Personal Musings category archive

A Penn student commenting on protests contemplated for an appearance by Eric Cantor:

“I think it’s a little too much to bring the protest to a college campus,” she said.

I mourn for the lost generation.

(Cantor canceled the appearance when it became apparent that the university was not going to allow him to handpick the audience. Competing press releases at the link.)

Don’t say and do racist things.

Link via Mr. Feastingonroadkill.

Based on recent visits to the Super Duper Market, I have concluded that a pound of bacon is now 12 ounces.

I’m going out on a limb and suggesting that they are using Windows, not Linux or Unix.

A mysterious computer virus has infected the Predator and Reaper drones of the U.S. Military.

According to a report published by Wired, the Virus was first found about two weeks ago and was several times removed from the systems. However, the virus keeps coming back and there appears to be no solution how to effectively get rid of it.

The virus did not prevent pilots at Creech Air Force Base in Nevada from flying the drones, but sources told Wired that the virus is logging every keystroke.

Aside:

The story about this in the local rag referred to the persons who operate the drones as “pilots.”

“Gamers” would be a more accurate term. They are no more pilots than my 13-year-old playing Star Wars was a space man.

For the robotic overlords at the joysticks and their commanders, it’s no more real than WoW.

I am more and more coming to believe that engineering the remote-controlled death of unidentified or poorly-identified persons is as morally indefensible as My Lai.

As my two or three regular readers know, I have lately been doing some work around the house. Specifically, I brought order out of the chaos that was the garage.

In the process, I uncovered my bike, built a simple repair sling, and got the machine ready for use, because the terrain in these parts is mostly flat ideal for bicycling. After my first outing, I decided it would be nice to keep some record of where I’ve been, so I downloaded two free applications from the Android Market.

I ended up choosing the Move! Bike Computer. It uses the phone’s GPS function to track your route and stats. If you don’t like to keep the GPS satellite feature turned on (and I don’t because it kills the battery and it’s creepy to automagicly tell someone else exactly where you are), it offers to turn it on when you fire it up.

It’s not perfect. The manual could use more detail and, in the example below, you will see that the “average speed” is higher than the “top speed”; I have no way of knowing whether that’s the program or a GPS anomaly. The map and distance of the route, though, were my main interests and were spot on.

I don’t need perfect and the price was right.

I had forgotten how much I like to bike.

Read more »

The Chicago Trib has an excellent editorial on what appears to be a growing movement to ban kids from places. Here’s a nugget:

Responders skipped right over the real question to list the many other places where children shouldn’t be allowed. Movie theaters. Grocery stores. Airplanes. Disney World. That last one was a joke … we think.

In four days, the site got more than 20,000 comments. The biggest camps by far were the people who are fed up with small people who whine, cry, run around and poop their pants in public and the people whose own children never, ever do any of that.

(snip)

The no-kids-allowed movement, aka the Brat Ban, is gaining momentum, driven by quiet-seeking adults who want to prohibit children from everything from concerts to public transportation to Facebook.

I guess all these adults forgot where they came from.

No doubt, when they were in diapers, they never annoyed anyone.

They waited until they were adults to annoy.

I determined long ago that I never want to live in one of those spooky “over-55” communities. They are full of not just Stepford wives, but also Stepford husbands, locked in their little Viagra-commercial bubble away from real life.

It would be condemning oneself to a lifetime of paper flowers, with real flowers forbidden, for real flowers grow only where there’s a little dirt in which to root.

To those adults who want no kids in public ever, all I say is, “Grow up, already.”

Furrfu.

Aside:

Banning kids from Facebook I can see.

Why subject them to the antics of the “adults” who frequent that place?

For the first time since Dave Stouder gave me a DayTimer as a Christmas present in 1979, I am not ordering new calendar inserts for the upcoming year.

I’ve gone Google calendar with my Android.

For one thing, there is nothing whatsoever on my calendar that could either embarrass anyone or give away anything that isn’t already public knowledge.

For the other thing, I trust Google, though not implicitly, enough to expect them to show a level of integrity unknown to, say, for example, just to pull a for instance out of thin air, Facebook, because, despite a few well-publicized missteps, Google has a track record of trying not to be evil.

Considering the fall telly vision line up, I agree with Dennis Byrne:

Living through the 1960s was weird enough for a lifetime, now television gives us a chance to relive it.

Do we have to?

Actually, line up is the right word. The TV executives responsible for Pan Am and Playboy Club should be lined up.

And marched out the door.

And the broadcast networks wonder why viewers are fleeing.

Full Disclosure:

I was once at the original Chicago Playboy Club as guest of a member while on a gig.

It was rather dull and uninspiring, much the same as the show is likely to be.

Follow the link for the rest of the column. It’s worth it.

Last night, I was at a function which turned out to have much smaller attendance than normal.

There were six of us, three white folks and three black folks, though mostly five persons were present at a time because persons came and went. So we had one of those lively interesting delightful conversations that cannot happen in a group of 15 to 20, the typical size of the gathering.

The conversation turned to the racism that floats freely in our society. Everyone had stories, some appalling, some quite nice.

The racism is there, all the time, everywhere (though not in everybody), lurking just under the surface of day-to-day life in America. You have only to open your eyes to see it.

Meanwhile, over at Balloon Juice, there seems to have been a kerfuffle about several somethings ABL posted. John Cole, the proprietor of the site, has stepped in regarding that, but what John Cole said could apply everywhere, not just at his own not-so-little blog.

As I have mentioned before, the reason we don’t “have a conversation about race” in America is because white folks don’t want to talk about it. Everyone else is willing to “have a conversation” (God, how I hate that overblown pretentious phrase!), but it would force white folks to face up to what white folks have done, so they ain’t talkin’.

So, what John Cole said.

My friend called my attention to this. I had read about it, but it had not registered in my small mind.

Religious broadcaster Pat Robertson stunned “700 Club” viewers Tuesday when he said divorcing a spouse with Alzheimer’s disease was justified.

Robertson, chairman of the Christian Broadcasting Network and former Republican presidential candidate, said he wouldn’t “put a guilt trip” on someone for divorcing a spouse with Alzheimer’s disease, calling Alzheimer’s itself “a kind of death.”

My mother suffers from advanced Alzheimer’s.

My father nourished her until he died, one month short of their 60th anniversary.

When I visit her, it is a gesture, for my mother is no longer present, except in a ghostly way. There is no one home in the house of her body.

Visiting her is something I do, sometimes reluctantly, because it is duty, for visits are painful and empty.

My father showed me through example that to do your duty is the highest calling–to do what you should do because it is right.

I consider myself Christian–one of those Christians who bases his beliefs and who tries to base his actions on the teachings of Jesus, not on the teachings of the Book of Leviticus.

Pat Robertson does not live in the world my father graced.

I do not want to live in Pat Robertson’s world.

Papers, radios, and even blogs have overflowed with stories recounting the events in New York of September 11, 2001.

Not here. There is nothing for me to add, no perspective unexplored. I don’t need help to remember what happened on September 11, 2001.

Indeed, I have done my best to avoid the issue–not to avoid my memories, distant as they are from the memories of those who were there, for my memories came at a distance: from watching the live television coverage in my company’s cafeteria along with a goodly number of my co-workers; from later stepping into the smoking area at the back door of the building and hearing no airplanes, though the building was about two miles from Philadelphia International Airport; from my mail carrier’s worries about his sister, whose fate he did not learn for five days; from other events large and small.

I contemn the efforts of both “old” and “new” media over the past two weeks to thrust those events upon me from all directions in macabre and tasteless ways, like someone describing the procedure for a post mortem to mourners at a funeral.

Lynne Steuerle Schofield put it quite nicely in the Denver Post earlier this week:

But I can’t help but wonder if this is really the best way, now, to remember my mother and the thousands of others who died on Sept. 11, 2001.

(snip)

Here’s the other side, though, for me anyway: Sometimes I feel I am asked to attend my mother’s funeral again and again, year after year.

And, throughout, the maudlin repetitious media mewling has missed the most important part of the story.

My contempt ripened and matured last week, when I saw this on the screen of my friendly local silicon-hearted ATM machine:

The creation of that, and of all the other similar empty gestures of the past two weeks, that’s when remembrance crossed into hollow pandering.

Why hassn’t Michelle Bachmann wondered whether the Texas wildfires are a sign from God to Rick Perry?

Yesterdays HearSay, the local NPR affiliate’s information and interview show, discussed the pros and cons of charging persons for emergency services. This seems to be a new trend among cash-strapped states and localities who are too chicken to raise taxes, particularly if the persons rescued can be construed to have been responsible for getting themselves into the emergency, like this bozo.

How much, for example, should the Fed and Treasury charge the banksters for emergency services?

Television shows used to have heroes.

Now they have zeros.

The idea of gambling as a revenue stream has always caused me disquiet.

My conservative Southern Baptist upbringing perhaps predisposes me against gambling to raise public revenue.

So too does my study of U. S. Southern history: after the Civil War, most Southern states instituted lotteries of some type, having no tax base left. In almost every case, lottery administrators ended up in South America living the sweet life of other people’s money.

At the same time, I do enjoy the ponies on a nice summer day. I wouldn’t play poker, but a penny a point at bridge wouldn’t faze me; I do not have a blanket objection to friendly wagers amongst those who play fair and can afford it. These days, a game of penny ante poker can cost less than an evening at the movies.

It’s justifying state lotteries and, to a much greater extent, slot machine palaces as sources of tax revenue that makes me queasy.

I think that, thanks to Renee Loth’s column in the Boston Globe, I have discovered the source of my disquiet. Here’s the snippet of discovery:

The capitulation to expanded gambling in Massachusetts represents a failure of imagination and will. After years of relentless attacks on broad-based taxes as the fairest way to fund public needs, even liberals are disheartened. Why not just accept the revenues from what former governor William Weld called “voluntary taxation’’ instead?

Here’s why. Gambling revenue – like user fees, naming rights, specialty license plates, and other forms of “voluntary’’ contributions to government – erodes a fundamental idea of democracy: that we’re all in this together. Instead of all people contributing equitably to the common good, a casino economy fractures the social compact. And it asks the most from those who can afford it least.

Clearly, we are not all in this together.

Those who have the most are in it the least, so the alternative is the fleece.

“Smart TV” is a contradiction in terms.

Yesterday, I sent a little email to the Editor of the Sacramento Bee in response to this article, in which he solicited opinions on how to deal with vile and disgusting anonymous comments on the the paper’s website.

I linked him up to a column by the Editor of my local rag, in which he evaluated the Virginian-Pilot’s experience after it banned anonymous comments on its opinion pages.

Late last night, Eastern Time, the Editor of the Bee emailed me an acknowledgement, which was clearly not canned, since he quoted the contents of my email and referred to it in the text.

Given the amount of email that persons in his position get, I consider that a classy act.

I am impressed.

I wanted to thank him publicly (not that I expect him ever to see this, but a one does what one can).

Will Bunch wonders whether the media, and particularly the Weather Channel, over-hyped hurricane Irene.

Unnecessary question.

Of course they did.

They over-hype an April shower.

That’s one reason I don’t watch television news, even from “responsible” (that is, non-Fox) sources.

Also, isn’t “over-hype” redundant?

In reality world, it’s raining really hard right now, but reports are that wind speeds have dropped significantly in the eye, which is still hours away. There have been spotty power outages from downed trees, and the power here at PVF HQ has blinked twice.

Afterthought:

This doesn’t mean it’s not a big storm that persons should prepare for, but, really, the limit on “storm of the century” is one per century.

Ex Post Afterthought:

Speaking of hype, all the television stations are broadcasting pictures of reporters standing in the rain, so we’ll know that it is raining.

Even the NPR news and information outlet is piping the audio of one of the local television stations, so that public radio listeners will know that TV reporters don’t know to come in out of the rain.

Pah!

To Sherlock Holmes, she was always the woman.*

Wait. That was Irene Adler. Wrong Irene.

The clouds started to move into the area about 3 p. m., low heavy clouds bringing with them a sharp rise in humidity. At times, the overcast has been complete, but the clouds keep moving. Fast.

Both propane tanks for the grill are full, the outdoor furniture is now indoor furniture, as are the potted plants, and the grill is securely lashed to the railing of the deck.

The cooler of ice is half-full as the freezer makes more and every available container is being filled with water. The pantry is full of canned goods that can be heated on the burner on the grill if the power is out for a significant time.

We are well away from any flood danger, so a power failure is my primary worry.

The picture was taken about half an hour ago.

__________________

*The opening line of “A Scandal in Bohemia.”

Judging by the headlines in today’s local rag (and other rags), an earthquake that causes no fatalities and does almost no damage is rilly rilly big news to persons who have not experienced an earthquake before.