You got to be kidding me...

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2007-02-12T09:11:00.000-08:00

...to WordPress. Please update any links and bookmarks!

The Next Big Language

2007-02-12T07:34:00.000-08:00

Does Steve Yegge know the future (of programming)? Probably not any more than anyone else, but his prediction is definitely entertaining!

C(++)-like syntax is the standard. Your language's popularity will fall off as a direct function of how far you deviate from it.

There's plenty of wiggle room in the way you define classes and other OOP constructs, but you'll need to stick fairly closely to the basic control-flow constructs, arithmetic expressions and operators, and the use of curly-braces for delimiting blocks and function bodies.

This is because programmers are lame, but hey, it's your target audience. Give the people what they want.

Read The Whole Thing^TM

Das ist Interessant!

2007-02-12T06:30:00.000-08:00

Autoextremist has quite an opinion about the DaimlerChrysler merger (hey, not like it happened 15 years ago or anything--we're still taking about it!) and why it should end (link via the Carnival of Cars.) In a nutshell, he says the problem is that the Mercedes organization can't make itself collaborate with the Chrysler organization. That's too bad, because the basic concept of the merger was and is simple common sense--give Chrysler brands access to Mercedes' engineering talent, while amortizing Daimler's investment in said talent and quality components across a high-volume product line. It should have been possible to increase Chrysler's quality and reliability, and Mercedes profitability and price competitiveness, and without any of the dilution-of-brand name that some people predicted--as if Mercedes and Dodge were going to start "badge-engineering" crossover models or put $90k price tags on minivans.

Unfortunately, that kind of thing only works when you get buy-in within the companies, and Autoextremist says they didn't do that. If so, then Chrysler definitely needs a new partner. More interestingly though, if they do part ways, the postmortems might give us the first real insight into why these transatlantic mergers never seem to work out the way they're planned. For example, the Ford group owns Volvo, Jaguar, and a few other major brands, but still can't manage to sell the same Ford-branded small car platform on both sides of the pond. Why? It must be political somehow, because they do sell the same compact Volvo model everywhere, and that's built on the same platform.

Life Imitating Art?

2007-02-10T15:54:00.000-08:00

Yeah, I ripped off the title from Vicky. The Volokh Conspiracy links this article about Richard Branson's new $25m prize for developing a technology to remove Carbon Dioxide from the atmosphere. At the same time, I'm watching the environmentalism episode of Penn & Teller: Bullshit, where they go out and trick a bunch of environmentalist protestors into signing a petition to ban water (they call it by its chemical name, dihydrogen monoxide)

You could say they handpicked their dumbasses, and they probably did, but is this "x-prize" for CO2-scrubbing technology any smarter? I should go into business selling "organic CO2 scrubbers" (trees) for $99 per sapling. Come on, people.

Tab A, Slot B

2007-02-10T13:23:00.000-08:00

No, this isn't about my Friday night, it's about my Saturday afternoon! A couple weeks ago I got myself a decorative outlet cover for an outlet in the livingroom. Upon removing the old outlet cover, pieces of the actual outlets broke off and fell to the floor. Time for a new outlet! Let's begin! Step one, of course, is to turn off the power :)

Old and busted--literally. My toofless outlet makes me think of West Virginia. Also note the push-in connectors on the back of the outlet (holes with cut ends of wire poking out) My home wiring manual says to use those ...never. But with this cheap POS there wasn't any choice; you can see it doesn't have screw terminals (except, weirdly, for the ground wire.) Also, it's hard to tell in the picture but there was a remnant of masking tape on the broken part of the plug, which means someone knew it was broken and "fixed" it that way. I would have to re-read the report to be sure, but I believe my home inspector did not catch that.

New hotness! This is a "professional grade" outlet for which I paid the princely sum of $1.50. It looks exactly like the manual says it should--two silver screws, two gold ones, and a green one for the ground wire.

Here's a dark-ish picture of the wiring. The outlet may have been junk, but the wires were nicely folded back into the box, which continues behind the wall to your right. Something odd here--notice there are two leads each for the black (hot) and white (cold) wires, but only one for ground (the uninsulated wire) That means the ground circuit is wired in parallel, but the power circuit is wired in series. I wonder if that's up to current code.

Besides a flathead screwdriver, this was the only tool I really needed (though not the only one I used) It's a wire cutter/stripper with the various gauges or thickness of wire labeled on the blade. The manual says household wires are either 12 or 14-gauge. Mine is 14. After hammers and screwdrivers, I use this more than anything else in my toolbox.

Zooming in for the picture, I noticed all these nicks on the cutting blade. Weird, because I've only ever used it on copper wire.

Here's the new outlet all wired up. It's hard to see in the pic, but there's a ridge in between the screw terminals on the side. It's nice because you can brace the end of the wire against that while you bend it around the screw. Amazing what $0.50 extra (compared to the cheap outlet unit) gets you.

And voila! Proof that I can accomplish simple electrical repairs without injury to myself or others. Yes, the outlet is upside-down. The manual recommends doing it this way because if your plug pulls out a little bit (as some of them do) and something metal happens to fall there, it will only hit the ground blade, which is not energized. That made sense to me, and I believe I've seen them like that in some newer houses too.

Federal contractors have massive cost overruns?

2007-02-08T09:12:00.000-08:00

Imagine that. Of course we don't have to:

The "floodgates of fraud reporting" have opened at the National Reconnaissance Office, the nation's top-secret builder and operator of spy satellites. This bit of news comes from no less a source than the NRO's inspector general, Eric Feldman.

The problems are so deep they "threaten the U.S. edge in high-tech reconnaissance satellites" according to USA Today. Specifically:

The agency's troubled next-generation satellite, a $25 billion boondoggle called Future Imagery Architecture, has been so dogged by cost overruns and technical trouble that the director of national intelligence cut the project in half last year.

Being a veteran of federal contracting myself, I think one of the biggest problems is actually related to the rules surrouding outsourcing and contracting. For one thing, it's often against those rules for an individual employee to split their time between contracts, negating most of the economic case for outsourcing in any line of work. For another, entire large projects like the aforementioned satellite replacement are outsourced to a prime contractor which becomes almost a department of the agency. These contracts are sometimes paid per full-time staff position, as opposed to a flat fee or even time and materials to accomplish specific goals. Of course the contractor's primary incentive is to keep the contract going as long as possible, not finish the job and move on.

And then there's the competence factor. Most government contracting jobs, both DOD and civilian, require a security clearance, but the process of getting a new clearance for an employee is extremely difficult and expensive, and is all placed on the contractor's shoulders. Therefore, even the largest contracting firms with the deepest pockets avoid getting new clearances whenever possible, even if it means hiring marginally-qualified people to do sophisticated work. Future Imagery Architecture is far from the only massive federal high-tech project to be years and billions of dollars past due.

My condo board, or your household (or mine) does it closer to right. We do the overall project management ourselves, bidding out narrow and specific jobs to qualified contractors. That's how the government should do it--keep project management in house and bid out specific pieces with tight scopes of work, and no rules about anything but getting the job done (and disclosure, if needed)

At any rate, I'll leave you with this original demotivator by Clint, which really captures the morass well:

All Able-bodied Citizens...

2007-02-07T19:01:00.000-08:00

I have a lot to complain about tonight, but in the interest of not going off half-cocked, we'll save that for another time. In the meantime, I finally got around to reading The Second Amendment and States Rights: A Thought Experiment (link via Instapundit) and I'm fascinated by the idea of returning to something like the pre-Civil War militia system. As the title says, the paper is a thought experiment and the authors aren't necessarily recommending such a system, but it's still an interesting idea.

I'll add a few details to flesh it out. Imagine every able-bodied man and woman being required to turn out at least once a year for military training, and to own and maintain at least the standard infantry weapon, with interested persons being able to participate in more intensive training (and acquire the weapons and other gear to go with it) or attend Officer Candidate School (if they're qualified) alongside regular military members. A system like that would kill the dreams of gun-banners once and for all, promote greater personal responsibility, and maybe even restore some of the lost sense of community with your neighbors. Most importantly in my mind, it would eliminate the mystique that allows guns and gun owners to be demonized in the minds of people who have never seen a firearm up close. If an "assault rifle" is something everyone's mom and dad have and use, then it can no longer be the anthropomorphized secular demon of gun-control lore.

Astro-nut

2007-02-06T19:54:00.000-08:00

I can't believe nobody else came up with that title...

Home Wiring

2007-02-06T10:23:00.000-08:00

Among the million things that seem to be on my plate these days, I have a broken power outlet in my livingroom. I mean literally broken. I had bought a decorative outlet cover, and when I pulled the plain old one off, pieces of plastic cracked and fell off of the receptable (plugs)

So, I have to replace it. I can't see hiring an electrician for such a teeny job, but being me, I have to research it to death before attempting a DIY. I bought two books, Wiring a House by Rex Cauldwell, and Basic Electricity by the Bureau of Naval Personnel. Yes, I have plans to learn and use electricity beyond just fixing the outlet.

Anyway, Wiring a House is great--it explains things in simple plain language, with lots of informative drawings. I feel like I now know how to install an outlet from scratch and make it completely up to code. I guess it's not rocket science, but I know several of the tips have already saved me from doing something unsafe that I would probably have done otherwise. If you are contemplating doing some household electrical projects, I highly recommend this book.

IATF RFC (2)

2007-02-04T05:47:00.000-08:00

Here's the first good response I've seen to Arnold Kling's RFC. I wouldn't say that I agree with the writer's commentary on Kling's list, but his alternative list is much tighter and, to my mind, works better as a statement of first principles. It's internally consistent, with no obvious language-of-political-convenience. Most importantly, it's simple. I particularly like the statement on foreign relations (emphasis added):

We further recognize that it is in the nature of free societies to extend the general scope of these rights and freedoms, and that it is in the nature of despotic regimes to extend the suppression of these rights and freedoms to the greatest possible extent. It is therefore an essential action of government to staunchly defend these rights and freedoms against despotic regimes, and to engage in peaceful coexistence or alliance with the free nations of world.

Edit: I'm just going to copy the entire list over here. Item #4 might rub some people the wrong way, but remember there can be a lot of different kinds of families. I don't know whether the author of the list is ruling any of them out, but I'm not. Traditional, nontraditional, gay, straight, 2.3 kids or childless, even close groups of friends who make up for each other's dysfunctional biological families, the point is that people are social animals and need their support group to maintain their humanity (if you've ever known someone who has no friends and isn't close to their family, you know what I mean)

Ethical and Economic Principles

1. The free individual, by virtue of engaging in lawful commerce, contributes to the general good of society.

2. Lawful commerce in modern societies requires the fundamental right of ownership of private property; the ownership of private property in turn requires the freedom of economic contract and the freedom of association for invdividuals.

3. Goverment is essential to the preservation of individual rights. A government that engages in unjust seizure or supression of these rights; whether by outright confiscation or usurpation, excessive taxation, the unequal enforcement of the laws, coercion via the threat of retaliatory action, or by undermining the private institutions of society; has become a danger to the general liberty of its citizens.

4. The family in particular is an essential private institution necessary for the continuation of a free society.

5. We recognize that the rights and freedoms of the citizens of any one nation depend, in part, upon the rights and freedoms of the citizens of other nations of the world. We further recognize that it is in the nature of free societies to extend the general scope of these rights and freedoms, and that it is in the nature of despotic regimes to extend the suppression of these rights and freedoms to the greatest possible extent. It is therefore an essential action of government to staunchly defend these rights and freedoms against despotic regimes, and to engage in peaceful coexistence or alliance with the free nations of the world.

6. Ethical behavior, being derived from numerous sources of wisdom throughout the cultures and history of the world, requires the freedom of private opinion, the freedom of speech, and the freedom of religion for its fullest acceptance by the people.

IATF RFC Comments (1)

2007-02-02T06:02:00.001-08:00

Arnold Kling has the following to say over at Techcentralstation:

I admire the governance structure of the Internet. I believe that libertarian conservatives, under siege from so many directions, could draw inspiration from this open, voluntary, do-it-yourself, just-in-time approach.

What he's getting at is that "libertarian conservatives" aka right-libertarians, are suffering today from a false dichotomy that's arisen between so-called liberals--dominated by the left--and social conservatives/the religious right. People now seem to expect you to be either a socialist or a social conservative, and you have to deliver a long lecture to explain the concept of being economically conservative (capitalist) and socially liberal. Really, libertarian conservative is another word for [classical] liberal, in contrast to leftists and various flavors of religious conservatives, none of which are 'liberal' in any meaningful sense of the word.

Anyway, Kling wants the right-libertarians/libertarian conservatives/liberals to step up and work out a statement of principles. I'll bite. I don't actually have a lot of comments on this first draft, but I'll reproduce the entire thing here since I don't think my readers frequent either TCS or Instapundit and probably haven't heard of this:

Economic Principles

1. We weave a thread of self-reliance into a sturdy fabric of interdependence. By respecting the law, we reinforce impersonal justice. By competing intensely and fairly in an impersonal global market, we raise our standard of living through specialization and innovation. By upholding Constitutional principles for limited government, we sustain our individual freedom.

2. We are creative and pro-active in helping one another. We do not have the patience to wait for government, nor do we want to be lulled into passivity by the promise of government. Instead, to solve those problems that require collective action, we form voluntary associations, including civic groups, corporations, clubs, standards-setting bodies, consumer information services, and charitable foundations.

3. Government must be kept in its place. We hold government officials to high standards of competence, honesty, and fairness. However, we do not confuse government with family. We do not confuse government with religion. We do not confuse government with business. We are conscious that any expansion of government responsibility, however well-intended, crowds out those institutions that are the true bulwark of our society.

4. We celebrate the successes of others. We are glad when an entrepreneur becomes wealthy by finding a way to fill a customer need. We are glad when an immigrant family climbs the ladder of success. We are glad when people living in other countries make economic progress and spur us to innovate and improve.

Ethical Principles

5. Government cannot legislate morality, but it does mess with the incentives. Those incentives should never be tilted against the institution of the family whose mission is to raise children to be fine, upstanding citizens.

I'll stop for a quick comment here. I would write the first sentence as "Government cannot legislate morality, but it can distort incentives, particularly economic ones." This is mainly to be clear what we're talking about. Very few people change their behavior because a criminal penalty exists, but everyone changes if they perceive a tax loophole or other regulation-based chance to make or save money. The first requirement of of all taxes and regulations should be to distort economic incentives as little as possible (well, except where the regulation is meant to correct a market failure, in which case the market is what's distorted and the regulation is actually making it better.)

6. We maintain an ongoing conversation about morality and ethics. This conversation is informed by the Ten Commandments and Biblical scripture. It is informed by the Declaration of Independence, the Gettysburg Address, and Dr. Martin Luther King's "I have a dream" speech. It is vital to continue the conversation, even when consensus is difficult.

Mainly nitpicking, but I think the list of influences (which I realize are examples and not all-inclusive) should be reversed so that the biblical references come last. Maybe they shouldn't be included at all.

7. Like new businesses, new moral ideals can revitalize our society, even though many of them fail. For example, we recognize that we are a better people without racial segregation or barriers to the education and career opportunities for women. However, we judge some social experiments to be failures, including eugenics, Communism, and nihilistic cultural relativism.

International Principles

8. Our ideology does not have to be sustained by military suppression. Although it can inspire people to fight against tyranny, ultimately our ideology allows us to live in peace.

9. We believe that people all over the world yearn for liberty, and for them we stand as a beacon and a champion. But we recognize that freedom is not ours to give when community leaders are not ready to seize the opportunity that it offers.

10. When foreign leaders issue threats against us, we take them at their word and act accordingly.

That last one needs to be removed. As much as the Don't Tread On Me approach appeals to me, foreign policy is a game, and it's played in the real world with real people. What works in that world is a sort of benevolent gangsterism, so if we're going to state an approach to foreign policy, it should be that we'll work to be the best gangsters we can be. Importantly, one principle of the successful gangster is to use force judiciously and as rarely as can be gotten away with, subject to maintaining your status and influence. And when--not if--it is necessary, then to act ruthlessly but also forgive quickly, in the Jacksonian way.

Blogging Will Be Slow For a Few Days

2007-01-31T09:10:00.000-08:00

While I deal with an overflow of school and work. In the meantime, much like John Edwards' "two Americas", there seem to be two John Travoltas. (emphasis added)

a)

In the movie "Be Cool" John Travolta's Caddy is blown up and he is given a Honda Hybrid as a courtesy car. How he deals with this:
Martin (Danny Devito) Hey Chili, that your car?
Chili: Yes, Its the Caddilac of Hybrids.
Martin: A bit tight for a guy like you?
Chili: a small price to pay for the environment.
Martin: But what about speed? (its parked between Ferarris)
Chili: Martin, when you're important, People will wait.

and, b)

John Travolta is qualified in several types of single and multi-engine aircraft, and has the highest pilot medical certification possible. His house is located immediately off the main airstrip, and is designed so his jets can taxi right up to two outbuildings connected to the main structure, which is shaped like a squat air-control tower. "He uses the 707 as the family van," says Jumbolair developer Terri Jones. "The Gulfstream is his sports car."

Hey, it's a small price to pay for the environment! I mean, we might never get the message about global warming if celebrities didn't have their jets to fly around to press conferences!

Car Sharing Running Strong in San Francisco

2007-01-29T19:11:00.000-08:00

Awhile back, I posted on the surprising news that car sharing was gaining traction in the market. It seems that it's continuing to prove the concept that for some urban denizens it makes sense to occasionally rent a car instead of owning one--providing it's convenient enough.

Several Zipcar sites are within easy walking distance of her home and work, Hunt said, and getting a car hasn't been a problem.

"I can't always get exactly the car I want -- I like Priuses, and they're popular,'' she said. "But I can always get a car when I want.''

[...]

Johnson and her husband, who live in a small Mission District apartment, drive to the grocery store, to pick up friends at the airport and to go hiking. They spend between $30 and $75 a month -- less than insurance used to cost when she owned a car.

Owning a car becomes vastly more economical the more it gets used, so it's not surprising that time-share ownership makes sense for people who don't drive everyday. Traditional car rentals aren't expensive either, but they're geared toward travelers and generally located well out of the way of local residents (think of the Avis "we'll pick you up!" commercials) That will probably change, and quickly, if car sharing companies keep doing well.

I Want My MTV!

2007-01-29T18:15:00.000-08:00

Especially when they show "My Super Sweet 16". Yes, my guilty pleasure is pointing and laughing at assholes.

Pigs Fly, Film at 11!

2007-01-29T05:50:00.000-08:00

Mickey Kaus makes a good point about the trouble with reading someone's interpretation of a video--the actual video often doesn't support the argument. This is selection bias, where you cherry-pick the evidence that supports your viewpoint. It's part of human nature and we're all guilty of it from time to time. I suspect it gets worse when you're trying to run a blog and feel the pressure to post on current topics several times a day, as Andrew Sullivan does. In real life people just don't usually pull the kind of blatant crap that makes a great gotcha. There are exceptions, of course, but the more common situation is something like George Allen's "macaca" flap. Allen said the word "macaca", but the actual video wipes out most of the other conventional wisdom on that incident (I don't have access to youtube right now, but you can easily find it)

Of course that doesn't stop people from linking such videos and adding their sensational and accuracy-challenged commentary. I try to avoid just linking and saying "uh huh, what'd I tell ya!" here. "Nuance" jokes aside, most issues are a little more complicated than first meets the eye, and to me it's more interesting to get into that complexity as opposed to stuffing every newsbite into an ill-fitting pigeonhole.

A Myth Inside The Myth

2007-01-28T14:12:00.000-08:00

Glenn Reynolds links an article in today's WaPo entitled "5 Myths About Suburbia and Our Car-Happy Culture". It cites statistics and does some basic math to show that cars aren't destroying the ozone layer as some alarmists would have it, that Europeans drive almost as much as Americans, and that (as I've mentioned previously) we are in no danger of paving over the last green acre in North America . All of which is true, but it leads the authors to the following stretch:

Many officials say we should reconfigure the landscape -- pack people in more tightly -- to make it fit better with a transit-oriented lifestyle. But that would mean increasing density in existing developments by bulldozing the low-density neighborhoods that countless families call home. Single-family houses, malls and shops would have to make way for a stacked-up style of living that most don't want. And even then the best-case scenario would be replicating New York, where only one in four commuters uses mass transit.

You hear this a lot from folks who don't like the sound of the term "urban planning", but the critical point they always miss is that the supersized suburbia they're defending is absolutely not an outcome of the free market. The choice of land to build on, how much of a lot can be covered by a house, what kind of house it can be, whether houses and businesses can be in the same neighborhood, even (I've seen this) the length of shadow a house can cast on the neighbor's yard, all make land development one of the most regulated and constrained industries in the United States. And every urban area in the country has that kind of zoning ordinance and building code. You can't say "most don't want" a different kind of landscape, because the building industry can't legally offer them the choice!

Snap, Crackle, Pop

2007-01-28T07:39:00.000-08:00

That's the scary sound my $15 coffeemaker makes, causing me to keep walking into the kitchen and see if the carafe is cracking from heat (especially when I hear the crackling followed by hissing steam) Yes, I bought it at the fell-off-a-truck discount store, but it's a major brand name so I thought it was a safe bet.

And, I just noticed what's making the hissing noise. Water sometimes drips over the top of the splash screen and down the side of the carafe. That still doesn't explain the crackling noise, but at least the steaming water isn't coming from cracked glass.

More Globalization

2007-01-27T18:36:00.000-08:00

Here's a good alternative and non-technical take on globalization from Micheal Totten, wanderer extraordinaire and definitely not rich, republican, or conservative. Money quote:

Globalization isn't all about America. It's not about making every restaurant, coffee shop, and retail outlet the same. It's about exchanging goods and ideas. That exchange goes both ways. Countries that trade may grow more alike over time, but they also become more internally varied.

I do wish Starbucks made it to Chile before I did. It's not like every café would have been a part of the franchise. Plenty of locals are now discovering what they've been missing. Some of them will never tolerate instant coffee again. Starbucks is almost sure to inspire local competitors. They'll take a North American idea (which actually first came from Europe) and then they will make it Chilean. Local cafés won't be displaced. They will be born.

What the Hell Are You Talking About ..?

2007-01-27T16:43:00.000-08:00

Just flipped past 9 News and they were talking about the British royal family visiting Philadelphia. Apparantly Prince Charles was in town to accept an award for his environmental work. The news ~~anchor~~ reader went through that part, then started babbling about how the royals could have skipped the flight on that big nasty polluting airplane and attended the ceremony by video link instead.

Umm, ok then. If you need me I guess I'll be outside Pledge-ing my horse cart.

I'm Sorry, We Don't Have Time For That

2007-01-26T11:48:00.000-08:00

I'm not going to bother linking it, but some idiot politician in the Carolinas is proposing that the government review the script of any film that's planning to shoot in the state to make sure it doesn't have something like the rape scene in Hounddog. How does the government come to be involved with filmmaking in the first place? Of course, it's because they offer subsidies in order to draw filmmakers.

The awesome stupidity of not only subsidizing an industry that makes plenty of profit on its own, but then using that subsidy to take a (small but symbolic) bite out of free expression, inspired me to think of the following way in which a politician committed to small government might sell the notion--in individual cases--even to people who favor a large public sector: "I'm sorry, your federal/state government has far more important priorities than to worry about [pointless-but-sensational headline of the day]. There are still wars, famine and diseases ravaging the world. Thanks, next question!"

Reagan could have pulled it off...

UGBs Coming to Virginia?

2007-01-25T09:42:00.000-08:00

Vicky sent me this article on the new Transportation Reform Plan being proposed in Richmond. The bill is sponsored by Clay Athey, former mayor of working-class Front Royal and now Republican Delegate representing the town. Having seen it from both sides, Athey should know the ins and outs of transportation and land use better than most elected officials. Athey explained the plan in the Fauquier Times-Democrat yesterday; it primarily addresses transportation infrastructure (basically, roads) by moving some funding and decisionmaking from VDOT to the counties, but it also includes new land use regulating powers intended to encourage more compact development patterns. Chief among them is what Athey calls "urban development areas" or UDAs.

If that sounds familiar to urban planners, it's because Oregon used a similar scheme--they called it Urban Growth Boundaries or UGBs-to contain sprawl beginning in the 1970s. The concept is simple. The county identifies the optimal place for most human settlement to go, and writes its comprehensive plan accordingly. Thereafter, development proposals can be approved inside the boundary, rejected outside it. UDAs have several major theoretical benefits for both government and citizens, with the main one being a much better ability to predict future transportation needs since you know where the houses and people will be.

The approach isn't entirely new in Virginia--both Stafford and Fauquier Counties have long had "urban service boundaries", outside of which no public water or sewer service is available. Driving from Warrenton to Manassas or western Loudoun County is an ample demonstration that the USB can be successful in containing sprawl, but there are at least two things that should be on everyone's mind as they consider this legislation. First, as Stafford County's planning staff made clear to Virginia Tech when we worked with them in 2005, "density" is a red flag to local residents when any new development proposal comes up. Most of these people moved from the crowded city and don't want it to follow them into the countryside. It works like this:

What’s more, [development consultant Daniel K. Slone] says, getting projects approved with the densities needed to make New Urbanist projects work is difficult without public support. Oftentimes local residents raise concerns about the impact such projects have on roads and schools. “Whether legitimate or not, [those concerns] often drive down the densities so that the projects do not achieve the desired effect.”

Whether legitimate or not. That's an important phrase in transportation and land use, because emotions and innacurate conventional wisdom are almost always the order of the day in this realm. Which brings me (sort of) to the other shadow hanging over the UDA idea--the fact that a A ballot initiative (Measure 37) stopped Oregon's UGB program dead in its tracks last year. Landowners whose property lay outside the UGB argued that the state had deprived them of a part of their property by making it impossible to subdivide their land. They could only sell into the lower-priced agriculture market. Measure 37 specifies that land use regulations must come with financial compensation for landowners whose options are limited by the regulation. I'm not aware of any such movement in Virginia, but there are Measure 37-like initiatives coming down the pike in several western states. UDAs could draw similar fire if they are seen as too constricting for landowners outside the line.

Riiiiight...

2007-01-24T18:49:00.000-08:00

All sorts of surprising people are throwing their hats into the presidential ring, for example Hillary Clinton, last seen artlessly trying to sell a straightforwardly socialist healthcare bill to middle America. So who else can we dredge up from the political graveyard? Dan Drezner has this to say (link blatantly ripped off from Instapundit):

Gingrich intrigues me -- he's far more complex and interesting a thinker than the nineties stereotype of him suggested. And if Hillary Clinton can remake herself as someone who's learned from past mistakes, I see no reason why Gingrich can't as well.

I can see why he might actually write that. Afterall Richard Nixon made something of a comeback as an elder statesman. Gingrich just isn't that far in the past though, and while the media will try hard to give Hillary a pass, Gingrich's skeletons (probably starting with the legendary hospital bed divorce of his first wife) would make encore appearances in the very first stories about his Presidential exploratory committee. Like Lebanon and Abu Ghraibh, that's just the world we live in.

Globalization

2007-01-24T09:30:00.000-08:00

This started off as a comment, but I'm making it a post instead. Commenting on this post, Clint tossed out a couple of the standard arguments against globalization. I've got an argument against unilateral dropping of trade barriers, but I'll get to that. First, Clint's comments:

Unemployment stats are pretty b.s. the way they are computed. I think they should include EVERYONE who doensn't work.

Then they would include babies and retired people and be at least as misleading. My understanding is that they're based on new unemployment filings, which seems relatively reasonable in that people who are long-term unemployed will seek unemployment compensation, while presumably the rest got new jobs. As Clint says though, that still doesn't account for the ones whose new job is greeter at WalMart.

the goal of globalization seems to be to have every job X to eventually reside at place Y where job X gets paid the least on the planet.

Technically, that's true, but it leaves something out. In the simple perfect-market model, an industry will tend to move where its overall cost of production is lowest (both labor and materials) because then it gains the maximum price competitiveness for its products.

Where it goes off the rails is in the implication that companies somehow have an interest in making people poor. Companies make money by selling stuff. If everyone is poor, who's buying their stuff? That even works if you assume the customers are other companies or governments instead of individuals, because a poor population makes a poor government (no tax revenue) and poor companies (no disposable income). There is no "conservation of wealth"--it can be created or destroyed, so the only way for anyone to get richer in the long term is for everyone to be made better off. Which is the ultimate goal of globalization. In the longer term it means that the prices of both labor and goods and services will become fairly even around the world, but in the short term, leveling between, say, China and the US will be painful for the richer country just as it is good for the poorer one.

Which brings me to my argument against unilateral open markets. It does nobody any good for country A to open its markets while country B maintains protectionist trade barriers. There is some case to be made for rich countries to help poor ones by maintaining a minor trade imbalance (minor for the rich country but a big deal for the poor one) but an imbalance large enough to actually damage A's economy is killing the goose that laid the golden egg. So on that basis I am (in principle) a supporter of "fair trade" or a series of bilateral trade agreements, versus one-size-fits-all open markets on our part while China, India etc. maintain protectionist policies at our expense.

The Congressional Cullah'd Waterfountain

2007-01-23T05:25:00.000-08:00

Presented without comment:

Freshman Rep. Stephen I. Cohen, D-Tenn., is not joining the Congressional Black Caucus after several current and former members made it clear that a white lawmaker was not welcome.

[...]

"Mr. Cohen asked for admission, and he got his answer. ... It's time to move on," [Rep. William Lacy Clay Jr., D-MO] said. "It's an unwritten rule. It's understood. It's clear."

[...]

Rep. Pete Stark, D-Calif., who is white, tried in 1975 when he was a sophomore representative and the group was only 6 years old.

"Half my Democratic constituents were African-American. I felt we had interests in common as far as helping people in poverty," Stark said. "They had a vote, and I lost. They said the issue was that I was white, and they felt it was important that the group be limited to African-Americans."

Well, one comment--what's with the old-style abbreviations for the states? They switched to two-letter abbreviations when I was in elementary school, so you know, a loooong time ago!

Hotfixes

2007-01-23T05:13:00.000-08:00

So I get to the office this morning to find that the network admins have pushed out another hotfix, which rebooted my machine after installation. No big deal, I'm glad I don't have to think about that stuff along with my actual job responsibilities. But it occurs to me to wonder if getting used to this at work is detrimental to taking good care of my home computers. Of course it's not for me, but what about non-technical people? Will they eventually be so used to stuff being installed and even rebooting their machine that they won't notice when spyware or viruses do the same thing at home?

How Much House for $300k?

2007-01-22T19:48:00.000-08:00

This NYT puff piece isn't as interesting as it could have been. There are lots of towns where you can get some very interesting houses for well under 300, most of which have history and amenities that most of us would love to have--if only we could get a decent job in the area. But hey, I guess it's nice to know that even in Alabama I can spend $300,000 on a tiny condo if I feel like burning money.

Retraining For "Victims of Globalization"

2007-01-22T19:13:00.000-08:00

Here's an interesting description of what happened when free trade came to Galax, Virginia:

Trade Adjustment Assistance (TAA) [...] includes up to two years of unemployment benefits while retraining, temporary subsidies to help pay medical insurance and, for those over 50, a short-term top-up to any lower-paying new job. The centre also co-ordinates more basic help, from child care to food banks run by private charities.

That's an apparantly federal program intended to transition blue-collar workers to new careers when their jobs go overseas. How's it working? According to the article, three big textile factories in Galax closed down all at once, laying off 1,000 people. The result:

At 6%, Galax’s unemployment rate is twice Virginia’s average, but no higher than it was a year ago.

[...] other, mainly younger, workers are already better off. After 19 years in a textile factory, Bobby Edwards has retrained as a radiologist. Brian Deaton has set up a thriving picture-framing business and has started selling gourmet coffee. Few of these people are enthusiastic about globalisation. “No one trusts China around here,” is a common refrain. But government help has cushioned the shock. “I’d be lost if they weren’t here,” says Mr Rotan, nodding towards the centre’s staff.

When I was younger, the national unemployment rate was 6% and things were said to be in good shape. In fact, most economists consider 6% or less to be effectively zero unemployment. Which means we seem to have a rare case here: a government program that actually works!

And As Long As We're Talking Snow...

2007-01-21T18:08:00.000-08:00

I like to pull out the old saw about "legislating the wind" to make fun of people who pass various laws to fight basic human nature (for example, the drug war) but as they say, truth is stranger than fiction and real life has now obsoleted that joke:

Romanian snowboarders have staged a protest at the lack of snow in front of the country's weather institute.

Blocking traffic, the snowboarders sat in the road and only moved on when weather officials said that their complaint at the lack of snow "would be passed on to a higher authority", Ananova reports on January 16th.

(link via The Bitch Girls)

Total Destruction

2007-01-21T16:54:00.000-08:00

No, not by the "snowstorm" (yet .. it's accumulated to around an inch as I write this) but at Clint's 33rd birthday party last Saturday. I don't have much to add, aside from taking 'executive producer' credit for Glen's videography of the early-evening 'RAPpening'. It is pretty funny how in our college years and 20s most parties were fight-free, but now that most of the OGs are over 30, fisticuffs have become a semi-regular feature.

Posting To Document That...

2007-01-21T11:35:00.000-08:00

...it's snowing. Yes, snowing in northern Virginia in the winter of 2006-7.

UPDATE: here's a picture.

Diary Land

2007-01-20T06:33:00.000-08:00

I've had a couple of blog or journal sites over the years, and am slowly consolidating them now. The focus has varied, from my urban planning blog to my personal page on diaryland, but reading over the old entries has been fascinating. I never kept a paper diary, mostly out of laziness but also because I thought interesting stuff didn't happen every week or month, let alone everyday. But years later I find even the "nothing happened today, I'm still waiting for this and the other to break" entries interesting, if only because they fix the timeline of major events. Also occurs to me that our grandkids will probably read our blogs the way people used to read their ancestors' old letters.

Anyway, for my three regular readers, you can look for more old posts to appear. I'll also get back to posting excerpts of my Europe journal in the near future.

Cue the Pr0n Music!

2007-01-20T06:11:00.000-08:00

The comment thread on this post (video link is very NSFW, but oh so worth it) over at The Bitch Girls got me thinking. Countertop says:

If you think “they do have a point about how animals are treated” and conditions are even anywhere near what they claim, then I have a bridge to sell you in brooklyn.

Cool, I always wanted to own a bridge! Though I would need a troll to go under it, and those are harder to find... My own thought is that, whatever its other faults, PETA doesn't exaggerate terribly about the conditions under which food animals are raised. They don't need to, because even the most clinical description would horrify any person.

But people aren't the ones being kept in those conditions, animals are. For a group that claims to be so in touch with nature, PETA sure doesn't get the whole food chain thing. The only thing we owe our food supply is to cultivate it in such a way that it doesn't run out. And I'm not even claiming that people float above the animal kingdom. We're definitely animals, and you could make a case that we're kinder and gentler to our prey than any other predator. Owls, those cute cuddly creatures from the Harry Potter movies, swoop down out of the night sky and spear defenseless small rodents with their talons, yanking them off the ground and out of the lives of their fellow meeses in a split second and carrying them off to a cold treetop, where they begin to eat them before they're dead. Is that humane? Is PETA going to train owls to go vegan? Actually I'd be fascinated if someone would try that, but then PETA doesn't concern me in the least. I am all for them continuing down their current path of bitching pointlessly about mankind's genetically programmed diet, while training attractive women to take their clothes off for the camera

Do as I say, not as I do?

2007-01-19T11:32:00.000-08:00

Jonathan Adler has some stats on Federal employees who owe back taxes. Money quote (emphasis added):

Also worth noting, apparently 4.85 percent of Tax Court employees are tax scofflaws as well.

Why I Couldn't Be A "Communicator"And Additions To My Reading List

2007-01-18T08:54:00.000-08:00

Well I finished Dog Days. The pace got better towards the end, and it was almost fun to read. The problem just continued to be that I hate everyone in it, because they glorify spin and manipulation. I'll save the details for a review post, but the Amazon customer reviews of another book (link via Instapundit) touch on a similar subject. One user quotes a very interesting insight by George Orwell that gets to the heart of my dislike of marketing spin:

Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, can indeed be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of the political parties. Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness."

Actually I think that gets to the heart of the most serious political problem in the US today: the excessive, obsessive pursuit of niceness, to the point where mainstream public dialogue worries about the dietary concerns of terrorist prisoners and justifies violent intimidation of political views that are seen as mean-spirited. I think this bassackwardness has a lot to do with the "euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness" that filters almost every contribution to public discussion. The atomic bombings of Japan, for example, were undertaken on the cold rational basis that killing 100,000 people today would force the Japanese oligarchs to end the war, preventing millions more deaths on both sides tomorrow. But can you imagine a political candidate making an argument like that on TV? Me either, but the refusal to face reality is how we get disasters like Somalia, Darfur, even global warming.

Anyway, I've read 1984 and Animal Farm, but I think it's time I added more of Orwell's essays and articles to my repertoire.

Boning Man

2007-01-18T05:23:00.000-08:00

Apparantly the founders of Burning Man are fighting over who owns the name. That's both funny and depressing, like tracing how the flower children of the 60s became the minivan-driving preschool-snobs of the 90s. Oh well, after 15+ years it was probably over. Anyone want to take bets on when Disney World comes out with a Burning Man ride?

Gah!

2007-01-17T13:07:00.000-08:00

Someone added this picture of my cousin Bridget's feet as a favorite on FlickR. I first thought "huh, that's weird" but then got a bad feeling and decided to look at the person's other favorites. Sure enough, all (women's) feet...

The Fisking Bitter is Too Busy For!

2007-01-17T11:37:00.000-08:00

Here it is, folks! Philadelphia Inquirer columnist Karen Heller has a funny screed on gun control in the Philadelphia Inquirer today. Unintentionally funny that is, because it appears to have been written by a turing machine set to "moonbat":

Any fool can kill a deer. I know, because I've almost done it several times. All that's required is a car driven at a relatively good speed, 30 miles an hour should do it, near a wooded area around dusk or later.

Voila, venison a la Camry.

Congratulations, you can drive a car. I wouldn't quit your job and head for the comedy circuit just yet though.

The less "a well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free State" rings true in contemporary America, the more the gun culture revs up its high-caliber lobbying and propaganda machine.

I guess this makes a certain sense if you consider militias in the Tim McVeigh sense, but I wonder--what does guarantee security in today's world? Karma? PC politics? Group hugs? We'll have to guess, because she leaves that sentence hanging and charges on to the next disjointed thought:

We've made smokers pariah, forcing them out to the street. Alcoholism and drug abuse, once private demons, have become public crusades. Abolishing trans fats is a civic battle legislated by urban councils.

She says that like it's a good thing. No really, she does. No further comment needed--what kind of person thinks that way?

Any politician running for higher office has to kiss the long barrel of the NRA and gun fetishists, preferably by praising gun ownership and going hunting - a dwindling passion - to show how authentically American he is.

Nevermind the lame oral sex innuendo (this anti-gay comment deeply offends me!) What blows me away here is the complete lack of self-awareness. She's doesn't like guns, so anyone who does must have a "fetish". There's no such thing as having different interests than you, those other people are just savages who need a good 'Christian' education! Ms. Heller would feel right at home in Victorian times--well, long as you kept her from hearing the word "Victorian".

"This is trying to perpetuate the myth of Teddy Roosevelt and the Rough Riders, the legacy of Buffalo Bill," says Joan Burbick, author of "Gun Show Nation: Gun Culture and American Democracy." "Tying gun rights to civil rights, transforming Americans into an armed citizenry, coincided with the civil rights riots."

Race, she argues, has plenty to do with it.

Again, Heller doesn't follow up on these assertions, maybe assuming that her readers already "know" that everything she doesn't like is "racist". But this bit about gun ownership suddenly appearing with the civil rights movement? In a sense, it did--among blacks who exercised their right to defend themselves from marauding white racists. Of course that's not the point being made here, but I thought Micheal Bellesiles was debunked a long time ago. You can't teach an old dog new tricks though, and the hard left will probably never give up its clumsy efforts to throw inconvenient history down the memory hole. The game of mental whack-a-mole goes on...

[406] people were murdered in Philadelphia last year. And here's where generalizations hold up. Most of the victims were young. Most of them were poor. Most of them were black. Most of them were killed with guns.

Our problems are bigger than guns. But guns are our problem.

Oh the irony--"here's where generalizations hold up" followed immediately by a pure example of irrelevant generalizations leading to a wrong conclusion. I'm sure a psychologist could write an entire book on the conviction that murderers somehow wouldn't kill anyone if they couldn't use a gun, but I'll just substitute Archie Bunker, speaking to his daughter when she said something like the above: "Would it make you feel better, little girl, if they was pushed outta windows?"

And now for the truly weird:

The myth of the fighter permeates throughout consumerism, Gap Kids fatigues in blue and pink.

Well as long as we're dealing in strawmen, I wonder how Ms. Heller feels about, say, Palestinian children who regularly turn up in news photos dressed up as terrorists? Somehow I doubt perpetuating "the myth of the fighter" would be first out of her mouth. But flyover-country Americans and their hunting gear? Now that's scary!

Where is the PETA for people being senselessly killed?

Where indeed, since PETA itself is well known to think the world would be just dandy with fewer (or no) humans in it. Do they really care if that's accomplished by gunfire or defenestration? Furthermore, isn't PETA on Ms. Heller's side of the aisle? I used to think it was a trait of the left that anyone not directly supporting their causes was automatically "the establishment", even a definitely un-mainstream hard left group like PETA. Now I wonder if it's just a trait of the kind of personality that decides an entire area of human endeavor represents their vision of evil and needs to be driven out of existence:

We need to attack guns and the all-too-powerful lobbyists and manufacturers the way cigarettes came under siege.

I started off writing that what we actually need is to undo the "siege" of the tobacco industry, but let's think outside the box for a moment--what if instead, we encourage these huge lawsuits against this and that industry. It will be a lean few decades, but eventually the only rich and powerful interests left will be ...trial lawyers. And the lefties always go after the rich, right?

Innumeracy

2007-01-16T12:18:00.000-08:00

I've been intermittently reading Innumeracy: Mathematical Illiteracy and Its Consequences by John Allen Paulos. As the title suggests, it's about all the little (and not so little) ways that people get into trouble by not understanding or applying even simple math in everyday life. He introduces his theme with the example of a weatherman who asserts that the 50% chance of rain on each day of the weekend means that there is a 100% of rain during the entire weekend. That's awful, but here's something even worse:

Goldman Sachs said homeowners had treated windfall gains from rising house prices as if they were "recurring income", using home equity withdrawls to subsidize over-stretched lifestyles. This artificial boost to spending has already dropped from 7pc to 4pc of GDP over the last year, and is likely to halve again in 2007.

Spending a one-time bonus on everyday consumption isn't something any sane, rational person would do. It makes no sense and is the very definition of living beyond your means. Yet, lots of people have done and are doing it. Why? It can only be that they just don't know the difference. Money is money, right? Well, of course that's not right, but we all know people who just don't get it. The scary part is that those blissfully ignorant folks could tank the economy for all of us.

As Manhattan Goes...

2007-01-16T07:01:00.000-08:00

So goes the nation, according to the New York Times, which tells us that census data shows for the first time in US history, more than half of American women are unmarried. They also helpfully illustrate that the writers of Sex and the City aren't any more talented than the rest of Hollywood--they just get their material from real life (emphasis added):

Emily Zuzik, a 32-year-old musician and model who lives in the East Village of Manhattan, said she was not surprised by the trend.

[...]

Ms. Zuzik has lived with a boyfriend twice, once in California where the couple registered as domestic partners to qualify for his health insurance plan. “I don’t plan to live with anyone else again until I am married,” she said, “and I may opt to keep a place of my own even then.”

A Good Old Feeling

2007-01-15T14:38:00.000-08:00

I think it must be the cool moist air coming in through my open windows, but I am just feeling great this afternoon, like I'm at the beach or something. It sure doesn't feel like a dreary day in January when I have to go to work in the morning.

Fun Videos and Funky Weather

2007-01-15T11:59:00.000-08:00

I found these gems while staying indoors with the blinds closed yesterday (this was the morning after a party, so you can guess why)

Doing an outside loop in a small plane (zero-g simulation) but someone forgot to warn one of the passengers! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SN77b9DqEbc

Flying Stuart Little-style. This has to be in the top ten coolest things in the world: http://youtube.com/watch?v=mlNF6e2wxss

And speaking of R/C aircraft ...well, just click: http://youtube.com/watch?v=zT60SkXN1UY

I felt quite a bit better today, but my plans were scotched due to teh gf being sick, so I decided to open the windows, go outside* and enjoy the weather instead. Yes, in mid-January I am walking around outdoors in shorts and a t-shirt. Also, the neighborhood across Four Mile Run (once you get past the ugly apartments along the highway) is absolutely gorgeous and I am going to start keeping track of real estate over there. It's all 40s-era bungalows, most of which have nice-looking additions or in some cases teardown replacements. Unlike some of the painfully-chic older neighborhoods in the DC area, this one simply looks lived-in and loved. Now I love it too!

* No, I did not go outside through the windows.

Jimmy Carter, "Disaster"

2007-01-12T18:45:00.000-08:00

A series of interviews Gerald Ford gave to his hometown newspaper has just been released. In one of them he has this to say about former president Carter:

"I think Jimmy Carter would be very close to Warren G. Harding. I feel very strongly that Jimmy Carter was a disaster, particularly domestically and economically. I have said more than once that he was certainly the poorest president in my lifetime."

But he qualified that in another interview a couple years later:

"He was a very decent, fine individual," Ford told the paper. "There were no major mistakes. There just weren't a lot of exciting results."

You have to wonder if he'd still think that today, with Carter's new Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid, over which 14 advisors at his Carter Center resigned in protest over its sympathy for terrorism and shabby treatment of Israel. Maybe Carter wanted to finally deliver those exciting results.

"Are You Some Kind of Moron?"

2007-01-12T16:08:00.000-08:00

Eugene Volokh links to this Cincinnati Enquirer story about former Democratic Congressional candidate and Iraq veteran Paul Hackett. Early in the morning of Nov. 19, three teenagers in a car "missed a curve" in the road and plowed through Hackett's fence, then returned to the road and continued on their way. Awakened by the racket, Hackett grabbed his AR-15 and investigated, then followed a trail of (presumably) leaking coolant and found both car and boys at a nearby house. Apparantly without actually brandishing his weapon, he ordered them out of the car and into a prone position, then called the police to report a citizen's arrest.

The comment thread spends a lot of time on whether the article is correct in referring to the AR-15 as an "assault rifle" (it's a semi-automatic carbine version of the M-16) and secondarily on whether Hackett exercised good judgement in pursuing the fence-breakers. I'm surprised, though, that none of the discussion addressed this paragraph in the Enquirer piece (emphasis added):

"He told the boys to 'Get the ---- out of the car and get on the ground.' ... He said he did not touch the vehicle with the rifle and maintained his distance. 'I knew they saw I was armed,' he said. He said he had done this about 200 times in Iraq, but this time there was not a translation problem," the Indian Hill police report said.

I wondered if there might be a PTSD angle, and this makes it sound as if there is. In my opinion, Hackett exercised poor judgement--if your family is threatened, the right course of action is to guard them, not abandon them and run off into the night--but it makes much more sense if you imagine him reacting the way he would have in Iraq.

There, his base would be well guarded and he would have both legal status and tactical freedom to run the bad guys down. Here his actions were reckless at best. As one commenter pointed out, he had no idea whether the occupants of the car were armed, high, etc. Faced with an angry armed man ordering them out of their car, the young men had more than enough justification to resist by force. Luckily for them and Mr. Hackett, they chose not to.

Which brings me to the title of the post. It reminds me of the episode of The Simpsons where Homer joins a gun club and proceeds to do all sorts of reckless things, including shooting his beer can open. Dumb hick Cletus then asks him "are you some kind of moron?" and Moe tears up Homer's membership card. I won't punch Paul Hackett's ticket, since he may well have woken up and reacted automatically as if he were back in Anbar. But if that is what happened, hopefully he'll get whatever help he needs.

Ugly Betty and Small Aircraft

2007-01-11T17:20:00.000-08:00

This afternoon I was pondering the idea of designing a single-seat airplane around a BMW 'R' motor. This is the classic 2-cylinder "boxer" motor that is to BMW motorcycles as the v-twin is to Harley-Davidsons. I figured the way to go would be to base it loosely on the BD-5, but with a modern carbon-fiber monocoque instead of the aluminum stressed-skin fuselage. I wondered how light it could be, keeping mind that an F1 race car's CF "tub" weighs under 200 lbs and is designed to stand up to a 200-mph meeting with the wall. Turns out the 1960s-vintage BD-5 weighed just under 400 lbs empty, so a CF version could probably come in around 300. Of course this is all academic, but it's fun to dream.

And, who knew America Ferrera had a new show? She's traded her trademark curves for braces and hipster-frame glasses in Ugly Betty. Sort of a SoCal version of Just Shoot Me, and not bad!

2007-01-10T13:27:00.000-08:00

Ok, laughing at this is inside-the-beltway geeky, but still. Heh^TM

The AK or the Avada Kedavra?

2007-01-10T10:10:00.000-08:00

I just made up the title of this post, but now I wonder if JK Rowling deliberately gave her killing curse the same initials as the most important automatic rifle in history. Bitter ponders the role of firearms in fantasy stories and concludes that the literary downside might outweigh the practical benefit for the gun-toting character.

It seems to be a common plot device in film fantasy to pretend things like guns don't exist, usually combined with treating them like something morally akin to WMD if they do turn up. Think of the episode of Buffy The Vampire Slayer where after failing to defeat Buffy with androids or dark arts, Warren finally just shows up at the back gate and shoots her. This is the final rung in his slide down the ladder, IIRC coming after he murders his girlfriend (i.e. we're to see using a gun--even if it fails to kill the victim--as worse than some sort of 'garden-variety' murder)

Alternatively, firearms exist but are magically useless against magical people or creatures. In the Harry Potter books, this is carried out further to have the good guys suffer drastic casualties while still limiting themselves to nonlethal magical weapons. I think this all mostly comes under the heading of suspending disbelief in support of the plot, but of course there's a well known current of anti-militarism in western art and literature dating at least to the First World War.

The explanation could be simpler though: It just wouldn't be the same if, say, Lucy and Edmund stood around discussing kill zones and the relative range and effectiveness of catapults, trebuchets or the weight of stone projectiles an eagle could carry, as opposed to finding the key to bring Aslan back at the critical moment to defeat the White Queen. Not that you can't write a techno-thriller about ancient weapons (Micheal Crichton does this spectacularly in his novels Timeline and Eaters of The Dead/The 13th Warrior) but as the commenter on The BitchGirls says, good old-fashioned firepower would have a boring tendency to dominate fantastical confrontations.

My Cooking Sucks

2007-01-09T19:16:00.000-08:00

Yeah I know, I didn't post all Christmas season. I got some nice stuff, but nothing really worth posting pics of. And I had an excellent and relaxing vacation up north, including a night out in Boston with Rachel and Steve. Against that, a couple of my local friends seem to have forgotten how to call back. And with that as a segue that will make vague sense only to me and one of those two, I'm also reading Dog Days, by former Wonkette Ana Marie Cox. Only a couple chapters in, but let's just say that the appearance of Washingtonienne had me laughing out loud and not in the way the author wanted. I'll reserve judgement until the end, but sofar it's threatening to make me put it down for all the same reasons I never wanted to get involved in that scene to begin with.

Anyway, the cooking. I took a steak out of the freezer yesterday with a vague plan to cook it on the Foreman grill with some broccoli on the side. Then today I got to thinking cheese sauce would be good on the broccoli. Google brought me a simple-looking recipe that called for butter, milk, flour, and mustard powder in addition to grated cheese.

Now, my whole point was to use up the cheddar that I haven't been eating, so I wasn't going to go out and buy grated cheese. This was just part of my downfall, with the others being that I only have unsifted whole wheat flour, no sifter, and--it turned out--no cheese grater. I still think I have one somewhere but by the time I realized I didn't know where it was, I needed something fast. Fortunately, there was something to hand: some shredded parmesan left over from last week. It worked--sort of. You start off by melting the butter and adding flour, then stirring in the milk. This is more or less how you make cream of wheat, and that's exactly what it looked and smelled like. After adding the cheese, it looked and smelled like parmesan cream of wheat. The taste ultimately wasn't terrible, but a far cry from the queso-like sauce I had been picturing. I think the problem was too much flour, but I put in exactly what the recipe called for. Finally, to add insult to injury the steak--something I'm normally pretty good at--was dry and mostly taste-free. That's disappointing after marinading it in BBQ sauce and frying with extra virgin olive oil. I guess it's back to the drawing board, or at least to marinading all day in the off-the-shelf lemon pepper stuff.

Make Your Plinking More Fun...

2006-12-12T11:06:00.000-08:00

...with a moving target! That's what one moronic fratboy did in Corvallis, OR over the weekend. Now, of course shootings are no laughing matter, especially when a well-off fratboy shoots a homeless man for fun--with all the sociopolitical baggage that implies. But really this is just comedy gold, like the Simpsons come to life:

Sanderson had just climbed out of a dumpster between AGR and Phi Gamma Delta, otherwise known as Figi, when he felt something hit his left thigh. He took a step and it hurt. When he looked at his leg he saw blood and realized he’d been shot.

"It was a unprovoked attack," Sanderson said. "Didn’t say anything to anyone."

How do you know it wasn't attempted murder? The shooter used a .22 <rimshot>

According to the friend, they were both "freaked out" that Grimes had hit Sanderson. They left the house together, Grimes to go to the library and the friend to get some pizza. When the friend returned to the AGR house and saw police at the scene, he "thought it was all blown out of proportion," the police report reads, and "(he) thought the response was bizarre."

Police did not agree and neither did the university.

Say, you mean they call the police when you blow away a bum? Damn commies!

Several people familiar with AGR have said the rural backgrounds of many members, and the fact they are hunters, might account for the quantity of firearms in the house. The national Web site for the fraternity says AGR is not just a social fraternity but also a professional one. Its members often come from agricultural backgrounds and are headed for careers in the "agriculture, food and fiber industries."

Brent Atkinson, president of the Interfraternity Council at OSU, said a lot of guys, not just at AGR, own guns for hunting and trap shooting.

Let us sing Kumbayah, and group-hug. Then we may understand these "guns" and the strange people who own them.

Addition to the blogroll

2006-12-11T12:56:00.000-08:00

I'm adding a link to the Housing Bubble Blog. I can't vouch for the quality, but there is some serious quantity over there, with multiple daily links and quotes from news stories relating to the housing market.

Fair warning: it's a depressing read for those of us who bought real estate during the last couple years.

Trans Fats and Synergies

2006-12-10T14:05:00.000-08:00

Awhile back I posted about Randall Fitzgerald's The Hundred Year Lie, wherein he suggests that modern Americans are contracting all kinds of maladies from combinations of synthetic chemicals that are in more or less everything we eat, drink, and otherwise use in our daily lives.

The trans fats mentioned in the previous post are essentially synthetic butter. You'll find them listed as partially hydrogenated vegetable oils on the back of the container. Presumably the partially hydrogenated oils have some benefit over butter (like lower fat) but the trans fats themselves apparantly have bad effects, including lowering "good cholesterol" and raising "bad" cholesterol. Maybe I'd prefer plain old butter. It also occurs to me that this is a verifiable case of a synethic compound that has a harmful effect. Fitzgerald's proposition is that many synthetic chemicals that are inert by themselves interact within the body to produce serious side effects.

That makes logical sense, but it's hard to test because the nature of these synergies precisely defeats the scientific method. If you control for all but the test compound, then by definition you will not see the synergy. If you can't verify something, then you can't very well decide it's worthy of a government reaction--like banning trans fats.

Note: I'm now using the new Google/Blogger beta, and it seems to allow for tagging posts. I'm tagging this one as "trans fats", "junk science", and "books".

Fat-Nazis

2006-12-09T13:01:00.000-08:00

Ann Althouse (link via Instapundit) on the war against obesity:

I simply do not believe that the so-called health side is really composed of people who are solicitous about everyone else's health. I can't prove it, but my intuition is that all the strength on the "health" side of this war comes not from people who really care whether other people are healthy, but from people who don't like having to see fat people. They are concerned about their own aesthetic pleasures, and they think fat is ugly.

I know this is true of me. My aesthetic preference leans toward "healthy" versus "skinny" (real women have curves!) but if I see someone who clearly weighs 300+ pounds lumbering down the hallway, sweating and (I've seen this) taking a break halfway from the lobby to the elevator, I am repulsed. Mean? Maybe, but I have the social grace not to comment on it. Not fake-quietly while the person is right there, not under my breath, not to my friend after they're out of sight. As the cheerleader said to the president of the chess club, I can't help how I feel inside.

But I know a lot of other people can't help letting such feelings leak into their politics. The movie Supersize Me wasn't made by a recovering three-Big Mac-a-day fatso who lives in stripmall suburbia, it was made by a physically fit vegetarian who lives in Manhattan. Similarly, the anti-smoking crowd seems to include former smokers mainly as poster children (and then only if they're dying of cancer)

Yes, I think these things are as least as much about someone's aesthetic sensibility as about any kind of concern for the supposed victims.

How to Trap Your Man (or Woman)

2006-12-04T06:12:00.000-08:00

The comment thread on this post over at the Bitch Girls is too old to keep posting on, so I'll beat the dead horse over here. The original topic was a bizarre Michigan law making it illegal for a man to break up with a woman while she is carrying his child. Yes, really. Who wins, Bitter asks? Some commenters said that women win because the government now stands behind them when they get pregnant to "trap" their mate. Others pointed out that being with someone you don't want to be with isn't a "win" for either person.

But being in a miserable relationship with someone who doesn't want to be with you is a big win for the person who does want to be in it.

Not--obviously--that I'm advocating that, but you have to realize what you've done to the other person before you can join them in misery. Otherwise a "win" is exactly what it is, because in your mind you'll have "convinced" the other person, or "made them realize they love you" or any of the other ways people rationalize coercing someone to stay in a relationship.

Which leads to another shopworn cliche, "I thought we were happy!" if the split arrives ahead of the self-realization...

Evolution, not Revolution

2006-12-04T05:38:00.000-08:00

I've been hearing bits and pieces about this for a few months now, but Amazon is going to make all of its physical plant available for rent (link via Instapundit) to people who have a product idea but can't or won't fund the fixed cost to start up a business. Jeff Bezos says it's going to change the world, and Kevin Maney agrees:

If you tease out Bezos' plan, you get to a point where a high school cheerleader sitting at home with a laptop could theoretically harness computing power, design capabilities, manufacturing and distribution from around the world, and make and market a cute little pink hot rod that would compete against General Motors.

Now, it will change the world for some things. Books and music for example, not because they are Amazon's existing core retail business but because they are a product where the manufacturer has no responsibilities beyond making and distributing the product. Anything else that loosely fits that description could make a killing using this service. Clothing, for example, which would be a much better bet for our notional cheerleader than a "cute little pink hotrod".
Why not the hotrod? Simply, what's she going to do when she needs to put out a recall? That should be fairly self-explanatory, but the bottom line is that for products that need post-sale manufacturer support, there is no substitute for owning your own factory. In fact, that's already becoming a marketing slogan for makers of high-end electronics, and precisely because of the massive outsourcing that makes it nearly impossible to know where the object you bought was made. No big deal if it's a t-shirt, but potentially a very big deal if it's a $3k HDTV, and definitely a dealbreaker for any color of hotrod.

Jeff Bezos also thought the Segway would change the world, and you never even hear about it anymore. I like the idea of what Amazon is doing here, but they need to closely study what's going on right now in consumer durable goods manufacturing. The moped market would be a great place to start, as it took off during high gas prices and dozens of US-based companies sold scooters (some strictly by mail order) that were all made by maybe three Chinese factories. Lots of people thought that was a great model, but it actually went exactly the way you'd expect and most of those companies don't exist anymore. Some never shipped a unit and a lot of customers ended up with junk bikes and no service or spare parts.

That said, I'll be waiting for my chance to write the great American novel and sell it on Amazon, all without any literary agents or publishers taking a cut. But I think I'll pass on "Maney sausage"...

There is no such thing as "gifting"!

2006-12-01T16:12:00.000-08:00

Rant: Gifting is the worst advertising-caused word coinage I can think of. It doesn't even make sense! If I give you something, it's called "giving", and the something is then referred to as a gift. You can't then go back around and say you're "gifting" it to the person. This is the worst example of bad english ever. I previously hated the substitution of "home" for "house" (RIP "what makes a house a home?"--now it automatically is) but gifting is way, way worse. And it's showing up more and more. Maybe the frogs were onto something with their anti-language butchering laws...

Twelve Days Without A Post

2006-11-30T18:18:00.000-08:00

So what did I do with my two weeks? Nothing interesting enough to write about, apparantly. I don't normally slow down much in winter, but this year seems to be an exception, or it did until I realized why I was so run down earlier this week--caffiene withdrawal! Yes, I inadvertantly bought two pounds of decaf from Dunkin Donuts; one for work and one for home. I blame my personal decaffienation for my failure to notice this until someone else pointed it out. Anyway, when I realized how severe my withdrawal was, I decided it's time to take a break from coffee. Really I've known this for awhile, since I no longer actually feel a coffee buzz, but being sleep all day and ready for bed by 8pm tears it. I'm back to juice and water for awhile.

My other not-really-interesting story is our (the 'rents and I) visit to Plimoth Plantation on Black Friday. As the name suggests, this is the historical park outside Plymouth, MA. They have reconstructed native and pilgrim villages with interpretive staff, but their real business is hosting modern and 1620-style dinners. More on that later.

The villages were interesting for their historical accuracy (I assume) but even more interesting was the contrast in political correctness. Signs on the path warned us that the native staff are "real indians" (not necessarily Wampanoag) and are not in character. Visitors are to please refrain from whooping, using words like "squaw", "chief", "brave" etc.--apparantly "indian" is alright. The pilgrim staff on the other hand are reenactors, are in character, and we told that they will speak with the attitudes and ideas of their day. This turned out to mean, in one case, a lecture on how the Irish are "very much like the savages". Silly, not that it's a big deal. But this is Massachusetts afterall.

The star of the trip was the Mayflower II, a 1950s reconstruction of the original, which was just a charter and went on to other jobs and an unknown fate after the Pilgrims' voyage. The ship is in excellent condition and is taken out sailing a few times a year. I had the impression that it's possible to crew on it, but will need to check into that more. If so, I know what next year's vacation will be!

The 1620 Thanksgiving dinner was a mixed bag. The food was interesting and good, with the centerpieces being mussels saute'd in the shell, pumpkin squash, and english "cheesecake"--basically a sweet-ish quiche without the ham. There was some rather mediocre entertainment that reminded everybody (literally, all the strangers around us mentioned it) of a rennaissance festival, and the company left something to be desired. You sit at long tables as in a pub, seats assigned by last name. I was wishing for a pretty girl to sit across from me, and I got my wish--sort of. She was cute alright, but in high school and didn't want to chitchat with someone old enough to drink. I'd have probably been the same way at her age, but it made it a long hour and a half. My mom told me later that a guy my age sitting near her was from Alexandria. I knew I should have taken the inboard seat!

Nothing Going On

2006-11-19T19:10:00.000-08:00

I haven't been posting because I haven't had much of anything to post about. This weekend went approximately like this: wake up, make coffee, get breakfast, feed cat, go to friend's house and veg in front of tv for 8 hours, come home, play online, go to bed. It was great!

Next up is Thanksgiving, which involves a trip to New Hampshire. I'll be leaving Gizmo there until Christmas, which will give me a chance to clean up the livingroom and get some stuff done, as well as wake up later than 7am. It will also give my mom a chance to harass him, though she promises not to make him gain 3 lbs like last time.

I have an update on my stereo situation too, but I want to take pics for that and am far too lazy to do so tonight. See, I'm saving good filler material for coming days!

Iraq

2006-11-15T16:12:00.000-08:00

Watching CNN "analysis" of General Abizaid's testimony in front of Congress. Hillary Clinton says "Hope is not a strategy", to which Abizaid replies "Despair isn't a strategy either, and when I come to Washington that's what I hear". He says his staff, field commanders and soldiers, and the Iraqi leadership doesn't feel despair. CNN then cuts to a British guy saying that there is still violence, that Iran is actively supporting the insurgents (apparantly someone finally hired a military history undergrad as a consultant) and there are still casualties. He concludes that General Abizaid must be talking about a different Iraq.

Kid Rock semi-famously said "it ain't bragging if you can back it up". It's not bragging to say I know more about world history than most of the people in Congress, and I've followed Iraq closely enough to understand and appreciate the strategy that's being followed over there. Of course the war isn't being reported by me, it's being reported by the most ignorant people in the west--reporters. When the definitive history of the Iraq war is written 40 years from now, the conclusion is going to be that the generals, the soldiers and the Iraqis were winning on the ground right up until the political establishment, finally overwhelmed by negative media coverage, pulled the plug. Funnily enough, that makes the "it's another Vietnam!" crowd right--just not the way they think.

One more note: if that happens, I will become an isolationist and anti-interventionist. I will do that not because I think either of those things make any sense, but because I will have had it proven to me that in spite of the basic fortitude of American people, the American government can no longer keep up a project that lasts more than a couple years.

Politics Again...

2006-11-13T07:36:00.001-08:00

Reading this review-of-a-review in Reason shows a very sensible point in defense of the skeptical American brand of conservatism.

to say we should "rely on tradition" doesn't actually relieve us of the responsibility for making our own moral judgments, for much the same reason the argument that the argument [sic] that we need religious texts as a guide to morality doesn't go through. There are multiple traditions to choose from, and multiple strains within each tradition, so an apparent "deference to tradition" always still involves the exercise of one's own judgment. (In the same way that you may outsource your health decisions to a doctor, but you're still responsible for finding a wise doctor.)

So unlike, say, the Iranian mullahs (or European tories), American conservatives are not actually harking back to some imagined golden age of righteous autocrats and moral purity. They are instead demanding (like an old Porsche ad I remember) that "change must, without fail, bring improvement." Of course, finding the change that brings improvement involves testing your ideas--this is where deference to tradition still involves exercising your own judgement. It's also the part where a conservative is skeptical of people who think they're going to come up with a clean-sheet design for human society:

Hayek's argument is meant to show why tradition's evolved rules are likely to produce better results than a wholesale constructivist rationalism.

The human race, like the natural environment we live in, is too complex for all of human knowledge to fully grasp, let alone an individual person such as the authors of the great 20th century totalitarian ideologies. Unfortunately, there's a strong strain of "paleoconservatism" that rejects even an incremental approach to progress and prefers the realists' definition of stability as enforced social and political stasis. That worldview shows up in the comments.

The Iraq War was a very unconservative venture based on pie-in-the-sky "we can remake the world!" ideas

No, it was based on the idea that centuries of "realistic" engagement with dictators (which amounted to propping many of them up, given the disparity in resources between the west and the rest of the world) had failed and created mass discontent that was now being channeled into terrorism and fascist political movements. The long-term solution was to abandon the pragmatic approach and actively overturn authoritarian governments, starting with those that actively supported violence against Americans. This was an incremental approach, not a constructivist one, because (media assertions aside) nobody suggested trying to "remake" Afghanistan or Iraq as a clone of America. The idea was simply to sweep aside the totalitarian regimes and give the people some breathing room to establish their own brand of representative government. Not to put too fine a point on it, the American public doesn't know this because the Bush administration didn't make its case, and reporters are too ignorant to understand the difference.

The worst result of the midterm elections isn't the accession to power of communists and plain dolts, but the return to policymaking of the Republican realists, last seen counseling Bush I to abandon Shiite Iraq to its fate following the Persian Gulf War. Between Nancy Pelosi, Frank Murtha and Bob Gates, "cut and run" is now a virtual certainty. That could change, and hopefully will, but at this point we should all be ready to see the helicopters on the embassy roof in Baghdad.

Hitting Ned Devine's

2006-11-12T10:37:00.000-08:00

"We came on the sloop John B., my grandfather and me,
Around Nassau town we did roam

Drinkin' all night, got into a fight
Call up the captain, I wanna go home."

No, last night doesn't truly compare to that song, but it reminded me of it. D&D (a couple I know), their friend E and I went out to Ned Devine's in Sterling last night. I'd never been there before, but it's in the same building as the old two-screen dollar theater from when I was growing up in that area.

I like the layout. You show your ID outside the door to a guy who looks like Steve the bouncer from the Jerry Springer show, and pay the cover ($10--this better be good!) at the box office. Once inside, the "quiet room" is where the projection rooms used to be, and the auditoriums have been combined into one big space, retaining the movie screens a la the late, lamented Bardo's. They have lasers and everything, even fog to cover up the awful geeky white people "dancing". Both because of that, and because the music was monotonously the same soundtrack from those days, we were all reminded of high school dances. That was good for some funny conversation, but sort of left me feeling like I should be wearing a cardigan and walking with a cane.

Luckily around that time the dance floor finally provided some entertainment. A couple guys and some girls got into a fight, complete with shouting (inaudible over the worse-than-normally loud music) and getting thrown out the back door by multiple bouncers. We'd barely started making fun of the 'fighting irish' when several bouncers ran past us heading for the front door, where the dumbasses were apparantly trying to come back in. Since we were waiting for the girls to come back from the bathroom, D and I got a slow start heading out to watch the fun, but I did manage to hear a very slurred voice yelling "what'd I do!"

When we finally gave up and left, vowing to go to DC to a real club next time, the parking lot was full of cops, with some scantily-clad girls in handcuffs getting misty in the summer rain and trash-talking the officers, who looked like they missed the good old days when Loudoun County didn't have a bar to its name. Call up the captain...

Cavtel

2006-11-11T10:06:00.000-08:00

At my old apartment, I had my house phone and DSL through Cavalier Telephone, a CLEC based out of Richmond. They were professional, reliable and (for the day) cheap at $75/mo. So when I moved to the condo I didn't even shop around, just moved my service with me. Well, forget professional. First they told me I needed to start a new order. Then it was ok to transfer my service. The craziest condition was that I couldn't have two accounts active at the same time, which eventually resulted in me reverting to a brand-new service order and a new phone #. What if I'm a landlord who is keeping the utilities at my properties all under my name? Thinking about it now, it probably was because I wanted to keep my phone number, but their people didn't bring that up at the time.

I could have dealt with all that incompetence though, if the service worked. It didn't. After being assured that the DSL modem they gave me for the apartment would also work in the condo, it took a month and several claimed-but-probably-never-done technician visits for them to figure out that I was in an area with a different type of service and needed a new modem. To make up for it, they promised me three free months of service. After five months, I started to wonder why I wasn't getting any statements in the mail, but the remembered pain of dealing with their customer service kept me putting it off until... I came home Thursday night to find my service cut off. Of course in their minds (and their computers) this is due to nonpayment, but it's hard to pay a bill that's never sent to you. The problem seems to be that they have the wrong city associated with my address. This both is and isn't their fault. It is their fault because back in the spring I corrected my address with them over the phone at least twice. But given the particular mistake they were making with it, they may not be responsible for the mailing problem since I've noticed Verizon's FIOS website also chokes on my address and wants to "correct" it to the same wrong city. So maybe it's a problem with error-checking software. Anyway, whatever the problem is, it's one problem too many and this once-good telco has permanently lost my business. As irritated as I've been with them this year, that still makes me sad because I remember when they were a good alternative to overpriced cable or Verizon DSL.

Freeholding

2006-11-08T07:23:00.000-08:00

This is a big topic, but I'll keep the post short. Reading about WWI battlecruisers the other day, I got curious about the titles of nobility in the German ships' namesakes; things like Graf (Count), Freiherr (Baron) and soforth. Looking those up, I unexpectedly came across a term I'd never heard before: allodial title, which is a kind of land ownership. I've seen a few different versions of the etymology, including old Latin for "all property" and "subject only to God" but the gist is that the holder of allodial land is a free "state" unto themselves, not subject to any municipal government but granted directly by the national government (state government in the US, if it were possible to have a real allodial title or land patent) This is why it's associated with nobility--if you're a landed aristocrat, you aren't part of any municipality or administrative subdivision. You are your own administrative subdivision; a county of your own, with yourself as Count!

If you google the term, you will come up with all sorts of pages telling you how wonderful it is to have an allodial title, and various schemes (all BS with no legal recognition) to obtain one. It seems that such things existed in the early days of the republic. Among other things, records from that time contain many references to "freeholders" and "smallholders" (the German term above, Freiherr, literally means Freeholder or Free Lord) and at least some of these people may have owned their land in allodium, subject not to a town or county but directly to the state. As mentioned before, they are basically their own county. Which brings me to why it's hilarious that libertines and tax-dodgers are the ones seeking allodial title to their land. It may be the ultimate form of freedom for the title holder, but it also literally means serfdom for anyone who lives on their land, since the allodial titleholder is the only political authority below the state government. The US Constitution prevents you from calling yourself a Baron, but a Baron you would be, and anyone living on your land, even owners of real estate (a legal subset of an allodium) would be subject to YOU as their local government. Cool for you, terrible for them.

Of course, you can't truly get an allodial title as far as I know. Nevada apparantly had a program for that at one point. They did exactly what a rational actor in their position should do--they would give you an allodium in exchange for the expected future value of the property taxes on your land. So Warren Buffet can buy himself a barony. The best you and I can do is to assemble all the property rights (mineral rights, water rights etc) associated with our land until there are no deed restrictions. But we'll still be part of the county or city, which is the true allodial titleholder. That said, it would be sweet to be my own county!

Hot Spiced Cider...

2006-11-06T18:59:00.000-08:00

...with a nip of brandy is damn good. Also, it saps all my motivation. Well, that and the 1600 yards I swam after work. I am really enjoying the swimming again, after a hiatus of nearly ten months. There is one thing Chinquapin doesn't have that Lee District Park did though: a hot tub. I miss the hot tub. Of course if I miss it enough there's always the jets in my own tub!

Advice Bleg

2006-11-05T14:17:00.000-08:00

(for those who don't know, "bleg" = blog + beg)

I need some new home theater equipment. Let me stipulate first that I am not a gearhead when it comes to this stuff, so for example I have no particular bias towards having a separate component for everything versus an all-in-one system, etc. Anyway, I currently have the following stuff: 27" flat-tube HDTV (broken), 20" flat-tube SDTV (works), $35 dvd player (works but has issues), Sony 5-disc 5.1/DTS surround system (dvd video output is effed, everything else works fine, too old to play mp3/wma) What I want is to get back to where I'm able to watch movies without skipping, in surround sound. I also want music in my bedroom. At some point I want an HD monitor too, but that will be step 2. As I see it, my options are:

1.) New dvd player, new 5.1 receiver and two new front speakers, moving the old all-in-one and its front speakers to the bedroom. This will involve adapting the +/- speaker wire connection from the (unpowered) subwoofer to an RCA plug for the new receiver. Is that easy?

2.) New dvd player, use the all-in-one system as a receiver and buy a bookshelf stereo for the bedroom. I was doing the livingroom part of this setup for awhile with the cheap dvd player and it worked (aside from the cheap player sucking)

3.) New all-in-one system, and move the old all-in-one to the bedroom.

Anyone have any thoughts? I believe option 2.) is the only one that's significantly cheaper, since it involves minimal new equipment. I may take that route since I'm thinking of getting a plasma tv. 1.) and 3.) are probably in the same total price range, assuming I get a decent-quality system. I don't think I'm going to invest in a completely new set of speakers, so I wouldn't be getting a high-end receiver either as the high-end ones today are all 6.1 or 7.1.

A Little Too Personal

2006-11-03T12:22:00.000-08:00

Awhile back, I signed up on Yahoo! Personals. Yeah yeah, I know. After a couple months I canceled my paid membership, but since I still have a Yahoo! account, my profile, searches etc. stayed around and I still get emails from them from time to time. Today I get an announcement that "Who Viewed Me? has arrived!". So I get to see who's looking at my profile. This could have some value, if only for anthropological interest. Sadly, I didn't think of this possibility:

Dang.

Serial Fiction

2006-11-02T12:02:00.000-08:00

So I always have story ideas floating around in my head, but rarely or never the discipline to sit and write them. This morning it occurred to me that maybe I should serialize them on the blog. What do you, my 1 1/2 loyal readers, think of that idea? Good? Bad? Would you keep coming back for more? Lose interest and never come back if I developed writer's block for a week? If I do it, should I take input from the comments? That might be fun...

Ok...

2006-10-31T17:47:00.000-08:00

...I realize I don't keep in touch with people as well as I could, but you can still invite me to your parties. Maybe I just assume too much when I think people are friends. I'll try to be more realistic about that.

On a less dramatic note, this was a productive weekend. Concrete steps taken to finally fill the empty space where comfy livingroom furniture should be. Funny Halloween pics taken, old friends caught up with (the graf above doesn't refer to the entire world) and snazzy curtains hung over the balcony door where boring sheers used to be. That last one means yet another mini-project around the balcony entrance though. The previous owner just screwed the curtainrod brackets into drywall, and I yanked one partially out while hanging the curtains. It needs to be widened about a foot anyway to make it easier to get the curtains out of the way and open the door, so some drywall anchors are in the immediate future. Ah, homeowning.

Silent Spring

2006-10-27T18:27:00.000-07:00

So I've been reading The Hundred Year Lie: How Food and Medicine are Destroying Your Health, by Randall Fitzgerald. It's a polemic; there are no footnotes or endnotes and while the prose is not really alarmist, it is fairly repetitive and dumbed down. The central theme is that synthetic chemicals found in food and especially in drugs are responsible, not by themselves but in concert with other natural and synthetic chemicals that we consume, for epidemics of once-rare diseases like autism, type 2 diabetes and various cancers.

The author, an investigative reporter, claims to be a libertarian who is concerned to bring us these observations because synthetic chemicals are so ubiquitous that there's no such thing as choosing to avoid them. That's a good beginning to a persuasive argument, but he unfortunately follows it up with unscientific anecdotes and assertions of statistical correlations between some chemical in a food or drug item and some disorder in humans consuming it. The only apparantly solid scientific conclusions presented in the book (still without direct references) are the scary "body burden" of 700-some synthetic chemicals in the average citizen of western countries, and eyebrow-raising increases in the rates of things like birth defects, autism, childhood allergies and diseases like asthma, and nervous disorders in the past few decades. If nothing else, I feel vindicated in my policy of avoiding all drugs unless absolutely necessary. Just don't tell me this shit is in beer!

Signs Are Only For the Literate

2006-10-23T15:55:00.000-07:00

When I was a kid, my dad told me the following story about the machine shop at the engineering firm where he worked. They moved some of their large custom equipment around with a forklift, using a special adapter that dad designed. It worked as intended, until one day one of the knuckledraggers hooked a cable to it sideways to try to move some heavy object sitting near the forklift (or something like that--I forget the details.) The adapter snapped clean in half, but since that was not the way it was meant to be used, the company didn't spend money redesigning it. They built another one exactly the same, except that dad had a sign put on it saying "under no circumstances side-load this tool". But, he said with a rueful smile, that was only for people who can read.

I just spent ten minutes setting my tire pressures properly, ironically because some other knuckledraggers (it's a term of endearment, I promise!) CAN read. Everytime I take my car for an oil change, they read the plate inside the door and set the tire pressures to what it says. The only problem is that I replaced the stock tires awhile ago with ones that happen to take much higher pressures. It says so right on the tire--max press 51 psi. But like clockwork, it always comes back from the dealer at 36fr/34rr, and then I have to pump them up to 48fr/46rr. I know they think they're doing me a free service, but I guess I'm going to have to start specifically asking them not to. Sigh.

Classic Night Out

2006-10-22T11:28:00.000-07:00

After finishing five games of pool last night without managing to get anyone else to show up*, Kipp and I decided to head for Rock It Grill and see if some fun could still be had. The Cue Club had been nearly deserted, very strange for a pool hall on Saturday night. Worse, the attendees were approximately 99% male.

I knew the crowd at Rock It would be much better, and sure enough. Even with all three bartenders on the clock, I was reduced to trespassing in the servers' counter to get my beer. It's a good thing they know me there. Surprisingly, we found seats along the partition next to the pool tables, and settled in to watch the karaoke.

Around half an hour later, Kipp says "hey, do you see those three girls sitting in front of the stage? They look like they want some company!" I wasn't entirely in the mood for that, but we all know you never leave your wingman. We watched for a few minutes to see that they really were alone, and went on over.

The first warning sign should have been when the (apparantly) older and soberer of the three just sort of shrugged and said the seats on the far end of the table were open. But we gamely sat down and began to appraise the situation. Only two girls were there at that point; one appeared to be in her late 20s and looked a little sour. The other was cute but barely able to sit up in her chair, plus the only proof she was older than, say, 17 was her presence in a bar after 9pm.

I looked at Kipp, and he said "I think they looked better from across the room." Roger dat! So we sat contemplating our shit-or-get-off-the-pot dilemma, when what to our wondering eyes should appear but two guys, walking up to "our" girls as if they were ...with them! The girls must have forgotten that though, because the guys took one look at Kipp and I and began to harangue the hapless and quite-drunk females. This was complete with pointing and hand gestures, shrugging and pretend innocence. I was far too mesmerized with this show to sneak off, but when the guys finally came over to kick us out they were--to their credit--friendly and polite about it. I'm guessing that happens a lot when this bunch goes out...

* Not really our fault. Pretty much all the usual suspects happened to be out of town, and the last 2-3 were busy or not picking up.

Old Journals Pt III

2006-10-21T08:10:00.000-07:00

In which we cover Nazism in Germany from WW2 to the present day (well, to 13 years ago anyway)

7:06 pm, Austria, July 4
We are in Westendorf, Austria. It is a resort nestled between steep mountains like in "Heidi" The mountains are very beautiful. I got my money changed tonight, and located the post office. Tomorrow, I will buy stamps and send postcards.
Earlier, we visited the Dachau concentration camp site. It was surprisingly sobering. We were pressed for time, but I saw most of the interior exhibits, and walked to the catholic chapel. There were a lot of noisy, unwashed gypsies camped around it, with signs that I couldn't quite read. I was angry. They seemed somehow disrespectful.

Really, they did. There was some sort of strike or demonstration going on, or at least a bunch of gypsies (that's clearly what they were) camped around the Catholic memorial at one end of the grounds. This bothered me because it seemed so out of place. Aren't there plenty of other places for them to camp, without disturbing the reverence of this spot? Yes, gypsies also died in the camps, but I didn't see a bunch of Israeli tourists starting cooking fires.

The barracks were long gone, but their foundations still exist, lined up in rows like church pews radiating out from the main buildings. Those buildings, of course, were where the medical experiments, torture and mass murder were done. The gates still say Arbeit Macht Frei ("Labor will set you free"--as vicious a lie as has ever been told to anyone) and the main building has been turned into a museum, full of lurid exhibits to give you the full picture of what went on there. Whatever else you want to say about the Germans, they've done an admirable job of owning up to their past. I don't think, for example, there is such a memorial to the Japanese-American internment camps, or the Cherokee Trail of Tears in the United States. Notoriously, Japan has yet to truly acknowledge its crimes, let alone build a museum. The Soviets and Chinese are held up as heroes of the anti-fascist cause even though their own-people body count eclipses even Hitler's, etc. I could go on about the subject of dealing with collective guilt--how much is enough and how much is too much, but that's another post.

Later we went to Cheimsee. The lake in southern Bavaria is home to an island where King Ludwig's castle was built. We didn't get to see the castle, but I got photos of the lake, tourboats, and of Leslie, Pat, and Mike. I still need a picture of Laura, but we got a group photo after we decorated our bus. I think tomorrow I will also call Mom + Dad and Karen. On the credit card, of course

Postcard list:
--------------
M + Dad (check)
Karen (check)
Elissa (check)
Wendy (check)

+keep one for Vicky (check)

Going to Cheimsee but not visiting Mad King Ludwig's castle was a recurring theme of this trip. We went to the next town over from the famous one, the less-traveled historical sites, spent only half a day in someplace interesting before decamping for the local equivalent of a freeway exit with a hotel and a walmart. I don't know why this was. Obviously there's 'cheap' to consider, or maybe someone in the home office actually tried to expose us to less touristy places. Thinking about it now, I also wonder if our concerts were a small piece of the economic development puzzle for these off-the-beaten track towns.

Strangely, I didn't write down the best story of the day. Since it was the 4th, we'd decorated our buses in the Cheimsee parking lot. Even in those days, being an American in Europe was sort of like being a Yankees fan in Boston, so I wondered how the red, white and blue was going to go over.

We got our answer when my little clique wandered off from the group in order to get closer to the waterfront. Three German guys without shirts and obviously drunk came wandering down the path, shouting something or other and pointing towards the main group of Americans nearby. As the only person among us (one of maybe half a dozen on the whole tour) who understood some German, I recognized phrases like "Foreigners get out!" or the alternative "Americans go home!". I've always told this story as 'how we escaped from the neo-nazis', but they were probably just the Deutsch version of your garden-variety ignorant redneck. Every society has them. We casually got up and closed ranks with the rest of our 80+ companions, and the "nazis" passed peacefully by.

But that wasn't the end of them ...yet. About an hour later these same buffoons came back around on a peddle-boat. Without any waterborne Jews or foreigners to bait, they'd started in on each other. In full view of the hated Amis two of them proceeded to stand up on the wobbly craft and start swinging. The drunker of the contenders wound up his arm like Bugs Bunny in one of the old baseball-themed Looney Toons, and put his whole body into his punch. Of course the other ultimate racist fighter sidestepped, and Mr. Auslaender raus! sailed right over the side. I don't remember the details, but he must have hit bottom because when he stood up the water wasn't much above his knees. It's too bad we hadn't managed to spread the story very far--only the five of us really got the full humor of that little show.

Next: a three day rest stop in the Austrian Alps and more of my unintentionally funny comments on girls.

Lightning Interruption

2006-10-19T17:28:00.000-07:00

Just want to toss this out: Micheal Totten's hilarious attempt at storm-chasing as he drives his new-to-him Acura RSX home to OR. He is far more likely to be washed away by rain than kidnapped by terrorists. If I ever get to meet the guy, let's hope photography and beer are involved!

Old Journals Pt II

2006-10-19T16:56:00.000-07:00

This is the second in a series of excerpts from the 21-page journal of a trip I took to Europe the summer after high school. The first post is here. I finally remembered the name of the tour company: American Music Abroad. They appear to still be in business, and hey, why not? It was generally a fun time, and a way for kids whose families don't take overseas vacations to see a place they never would otherwise.

Folks, this trip took place in 1993. Thirteen years ago! That's almost half my life, and I was an adult at the time and even still remember it reasonably well. Can I really be that old? I guess so. Anyway, let's join my 18 year old self in Germany again, as the tour really gets underway:

We stopped in Heidelburg, where there is a large castle, and an 'Altstadt' or old town. I changed $80 into deutschmarks. I now have DM92,10, 90 French francs, and 20 swiss francs. Germans like coins. They come in denominations as high as DM5. I have DM2,10 in change. I also have $1.84 in American change which is worthless here. I have to sit next to a real pete on the bus (coach, sorry. "bus" is politically incorrect. They'll get mad at you and play Neal Diamond on the stereo really loud for the rest of the day if you say it.) The pete is big, fat, clumsy, dumb, crude, friendless, annoying, smelly, possibly gay, camera-happy, and takes up half my seat as well as his own.

Let's pause here while I explain two things. First, as I warned you last time, my attitudes and language were a bit different back then. Today I would take exception if someone else included "possibly gay" in a list like that, especially since there are so many other perfectly good (bad?) items on it. Second, some of my friends in high school used to call annoying idiots "petes" after--naturally--a guy named pete who was an annoying idiot. It's quaint to read that now, and sort of underlines how long ago all this was.

Opening the emergency hatches in the roof fixed the A/C situation. As long as we're moving, there is a breeze inside that's more than adequate. There was a big castle in Heidelberg. It had a 45,000 Liter wine cask in the basement. I wandered around the castle and the altstadt and briefly got lost along the river (the river Neckar) In Dinkelsbuehl tonight, I had my first glass of beer. It was Loewenbrau. It tasted nasty and I got slightly tipsy even though I didn't finish it.

Yup, my first beer at age 18. Without stretching the point too much, it really was a more innocent time (and if you're my age, that's a scary thought!) and plenty of us on this trip were enjoying our first chance to imbibe. I mean hey, it was still illegal back home!

July 3, Dinkelsbuehl.
Today we all (Me, Patrick, and Mike) slept through our alarms. We woke up at 8:30, and skipped breakfast. I showered and was the last to leave the room. I bought some tape to mark my film cans and some postcards. I also bought a 0.76 Liter bottle of orange juice. That was my breakfast. My lunch was some strawberries that I bummed off Laura. She and Leslie came to our room for awhile and talked this afternoon. After they left, Pat and I talked for awhile and Mike fell asleep.

For some reason, I was diligent about listing the names of people who figured in my day. I'm glad now that I did, though some of it is hilarious because, of course, I was eyeing up all the girls in the group:

Tara is really cute, and she is nice to me ...a rarity among the girls on this tour. She suggested that I spend the last of my change on ice cream. I did, and it was good. Now it's time for an evening shower, and then dinner. Concert tonight at Bad-Windsheim.

Ah, our first concert. I just may have been wrong about the 10-hour practices back in PA being superfluous, or maybe people just had a lot of wine with lunch. Either way, it's just a good thing we weren't singing for our supper, because...

12:23 a.m. The concert was very bad. We were out of tune and had poor tone quality. The band directors were too low down for the brass to be able to see them, and we messed everything up. At least the people didn't kill us, though some walked out. I don't want to play in this band again. It is just too bad. Bad-Windsheim is a neat town. It has narrow streets and picturesque buildings, and a real nightlife. I think that Europe is a neat place to visit, but I don't want to live here. I do want a car, though.

And there's our last sign of the times for this section. I was such a car nut back then that my residual knowledge today can still irritate the hell out of people. I've spared you the lengthy description, but not only did I want a European car, I knew exactly which model and engine option. I may even have known the price--and notice everything is in DM. This is long before anyone was talking about Euros.

Tomorrow, we visit Mad King Ludwig's castle and re-enact World War II on the Fourth of July!

Old Journals Pt I

2006-10-17T19:20:00.000-07:00

How exactly did a week go by since my last post? Feels like I put it up yesterday. Anyway, since very little worth babbling about is going on with me lately, let's step into the way-back machine and visit a time when a lot was happening. This post and maybe the next few will feature excerpts from my personal journal on my first trip to Europe, the summer after I graduated high school in 1993. I'm copying them word for word and as close to the original formatting as HTML allows; you are fairly warned that the language and thoughts are those of an 18-year-old, and accordingly lack 30-something social graces. Enjoy!

Day 1, Lancaster, Pa. Franklin + Marshall College

forgotten items list
-----------------
1.) Deodorant
2.) Calculator

Today we had 2 largely useless meetings, I discovered that Mr. Schoonover is an asshole and he acts like a faggot, we practiced for an insane, point-of-diminishing returns amount of time (almost 10 hrs.) and we were locked out of our dorm by some pencil-neck security man. The guy that came to unlock the door was straight from central casting. he could have been on C.O.P.S. He got out of his jeep and said "You guys locked out here?" duh! How many pennsylvanians does it take to screw in a light bulb?

Bugosh quotable quote #1:

"let's start with the trumpets. -Oh, that's a french horn."

Bugosh, whose first name was (I think) David, was the head band director. The program was to put together a band made up of high school students from around the eastern seaboard, and go around western Europe seeing the sights and playing concerts. An interesting concept, and the actual experience ...well, read on:

1

19.20 (7:20 p.m.) , Koblenz, Germany : July 1
The drive from Brussels was long and almost uneventful. We seem to have had bad directions and got lost. Also, the air conditioner on the bus is incapable of beating the heat with the sun shining in through the windows. We arrived at the hotel an hour late, hot, sweaty, irritable and tired. As am I. time to sleep.

And that quick-and-dirty graf wrapped up my entry into Europe. It was a marathon trek from Lancaster to NYC, to Brussels and immediately (I think--we did tour Brussels at some point but that may have been on the way back) to Germany before we took a real breather. Tomorrow, northern Germany!

This Is What I Come Back To?

2006-10-12T18:05:00.000-07:00

Seriously, I can't leave you people alone for three days. Cory Lidle crashes into an apartment building, Kim Jong Il attempts to explode a nuke, Rep. Foley doesn't understand that a pageboy is just a haircut, and now Mark Warner isn't going to run for President in '08.

Of course, the real news is the Canucks versus the Enormous Mary Jane Plant in Afghanistan (feed me!!!)--what would life be without Fark?

In the meantime I've been reading up on Civil War blockade runners and how to get your pilot's license. As usual, I want to do about a week's worth of stuff everyday, but I'm sure I'll pick one soon. Probably flying, since the market for blockade running has been pretty dead the last 145 years.

And finally I am contemplating camping this weekend, even though the overnight low is predicted to be in the mid 30s. That's why they make 30-degree sleeping bags, right? Or at least that's why they make nice hot campfires ...and booze!

Dear people, You are hopeless. Sincerely, Me

2006-10-08T14:09:00.000-07:00

1.) Lady at Home Depot who looked directly at the piece of dryer vent, then pushed her cart directly into it.

2.) Ethnic family standing in the middle of the service road outside Home Depot, completing their crossing only after cars screeched to a halt to avoid flattening them. This would have made a fantastic picture from my POV, with an SUV braking at a cocked angle while all the people stood around right in the center of the lane in front of it.

3.) Guy in REI parking lot who like ~~many~~ ~~most~~ all SUV drivers left ten feet open on his right while crowding me so much on his left that we both had to come to a complete stop before safely passing each other.

4.) Two different people who stopped way short of traffic at a stoplight, then crept slowly forward a bit at a time. Don't ever do this. Not ever.

5.) Lady in the left lane of Rt 50 going about 42mph, but clearly enchanted with whatever the person on the other end of her cell convo just said.

6.) Unseen idiot at Seven Corners who could not decide which way they were going and brought all three lanes of the 7/50/whatever-the-other-one-is intersection to a traffic jam worthy of Wednesday afternoon rush hour.

7.) Moron on Rt 7 who unaccountably waited nearly 2 minutes for a green light before making a right turn. No, there isn't a sign.

Not only all in one day, but all within a couple hours, and I know I'm forgetting a couple. Anyone have a mountaintop for sale?

Majority Rule?

2006-10-03T13:49:00.000-07:00

Interesting article on Politics Central (link stolen from Instapundit) today; what if a majority of people in a democratic country voted to get rid of democracy? For example, by replacing it with Islamic Sharia law? Nothing like that has really happened before but demographic changes in Europe bring up the possibility, remote though it may be:

A few weeks ago, Justice Minister Donner – known for his legalistic approach to most issues – said in an interview that if two-thirds of the Dutch population would support it, the Dutch constitution would have to be amended in order to introduce Sharia law. The immediate broad public outburst over the minister’s remarks was, given their factual and legal basis in the principle of majority rule, surprising. [...] Even then the demographic projections of today would have to materialize, and we would have to assume that all Muslim immigrants in the lowlands would remain unintegrated, rejecting all the great things that a free democracy had to offer.

Well, or they could integrate but remain ignorant and believe that the benefits of democratic countries somehow come from something other than democracy. Like all identity movements, Islamism is about gaining a sense of personal authenticity through the rejection of what it sees as degenerate foreign influences. And of course, rejecting democracy in favor of racial, religious, ideological, or whatever other kind of purity is about as authentically fascist as it gets. I have little doubt that when muslims achieve a majority in a western country, they will be strongly inclined to vote away the freedom that created the opportunities that drew them there--and then be shocked speechless when it instantly turns into what they thought they were leaving behind in the "old country". Which is where we get into the 'democracy is not a suicide pact' discussion ...but not today.

Ally McBeal Lives!

2006-10-01T10:13:00.000-07:00

The cult of nano-dress sizes is alive and well in the fashion industry, according to Liz Jones, former editor of Marie Claire. I often think a lot of "scandals" could be helpfully removed from our collective plate if the people being accused would just tell the Woodward and Bernstein wannabes to get a life. This, though, is not one of those cases. A size minus two??? Sorry, even if you wanted to argue that society demands beauty, I don't know anyone who wants a woman to look like she was just liberated from Auschwitz. Real women have curves.

From the Department of Really Late Movie Reviews...

2006-09-30T11:12:00.000-07:00

Back when I had HBO I used it to seek out the old or obscure movies that I tend to prefer. I don't have HBO anymore but Netflix fills the gap nicely, especially since going to the theater is so expensive now that I really only do it for social occasions.

Anyway, though I'm not a big sports fan I remembered liking Varsity Blues, so when Friday Night Lights showed up on my recommendations I decided to try it. Am I ever glad I did! What a great movie. It starts off a little slow and disjointed, but you soon realize that's because they're introducing the main characters, who don't necessarily hang out in one group. Character development--imagine that. And you wouldn't expect Hollywood to choreograph a football game worth anything but this looked great to me, especially since a lot of the camera angles seemed designed to mimic the way TV covers a game. People who know more about football than I do (almost everyone) might find stuff to criticize there, but it looked brilliant to me. The cast is an ensemble and I didn't recognize most of the faces, so they apparantly haven't gone on to great things yet, but Billy Bob Thornton does his usual great job, in this case as the coach balancing small-town political pressure to win against his personal responsibility to the players, who after all still kids. And all done with near-zero melodrama and no obvious plot formulas. Of course it's a coming-of-age movie so there are formulas all over the place, but as in Top Gun they're used wisely and advance the plot without distracting. I'm not really a football fan, but I think it's safe to say Friday Night Lights is a football movie for football fans. You can never assume that in these PC times...

Rain and More Auld Acquaintances

2006-09-28T16:54:00.000-07:00

I seem to be on a run with running into people I used to know. Riding Metro into my old neighborhood to pick up my car from the Subaru dealer this afternoon, the cold wind and rain were blowing sideways hard enough that there wasn't any truly dry place on the platform, let alone outside. I therefore decided to take the elevator to the street level and stay dry for a couple more minutes. Wouldn't you know it, over my shoulder I hear another familiar voice saying "Stacy!", and turn around to see Darren, a former classmate at Virginia Tech who lives in Huntington.

We caught up a bit as the bus saved him from getting soaked on what would otherwise have been a 15-minute walk to his house, but I was mostly thinking "this rain is going to trash my balcony." Had I been expecting a thunderstorm, I'd have taken down my hammock or at least brought the pillow inside and stacked the chairs. I'd also have taken the 36" planter box off the railing since it will fill with water in a downpour.

When I got home though, it wasn't as bad as I feared. Yes, the pillow is wet but it's all synthetic so that's not an emergency. The 24" planter box on the railing was enjoying the rain just fine, as it should since I drilled drain holes in the side after the floods this spring. And my plucky little apple tree is still green and standing up straight. The 36" box, though, and all the catnip in it are done. I guess it's going to be time to plant those snow peas...

Call Me a Cab! ...Ok, You're a Cab

2006-09-28T06:43:00.000-07:00

In London a couple years ago, Vicky and I joined her old bridge-playing buddy Jason for a night of clubbing. Jason warned me that British girls are snobbish and unfriendly, and he was right, but it was a fun evening anyway. One of the more interesting parts came near the end when we took a 'black' or unregistered cab back to the hotel. This was just a guy making some extra cash by driving people around at night, and quite a bit cheaper than a real cab. Of course you can't visit London without riding in the funky oldtime cabs, and we did take one of those to the Eurostar terminal the next day.

I thought about that this morning when a coworker joked that he's going to make a lot of money driving a cab today, since several of us need rides to a going-away lunch. I've taken two cab rides in the past week or so, once from National to my house on the way home from California, and another from Japone to Rosslyn when the metro unexpectedly closed at midnight instead of 2am like I thought. Both were $15-20 including tip, which strikes me as a pretty nice hourly rate.

Of course that's the benefit of the artificial scarcity created by the taxi licensing system, but like most regulatory systems it creates an opportunity for freeriding. In each of my cab rides, the distance was around 5 miles. You probably have to drive around a bit in between fares, but let's say you have a 5-mile fare for every 10 miles driven. The standard mileage deduction on your taxes is 42 cents, so that's a cost of $4.20 for your ten miles of driving. If you undercut the pros by $5 then you're pulling in, conservatively, around $6 for your ten miles. If you can do that 3 times an hour, that's $18/hr.

So, if you call yourself a cab for 3 hours a night 2-3 times a week, that's all your going-out money. Not a bad little racket, especially if you're a student of humanity (or of drunk girls coming home from the club!)

Ok, This is Kinda Good!

2006-09-27T14:10:00.000-07:00

My alternate title for this post was "Fear my net.stalking skillz, or I Can Read LJ and Click on Links!". But I decided that was going a long way for not much of a joke. Anyway, I ran across Meagan's LJ and from there to her AudioStreet page where she's got an mp3 posted. I've told a couple of my friends before how she brought down the house at Freddie's one night, so I was pretty interested to hear her singing her own stuff. And you know what? I like it! She definitely reminds me of someone I've heard before, though I can't come up with the name offhand. Think somewhere between Tracy Bonham and ~~Veruca Salt~~ Ani DiFranco, though that's probably a horrible comparison and all my more music-literate friends will tar and feather me for it. Anyway, go listen, you'll like it!

Too White and Nerdy

2006-09-27T14:00:00.000-07:00

This explains a few things...

How White and Nerdy Are You?

Here's the video. There, I just saved you a few white-n-nerdy points!

Modern Architecture (con't)

2006-09-25T15:18:00.000-07:00

Clearly, I wasn't clear in my last post. That's non-sarcastic--as I look back I don't think I made my point well. Christina and Clint's comments just confirm it. Given that, a couple points bear elucidating (I got yer $10 word right here!):

Nontraditional architecture - What I meant to do was respond to the WaPo writer's assertion that "Not to build such a splendid, modern structure would have been a dumbfounding mistake. The error would have been noticed around the world..." It seems to me that the implication is 'new and cool' has intrinsic value of its own. The marketplace may say that it does, but I think saying DC should have interesting modern buildings because other great cities like London, Berlin, Hong Kong, etc have them just a variation on "everybody's doing it". A pissing contest, as Clint said.

That's not to say that DC should always have neoclassical architecture because it's always had neoclassical architecture in the past (though this is apparantly the city's policy.) I just feel that if the motivation is "I saw something awesome in London last summer, there should be something weird and interesting here too", that's a bad reason to build something. A good reason would be that the design addresses a particular set of needs in an innovative way and was preferably "invented here" by local talent. I'm not going to have much extra pride in my city because someone brought in outside talent to build something intended to look like a shinier version of something else in some other city, without much regard for setting or function. Yes, that's an aesthetic sense on my part, but that being so it puts me in the Ayn Rand school, which is also basically the Frank Lloyd Wright school so I'll go ahead and hold my head up.
Property rights - Just to talk about Clint's point for a moment. I disagree on the basis that if your neighbor were to build a borg cube with pink bunnies that takes up their entire lot, it reduces the market value of your property because most people don't want to live next to a borg cube (with or without pink bunnies) and will be willing to pay less for your house. So it does affect you, and along with health hazards related to industrial facilities, that is the reason we have zoning. If enough people want to live in borg cubes, they can in theory get together and buy land, lobby the county to create a borg cube zone, and cube it up to their heart's content (as long as they plant trees so the next subdivision isn't forced to live making the same boring cubist jokes day after day)

Modern Architecture

2006-09-24T07:11:00.000-07:00

Real quick, this Post article from last year about the approval of Norman Foster's glass canopy for the Old Patent Office Building courtyard (link from DCist) gives me an chance to say something I like to say about architecture and urban design whenever I find someone to listen. The article includes the following sentiment beloved of, from what I can tell, every architect in the universe:

Not to build such a splendid, modern structure would have been a dumbfounding mistake. The error would have been noticed around the world, for sure. Today, architecture plays a significant role in establishing a city's competitive credentials. To turn down a wonderful building out of excessive caution or misplaced preservationist zeal? Definitely embarrrassing.

My personal opinions aside (short version: I'm on the fence about modern architecture, but have no love for columns and porticos just because they're traditional) it's an even bigger error of judgement to potentially blight the landscape for the next century or more just to add a big-name building to the city's resume, or because something similar looks cool somewhere else in the world. Followers build things to keep up with the Joneses. We should do-or not do-based strictly on our own needs and wants.

Check Your Dryer!!!

2006-09-23T19:12:00.000-07:00

A lot of my button-down shirts have plastic tabs in the corners of the collar to keep them stiff and pointy. I am usually too lazy to take them out before washing, but it's never been a problem til today. Or so I thought. I bought a new shirt this morning and went to give it the pre-wearing wash. When it came out of the dryer it was short one plastic tab. I felt around the bottom of the dryer, checked the lint filter, nothing. I said a mental "blah!" and went on about my folding and ironing. Afterward I decided to check again just for fun. This time I spotted a faint outline of something next to one of the fins inside the dryer.

It was a plastic tab, partially stuck under the fin. But it wasn't the one that came out of my new shirt, it went with some other shirt. I went on to recover the matching tab, plus the one for the new shirt for a total of three. So one of my shirts needs tabs, doesn't have them, and may not have had them for several months. Check those dryers!

And Speaking of Flying...

2006-09-22T09:54:00.000-07:00

Getting a private pilot's license has always been "on my list". My dad had his when he was about my age, and flew my mom around on some of their dates. I know I'd love it. I've always had a natural feel for what makes airplanes tick, and natural talent at handling any vehicle I've ever tried, from bikes to powerboats.

So when one of my relatives last weekend was complaining about airport security, and declaring that if she ever flew again she'd be her own pilot, it made me start thinking about small planes again. I'm a compulsive researcher (just ask my friends; one of the most common complaints about me is my know-it-all tendencies) and set off to find out what kind of small airplanes (lightplanes) are available today. Answer: the majority are disappointingly the same as when I was a kid looking through my dad's old flying stuff.

The few new-age designs out there have specs that tell me something about their designers' intent. For example, the useful load (weight capacity, incl. fuel) of a Piper Saratoga and a Lancair IV are within 100 lbs or so, but the Lancair cruises almost twice as fast and is 20%+ more fuel-efficient. If you compare any two old and new designs with similar seating capacities, you'll find about the same thing. New airplanes carry the same load as old ones, but generally faster and with lower fuel consumption--using the same Continental or Lycoming engines.

That's a whole box of cookies for modern aerodynamics and materials science, but it leaves me scratching my head in one way. The two aircraft linked above, which are fairly typical, have a max load of about 1200 lbs including up to 60-70 gallons of fuel. At a little over 6 lbs/gallon, that's 400 lbs or so out of that 1200, leaving 800 to divide among pilot, passengers and luggage. Even 6-seat lightplanes come with numbers like that, so unless I'm missing something pretty much every single-engine lightplane on the market can't fill all its seats without being gigantically overloaded!

Kirin is non-alcoholic beer

2006-09-20T22:10:00.000-07:00

Tonight had a bit of magic to it. I was up late last night, so tired this morning and dying by 5:30 when I got home. I laid down and slept like a baby for two hours. This was one of those sleeps where you start off feeling just peaceful and relaxed, and wake up feeling completely refreshed. These don't come around often, at least not to me. I woke up around 7:15, made dinner and got ready to go meet Angel, Ian and their crew for karaoke at Cafe Japone.

I don't go to DC much these days, and Japone is in the neighborhood where I used to work. But more on that later. Coming from Virginia I have to change trains at Metro Center. I glanced around the platform in case I might spot anyone en route. That happened more than once going to parties back in the day, but not tonight. Just when I'd satisfied myself of that, though, I heard a familiar voice calling my name. It was Ryan Schutt, an old friend from Virginia Tech who was on his way home from the Nats game. He lives in Rockville but I almost never see him. He said he hardly ever comes into the city either, so the odds of us meeting like that are astronomical. He's doing well and is getting ready to go to Japan for two weeks on vacation. Didn't get much detail besides that as I got off the train two stops later, but it sure can be a small world!

I arrived at Japone a little early, so I decided to check out my old office building. It's still there, as is the organization I worked for, but I'd say a good 3/4 of everything around it has changed. An old womens hospital two blocks away has become a high-rent apartment building, there's a fountain and an outdoor patio bar where there used to be ..not that stuff anyway. Lulu's is gone, though I've heard of it lately so maybe it just moved. Almost every nearby building has had some renovation, an addition, new facade, something. I walked on over to Connecticut Ave, and saw a line outside the Lucky Bar. I knew that couldn't be right, and it wasn't; there's a place next door with loud music and what looked like the Tower Records logo for a sign. At least the Lucky is still there. Some things never change, like the McDonalds across from Joseph A. Bank on M Street. Others definitely do. There must have been 2-3 Cosis in the 10 or so blocks I walked, and of course many Starbucks. I saw a Krispy Kreme off Dupont Circle of all places, which amused me since that's about the last place I'd expect glazed donuts to be popular.

After all that, Japone was a letdown. It was good to see people but the room was small, the beer weak, the whiskey ready to run your car, and the other patrons far too loud to hear anyone sing. I think I'll stick with Freddie's for karaoke, but I wouldn't trade the rest of this evening for anything.

Flying ain't what it used to be...

2006-09-18T09:28:00.000-07:00

So I arrived to National at 10:30AM Thursday, two hours before my flight, only to find said flight cancelled. According to the gate agent, Northwest's reservation system automatically rebooks you onto ...the same flight tomorrow. Yeah, that's useful. The next best option didn't leave until 2:30PM, and to top it off, it was obvious by then that dad wasn't getting my voicemails and therefore didn't know what had happened to me. I tried to call him, he tried to call me, but we kept missing each other due to being on airplanes, and when I finally got to Phoenix at 7PM Pacific, he'd decided I wasn't coming and was half an hour down the road. We finally got to my aunt's house around 11PM local, or 2AM my time. The best thing I can say about all of that is that they did give me a free first-class upgrade between Minneapolis and Phoenix. You still get dinner in first class, as opposed to coach where you have to pay $5 for a box of crackers, cheese and Oreos. All this for the low, low price of about $350.

More later, but the immediate news is the answer to this question:

She's ~~pregnant~~ just had her baby, and some of us wonder if Karlie is too

Yes! So Elisabeth will have a playmate right next door. They'll be my 3rd cousins, thanks to step-2nd-cousin ("what does that make me?" "absolutely nothing!!!") Katie for clearing that up. I could never keep the Nth-cousin/N-removed bit straight, but now I know.

It's Jimmy Buffett, not Frank Sinatra

2006-09-13T12:57:00.000-07:00

That's how my cousin Karlie described the dress code for her (shotgun? I don't know!) wedding, which will be held Saturday at her parents' house. Why do I not say it's at my aunt's or uncle's house? Her mom is actually my first cousin, though she was born 20-some years ahead of the rest of us. I admit I was sort of looking forward to being the classy east-coaster in the group, but the t-shirt dress code makes packing a lot easier since I should now be able to get everything into my backpack and avoid checking a bag on my two-part flight to Phoenix tomorrow. That's a long flight just to turn around and come back on Sunday, but it'll help that dad's going to be on the connecting flight with me.

Anyway, back to the wedding. This all began (from my point of view) with an email that arrived about midnight on a Friday three weeks ago. It cryptically said that Karlie is getting married on the 16th and they'd love to have me show up for the party. Who's the groom? No idea! Then plot thickened when dad called to say that not only was Karlie getting hitched, but her sister Sara had finally decided on a guy and was already married, having eloped in Vegas a few weeks before. Seems her longtime (but ex- for about a year) boyfriend finally moved out of his mom's house and did something with his life, which is apparantly what she was waiting for. She's pregnant, and some of us wonder if Karlie is too, but in my case that's mainly due to lack of information. Is this the same guy she was going to marry three years ago? A different one? It's going to take the whole trip just to catch up on all the gossip. I can't wait. The only downside is that it means I had to bail on a previously planned weekend with some friends in the mountains. But hey, how many times does your favorite cousin get married? (shh, that was rhetorical...)

All Politics is Local...

2006-09-12T19:58:00.000-07:00

I attended a meeting of my local civic association tonight. The topic seemed like it should have been interesting (to me anyway, with my urban planning background); a presentation on zoning changes at the county maintenance facility next to my subdivision. The gist is that the facility started off being zoned something that wasn't really appropriate for its decades-old industrial use. In order to avoid problems in the future, the county sensibly decided to rezone it to a more industrial classification. In other words, the zoning changes to reflect the land use, which doesn't change. Simple, right?

Well, first it takes the two county employees 20 minutes or more to manage to convey that point to the civic association officers, some of whom are visibly waiting for a chance to pounce on something--anything. These folks all appear to be retirees with a lot of time on their hands. One goes on about how he can hear backup chimes from trucks all day; another makes the county guy talk at length about issues even he admits aren't a problem to anyone. A third raises his voice slightly to demand that parallel parking spaces on the street next to it be removed in order to have a left turn lane, despite having a drawing right in front of him that clearly shows no parallel parking at the spot he's talking about.

By a narrow margin, the worst one was the lady who alternated between flirting with Irrelevant Man and tossing out silly little gotchas. These included darkly implying that children would be poisoned by playing on a road easement connected to the county facility, which abuts a park and elementary school yard. Nothing is or was built on the easement, it's just a line on a map. But the good citizen is going to Save The Children from death-by-evil-bad-(nonexistent)-pavement!

So much for the civic association. At least now I know that the condo association really is the main political game in my neighborhood. Forget the cranky oldsters.

Decisions, Decisions...

2006-09-11T06:35:00.000-07:00

Camping this weekend reminded me how much I love camping (thanks, Clint and Carolyn!) but driving out there reminded me that I miss motorcycling. I still own a bike but, it isn't running very well right now and I don't trust it when I have someplace I need to be. I want to replace it, but the available choices just aren't that interesting. Or I should say, not that practical. Yes, a motorcycle can be practical. But a crotchrocket generally isn't, especially the newer ones that are a bellypan away from being track-ready. The kind of motorcycle I want would weigh 450 lbs or less, be able to take a passenger and sidecases, and have an upright riding position that won't cause shoulder cramps and CTS after a couple hours.

While bikes like that are everywhere in Europe, they are few and far between in the US market, aside from a couple of very expensive BMWs and the Suzuki V-Stroms which are too big for us short guys. What does get imported over here are so-called "naked bikes"; crotchrockets without bodywork or any kind of windscreen at all. As near as I can tell, that's because the magazines over here constantly drool over the European "streetfighter" scene, but the bikes themselves didn't and don't sell well in the states. On the other hand, there's a very active long-range touring scene whose members are inconoclastic, affluent and open-minded about the bikes they ride. That group would eat up the bikes linked above, but since they're essentially ignored by the press, they don't get the chance. And I end up looking at scooters to accomplish the mission I have in mind. Anyone want to grey-market me a Honda CBF1000 (and somehow magically get rid of the VAT that puts it in BMW price territory)?

People Suck

2006-09-09T07:38:00.000-07:00

Bitter got a new [to her] 27" TV, and I whiled away the first half of last night helping her move it into her new digs. It's quite an improvement on her old one, being at least as big as my place and with all-new cabinets and mostly-new appliances. It was also a minorly interesting historical piece, with a floorplan very similar to Mel's old apartment, especially in the placement of the diningroom relative to the kitchen and livingroom.

My reward for this effort--the TV had to go up a couple flights of stairs--was what may be my last meal at the chinese place up the street, which is one of the best in the DC area. The entire shopping center, which is a charming 50s period piece reminiscent of the original Greenbelt, MD, is slated for redevelopment. The new complex will probably have at least the same number of storefronts, but it will undoubtedly be more upscale and expensive. And better, I'm sure. But the Northern Virginia of my youth is slipping away.

On another note, I can't tell the story of the second half of the evening since it involves people known to everyone who reads this. Suffice to say that the human race can be brutally disappointing sometimes, and that there's a new name on the list of men to whom no woman I'm dating will ever be introduced.

A Picture AND 1,000 Words...

2006-09-08T10:08:00.000-07:00

This is the coolest thing I've seen in quite awhile. Serialized fiction on FlickR. The stories aren't really related to the pics, but the pics are very artistic in themselves, especially the night shots. More motivation to me to try writing again...

Flickr and Weekend Plans

2006-09-08T07:48:00.000-07:00

Per Clint's advice, I tried out Flickr Uploadr. It's interestingly the exact same set of capabilities as the web-based uploader, but adds the ability to edit photo titles and to batch-upload a bunch of pics at once. It also allegedly allows rotation of pics, but when I rotated one, it appeared in the original orientation on Flickr. Bug. Still a big improvement though!

Most likely going camping this weekend. Even after the big hike last weekend, when you live among pavement and brick you don't turn down opportunities to get outdoors.

Teh Plan:

2006-09-07T10:26:00.000-07:00

I'm going to try to post at least once a day, which means that most of it won't be Deep Thoughts ^TM. The rain that's been coming around often enough to keep outdoor activites mostly shut down, but not (at least in my area) doing any particular damage, seems to have abated. It's not dry enough for me to go to Wakefield, at least not without an external bike rack to keep the car clean, but I'll ride around the neighborhood and maybe make a food run to test out the panniers. I wonder if there's a relatively flat route to Harris Teeter from Fairlington...

Also, hurray for cooler weather. The electric bill was $65 last month, which is ridiculous for 1100 square feet. Then again that's probably due more to the dryer than the A/C. I really need to get an electrician to come in and discuss my wiring ideas. Anyone got somebody to recommend?

You're a little busty for a Storm Trooper, aren't you?

2006-09-06T06:50:00.000-07:00

Latest trend in Star Wars geekery: "Femtroopers". Quick, someone tell Jacqueline Passey! And with October fast approaching, I'll have to be sure to catch the Annandale Parade and see if any of the SW reenactors (yes) are wearing the latest gear this year... (link via Instapundit)

Go Hokies!

2006-09-04T14:20:00.000-07:00

So Kipp and I went down to Blacksburg this weekend to watch Virginia Tech play Northeastern. Not a great matchup, but being the season opener it brought out the crowds. Said crowds thinned noticeably in the 3rd quarter, by which time the Hokies were blowing them out 35-0. The final was 38-0 and the most I can say for it is that at least they seem to have gotten over their old bad habit of getting overconfident and losing to crap teams.

I have pictures, but can't upload them right now because during the game, someone opened Kipp's car door and helped themselves to a pack of cigarettes and my USB cable. Apparantly that was more worthy of being thieved than my GPS, cell phone, camera battery chargers or Leatherman that were also in there. Not to mention Kipp's credit cards, which were spread across the front seats but otherwise present and accounted for, along with his radar detector and stereo. I guess the nicotine addiction is a powerful thing...

Update: I found a substitute cable in the basement. Pics will be posted soon but not fully tagged for a couple days.

Mike Totten in Israel

2006-08-13T09:16:00.000-07:00

Some of you may have heard of Michael Totten. He's back in the mideast now, "on assignment" for those of us who contribute. Here's an excellent example of what I chip in to pay him for. You don't find this kind of detail on CNN.

By the way, Michael Oren (the IDF spokesman he quotes in the article) is also a well-known historian who wrote the authoritative history of the six-day war.

McCain-Lieberman '08???

2006-08-12T06:38:00.000-07:00

Michael Barone imagines a (Republican) McCain-Leiberman presidential run in 2008 (link via Instapundit)

Instant gratification: I would vote for these guys in a heartbeat as by far the best-available candidates in an era that distinctly lacks great statesmen (or women) here or elsewhere in the world.

Blah-blah: Who else is the GOP going to nominate, Dick Cheney? Don Rumsfeld? Cheney is a great VP and a solid backstop for W, but can you imagine him campaigning against, say, blow-dried and Botoxed John Edwards? I used to think Rumsfeld was the greatest thing since sliced bread, but after the last couple years I've come to see him as a modern version of Bob McNamara--a sharp manager but suffering from the tunnel vision that afflicts a lot of sharp managers. He can't see that his plan only took him so far, and a president has to be able to step outside himself and adjust to changing situations.

But either of those guys would be way better than anyone in the Democratic camp. Both Edwards and Barack Obama are media darlings without much in the way of political accomplishments, Al Gore has spent the last five years whoring himself out to the tinfoil-hat left, and Ned Lamont is a richboi protest candidate whose neo-Stalinist backers will guarantee him political death in Connecticut, let alone the rest of the country. None of those people have a thought in their head besides that they should be in charge because they think they're smarter than everyone else. The one and only Dem that I might actually vote for (and I did, for governor of VA) is Mark Warner. Unfortunately he's also exactly the kind of practical centrist that the Micheal Moore pitchfork brigade is promising to run out of the party. Yes, there's another year for the world to turn, but the Dems' world has been turning backwards for the last 6 years in a row now. I'm not holding my breath.

So... McCain-Lieberman '08!!!

Some more personal stuff

2006-08-03T06:47:00.000-07:00

Yes, Mel, this has something to do with our conversation about blogs and which ones are boring ;-)

So here I sit, blogging from the bathroom. I'm doing it strictly to multitask while I try to get out the door on my way to Assateague, but it reminded me of a thread I read somewhere a couple years ago (before wi-fi was popular) where a guy was asking for advice on running cat-5 cable into his bathroom. Predictably, most of the replies were along the lines of "if you can't tear yourself away from the internet to poop, you have bigger problems than how to run cable". Then later it turned out he needed his privacy to surf pr0n or whatever, because his girlfriend looked over his shoulder constantly otherwise. Having dated someone who was big into chatting online, and caught her at least once netsexing some guy _while I was in the room_, I can semi-understand that. However, "solving" that problem by locking yourself in the bathroom ...?

Anyway, off to Assateage for a long weekend of ~~sweating my ass off~~ fun on the beach! Hope everyone else has a good one too.