Grammar in the morning

I was just reading about grammatical aspects on Wikipedia. Talk about your unadultered web surfing. Thought I'd share.

Seattleites! Vote Pongo's Richard Gold for poët populist

Email from Richard:

Dear Friends,

How are you? Pongo is doing very well… As most of you know, the Pongo Teen Writing Project is a 12-year-old nonprofit that establishes therapeutic creative writing projects for youth inside homeless shelters, juvenile detention, psychiatric hospitals, and other sites in the Seattle area. Most of our writers have suffered childhood abuse and neglect, and our poetry program allows them to express themselves in a healing and constructive way. Pongo's web site is www.pongopublishing.org . I've enclosed some teen poetry and some more information about Pongo at the end of this message.

The latest news is this... One of Pongo’s board members has nominated me to be Seattle Poet Populist, a one-year position to advocate for art and democracy in the city. This is an exciting opportunity for me, which I explain below, and I’m writing to ask you to do two things:

1) Would you participate in the online voting and vote for me, Richard Gold. The web site is http://www.seattlepoetpopulist.org/vote.htm . (The Rules: You must be a Seattle resident, and you can only vote once. Voting ends August 15th.)

2) Would you take a few minutes to contact your Seattle friends and ask them to participate and vote for me. Would you ask them to ask THEIR friends to participate, as well. This email stream is my only effort to solicit votes.

I'm excited to run for Seattle Poet Populist because I want to share the poetry and lives of my Pongo Teen Writing Project authors, so that people better understand both their struggles and their strengths.

This message about the Pongo authors is multi-faceted. First, I want to share the stories of what these young people endure. They consistently write about early childhood trauma, such as abuse and neglect. The circumstances are often torturous – for example, one girl wrote about watching her mom die from a drug overdose, and about being told by her mom not to call for help. And you can also see, through the teens’ poetry, how childhood loss is connected to self-destructive behavior – such as teens’ addiction to drugs and the diversions of street life as a way of dealing with their pain.

But, second, I want to speak about resilience and the power of poetry to heal. The Pongo authors may write about traumatic events, and even cry while they write; but they learn something in the process, they feel proud (and joyful!) to express themselves creatively, they are excited to share their experience and help others, and they learn how writing can help them cope and grow.

In the last year, Pongo conducted surveys of 99 of its teen authors. Among the results – 100% of participants enjoyed the writing experience, 99% felt proud of their writing, 68% wrote about things that they had never talked about before, 73% learned something about themselves, 81% felt better because of their writing, and 91% said they would write in the future when life is difficult.

Finally, if I am Seattle Poet Populist, I’d like to explain this… Sometimes even caring people believe that teens who’ve had difficult childhoods are destined to become victims and victimizing adults, to perpetuate the cycle of abuse. But studies of resilience show that MOST people who are exposed to risk do fine, even if they sometimes struggle for a while as children and teens. In fact, people who are exposed to difficult childhoods often learn and grow from their experience, to become some of our most independent-thinking, principled, and caring citizens.

I've enclosed some teen poetry and more specific information on Pongo, below. Anyone who receives this message and wants to be on the Pongo email list (or off the Pongo list), can write to me at pongo_publishing@hotmail.com .

Cheers and Best Wishes!

Richard Gold

Founder and Executive Director

Pongo Teen Writing Project

www.pongopublishing.org

Our long national nightmare is over

I have been offline since Memorial Day, since I moved out of my last apartment. A friend offered to sit in my apartment all day Friday waiting for Verizon and flexing her technical troubleshooting muscles, and as of 1:20 PM yesterday I had a wireless network at home, winning me $1 from the bar across the street, which gambled they could resolve their Verizon wireless troubles sooner.

Woo Hoo! It feels good to win. And to be back on the net. Lord knows how you people have gotten by.

I'm trying to register my account with Verizon. As you may be aware, Verizon's core marketing principle is 'suck at everything that's not network quality, so customers don't feel we're misspending our efforts." Although I still give Verizon Wireless props for not selling cellphone records, that's really the joint venture.

So, these are just reflections from the first page of the account registration page. They have the 'secret word' security device, that communicates to the user that they don't give a crap about passwords either. When left alone with friends' computers, I've often cracked their passwords by typing in boyfriend's names, pet's names, children's birth dates and what not; the secret question security hole really lets everyone do this.

But, the secret question is common enough. Verizon's spin is to make the questions themselves, in database terminology, indeterminate.



If you forget your password after a year, are you going to want to visit the same country? I think my first job was selling Burpee seeds door to door, but it could have been Stuart MacGuire shoes -- in any case, delivering newspapers was not only more lucrative, but I had a far more formal relationship with the Stamford Advocate. However, I wasn't strictly anybody's employee until I worked for Mr. Sports at the Springdale Shopping Center. But, if we're talking professional jobs, here, should I put in my contracting firm, or the place that I worked? Progressive Networks is now RealNetworks. If they were my first employer, which name should I use? Whatever decision I make now, am I going to answer that question the same later?

How am I supposed to choose favorites among my friends and pets? Should I be encouraging competition for my favor among these populations?

So, that brings us to High School mascot. I only attended one high school, although only for two years, so that has the least ambiguity. My high school mascot was a blue wave, which makes cool logos, but is a little hard to cheer for. I could never understand what I was supposed to call each team member. A packet? Unfortunately, 'Blue Wave' has a space in the middle of it

So, it goes on, with another of my favorite registration page foibles, the incremental password rules. First, I type in a weak password.

Fair enough. Who knows what mischief people might get into with my Verizon account? Spuriously paying my bill and reviewing my network service. No, thank you! So, I gamely type in a longer password.

Sigh.

I want to subscribe

Need I move to Alberta?

Moore Sicko Kenefick

Jim Kenefick runs a blog called MooreWatch, which is apparently committed to denouncing Michael Moore's behavior and work product in real time. After reading his last three posts, my impression is that he spends half his time complaining about the inadequacies of his hosting services, but I think that's the mission.

Moore has a new film Sicko at Cannes, giving the health care aspect of how

instruments of the corporate state, like student loans and bottomless credit-card debt, perform a crucial function for that state. They undermine democracy by creating a docile and hardworking population that is addicted to constant debt and an essentially unsustainable lifestyle, that literally cannot afford to quit jobs or take time off, that is more interested in maintaining high incomes than in social or political change. Moore seizes on this insight and makes it a kind of central theme; both in the film and aloud, at the press conference, he wondered whether some essential and unrecognized change has occurred in the American character.*

Actually, that's a pretty good reason why the government did nothing to stand in the way of the housing bubble. So, Kenefick complained on his blog that his insurance premiums approached $1000 monthly, and Mr. Moore payed for a year's worth. He did it anonymously at first, but closes the movie with this gesture.

Now, Michael Moore seems to want to imply he has a charitable arm that finds people and gives them money.

"I asked myself, would you be doing this if it weren't in the film? I decided that I would, and I should, and that that's the way I think we should live."

I can't really comment on that. For all I know he does, but I suspect this was more or less a one-off event. Kenefick's somewhat suspicious, although he expresses gratitude in bits I'm not quoting.

$12,000 is equal to his ding-dong budget for the week. Or what it costs to make one of those suits for award shows. Add to this growing list the fact that it was never altruism and every human being alive who knows anything about Moore knows that. He paid $12,000 so he could manufacture a “gotcha” moment in his film. Sounds pretty cheap to me.

What am I supposed to be grateful for? The chance to look like an ass? The chance to be in his movie? For him throwing me pocket change in order to try to humiliate me later? That’s why he did it. Period.

For no good reason -- and, as you know, that's what drives all these posts -- I wanted to give my own take on Moore's motivation. I think he was just showing off the addiction. How he could find one person who was sure to disagree with the central point of his movie, and be able to tell the story of how that person who was being crushed by the system is going to defend it. His movies all have a component about people being duped into defending the very systems that are ravaging their lives, and this opportunity really fell into his lap. The $12,000 gift is the personal injection shtick that Mr. Moore uses to tie his movies together. He was probably glad to be able to help someone who needed it, but Mr. Kenefick's no doubt correct that he did it for the movie.

* -- this is Salon.com's Andrew O'Hehir's digestion of Sicko's presentation of the argument of "Tony Benn, a leading figure on the British left."

I need a word!

I was chatting with a friend this morning about how we cry after speaking with particular ex-lovers, not because of anything that happens in the conversation, but just in grief over the loss of that life.

So, it seems to me there must be a more specific word than 'regret' to cover the mourning of a broken way of being, and that it's probably German (Danish?), but I couldn't think of what it was.

A little help?

Goodbye the the first named storm of 2007!

Oh, Andrea. You portend so little. I'm sure everything will be fine.
Earlier in the day, NHC said GFDL thought Andrea might resurge as part of the next storm, but it looks like she didn't make it, and we're going to have to use up another name in a couple of days.

Yeah ... you guys hang on. I'm going to go.

I was watching this on my Google home page's NOAA satellite widget, which I accept makes me an obsessive (in my defense, I also have an USGS earthquake widget -- does that defend me?) I'm going to go hide on an Eastern Boundary until the ice age hits. You guys enjoy your hurricane season.

SPECIAL TROPICAL DISTURBANCE STATEMENT
NWS TPC/NATIONAL HURRICANE CENTER MIAMI FL
1115 PM EDT TUE MAY 8 2007

A NON-TROPICAL LOW PRESSURE SYSTEM...CENTERED ABOUT 175 MILES EAST
OF JACKSONVILLE FLORIDA AND ABOUT 160 MILES SOUTH-SOUTHEAST OF
CHARLESTON SOUTH CAROLINA...HAS BEEN MOVING SLOWLY WESTWARD AT 5
TO 10 MPH.  THE LOW IS PRODUCING GALE-FORCE WINDS NEAR THE COASTS
OF NORTH CAROLINA...SOUTH CAROLINA...GEORGIA AND NORTHEASTERN
FLORIDA.  THIS SYSTEM HAS CHANGED LITTLE SINCE THIS EVENING...AND
NO SIGNIFICANT STRENGTHENING IS EXPECTED.  THE LOW IS BEING
MONITORED FOR SIGNS OF TROPICAL OR SUBTROPICAL CYCLONE
DEVELOPMENT...AND AN AIR FORCE RESERVE RECONNAISSANCE AIRCRAFT
IS SCHEDULE TO INVESTIGATE THE SYSTEM TOMORROW MORNING.

INTERESTS ALONG THE COAST OF THE SOUTHEASTERN UNITED STATES SHOULD
MONITOR PRODUCTS ISSUED BY LOCAL NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE FORECAST
OFFICES.  ADDITIONAL INFORMATION ON THIS SYSTEM CAN ALSO BE FOUND
IN HIGH SEAS FORECASTS ISSUED BY THE NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE...
UNDER AWIPS HEADER NFDHSFAT1 AND WMO HEADER FZNT01 KWBC.

FORECASTER BROWN

More Information on Girl Distribution

As you may recall, this distribution of men and women has had a persistent fascination for me. A reader sent in a link to 'The Singles Map' at the Creativity Exchange, so I thought I'd share. It shows the difference between men and women in absolute terms. It's interesting that New York and LA both have a reputation for hot women, but LA is actually overrun with men. I guess the women are competing for the nation's attention, not any local man's.

10163-3663

Like Nordstrom*, I now have my own zip nine code. I know that a lot of you are looking for ways to send me physical gifts and submission packets, but I haven't really enabled that. I decided it was time for a change, and so I went up to Grand Central Station and got me a PO Box.

Now! If I had been quicker on the mark, I would have requested box 6101, and then I would have a true palindrome. But, as it is, it's a pretty neat dual quasipalindrome. 101 and 6336 together are cool enough, but it's the last 63 that really makes it art. It's as if you took the 63, and turned it over once to make a 36, and another time to get back to 63 ... three elements where the middle element is the inversion of the identical outer elements. There should probably be a name for that, but I'm sticking with quasipalindrome.

The blog address is:
Fears and Frets
PO Box 3663
Grand Central Station
Manhattan, NY 10163-3663


* -- um, maybe it was The Bon Marché. One Seattle-area department store had a billboard series in the 90s about how they now got enough mail to rate their own zip code.

Garry Trudeau gloats a little

With some awareness of a shift in national consensus, Doonesbury reruns a strip from October 19 of 2002, when we were still preparing to mass troops at the Kuwait border and before inspectors had been withdrawn. Mark Slackenmeyer reminds Ari Fleischer

• There's no real Al Qaeda link
• The Iraqi Army's been decimated
• Saddam Hussein has not been able to shoot down a US Jet

He asserts there's no provocation. Now, people who supported the war and now realize they were in error form about 60 % of the pollable electorate. So, Mr. Trudeau's "Nyah nyah nyah" targets a lot of people. But, I'm not sure it's so wrong. Keeping quiet or pretending there was some truth on either side didn't work.

It's hard not to openly mock reformed war supporters. We've sat here for 4 1/2 years, wondering what could ever be going on in the heads of our countrymen. And, so now when they say, "Oh, yeah. I guess that didn't make any sense. I must have been tricked," it's a little hard not to scream at them. That we went to war based on lies should have been heard by anyone with ears. I still don't know how so many people participated in their own deluding, and I imagine Garry Trudeau was a little bemused himself.

We can forgive him a mean little dig. I would just like to find some way to keep this from happening again, and to destroy the tools used by the Bush Administration's controllers* to subvert our democracy.

* -- um, does that make me sound like a conspiracy theorist? How many conspiracies do we have to expose before conspiracy theorism gets disassociated from paranoia?

Mars, Inc., takes a pro-cannibalism stance

I want to take a stand against cannibalism. Really, I think that this is a slippery slope argument that works: if we start eating other people, or even parts of ourselves, outside of times of extreme duress, some of us may develop a taste for it. And some of those might go out and harvest it. Once the concept of people-as-foodstuff goes beyond a certain level, we're looking at a world where people are raised for slaughter in tight cages with their nutrients controlled for the color and flavor of their flesh.

That's not a world I'm asking for.

Now, you might think that this was an unassailable position. That, like anthropogenic global climate change or the occupation of arbitrarily selected foreign countries, the cannibalism industry would be universally regarded as a bad thing. However, it turns out that I'm not a super good predictor of what's going to be accepted by the American people, so I wanted to express my opinion.

What makes me think we might be in danger is a new package from Mars, Inc's Masterfoods subsidiary for their Shrek's Select Ogre-Sized Peanut Butter M&Ms. I'm not opposed to peanut butter, or even coating it in a candy shell or marketing it with a child's movie character. OK, maybe I'm a little against that, but that's a separate issue, if you can truly separate the fattening of children from the eating of people.

The package features the yellow peanut M&M dressed like Shrek wiping the saliva from his mouth as he stands next to a cauldron full of peanut butter (and Shrek himself.) He looks drowsy and happy, as if he's been using his green gloves to shovel melting peanut butter into his mouth all day. All of this is well and good. It's what he says that perturbs me.

I knew a few of those guys.

So, anthropomorphic character delighting in the denuding, grinding and melting of his fellows -- ones with whom he was personally acquainted -- as they are prepared for consumption. The seditionists at Mars, Inc can really only be advocating one thing, and we as a body public must be ever vigilant against it.

In the run-up to the Iraq war, the Democrats were doing exactly what you think

Which was ignoring the fact that they knew the administration was lying. Dick Durban, in the link, tells the story of how as a member of the Senate Intelligence Oversight Committee, he was not led to believe there were nuclear, biological or chemical weapons in Iraq. He saw the American people being so led, and made no counter claim.

Congress' one out on the culpability for this failed venture has been that they were lied to just as we were, and voted to overturn the War Powers Act because they believed the danger from Saddam Hussein was so urgent that there would never be time to consult them before invading.

Durbin's just given that up, unless oversight really means sitting on your hands while watching villainy. But, then, one might ask, why have it?

We should really strike the word 'war' from discussions of our involvement in Iraq

I've tried to be careful in the last four years, not to refer to the occupation of Iraq as a war. It plays into the Administration's fantasy that evildoers have raised a mighty army against us and placed it inconveniently far away, a challenge to which we bravely rose, even though chasing down Osama bin Laden, on whom there's consensus that the immediate responsibility for the collapse of the World Trade Center towers lies, is not worth the money. But, I've been slacking off, and slipping into staying 'war' more and more.

Josh Marshall makes the point that it's an important distinction we should hold on to. We're really just poorly managed and erratically violent foreign overlords.

Now, to the bin Laden point. I know there are two viewpoints on 9/11 -- the LIHOPs, like myself, who believe that the Bush administration's being asleep at the wheel vis a vis terrorism was an intentional policy to allow a major terrorist attack on the United States to create pretext for all sorts of corrupt wrong-doing, and the MIHOPs, who believe that people affiliated with the Bush League had an active role in planning the attacks. I know there's a swath of other viewpoints on what happened, but they all strike me as somewhat deluded. I think that MIHOPs generally believe that Osama bin Laden had a central coordinating role in the event. And, irrespective, I'm sure they'd like him compelled to speak clearly about what he knows. But, if you doubt OBL had any involvement, please post a comment and let me know.

And now, Rostropovich

I suspect that the pantheon of celebrities is actually huge, and its only listening to the radio in the morning that makes it seem like everyone's dying. But, still.

Special 39th Birthday Overheard in New York

Priceless

Not, you know, that this is how I feel ....

Tiny Bubbles

So, cafe culture for the last several days, at least to the extent that I participate in it, has been buzzing with the death of Kurt Vonnegut. And, I may find more to say on this blog about it. But, since celebrities keep dying, I wanted to note one more, Donald Tai Loy "Don" Ho.

I watched a lot of television as a child, and I was a regular viewer of the Don Ho show. I have no idea what went on during the show, except that he always sang 'Tiny Bubbles' at the end; this suggests that time was wasted, but we'll call him a hard to track influence.

Rest in Peace, Don Ho!

* -- I've got to say, Wikipedia claims that the David Letterman Show was only on for one year, and mostly in the Summer

Mail

So, April 15th is the one day a year that I dig through my received snail mail. I'm not defending the practice, I'm just not the kind of person who opens his mail. And I just discovered why the opera didn't have my will call tickets for a performance in February --- they had mailed them to me! I'll have to be extra vigilant, as I'm going to the opera Wednesday, and I believe they planned to mail these as well.

Who will warn us about our big brains now?

Kurt Vonnegut, RIP. He spoke of sometimes wandering aimlessly around Gramercy, so I was always hoping to see him. It was my little secret, the only celebrity I've been keeping an eye out for.

Mr. Vonnegut really forwarded the arts of the novel and of storytelling. Remember when he, the author, confronted Kilgore Trout? Remember Kilgore Trout, the perennial incidental character who wrote science fiction stories for pornographic magazines? Remember Billy Pilgrim, unstuck in time? The end of Player Piano, when people started building machines? When the narrator became president, and made sure that everyone had a family to belong to? Ice 9, which when brought in to contact with water would crystallize it at room temperature -- this was so wonderful because it's so clearly something that no responsible person would want to exist, but the Generals of the Marine Corps really felt it would help the grunts cross rivers more easily.

My favorite Vonnegut book is Mother Night, about an American captured by an Israeli Death Squad for hosting an incendiary radio program in Nazi Germany. He'd been passing codes to the resistance during the show. The book is him in prison, awaiting his execution, wondering how much of that he'd like to get out. It's a brilliant study in guilt.

So, thanks for the books and all, Mr. Vonnegut.

Microsoft Agent's on my computer!

I just got this patch notice from Microsoft about my Windows XP installation at home.

A security issue has been identified in Microsoft Agent that could allow an attacker to compromise your Windows-based system and gain control over it. You can help protect your computer by installing this update from Microsoft. After you install this item, you may have to restart your computer.

Oh, my goodness! Do you remember Microsoft Agent*? It was a user interface concept that brought Clippit to the masses, really an intellectual descendant of Microsoft Bob. For like two months in 1996, I was putting genies in everything. It refers to itself as a new technology, so I'm inferring that web page doesn't get updated very often.

Still, it's nice to know they're patching it.

* -- check out the link. The text to speech engine doesn't work for me, so I couldn't get Genie to talk, but the page source is worth checking out just to see 'End Sub' in html -- vbscript on a web page was a perverse signature Microsoft used in the 90s.

Fun 'Rent v. Buy' tool in Today's Times

So, if we assume that real estate prices stay the same and correct through inflation, while rents stay steady, renting is very compelling. If real prices drop 10 per cent every year while rents increase 10 per cent, after a few decades, buyers win.

Play around with it a little!

Selectiveness at Speed Dating v. Online

Try to look past John Tierney's attempts at original content and focus on his references. Speed Dating, I feel, combines the worst of random pickups -- there's no filter, you'll only meet other drinkers (as the events are generally in bars), and you're very much on display to other women while talking to one -- with some of the bad aspects of online dating, to wit the women are unvetted, you're in an intensive competitive environment, and you have to communicate your value pretty compactly. While I was pretty excited about speed dating, I think it's pretty appropriate within a synagogue or other small community, for which it was designed.

I think the results that Tierney quotes here are reinforcing -- since I like to be right, I'm passing it on.

Also, check the sidebar for some good references on mate selection with the new dating models*.

* -- I just put 'dating models' in my posts to increase my hits on Google ;)

Sea of People

New Yorkers are going to dress in blue Saturday morning and mark the new coastline under a ten foot sea level rise. It'll be cool!

Photo from Tortola

The lower gentleman in the picture is Raymond Ward, of Lauray.net. The upper gentleman is me. Beverly, from the LauRay, took the photograph in Tortola, whilst I awaited a flight to Puerto Rico after my week-long yacht charter.

You can see how spending time on the boat relaxed me.

How I got so illuminated

A shout out to the home church! The Fish Church, where I grew up, is pictured on pages 1 and 2 and given the title 'most illuminating' on page 3 of Life Magazine's online review of churches. Now I feel totally justified in wearing the fish bow tie my sister gave me to prom.

The Tax Form

So, the dearth of entries this year is largely due to my feeling that I shouldn't blog at all until I finish my taxes. Which I've just now started. On the first page of the CompleteTax wizard -- or at least the first page after I've been completely identified -- it asks:
Are you blind?
Are you disabled?
...
Are you dead?
I don't think I want to answer any more of these questions.

Soybean Sputum

Just a little shout out to Google on April Fool's Day

John Hagelin

I was browsing the Christian Science Monitor today, and I came across this quote.

John Hagelin, a quantum physicist says in [The Secret], "Quantum
mechanics confirms it; Quantum cosmology confirms it: that the universe
essentially emerges from thought and all of this matter around us is just
precipitated thought. Ultimately we are the source of the universe...."

Do you remember John Hagelin? I met him in Seattle in 1992, when he was the Presidential Candidate for the Natural Law Party, which claimed to be doubling in size every week. Wikipedia says "Hagelin is now a professor of Physics and Director of the Institute of Science, Technology and Public Policy at Maharishi University of Management, and Minister of Science and Technology of the Global Country of World Peace."

So ... I'm not saying he's not a quantum physicist. I'm just surprised to see an uncontextualized quote.

Having driven on the 405, I can totally see the need

Which is a story I won't tell here.

You're not going to miss the bottom

So ... if Wheaton's right, we should be a little concerned about the subprime lenders closing up shop. I'm just saying.

The Onions says what I want to so much better, once again

So, you know, if you have any friends....

Daddy Halliburton

Did you know Li'l Orphan Annie was still kicking around? Apparently Oliver Warbucks is controlling Ratznestistan on the US Government's behalf, and has been sent to remove the strongman dictator to appease the local insurgency.

There was also a nice bit about the number 6 train.

NYC Opera 2007 - 2008 Season announced

Toni Morrison's Margaret Garner is included, and apparently they have quite a dancy King Arthur. More Don Giovanni! Wheee!

Ides, Nones and Calends

One more useless thing to know. Remember that March, May, July and October are different! These are the 3rd, 5th, 7th and 10th months, for which we need a good mnemonic.

I think I'd prefer a job that was doable

So, this posting for a Vice President of System Engineering at Integrien caught my eye. Specifically, this bit:

* Must be very, very, very smart (High Emotional Intelligence)
* 10+ years engineering experience with 7+ years of experience in management
* Must understand software and technology intimately
* Heavy technical background in computer science or mathematics
* Able to travel 50% of the time

Ah ... Now, if a job posting demands that I be smart, that's fine; they're just using space badly. It's a throwaway line. Do stupid people see that and say, "well, that lets me out?" If a posting asks that I be very smart, I break out in a sweat. This suggests that they have technical problems that they want someone to solve without spending money.

Three 'very' modifiers means things must be very, very, very bad indeed. What "very, very, very smart" communicates is that they're desperate for a savior, and you should only take this job with the intent of being hired away on the strength of it before everything comes crashing down.

And 'high emotional intelligence?' I think that means, "our management is a little unstable, and it's important that you not cry if they scream at you."

Reaping the Whirlwind

The Iraq Occupation is a complex enough beast that it supports many little pet theories. When Larry Franklin was nailed for passing classified information, I developed one that he was a pivotal figure working on behalf of Iranian intelligence -- that Iran maneuvered us into Iraq to weaken America and remove Saddam. And, if a bright light is ever shown on the ramp up to our invasion, I expect that it'll show Iran helped things along materially at the very least.

If we do invade Iran, this will be bad for them. Bad for us, but worse for them. And we wouldn't have gotten anywhere close to it without strong presences in Afghanistan and Iraq, so that'll've been a little ironic.

One of the few things I envy about the lives of people in the future is that they'll have a much better perspective on the various debacles at the start of 21st Century America.

The best superbowl commercial

As much as I love the paper, what I read in the Wall Street Journal often upsets me. Today, I was pretty happy. There was a front page reminder on how our miracle economy is due entirely to Chinese (and to some extent Koreans) giving us money and another noting that investors who looked brilliant three years ago are sitting on empty houses and quoting a 34-year-old who dumped a pair of investment homes last year saying 'it eats you alive.'

But, one thin I couldn't get past. Their superbowl commercial coverage gave panel reactions on almost every ad in the game, without even mentioning the best one. An unwieldy map refuses to be refolded, and continues to expand miraculously, growing into a monster and wreaking destruction. Ultraman, now powered by a Garmin GPS navigator, arrives to destroy him. It's pretty cool.

It makes you wonder if they throw up conceptual blind spots just for practice sometimes.

URGENT STAFFING REQUEST - Sheltering

Due to a 6th Alarm fire in Far Rockaway, Queens, 300 residents are in need of shelter for the next day or more. We are currently looking for ERV Drivers, Shelter Workers, DMHS, and DHS to respond immediately and throughout the day.

This sort of thing comes in from the Red Cross every so often; I'm a shelter worker. But, I'm tired, I have work to do and brunch and superbowl plans, I just did a 6-hour shift on Wednesday, and they don't call it Far Rockaway because it's convenient. On the other hand, my friends would understand if I bailed, people really need help, and I could spend 8 hours out there.

I'm saying 'no', but I want to keep an eye on this -- saying 'no' to institutional requests for help can be habit forming. I haven't responded to an emergent event since the Yankee flew into a building.

Unofficial 'Best Guess' Acronym expansion:
ERV -- Emergency Response Vehicle, it's a small truck with many disaster management tools
DHS -- Disaster Health Services
DMHS -- 'M' for 'Mental'. People -- both responders and clients -- get very upset at these things. There's a lot of counseling.

The futility of software project planning

This is a nice little review of Scott Rosenberg's Dreaming in Code. It has a little 'software programmers are bad people' bias, but it's understated.

I had moved from being a journalist and an editor to being the managing editor of a Web site, and we had decided to build, on our own, some software for Salon: a new content management system. But as I tell it in the book, it turns out to be a software disaster, a classic death march situation in which everything went wrong and nothing worked as planned and when we deployed it everything broke.

It's hard to communicate exactly how unpredictable software development is. In many types of projects, once you've finished it, you know how long it would have taken. And that's the sort of process system dynamics talks about well -- particular situations and units of work. But, in software development, there are always many choices, most of which won't work. But, deciding they won't work isn't much easier than actually trying them.

[A]s long as you are not trying to do something new -- if you are doing something that has already been done -- then you have a frame of reference to estimate how long it is going to take, and to guess how many people are going to be required, and so on.

Now, he gets into the 'build vs. buy' argument a little. I used to be pretty categorical about this: building software is always a disaster; if it exists and you can't afford to buy it, you can't afford to do it. Only code when you have to. However, since moving from development to professional services, I've come to understand that buying software is also always a disaster.

[T]he programmer who says, it will be faster for me to write it, rather than to learn it, is usually correct. Except that what he will write, most likely, is something that will work but will not have its rough edges worked out, will not have the benefits of a piece of software that has actually been used for a few years, where the bugs have been found and the users have given feedback and have helped you figure out where the problems are. So what they will often be handing you at the end of that I-can-do-it-faster-myself thing is something that works, but that is kind of a mess in certain ways. Whereas the thing that you were going to pull off the shelf, maybe it will take the programmers a while to learn it, but once they learn it enough to hook it up to this project you are creating, what they are hooking up will probably have a lot fewer problems.

This isn't true. Any software you buy will have had gaps in its testing, probably just right where you want to use it. And, components are often even less well documented than business software, because there's a cultural thread which states that well written code is self-documenting, and documentation is just to please PHBs. This contributes to the bit about writing code being as easy as learning someone else's code, which is truer.

So, I'm thinking maybe I'll read it. I'll get back with you if I do.

Climate Change about 1/115 as bad as auto traffic

The worst could mean more than 1 million dead and hundreds of billions of
dollars in costs by 2100, said Kevin Trenberth of the National Center for
Atmospheric Research in Colorado

Do you feel a little like Number Two when Dr. Evil wants to hold the United Nations hostage for one million dollars? We lose Florida, invite routine tornadoes and hurricanes, create large scale famine and only lose one in every six thousand people?

Car crashes, which is a fine measure because it's a risk we're completely comfortable with, killed about 1.22 million people in 2001. Climate change will kill fewer than that over the next 94 years.

Well, maybe the industrial revolution wasn't such a bad idea after all.

COULD A LARGE MIRROR DEFLECT GLOBAL WARMING?

So, if you thought the Iraq Occupation was as bad as ideas got, check out this policy proposal from ABC News. My favorite part is where it says "Not a scientific survey."

Swampland

So, my two big questions about climate change are what's going to change and when. I don't think I'm alone in that. But, I believe that there's some confidence that temperatures are going to rise generally and the soil's going to get much less moist. I don't see any reason that water levels won't return to Miocene levels, some 110 meters above what they are now.

This combined with my love of mangroves suggests that maybe I should start looking at swamps long term.

Who knew interpolate had a homophone?

Seriously, I've been speaking this language for close to 40 years, and there's still all these words I don't know.

Interpellate's a good one to know, though. We're hoping for more of it. It's almost impossible to use it in a sentence and not get some hope for the future. As Bush cronies get interpellated during the Irving Libby's trial for impeding the nation's work on WMDs, don't you get a little charge?

[title changed in light of Brad's comment below]

The Axis of Constructiveness

Now, the president is fetishizing obstruction and indifference. This administration has totally gone off the rails.

All they're going to do is talk

From the party of climate change denial to the party of climate change inaction. It really feels like a step up, but a feeling and 35 cents will get you a cup of coffee in Tennessee.

Margarine Defended!

Emma, From I ❦ Margarine, has defended margarine from my elliptical attacks. So, I wanted to point out her comment.

The point of the piece was that trans fats were bad, arguments about whether or not trans fats were bad were dishonest and that fat replacement food additives in general seem to eventually be revealed as poisons (I only implied this, but it's a deeply held conviction.) Margarine introduced trans fats into our diets, but I haven't researched how bad it is for us in its current formulations.

You may consider margarine as incompletely condemned by this blog at this point.

Contribute 60 second video commemorations to loved ones lost in Iraq

Robert Greenwald at Brave New Films -- the documentarian behind Iraq for Sale: The War Profiteers (as well as Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price and The Big Buy: Tom DeLay's Stolen Congress) will release a project in March commemorating the American Army victims of the Bush league in Iraq in the words of their loved ones.

He's asked me -- in the sense that I'm part of everyone, and he's asked everyone -- to promote the project and help solicit video clips.

So, this is it! If you know someone who has lost a soldier in Iraq, please point them at the link, and let them in on this catharsis.

The surprising thing about the Manhattan Grand Prix Half Marathon

So, the number one fact about running a half marathon in Central Park in January is that it's 13.1 miles long. Running, we often referred to the length as 13 miles, so I suspect those last 500 feet came as kind of a shock to some people. The second fact are the hills; you do two loops of the park, and there are two long hills that take on far more significance the second time.

The third thing -- and remember that it was 19°F (11° with windchill) when we started the race -- is that ice forms on the water cups the volunteers set out. You might think that they would have fewer cups of water in reserve than they do given this problem, but I guess efficiency is paramount.

At first I was able to pick up a cup of water and poke through it with my thumb. As the race progressed, I started to have to crack it with a knuckle. My last drink of water, I picked it up and smashed the paper cup -- which had something like 3/4 of an inch of ice at the top -- against the table. It created a little cascade of ice and water, but I got my fluid.

In retrospect, the Gatorade Endurance formula probably froze more slowly, but it doesn't have a name that inspires confidence. Anyway, some pictures, courtesy of a friend with a cell phone. It was a beautiful day.
1. Starting off. I'm just to the right of the speaker.


2. Running partner Rob coming in for the big finish

3. Following Rob none too closely. You can pick out my distinctive yellow pants. I'm the fifth runner in the picture.

4. Me and my enormous keister making 13 miles into 13.1.

Finished the half -- placed in the top 3/5 of men my age

NYRR Race Results About NYRR Race Results Questions NYRR Event Calendar		NYRR Manhattan Half-Marathon List by Runner Number: ☺650 Distance: 13.1 Miles, 21.1 Kilometers Date/Time: Jan. 21, 2007, 8:30 am Location: Central Park, NYC Weather: 21 F, fair, 32% hum., wind chill 14 F Search Results Wheelchair Finishers Award Winners View, Share & Purchase Photos Statistics

Last Name	First Name	Sex/ Age	City	State	Overall Place	Net Time	Pace/ Mile	AG Gender Place	AG %
MALECHEM	RIONN FEARS	M38	MANHATTAN	NY	3831	2:19:58	10:41	2606	43.3 %

By using this Web site, the user agrees that nothing contained herein may be reproduced in any manner without the express written permission of New York Road Runners. ING New York City Marathon™, New York City Marathon®, and the apple/runner logo are the property of the New York Road Runners.

AmEx just halved my interest rate

I wrote them and said, "Hey, lower my interest rate!" I don't carry a balance, but I worry.

They dropped it by half. Because I asked. So, if you have an AmEx account, ask.

For those of you who thought the Bush Administration was coming around

Well, you should read the story, to which I was referred by a comment at TPMCafe. But, here are some tidbits...

The government's ability to understand and predict hurricanes, drought and climate changes of all kinds is in danger because of deep cuts facing many Earth satellite programs and major delays in launching some of its most important new instruments, a panel of experts has concluded.

...

As a result, the panel said, the United States will not have the scientific information it needs in the years ahead to analyze severe storms and changes in Earth's climate unless programs are restored and funding made available.

...

According to the report, NASA invested about $2 billion annually in Earth-monitoring missions from 1996 to 2001, but that figure, when adjusted for inflation, started a decline in 2002 and is projected to be $1.5 billion annually from 2006 through 2010. Since President Bush announced plans in 2004 to return astronauts to the moon and later send them to Mars, many involved with the NASA science program have warned that their efforts are being curtailed, and will be restricted further in the future.

...

The problem at NOAA is different, and involves continuing and costly complications with its National Polar-orbiting Operational Environmental Satellite System. Initially conceived in the 1990s as the next-generation weather forecasting satellite for NOAA and the Defense Department, it is now three years behind schedule and as much as $3 billion over budget, according to the Government Accountability Office. In addition, the NSC report says, many of the weather and climate instruments that the satellite was supposed to carry have been dropped to keep costs from further increasing.

I knew that Mars program was worse than just a bad idea. I didn't suspect that it was specifically targetted at undercutting climate change research, but that's mostly because I'm a moron.

I don't have much to say about the article past its content, I just wanted to share a little outrage. So, there you go. There is this, though:

NOAA officials announced last week that 2006 was the warmest year on record in the United States -- part of a highly unusual warming trend over several decades that many scientists attribute to greenhouse gases. Some climate experts think that the atmospheric warming could bring more extreme weather -- longer droughts, reduced snowfall and more intense hurricanes such as the ones experienced along the Gulf Coast in 2005.

Many? Some? How about 'all ... not fellating the power structure.'

The loss of what I never had

Ah ... so, I leaned on Asurion today, and they admitted they had some VX9800Ms lying around, which the phone lady believes are VX9800s with a software upgrade. While I was all excited about upgrading to the VX9900, really getting my phone back is what I wanted.

So, my insurance is finally grinding into motion! I should be happy!

And yet ... the eight days of promise of this fantasy phone got me all excited. What should be a time of rejoicing tastes of ashes.

Stupid human nature.

Please share your story concepts

Well, Brad's suggested maybe another posting on theSpoof. Now, when last we visited the website, it was barely holding together as an enterprise, and I was more or less forced to create my own venue. This blog is somewhat more conducive to logorrhea than full on satire, though, and the spoof writing was worthwhile. Remember this classic? Ah.

Last October, Paul Lowton came back to theSpoof. I've just found out about it. So, maybe we'll see if we can't put something together. What is there left to write about, though? Hasn't every absurd possibility come to pass? Think of these great satire titles

• NOAA attributes balmy Manhattan Winter to El Niño
• Bush thinks 20,000 more troops is the ticket
• Corporate economists claim housing slump over, nothing to worry about
• Saddam Hussein executed by Shi'ite extremists
• Condoleeza Rice to replace Cheney, lower impeachment risk cited
• Democrats win office, promise to reduce corruption

¡Dios Mío!

I win again! Or, run up again. Whatever.

Rionn Fears Malechem,

Congratulations! Your headline submission for the Overheard in New York Headline Contest has been chosen as a winner or runner-up. To find out which, check the site on Jan 11th. If you're the first-place winner, please email me your full name and the address where we can send your prize, a signed copy of the book Overheard in New York. Thanks!

-morgan

Morgan Friedman
Publisher, Overheard in New York

Two thirds of Republicans still approve of Bush's performance

What are they hearing that I'm not hearing?

A little pro-sprawl argument

So, Jan K. Brueckner of UC Irvine and some Irish woman argue that Robert Putnam was wrong -- they call him out in the abstract -- and that social capital is better in the suburbs. City people are less engaged than drivers in their communities and the latter have more and better friends.

I guess this is somewhat more credible than my sun sign affecting my driving record, but it's pretty surprising.

Manhattan Luxury Real Estate continues to inflate

Um, does this somehow not sound sustainable?

One of the biggest price surges in Manhattan took place on the Upper West Side, where four-bedroom and larger apartments cost an average of $5.7 million, or a 48 percent increase over the fourth quarter from 2005.

If you haven't been keeping track, the fourth quarter from 2005 was one year ago. This is a year-on-year increase of one half. It's nice to see exorbitant unearned bonuses for financiers going into transitory housing prices.

Still no phone

I'm starting to lose my initial delight at having my Lucky Goldstar VX9800 replaced with an VX9900. I had already given the phone over a week to show up on its own, so I've been without for going on 16 days -- without my fancy convergence device, I can't read my email during the day, which has been causing all sorts of problems.

Asurion calls me every three days and tells me the equipment is still on backorder. Are there manufacturing problems, or are they just waiting for the price to come down? LG apparently hasn't scheduled an IR call since August, so there may be something bad happening in Korea*.

Part of my increasing grumpiness at waiting for the replacement phone is the parlous state of the phone I'm using now. The whole reason I didn't give it to my mother was that the buttons became somewhat unreliable after the last time I dropped it. Besides the fact that it's hard to go back to T9 once you've been using QWERTY.

So, waiting....

* -- No, I know. I'm just making fun of the website. But, they do seem to post news pretty rarely.

Momofuku Ando has passed

And in his honor, a little haiku:
Winter cherries bloom
Cheap noodles oppose hunger
Pour boiling water