescue frozen embryos, which doctors weren't sure would be alive anyway. But it's a minor point; I wasn't there, so I can't say for certain whether or not the police had better things to do. I'm glad the people whose embryos these were are going to be able to have those kids they wanted. I guess. I'm also not going to talk about my feelings on the number of children people think they need to have. The focuses of the article already have one. Enough said from the cynic.

Now, the crux of the matter.

"We haven't even picked out a name yet," Mrs Markham said. They have ruled out Katrina, but Mr Markham's choices include Duke and Nitro.

"Nitro could be liquid nitrogen, because that's what saved him," he said. "For a girl, I like Breeze."

No! Or rather, what?! Jesus, these people shouldn't be allowed to have children. And of course it's the father who wants to name his son Duke or Nitro. Duke is a title, or the name of a dog. No one should be allowed to name their child Duke, and if you are named Duke and you disagree, you're wrong and your parents should be ashamed of themselves. Nitro? I won't even justify that with comment. It's tempered somewhat by the fact that it's topical, but on the other hand, topical names suck. I would be willing to forgive it if it weren't for the fact that you want to name your child Duke. That's much worse.

Breeze. Can't compete with Duke or Nitro. Frankly, I'm surprised they didn't go with Duke or Nitro for a boy, Duque or Nytroe for a girl. These people should not be allowed to name their child, and possibly should not be allowed to ever see it again.

And those are my views about which nobody cares.

Urine

Well, I've done it. I've used a picture. I shall be damned for all eternity.

Damnation aside, I was sent this by a friend who seemed to find it either funny or true. I find it dubious on both counts. And "Riddle" seems like a strange place name to me too, but that's not important.

I have seen urine tests required for all sorts of jobs. I hope they are all for drugs; I'd hate to think that urine was being used to test for something else, like poor genetics or hygiene, or maybe health of the bladder. For some jobs, I guess non-high-ness (I can't really say sobriety, for reasons which will, I hope, become apparent) is important. For others... I'm not so sure. Certainly, drugs are illegal, and so if an employee is using drugs, that could violate his or her contract, just as murdering prostitutes (have you noticed I like to talk about murdered prostitutes? Really? You don't say) or bank robbery might. But one has to wonder why the paranoia is necessary.

I'm not going to get into drugs' legality. They're illegal, and that's the bottom line until someone says differently. But urine tests aren't just to maintain decorum (another euphemism for non-high-ness which sounds better) in the workplace; they detect any drug use within a certain period of time. This begs the question: why not just keep an eye out for employees who are poor employees because of their use of drugs.

The reason is simple: remove "because of their use of drugs" and you've got the formula that all businesses should follow. Don't continue to employ people who aren't good employees. But drugs give companies a convenient scapegoat so they can fire people for poor conduct; a drug test is a known quantity, whereas employee performance is a judgement call.

But it is naive to assume that employee performance, or indeed many of the ills of our society, can be blamed on drugs. Urine tests will not detect alcohol abuse, which is a far bigger problem. Nor will they seek out and destroy various other human failings.

I'm beginning to sound like I'm not in favor of urine drug testing, which isn't true. I don't really care one way or the other; until the government makes everyone in the country do it, it's something you sign up for when you take a job. What began, and should rightfully end, this essay, was something which wasn't all that funny: urine tests for welfare.

Never happen. Sorry Leonard. Not only would it be seen as a gross civil rights violation, but the massive bureaucracy would turn it into a losing proposition. And since you seem so sure that everyone on welfare is a no-good, drug-using bum, what would it prove? What would it eliminate? Most people don't "sit on their butt[s]" and collect welfare anyway. And can you imagine the thousands of gallons of welfare urine? It makes me ill just to think about it.

In conclusion, ladies and gents, urine testing has always seemed to me to be a little silly, a lot paranoid, and mostly for show. People who don't do drugs don't care, people who do either stop in order to keep their jobs or find some way of getting around the test. And lots of people get caught because they're too stupid to figure out in which camp they belong. If it's performance-enhancing drugs polluting a sport, by all means, test away. If we're worried about hiring potheads at Wal-Mart, give me a break. If they piped pure THC through the vents, would it really destroy the quality of Wal-Mart?

Thirteen

This is not in fact the thirteenth post.

It's the thirteenth day, but the fact that I got overeager and posted twice on one day means that I have successfully avoided doubling up the thirteens. And since I'm lying about the date on which this was written anyway, Thirteen seems like something of a misnomer for the title. I just wanted to talk about the number, and it was a flimsy pretext. I should have called the blog that: A Flimsy Pretext. But then people might have thought I was talking about Iraq. That stupid war will overshadow our entire lives and whether you love it or hate it, you won't be able to ignore it; it will inject itself into every context. So I guess it's a good thing that I didn't use that name.

Why thirteen? It's not the first prime, or the first double-digit prime. It's a number which comes up much more frequently than, say, 67. It must be a great source of sadness to students of the occult and numerology that there is no thirteenth month in the Gregorian calendar. But for all of that lack, there are at least thirteen days in every month, there are at least thirteen hours in every day (we avoid the obvious by operating our common clocks base-12, but the 24 hour clock is coming on strong, unlike the decimal time system, which is, I think it is safe to say, dead and unlamented), thirteen minutes in every hour (at least, remember), seconds in every minute, and so on. So, by rights, it could be the thirteenth of the month at 13:13:13, and if it happened to be the year 1313, that's five of the buggers right there.

It's a superstition, I know, and it probably dates back to Pythagoras being unable to figure out what the divine nature of thirteen was (I don't know, and frankly, Pythagoras gets really good press, so I'm all for taking him down a few notches, since he was a crazed, bean-fearing wack-job by many accounts). But what's so wrong about thirteen?

And yet you'll notice that I've managed to keep it from being over-present here. From a fake thirteen, signing off.

Not Excusing

I tend not to make New Years resolutions because I know I won't keep them. Not because I'm a bad person, just because... well, okay, I'm a bad person. I don't like to lie to myself about self-improvement, because that just seems like a slippery slope. I'm a bad person and I don't see that improving, frankly, so I'll be honest about it.

That said, there is something very nice about resolutions if they are ones you plan on keeping. We all fall into ruts in life, and kicking ourselves out of them is healthy. But if we make resolutions that are doomed to fail, we're not helping ourselves. Either we resolve to do too much (Tony Kornheiser, or rather Tony Kornheiser, or rather, officially, Tony Kornheiser, wrote an amusing article about this wherein he claims men are the biggest culprit in the over-resolving kick, but I think it can happen to anyone) and can't possibly succeed (I wish I could find a copy of the article on the unofficial website which is blatantly ripping Tony off and seems to have very little acquaintance with copyright law, so I guess it's okay that I can't, but I did give a link to this site, which is bad), or we resolve to do something and never slip up, which is asking for trouble. It's okay to make a mistake or two.

Most resolutions could survive a small setback, but people take all of them so seriously. Certainly, if you resolve to stop murdering prostitutes, or to stop doing heroin, a small slip-up is really more of a problem than just breaking your resolution. But if you resolve to eat more healthily (a sensible resolution, rather than, say, resolving to go on a strict diet of water and vitamin pills, which is neither healthy nor realistic) you shouldn't decide to throw in the towel just because that brownie unfairly tempted you. You can slip up. It's okay.

How, you ask, can I make this work for me? Rationalization. If you resolve to eat more healthily, rationalize a few snacks into "healthily" by remembering that moderation is everything, and even "healthily" must be pursued in moderation. If you resolve to work out three times a week, rationalize a few missed exercises by exercising a little longer next time. Don't try to make up for your mistake by doubling your commitment, and don't throw in the towel. Even if you fail to exercise three times a week, if you exercise a few more times than you otherwise would, you're better off than you otherwise would be, right? The guilt you feel for messing up is punishment enough; don't make it worse by making the rest of the resolution untenable.

I guess what I'm saying is that it's okay to mess up, as long as you try, and keep trying. Which is why this essay, which claims to have been written on Friday, was in fact written a few days later than that. As I said at the beginning (of the year), I will not succeed in writing something in this blog every day. But I feel a little guilty about failing, and I suppose that's healthy too. And since I stated at the outset that it was a resolution doomed to failure, and since I never actually made a New Year's resolution to do it, it's okay.

Evolution

On the subject of politics (ha ha, gotcha), I keep seeing things which remind me of the heated debate (well, heated in some circles anyway) about evolution. Why is there a debate? Al Franken tells a wonderful story in one of his books (yes, I know, Al Franken, I must be a horrible liberal, but for the purposes of this story, it doesn't matter) about a member of the Religious Right, a firm believer in Creationism as spelled out explicitly in the Bible, who was a big fan of Jurassic Park. He tried to explain that you couldn't have it both ways, but she wasn't listening, possibly because she thought the whole "dinosaur" conceit was simply fictional. It's not, but perhaps she wasn't stupid, merely myopic.

In any case, there should be no scientific debate about evolution. It is a scientific fact. Note that I'm not talking about Darwin; I'm just talking about the simple, scientifically verifiable fact that life changes over time through genetic mutations. Whether you believe that "survival of the fittest" explains this, or whether you believe that the changes are due to a giant purple kangaroo who lives in the center of the Earth and occasionally makes mistakes in transcription, things change. If you don't believe this, then you have no business calling your "theory" scientific, because it isn't based on scientific reality.

I have a great deal of respect for things which aren't based in scientific reality, because scientific reality is, for the most part, boring, tedious, slow, and unimaginative, much like most of religion. But that is beside the point. Demanding that Creationism be taught as a scientific alternative to Darwin is selling Creationism short; it's not science, nor should it be. If you believe that God made the Earth in 6 days about 6000 years ago, that's not science, it's belief, and while I respectfully disagree, I wouldn't ask you to change your beliefs simply because they fail to fit the science. Many beliefs do.

But all of this is beside the point, because Creative Design or Creationism or Darwin are all just theories or beliefs, which either fit or do not fit the fact that evolution is a fact. Darwin is not. If you want to debate Darwin, by all means, but you cannot engage in a scientific debate about evolution, because it's not a theory. It's a fact.

The problem arises from the fact that people view "Darwin's Theory of Evolution," as being a theory that describes a theoretical change which might possibly be occurring. False. Darwin's Theory is a theory relating to evolution, which attempts to explain a possible mechanism by which this fact (evolution, in case you fell asleep somewhere back there) occurs. By the same token, Jerry Falwell could publish Falwell's Theory of Evolution wherein he theorized that evolution was an illusion, explaining away the fact that things change. But it wouldn't do to call that Theory evolution, now would it?

A further illustration: the sky is usually blue. Such has been the case for as long as people have looked at it, and probably since before that. No one would call me a theorist if I published a paper saying that the sky was in fact yellow. They would disagree because it failed to fit the facts. If I published a holy book wherein I stated that the sky only looks blue to sinners, and anyone who saw it as blue was therefore going to Hell, some people might believe me, and it might be true. But this would not be science. What would be science is if I, as many people throughout the ages have done, published a paper wherein I tried to explain WHY the sky was blue. This Theory of Sky Blueness could be judged as science, because it merely attempts to explain the facts, not dispute them.

I don't want to get too meta about this, because it's really not worth it. Debating whether evolution should be taught in schools is like debating whether students should be taught to draw a blue sky; both are facts, and school, at least public, governmentally-funded school, is about facts. The government is no more obligated to provide equal time to Creationism than it is to provide equal time to the Amish, who, I'm sure, feel strongly about many things taught in school. Equal time for belief is not something guaranteed in the separation of church and state. If that were the case, I might successfully lobby to have my kangaroo taught in school.

But, if the government wants to teach Darwin, it needs to make clear both that Darwin is not the only boat racing and Darwin and Evolution are not the same thing at all. So teach evolution. We let them teach that hydrogen and oxygen combine to form water, don't we?

To be fair, I should point out that I am biased. I believe that the Earth was created seventeen minutes ago, and that all of recorded and unrecorded history is merely a collective hallucination. Disprove that with science!

Dominoes

I'm not really interested in making this a blog about politics, largely because that's a set of views that NOBODY cares about, but also because blogs about politics are, in large part, preaching to the choir. I doubt very much that people from opposite sides of the political spectrum (in the United States, and I should have made that clear from the outset because not everyone is from the US, shockingly) are going out to find each other's blogs, and that's a sad commentary on political thought in this country (but see my earlier statements about unity). Certainly, there are people with whose opinions I disagree who are still fine, decent people, but I don't really want to hear about their political views, and I'm sure the same is true in reverse.

But I do have to point out a big thing which I think many people are missing in the whole, "Iraq has become Vietnam II," thing: similar theories. I won't go point-by-point over the similarities and differences between Iraq and Vietnam because I think that's bullshit. Iraq isn't Vietnam, any more than Captain Kirk should be compared with Captain Piccard, or apples should be quantified against oranges. They have similarities, but comparing them is missing the point.

The point is: what can we learn from Vietnam (indeed, from any historical event) that can help us examine the present, in this case Iraq. And the thing is, there's a huge, gaping problem in people's justifications of Vietnam: the world is not Communist. That was the Domino Theory, and that is why we were supposed to be justified in going to "Police Action" in Vietnam. But there are fewer Communist regimes in the world now than there were before. So why didn't the fall of Saigon herald the doom of freedom, democracy, and world peace the way we were told it would?

History gives us two kinds of enjoyable lenses: rose and granite. Either we can see things more charitably, or we don't seem to see them at all. You can take your pick of which to use on the Domino Theory, or you can look it square in the face. The temptation is to use grandiose claims, and say that because Saigon fell and Communist troops didn't immediately invade California, the theory was bunk. Or you can look at relatively unconnected events, such as the fall of the Berlin Wall, and say that if those things happened, Communism clearly didn't win, and therefore the theory was wrong.

But Vietnam became Communist. China stayed Communist. Myanmar (or Burma, or whatever it's supposed to be called) became Communist. So did Cambodia, for a time. North Korea... well, that's another problem. In fact, South-East Asia has serious problems, possibly in result of Communism. So does Russia and the Ex-SSRs. So does Eastern Europe. Playing, "what might have happened if..." is fun, but pointless, because you can't convince anyone. So why play, "What might have happened if the US hadn't entered into the conflict in Vietnam?"

We now have a similar theory in Iraq: if we lose Iraq, the rest of the region will fall into anarchy and terrorism and 9/11 9/11 9/11! It's a compelling theory, precisely because a close study of history and a realistic look at the original Domino Theory shows us that it's all too likely. Probably more so, because the Middle East isn't terribly stable even with all the dominoes standing upright. So that's the justification we are given to stay the course, or sacrifice more, or surge, or whatever.

But we didn't go to war because of Domino Theory II, and that's why Iraq isn't Vietnam. In many ways, comparing Iraq to Vietnam is something that the administration would like us to do, because Domino Theory II is a compelling argument, when you cut right down to it historically. But they're selling us a line; we didn't go to war in Iraq because of Domino Theory II. We went there because Saddam Hussein supposedly had possible weapons of mass suggested destruction. That's why. And you know what? We were wrong. Don't look through the granite lenses; he didn't, and we were wrong. No matter what we do, whether we win or not, we are fighting for the wrong reasons.

I am not saying this because I hate Iraq, or because I hate George Bush, or because I'm anti-American. I hate all wars, and I don't want anyone to fight them, and I don't care why. But from a strictly historical standpoint, the facts are there: Domino Theory I was mostly a correct prediction (unless you want to get hysterical about it and pretend that it was ever about Viet Cong invading San Francisco) but a lousy foreign policy, Saddam Hussein did not have what we claimed he had nor did he do what we claimed he did, and Domino Theory II, right or wrong, is beside the point. From a historical standpoint. But also a lousy foreign policy.

And as a final note, I must also point out that, "What if..." cuts both ways. Proving a prediction right is based on cause and effect, and there is nothing one can argue that states, for certain, that the loss by the United States in Vietnam led Communism to triumph (as spelled out by Domino Theory I; it's hard for me to justify saying that Communism won the Cold War, for instance). It is possible that, no matter what, Communism would have triumphed everywhere else, and events would have proceeded exactly as they otherwise did, even if the US took over the entire country of Vietnam and set up a perfect, free, fair, and honorable government which continued to this day. And as long as we're living in a fantasy world, I'd like to win the lottery.

Human history is tricky when it comes to causality, and usually the only time we get to play the game of cause and effect is after both cause and effect have already long gone. So I won't play it, or mention anything which points to removing Saddam Hussein actually destabilizing an already terrible situation, or the introduction of Western influence into an area which is notorious for reacting poorly to said influences (vis. Israel). So don't believe that just because history seems to vindicate Domino Theory I, that it was anything more than a flimsy pretext for killing, either innocent or guilty, as Domino Theory II is turning out to be.

All I Want

Gift giving: oy! What do people want? That's why the wish list is simultaneously the biggest injustice and the biggest help. Unless you tell me what you want, I can't give you want you want, but if you tell me what you want, then it both takes the surprise out of gifts and makes it seem like you're telling me what to buy you, an act of supreme ego. So we try to hint at what we want, and every year we wind up with things that we either can't or won't use.

We could give money, but that's unoriginal and unthoughtful, and it's the thought that counts right up to the time when the thinker is shown to be completely insane. I'm sure we can all give examples of bizarre gifts we've received. So we give gift certificates, but as many people have pointed out those are just as bad as cash in the thought-counting department and worse than cash in every other way because half the time, we can't use them. Who has fifteen cents worth of gift certificate left over after a purchase that they will probably never use? I thought so. Or how about those gift cards that grow mold in our wallets because they are from places we don't shop ordinarily, or perhaps ever. Getting a gift certificate to a clothing store is like getting underwear, except at least with underwear you're not required to choose the gift yourself.

So we return gifts. If the giver saved the receipt, it's almost an acknowledgement that the gift was bad, so givers don't save receipts. If you ask from whence the gift came, it's rude, so half the time, we don't know where to return our gifts, and the other half, we can only get store credit because we don't have a receipt. So we now have credit at a store which is undoubtedly someplace which we wouldn't shop, because why else would anyone get us a gift from that store?

So what's wrong with just not giving gifts, or getting really cheap, thoughtful gifts which are accompanied by wads of cash? I know the temptation is there to simply take a gift-wad and spend it on gasoline, or groceries, or some other mundane and non-gift thing. You could even spend it on a gift for someone else. But the small thoughtful gift can make up for those people who give in to the temptation and buy a fill-up for Christmas, or you can simply look at it as giving, regardless of where the gift winds up.

Too long have we felt (this country in particular, although I'm sure it's a problem elsewhere too) that gifts need to be something other than normal things, that we cannot simply give a gift that people would buy for themselves. We look for "gifts" that only exist to be given, luxury items that, were they not gifts, we could never afford, even items which simply have no function at all.

Next year, if anyone wants to give me something, I'll be perfectly happy with money. Or a gift that I have stated, in that egotistical tradition, that I want. If you won't give either of those things, then please, take the money you were going to spend and give it to charity. I acknowledge that simply giving things is fun, probably more fun that receiving them, so that seems like a good way to both satisfy the givers and keep me from drowning in presents that I don't need.

Demise of the Four Year Degree

I got my degree in four years.

That's pretty much all I have to say about that.

No, okay, it isn't. I'm also glad it only took me four years to get a degree. Very happy about that, because if I had stayed for one more minute, I would have gone crazier than I already was (and continue to be). And why not? You can't stay in college forever, no matter how much you might like to. I have numerous friends who all got their degrees in four years. And a few of my other friends didn't, but they wished they had.

Of course, once you leave your four-year degree training, most people wind up going back for more. But that doesn't mean that they wanted to take five years to get a four year degree. I'm unclear why people seem to be taking longer and longer, but I bet it has something to do with the same reason people have more and more homework in the primary grades; we expect too much. If everyone simply expected to take six years, even seven, and return with not only a Bachelor's degree but also a Master's, it wouldn't be so bad. But we try to cram more and more into a program which was never designed to be the end of higher education.

Then, when people finally graduate, they find that no one wants a graduate with a Bachelor's degree because everyone is judging the degrees by the assumed amount of time that went into them: four years. Never mind that today's Bachelor's degree includes schooling that yesterday would have been sufficient for part of a Masters; it's the name that you get. And people are still expected to graduate in four years, even if, according to the news media anyway (although certainly not according to my own personal experience), no one does.

What's to be done? Well, charging less for college so a five or six-year program could be feasible, money-wise, would be a start. Changing the attitude of employers, lowering unreasonable expectations, even perhaps simply saying that the program will take longer than four years, these things would be good, but the money is a large portion of the problem, especially since it makes people who can't afford college work harder to graduate earlier so they can afford it. But wait; to afford college, these poor people have to work full-time jobs in addition to college. So it's even more unfair.

I would declare class warfare over this, but it just isn't worth it, especially when I managed to graduate in four years. Ha. Ha ha. I mock you slowpokes.

Rules Rules Rules

There has been a certain amount of talk among people with whom I have associated (read: fellow viewers of television when I happened to be in the room) about the fact that the rules of football seem to be becoming more and more slanted in favor of being unable to do certain things. For instance, the referees seem eager to call defensive pass interference in cases where the defensive player looked at the receiver too hard. Another common problem is the fact that, once you get several hundred pounds of defensive lineman moving in the direction of the quarterback, it is difficult to stop said pounds when the quarterback throws the ball, but more and more, referees are calling roughing the passer.

I understand the motivation behind some of the rule-tightening. Safety issues alone have made certain plays illegal, such as the above passer roughing. The NFL simply cannot afford to lose quarterbacks to injuries, especially when they are so easy to injure (not to malign the chutzpah of quarterbacks in any way; it's a matter of being off-balance, unprepared, etc. not of being weak). It isn't fun when a player's neck is broken because someone grabbed his face mask. Frankly, there are many unstated rules which also protect the players; the referees don't allow knives, for instance.

When a rule is there for safety, I can accept it even if it might mean slightly less exciting play. But some rules seem to be introduced or altered simply to preserve the "purity" of the game. This is not a situation unique to football. Quite frankly, what purity? It's a game. It is not played for the players; it is being played for the people watching. It is modern-day bread-and-circuses, and taking it too seriously will ruin the fun for those of us in the stands (or in front of the TV, as the case may be).

On the one hand, part of me says, "Throw out all rules, give twenty-four guys a field and a ball and tell them to put said ball over arbitrary line X in the shortest amount of time by whatever means necessary." There is no doubt that this might be exciting. Ultimate football, as it were, in the style of a street brawl.

But part of the reason we have rules in sports at all is because a fracas isn't interesting, or at least not as interesting as it sounds. Most "Extreme" sports have more rules than you can shake a stick at. Ultimate fighting, supposedly the more "pure" boxing without all those rules, still has rules. We enjoy rules because they give us a framework in which to enjoy creativity. Unfettered creativity isn't very interesting. Indeed, saying "twenty-four," "ball," "arbitrary line X," and "shortest amount of time," amounts to rules.

We cannot eliminate rules from sports; sports are rules. Games on the whole are rules. But the rules should exist to serve the enjoyment of the game, whether because it isn't enjoyable to get killed, or because rules are made to be bent a little. When we create rules simply for the sake of keeping a game within the rules, we forget that rules are the game, and whatever the rules are, the game is bound to be within them.

And stop calling so many pass interference calls. And one guy on each team should have a whip. And there should be a live tiger on the field. Now that's football!

Axes to Grind

Actually, knives to sharpen. The topic has nothing to do with axes, so if you were hoping to see me give an impassioned and reasoned take on how to dismember a corpse using an axe, or the virtues of axe-murdering people versus chain-saws, you'll have to wait until I come up with some impassioned and reasoned views on those subjects, because right now, I don't have any. I spell "axe" with an 'e,' and that's pretty much all I have to say on the subject.

But knives inspired my narrative, if so it can be called. I saw a program on television, which I watch too much of, which talked, in part, about the Luddite virtue of purchasing your knife from a Japanese knife-maker. For the price of a handmade Japanese knife, a chef could feed a homeless family in Africa for a decade (well, probably not that long, but I don't have an exact figure on knife-price-to-homeless-family-in-Africa-welfare-by-date). Of course, because they are handmade, they are supposed to be better. Maybe they are, a little. But who is to say that a knife which is slightly lower in quality will cause any food I cook to become substandard.

I am all for using the right tools for the job, and I suppose I don't begrudge people who have the money to purchase high-quality Japanese knives, but I do resent the implication that anything handmade is automatically better. In many cases, this simply isn't true.

And yet at the same time, I too yearn to give up my life, go apprentice myself to a Japanese knife-sharpener, and learn the ancient craft. The realistic portion of my brain also tells me that people have been using and sharpening knives for thousands of years longer than Japan has existed, and they can't possibly be the only people who can do it well. Someone has to sharpen knives that aren't made in Japan, and someone has to keep knives sharp that aren't located in Japan. Ergo, there must be a knife-sharpener outside Japan.

I don't know where this is going, which is a good sign, because my views usually don't arrive at their destination. I would like to learn how to sharpen knives, but I resent the fact that we in America seem to feel that things from other places are automatically better, that things made by hand automatically are worth more than things produced by machines. I think people in the US are too eager to look elsewhere for their culture, to feel that it's bourgeois to like things from the US. French cooking is, for the most part, boring and small. Japanese knives are, for the most part, overpriced and will not make your food any better. Chinese pottery is, for the most part, in Wal-Marts around the country.

Give us a chance, world. If we would stop chasing after the culture that other people have and start recognizing the culture that we have, maybe our culture wouldn't stink so much, for the most part. Judge something by its quality, not where it comes from.

In that spirit, I would like to say that those Japanese knives on that program looked very sharp, and I wouldn't mind owning one. I doubt if it will enable me to make a soufflé. And Blogger's spell-check doesn't believe that "soufflé" is spelled that way. We've all got problems.

Potpourri

I don't tend to lie a lot. Actually, that's a lie; I lie about all sorts of things. But I don't tend to lie about dates. Also a lie; I wish the post office would allow me to postdate my own letters so people would think they'd been lost in the mail. Actually, I am a huge liar. Which is why I'm writing this sometime after 1:00 on Saturday, but I have told Blogger to say it is Friday. I lie.

I have entitled this "Potpourri" because that's what one is supposed to title things which have no topic. So I guess I could have called this entire blog, "Potpourri," although that's probably been taken. I could also have called this posting, "Andy Rooney Can Suck It!" but that seemed rude. So prepare to be dazzled by my ability to complain. Well, perhaps not dazzled.

Does anyone besides me remember a time when it was possible to skip things at the beginnings of rented movies? Like the FBI warning; press the FF button and watch ol' J. Edgar cry. Or previews. FF - gone! There were no menus of options to select. There were no special features to investigate. There were no little games to play with your remote. Put in tape, press FF, press Play, watch movie. If you wanted to get funky, you could press FF twice to see if it would make it faster forward. It usually didn't.

Don't get me wrong; I love DVDs. I like menu options. I love special features. I'm tepid about little remote games, but far be it for me to complain about little things I don't have to endure if I don't want to. What I don't like is this increasing push by DVD companies to create menu sequences that go on for half an hour before they let me press anything, and heaven forbid I try to skip them. It started out with FBI warnings that I couldn't just press MENU and skip, so I had to use the chapter skipper to skip them. Then they disallowed that, so I had to FF through them. Then they disallowed that as well, making me contemplate, in two languages and for multiple agencies, the terror of copyright infringement. I know why this is (MPAA, the FBI warning is not what is keeping people from stealing your products, hint, hint). But then they decided that, not only shall I be unable to skip warnings, I shall also now be subjected to previews... which I cannot skip. Fie to all of them! If I wanted to be able to put in a movie, go to the theater, watch another movie, return, and find the menu sequence (which has become a form of entertainment all its own, with bells, whistles, theme music, thumbprint activation, and bands to beat the band) just wrapping up, I would not rent (or purchase) the DVD in the first place. I would have watched the movie on TV and done my business during commercial breaks. I foresee a time when DVDs have these too. Just you wait.

Lastly, why is it that sitcoms always have a normal-looking man married to a supermodel wife who has obviously never had children. And by normal-looking, I mean schlub. This is not realistic. I demand beautiful people in all roles in sitcoms.

Potpourri.

Do-Nothing Congress

Everyone is hoping that the Democrats and Republicans will put aside their differences and work together for the next two years. Some really naive people are even hoping that the Executive Branch might be brought into this little governmental love-fest. Even realists expect that the first 100 days of the new Congress will produce legislation.

I have to ask: why? Why do we hope for unity? What does it get the average man in the street? When Congress gets to pass laws, they usually abrogate our rights, raise our taxes, tap our wires, incarcerate our terror suspects without trial, balloon our deficits, and, let's not forget, raise the pay for our Congress. I'm not accusing either side in the debate of being worse. The Republicans violate our civil liberties and give our money to huge, faceless corporate automata. The Democrats pass sweeping social legislation which doesn't work and costs too much money and then turn around and raise our taxes to pay for it. The Independents... well, they are harder to pigeonhole, but they're probably planning to spend our taxes on giant statues to Baal or something.

Since when is it a bad thing when the government does nothing. Debate is healthy, and in a sharply divided and partisan atmosphere, any legislation which makes it through must be really good legislation, right? Well, actually, probably not, since in a sharply divided and partisan atmosphere, most of the legislation that makes it through is pay raises and pork. But what's wrong with that?

I say, let them fight. When they're fighting, we don't get ridiculous wars, anti-immigration fences that will never be built, Stealth bombers that can't fly during the rain, anti-ballistic missile systems to protect us against the Soviet Union (which isn't a really big player in the international scene, if you haven't noticed), and ethics laws to govern politicians, who are by nature unethical.

Okay, I'm picking a little bit more on the Republicans than the Democrats, but they've been the ones in power for the last few years, so they've been able to pump out more garbage recently.

Unity is for sheep. Give me partisan bickering any day.

Security? Hardly.

Another thing that bugs me about the Internet, besides the joy of not being able to read things because they are too small, is the fact that the Internet apparently wants me to pull down my virtual pants and grease up before I can enjoy any content. I am not by nature a paranoid person, but I don't want my computer to turn into a wretched hive of scum and villainy, so I have installed various medicine-ish type things on my computer, the most wonderful of which is my proxy filter. I strongly urge everyone who doesn't like advertisements, pop-ups, annoying javascripts, and all that other Web 2.0 garbage to get one.

Sadly, regardless of how unsafe one wishes to be, there are limits. I don't feel like just letting any old thing run on my computer, but this is, in essence, what most websites demand I do. Any javascript? Check. Any Flash? Check. Any other random crap that I hate? Check. All of these things must be both allowed and condoned in order to make Web 2.0 work. Indeed, I have to turn off most of my security to write in this blog, and sometimes I wonder if it's really worth it.

I'm okay with things that are useful, but when you can't even access content, textual content, without turning on javascript, flash, and God knows what else, I am forced to balance my desire to not let my computer be overrun by faulty/dangerous/annoying programs and my need to see the information. This is not good.

Bells and whistles and gizmos and thingummies... screw them all. If I want usability on the Internet, I don't need it to look like anything other than what it is: the Internet. I resent the fact that Flash provides no means to turn off the Flash player for individual instances of it, which causes any Flash I'd like to run to slow to a crawl. Hasta la vista, any Flash games, because all Flash games come from websites which have Flash advertisements, usually three or four to a page. One word - lag.

Flash (and the rest of the Internet, actually) is apparently designed for a limited subset of the population that makes Flash files, rather than the huge majority that consume them. Where exactly is anything on the Internet consumer-driven? We put up with garbage we wouldn't stand in other products because we don't know any better. Developers make the rules; no Flash developer wants the audience to have any more control than the developer allows, because that would allow users to skip ads, mute annoying noises, pause animations so as not to drain bandwidth... and so on.

But the main point is: Web 2.0 is apparently just an excuse to bell-and-whistle any security arrangements one might want to make into an early grave. It doesn't have to be, if the providers of security would make more of an effort to create products with enough AI to sense the difference between navigational scripts and malicious code. The developers of websites also have a responsibility to use only that subset of features which are necessary, but more than that to provide a way, perhaps less attractive but still usable, for people without the capability to use the site in its normal form to access the information. It's not just security; it's also usability.

Until that happens, I will continue to cobble together solutions and make compromises to use the limited subsection of the Internet I choose. It's not a solution, but it's all I have.