Category: Shallow Thoughts

From The Washington Post
Seems that the recession is causing more children to fall into poverty…

In Michigan, for example, the rate of children living in poverty rose by more than a third, from 14 percent in 2000 to 19 percent in 2007. In Ohio, the number went up by almost a fifth in the same period, from 16 to 19 percent.
“They’re like a canary in a coal mine,” Beavers said. “We’re likely to see this pattern repeated in many states.”

Remember folks, in times of recession, Kids are like a canary in a coal mine.

Mostly by way of demonstrating to my readers (both of you) that I’m still alive.
Things I discovered this past weekend:
1. The lights in the front of the basement, and correspondingly the electrical outlet on the base of the light fixture, are on the same circuit as the back of the living room where my linux box is plugged in, the back of the office where the rest of the computers are plugged in, and the front of the office where the air conditioner is plugged in
2. The light in the back of the basement is on the same circuit as the washing machine
3. Leah’s vacuum cleaner plus the three computers in the office plus the air conditioner plus the one computer in the living room all together draw more than 15 amps.
4. So does Leah’s vacuum cleaner plus the washing machine.

I just saw a commercial for a new super-powered juicer/salsa-maker/food processor thingie. I wish I had a picture to show you because I haven’t posted a new IT in months.
The reason I bring this up is that during the commercial they show a CGI sequence of some piece of fruit being rendered into juice by this device, just like in CSI, when the criminalists theorize how some piece of evidence relates to the crime.
I use this analogy because in this CGI dramatization, the millions of tiny rotating blades of the sarlaak juicer basically cause the small CGI peach (or maybe it was a nectarine. It’s hard to tell in CGI) to liquefy instantly, exploding in a shower of peachy (or nectariney) gore. And the first thing I thought was “My god, can you imagine what that would do to a man’s hand if he got caught in one?”
And then my mind concocted all sorts of wild scenarios whereby the mafia might grab you for defaulting on your shady debts and, say, make you stick your hand or face or penis into a Sharper Image Juicer.
I think maybe I watch too many crime dramas.
Also, the preppy tween boy and girl that mom hands glasses of their pureed father ocra juice to at the end are absolutely adorable.

The New York Times reviews ‘The Gingerbread House’:

Call it a whopping case of seller’s remorse. The moral of “The Gingerbread House” would appear to be that retailing your children to strangers will not bring satisfaction. Glad that’s been cleared up.

Me: Hey, look who the guest star is in this episode!
Leah: He looks familiar. Who is he?
Me: Imagine him doing the Truffle Shuffle.
Leah: The Truffle Shuffle?
Me: He’s the fat kid from The Goonies
Leah: I thought that was–
Me: No, you’re thinking of the fat kid from —
Both: Stand by me
(That waiter? Jean Luc!)

• There’s been quite a bit in the news about the holocaust-denying bishop. Lots of folks think it’s uncool that His Holiness un-ex-communicated (recommunicated?) him, because, well, he’s a fracking holocaust denier. Comparatively few people have pointed out the church’s position on this: “Saying the Holocaust didn’t happen is untrue. But that doesn’t make it heresy.” C’mon. If you could be excommunicated for being a jackass, Augustine of Hippo would never have made Sainthood.
• Another thing hardly anyone is mentioning is that this bishop wasn’t excommunicated for being a Holocaust denier. He was excommunicated for the more or less totally unrelated matter of the fact that he’d been appointed bishop by a breakaway archbishop who didn’t have the authority to appoint bishops. The whole sect got excommunicated en masse for breaking away from the Church.
• Speaking of news, I’m told that newspapers are failing. Everyone is up in arms and trying to find a way to save them. Most of these proposals are following the example of the music industry and the movie industry: if new media is hurting the sales of your old media, try to force new media to suck. There was a fellow on The Daily Show whose proposal was “Work out a way to stop people from getting news on-line for free.” Has anyone actually sat down and answered the question: So what if newspapers fail? I mean, really, aside from the fact that they’ve existed for as long as anyone can remember, is there any actual value to newspapers in the world we live in? Obviously, it sucks that newspapermen will be out of work, but, well, no one’s bitching about all the lay-offs in the cuneiform industry, and no one’s looking out for the old fashioned manual typsetters’ union. I mean, really. It’s not like dead tree format is somehow an inherently better way to receive news. In fact, it’s worse. The day Mr. Obama won the election, this news appeared on the front page of (almost) every newspaper in the country. The day Mr. Obama took office, this news appeared on the front page of (almost) every newspaper in the country. There was two, maybe three articles worth of news in these events, but there were hundreds of articles published and millions of trees deadened to deliver this piece of information. Which is fine, I think that the election of President Obama is awfully newsworthy. But there is only a finite amount of dead tree. So every article about the Obama election pushed out one article about something else. A newspaper must by its very nature deliver only those stories which are of the broadest interest, and it can cover only a very few of them in any sort of depth. Back in 1997, when I was about 2 or 3 weeks in college, two newsworthy events happened at nearly the same time. But there’s only so much news you can cover if you’re constrained to filling the corpse of a tree, so the death of a popular British noblewoman pretty much stole the news cycle from the death of one of the greatest humanitarians of our time. When I was young, my dad got the Evening Sun, which was the penultimate of what had once been, I think, five editions opf the newspaper that came out in a single day. But in the late 1980s, well before the rise of the internet, the Evening Sun was found surplus to requirement, and the paper was only published once a day. Which means that you get one set of articles in the space of 24 hours, each of which takes time to write, and has to be brought to your house via a car or truck from its place of publication. Which means that you are never going to read anything in your daily paper that is less than 12 hours old, often more like 24-48 hours old. Newspapers aren’t searchable. They don’t include cross-reference hyperlinks. If I’m interested in the content of an article, I can’t ask the newspaper to show me more about this subject. Look, folks. It’s not that my generation is a bunch of attention-deficit, myspace-loving, twitter-pated know-nothings. It’s that, and I can not stress this enough, Newspapers are simply not a very good way to transport news to people compared to the internet. If he coulda, Ben Franklin totally would have been writing Pennsylvania-gazette.typepad.org
• Of course, you can’t wrap fish in a blog, but that’s not much of a reason to keep newspapers around
• Speaking of new media, folks are up in arms as usual about kids using things like myspace and facebook and all that, because these are SCARY NEW MEDIA and not wholesome ways of social interaction like banding together to go outside and play improvised sports games using sticks and strings, egg cars, walk down railroad tracks and through leech-infested swamps to find a dead body, evade the Fratellis while searching for the lost treasure of One-Eyed Willy, bond with members of other social cliques during detention, torment classmates on suspicion of homosexuality, or all those other wholesome social interactions they misremember from when they were children. Again, has anyone ever actually checked to see whether there’s any kind of measurable detrimental effect of this? That it’s really unhealthy for kids to make friends based on mutual interests and shared goals, values, and the like, rather than on an accident of geography? Also, shouldn’t it be good that kids spend more time reading and writing? 3ven 1f they r writing 2 a bff4eva lol?
• Speaking of children and wholesome social interaction, I’ve hit that age where my friends are starting to become parents, and therefore by proxy, I’m learning how much childraising has changed since I was myself a child and got raised. We often stop and pause to note all these “ridiculous” safety precautions everyone’s expected to take all the time and how cherished childhood institutions like “Stick your baby in a small cage and leave it alone for a few hours while you do something else,” “Let your child play with things that produce heat, have sharp corners, or break into tiny swallowable parts”, and walker frames have all gone the way of the dodo. Invariably, someone recalsl that we had all those fun dangerous things, and nothing bad happened (This effect is even more prominent when dealing with people of my parents’ generation who were, I believe, as children, this is at the age of like 3 and under, if I understand, play alone in the woods, with guns and knives, wearing clothing which was made of — I think there had been a study done proving it was healthy — gasoline-soaked asbestos and chewing tobacco, all the while drinking straight whiskey (it helps with teething).). We keep forgetting that when we were kids (and, more especially, when our parents were kids), every once in a while, a young child would die or be horribly disfigured, and that was totally okay. I mean, it was sad, sure, but, hey, sometimes babies just drop dead for no reason. Seriously. This was common enough that both of my parents had siblings who died in infancy.
• Speaking of disapprovable safety, however, I had to drive Leah’s car just a short distance a couple of weeks ago. Her car has something like six hundred airbags. I wonder if anyone has ever done a study on how many accidents were caused by airbags — the added bulk of their storage causes all the trim on her car to stick out about three inches farther than it needs to. She’s got blind spots you could park a Buick in, because those airbags are obstructing the view.
• Incidentally, Leah and I live together now. We are still working on integrating our separate gigantic stockpiles of possessions. Leah is much more comfortable stacking things up into tall, unsteady piles than I am. Whenever she does this, I hear John Cleese reminding me, and I can not stress this enough, that there are still many things which have not been put on top of other things.
• Immediately prior to her moving in, I bought a new boiler, as mine was busted. Because googling did not easily get me to an answer for this until much tryign and hand-vetting of answers, here is a google-friendly summary of an issue you may encounter if you are ever in this situation:
  I have STEAM HEAT. At the END OF CYCLE I get a LOUD WATER HAMMER or STEAM HAMMER sound from NEAR THE BOILER. I wanted to know HOW TO STOP STEAM HAMMER SOUND NEAR BOILER AT END OF CYCLE. It turned out that if the WATER LEVEL in the boiler is low enough that AT THE END OF CYCLE when as much of the water has turned to steam as is going to, the level of LIQUID water in the system can drop to a point where even though the LOW WATER CUTOFF hasn’t tripped, the water level is below the NIPPLE IN THE HARTFORD LOOP. Which basically means that the opening where the WET RETURN system (which is a pipe that hangs off of the main steam pipe so that the returning water doesn’t have to push past the steam to get back into the boiler) comes into the boileris above the water. If that happens, the returning STEAM can get into the HARTFORD LOOP. The whole system is connected because this is a single pipe system, but there’s a loop that is physically closer to the ground, where the water will accumulate, following the force of gravity, while the steam, which is lighter, will stay in the the top loop. The Hartford Loop is a looping section between the two which exists to equalize the pressure between the side of the system that is full of steam going out to your radiators and water coming back from them. If steam is forced into the bottom loop, it will bang around in there causing a LOUD WATER HAMMER SOUND which occurs right at the END of the cycle. HTH. HAND.
• Also, I just love to say “NIPPLE IN THE HARTFORD LOOP”:
• I also had the living room painted red and the bedroom painted green. I am red-green colorblind and this gets me out of ever being allowed to make important decorating decisions. The dining room is battleship gray, because we neglected to tell Leah’s uncle that he didn’t need to prime it when we hired him to do the painting.
• I got the place recarpeted as well. (We are now into the range of about $10k I have spent in the past three months on this place). When carpeting, there’s a tool you use to pull the carpet taught to the wall. It’s got a heavy end with hooks that goes against the carpet and a padded end you strike with your knee repeatedly as hard as you can. I wonder if “Carpeter’s Knee” is the common name for some sort of chronic knee injury.
• Yesterday, I got to stay home from work on account of snow. Specifically, on account of the three-inch accumulating, all-day, school and business-closing snowstorm. In March.
• New theory: Starbuck’s dad is Daniel The Cylon Everyone Thought Was Dead
• Eleventh Hour: Based on a british show which ran 4 episodes and wasn’t very good in spite of starring Patrick Stewart, this American show is pretty good and is the only TV show I have ever seen which got that being a genius is not the same thing as being autistic. But halfway through the season, the writers seem to have said to themselves: “Y’know what this show needs? A comedy relief black guy.” So they added one.
• Knight Rider ditched half its cast and reformatted to make it more like its predecessor. They also removed their first-half-of-the-season trope of having at least one girl in a skimpy bikini in every episode. Which was The only good thing about the show. The voice of KARR was provided by Peter Cullen, who did the original KARR, and also the voice of Optimus Prime. The body of KARR appears to have been also played by Optimus Prime. But we only see KARR for about 3 seconds, and it’s filmed just like the incomprehensible fast-moving jittery scenes from Transformers, plus it’s night so I can’t really tell. On the plus side, the past few episodes have featured a cute kid, a corrupt hick cop, and a pair of humorous mentally-handicapped car theives, so they really are getting closer to the style of the original. Unfortunately, upon closer inspection, it was only by the standards of the early 80s that the original Knight Rider failed to suck.
• ‘Frack’ has entirely replaced ‘Fuck’ in my normal usage except when I am in physical pain. Now, middle school kids, don’t frack this up for us by using it so much that they promote it to be a real cuss word.
• I also have started using the phrase “Surplus to Requirements” a lot
• Rush Limbaugh 2001-2008: “Democrats hate america because they won’t support the president just because they disapprove of his policies, and if they really loved america, they’d want Bush to succeed”. Rush Limbaugh 2009: “I want Obama to fail. I hope america goes into the toilet because then we will win.”
• Speaking of Republicans, I’m not really a pinko, but every time I hear a republican scream “They’re trying to turn America SOCIALIST!”, I think, “Yeah, and that would suck because laissez-faire capitalism has worked so well for us recently.”

• Yesterday on the way to work, there was a sign at the top of the exit that said “Lane closed 1500 feet ahead”. About 50 feet past that, the lane was closed for some road work. I assume that the road work being done was “install a more accurate sign”.
• xkcd proposed that YouTube commenters be forced to listen to their comments read aloud before they are posted. This is now a (sadly optional) feature of YouTube. I for one welcome our new stick-figure overlords
• Yesterday evening on the way home from work, there was a sign in downtown Baltimore that said “2 left lanes closed ahead,” so I got over. The “2” had been affixed over the original text of the sign when they had upgraded the lane closure. Suddenly, I had to fight my way over another lane, as just up ahead, 3 lanes were closed. Is this the month of inaccurate road signs?
• A friend of mine is pregnant and close to her due date. The past few months, I have heard the word “cervix” spoken aloud more often than in the entire rest of my life. It really does sound like the name of a Doctor Who monster.
• Joe the Plumber, as it turns out, is a tax cheat. Also, he’s not even really named Joe. And does not have a license to plumb.
• At work, a word we use a lot is “releasability”, which spellcheckers everywhere tell me is not a real word, although “releasable” is. A colleague suggested that anything which is -able ought have an associated -ability (just as I think any adjective has an associated -ly adverb. I bluely believe this to be the case), but perhaps the problem is that what we have is actually “release ability” rather than “releasability”, much as he, being able to ride a bicycle, has a “bicycle ability”. I pointed out that “bicycle ability” and “bicyclability” are very different things: “bicyclability” would mean “the capacity to become a bicycle”. My colleague has bicycle ability; carbon fiber has a certain bicyclability (though I would argue that aluminum has a higher bicyclability, because it is far more able to become a bicycle — while carbon fiber bikes are excellent, it requires much more effort to hew a bicycle out of carbon fiber.). The only being I know of who possesses both bicycle ability and bicyclability is Cy-Kill, leader of the renegade Go-Bots
• Stuck in head most of the time now: Seven Wonders by Fleetwood Mac. In spite of this, I think that it is one of the only songs which is actually better if you hear the Kids Incorporated cover.
• It is so weird that as we demand larger and higher-definition TVs, and video snobs insist that even the sight of a standard-dev TV makes them want to puke and all that, we simultaneously are more than ever willing to huddle around a QVGA low-bitrate image on YouTube.
• Also, it is really amazing how quickly you stop minding that when you watch standard definition tv on a high def TV without correcting for the aspect ratio, everyone is a third again too wide. In fact, whent I watch video from my computer (which is smart enough to automatically correct the aspect), everything looks too narrow.

On my way home tonight, I noticed some strange lights in the sky somewhere to the north:

There’s a whole gallery here. Now taking theories to wtf these lights signify:

• Large Hadron Collider pierces earth at an oblique angle, coming out in north Baltimore
• Asgard trying to catch a late show at the Senator
• Ass-kicking kegger at Loyola
• Zuul and Vinz Clortho did it, thereby summoning Gozer

Funniest thing today:

Just wondering:
Suppose a man standing in Four Corners, NM, shoots someone across the line in Arizona. The victim falls forward into Utah, rolls over into Colorado, and dies.
Murder is a state crime. Which state gets jurisdiction?