Halloween

Now it's time for my sort-of-too-late Halloween message. By this time, you've probably made all the bad decisions you're going to, but maybe you'll listen to me when I tell you what you should not have done.

So let's just come out and say it. Jack o'lanterns are not your personal canvas. I'm not saying that you can't express yourself artistically how you like. Go ahead and reproduce Marilyn Monroe's silhouette in vivid colors if you want, and snort cocaine until your nose turns to snot. But please do not try to impose yourself on established customs.

Jack o'lanterns are a grotesque face carved through the skin of a pumpkin. Then you put a candle in the pumpkin, and it shines out through the holes. If you are doing that on Halloween, you are doing it right. On the other hand, if you are etching a design into the face of the pumpkin without ever breaking the skin (and I realize you can get a more detailed design that way) so that the light shines through like an Alfred the Great lantern, you are doing it wrong.

If you are cutting something into your pumpkin that is not a pumpkin-type face, you are also doing something wrong. No images, Halloween-themed or otherwise. No pleasant smiley faces either. Please just a spooky, teeth-missing Halloween pumpkin face.

As I say, you can do whatever you want by way of art, but this is not art. This is buying into a pre-existing cultural thing. If you carve a pumpkin for Halloween, you are saying "I think that this pumpkin carving thing is a good tradition. I want in." But Alex, you say, is there no room for ironic commentary on the Halloween traditon?

Of course there is, but it's a fine line between wanting to participate in the Halloween tradition but still be more clever than everyone else, and really clever mockery or deconstruction of it. Additionally, Halloween is a really big thing. Any genuinely clever idea you might have come up with? Ten people have already done it, 5 have done it better, and it's not clever enough to leave on your doorstep for a week and a half. Get a new big creative plan.

Incidentally, all of this applies to Halloween costumes too. And if all of my rude remarks have led you to conclude that you can't have a jack o'lantern that pleases you and me, that's good too. Jack o'lanterns, like snowmen, are never as good as they look in the illustration. I'm not so sure we wouldn't be better off without any at all.

Hey! It's Music!

I mean, there's notes and everything. So I guess it is.

But gee. Is there someone who can listen to this stuff and like it? My musical tastes are not universal. Arabic music seems dissonant to me, for instance. But Arabs can't seem to get enough of it.

Arabs number in the hundreds of millions, but is there any market for this least-common multiple music? Do avant garde composers come home after a hard day and cue up the "88 notes on a chromatic scale played out of phase" song? Do they relax in their armchairs with a gin and tonic and let every possible chord wash over them?

If so, how did they get to be that way? I bet Arabs like Arabic music because it was playing when they were young and all their friends liked it and there's something about those tunes that meshes with their particular cultural upbringing. I doubt artists have a similar background. What do you have to do when you're fifteen to get to like the mathematical music?

Of course someone thought it would be, if not a pretty song, at least a good idea to write these compositions. Perhaps nobody likes them as music. Perhaps the composer just thought it would sound "neat" or something, and that was enough justification for him to compose what is actually a very simple song.

I have news for him, though. It doesn't sound neat. It goes tinkle tinkle tinkle pause plunk repeat. The number of tinkles and the length of the pauses and the volume of the plunks varies in a mathematical way of course, but not in a way that's interesting to someone without a slide rule in his ear.

In fact, it adds almost nothing to the visual element. The swirling dots are the real attraction here, not the impossible music. Judging from the name of the website, I think the author intended it the other way around, but either I am completely wrong about how other people process music or you should look at "Whitney Music Box" with the sound off.

Some Roman Gods and the Diseases They Would Treat if They Were Drugs

Orbona -- Livestock anaesthetic
Meditrina -- Insomnia
Cinxia -- Chemotherapy
Deverra -- Estrogen replacement
Semonia -- Alzheimer's disease
Fornax -- Osteoporosis
Vervactor -- Low energy*
Alemonia -- Gastrointestinal disturbances
Vacuna -- Depression

*The FDA has not evaluated these claims. This product is not intended to treat, cure or prevent any diseases.

Nobel Peace Prize

The Nobel Peace Prize makes me sick. I was away when the winner was announced, but an article about it in the New Yorker gives me a good excuse to mention it now. It is supposed to be awarded to people who have fostered peace in the world. It is definitely an Edwardian lamps-not-yet-out-all-over-Europe kind of prize. You know how I love that Captains of Industry ethos. But it has been abused in these recent years. I think they should just discontinue it, if they're going to treat it this way.

There are two ways to misuse a Nobel Peace Prize. The first is to award it to more than one person. Awarding first prize to more than one person is a bad habit of judges. It would have ruined the whole 2002 Winter Olympics for me, if they had not already been ruined by their own awfulness. Looking back, I see that in the past 10 years, 5 of the prizes have been awarded to more than one person. What motivation is there to do that? The process is simple: Somewhere in the world, there is the most peaceful person. Find him, and give him the prize. The second place finisher is an awfully peaceful person, but awarding it to two people means that the average peacefulness of the Nobel Peace Prize recipient is diminished. Is that something the Nobel board wants to encourage?

Even worse is when they treat the prize as a medal for good behavior. It's good to be a humanitarian, but that's not what the Nobel Peace Prize is about. The Nobel Peace Prize, bizarre though it may sound, is for people who foster world peace. Of the last ten awarded, 5 have been given to general do-gooders. I understand the temptation to reward a philanthopist with whatever is at your disposal (in this case, a Nobel Prize), however inappropriate, but please hold back. It doesn't make you look magnanimous. It makes you look either ignorant or political.

Only 5 proper Nobel Peace Prizes have been awarded in the past 20 years. My pick for 2007? The world's trees (for their work producing oxygen and promoting democracy). Don't think this problem is confined to Nobel Prizes, though. Look for my expose on Time's Man of the Year when it comes out. It's enough to make you vomit into your diving apparatus.

Beer While Diving?

If you were ever wondering about the effects of your marijuana hobby on your deep-sea diving hobby, look no further. Http://scuba-doc.com/marij.html has all the not-quite-sure-who-cares information you would ever need. Frankly, it seems like if you're the kind of person who takes drugs before he dives, you're the kind of person who takes his life into his own hands, and no amount of black text on a goldenrod background is going to change your mind.

It kind of looks like he made most of it up anyway. Symptoms apparently include "extreme panic" and "depersonalization" (whatever that is.) He tried a little harder with the alcohol one, refraining from the "nothing can sober you up but time" line, but his reasoning is clearly distorted by his own bias, in favor of nitrogen narcosis. Probably all other intoxicants are just not in the same league. At the same time, I think he shouldn't stop with alcohol and marijuana. Sure, those are the most popular drugs, but there are others. How is deep-sea diving affected by:

• Methamphetamine
• Xanax
• Fasting and meditation (losers only)
• LSD
• Novocaine
• Heroin
• Thorazine
• General anaesthesia

Inquiring minds want to know.

While we are on the same topic, there are a lot of semi-hysterical warnings about not bungee jumping under the influence of alcohol. Admittedly, most of these are from actual bungee jumping firms that want to limit their liability in certain indigestible ways, but some are not. I think, if you want to bungee jump stinking drunk (or under the influence of nitrogen narcosis, if it comes to that) then you might as well.

Assuming that sober professionals are measuring out the ropes and building the diving platform, what is there for the diver to do? Just fall down, mostly. Something drunk people are particularly good at. There is no concentration required to bungee jump. Like the deep sea divers, the bungee jumping people are all closet prigs. Or maybe they're afraid you'll get sick, but are too shy to say so. It probably would happen, when you come to think of it.

Coffee the Hard Way

Wikipedia sez:

This is a process that was used with farm animals at one time. This process involves the placing of a carcass into a sealed chamber, which then puts the carcass in a mixture of lye and water, which breaks chemical bonds keeping the body intact. This eventually turns the body into a coffee-like liquid, and the only solid remains are bone hulls, which could be crushed between one's fingertips.

Unless I am mistaken, the idea of a farm is to get more animals, by feeding them and sheltering them and guarding them. Then later on, you slaughter them and sell the meat. I am not sure how you would get the notion that what you really want to do is dissolve your animals in lye. Unless the resulting liquid is a delicacy to farmers, like the liquid evolved from silage. Apparently it is "coffee-like", although I'm not sure how.

You know what? I think what happened is that one of this guy's animals fell into his vat of lye, and he just stuck around to see what would happen. Then he wrote a Wikipedia article like he meant it to go that way all along.

MySpace

This is probably a good summary of most of the reasons I don't have an entry in MySpace. Also, most people use MySpace to play music at you, and I think there are enough places for me to hear music already.

I don't want to have a MySpace page of my own, but think of the possibilites. Ads for teenage movies all have their MySpace addresses in the bottom corner of the screen. Bands and cartoons have their own MySpace pages. This is all good, if you don't mind embarrassing yourself, but the concept could be taken so much further.

How about a set of pages for the primary colors? People could list their favorite color as one of their friends. You could have pages for the political issues of the day. If you're pro-Israel or anti-Zionist, just befriend the appropriate movement. I'm pretty sure that people have already set up pages for various fictional characters, but how about literary themes? Eros/thanatos is sure to get a lot of pals, and how about man versus self?

How about body parts? If you think your incisors are more useful than your molars, you had probably better let the world know. You can identify your favorite hand, and say whether you think the spleen is underappreciated. Chemical elements too. I'm sure most people's favorite element is carbon, but if you happen to like scandium, then scandium is just waiting, on MySpace, to be your friend.

Do deceased people get to have MySpace pages? I think that recently deceased people get to keep theirs, including that unfortunate boy who was took shots at gay people and the police and was gunned down, but what about long-dead people? I like Charlemagne, and I am pretty sure that Charlemagne would like me if he were alive (he would be impressed by my literacy) so why can't I have him as a friend? There are dead people all over the world, who would love to meet me, and I think that MySpace can make it happen.

Senility

Senility is the most horrifying thing America can think of right now. Now that the threat of terrorism is a joke, and polio is at an all time low, what have we really got left to fear? Aside from our kids on MySpace, only losing our minds. This is generally taken to be a fate worse than death, probably for confused reasons. I blame Time Magazine and its ilk.

First though, the name of the disease. Most cases of senility are Alzheimer's disease. When you have a folk disease, most of whose sufferers have the same scientific disease, why would you throw out the folk name? The non-Alzheimer's senile patients sure, rename their disease, but why not let most senile patients go on being senile? Scientists like to boss everybody around in little ways.

Now then. What is the big deal with senility? It's a bad thing, no doubt. If I had to pick "rest of my life senile" or "rest of my life alert" it would be no contest. I would also not like to die of a heart attack or stroke, but go on living forever, the creature of a new century in which nobody dies. It's not going to happen (or is it? Let me know, okay?) You've got to die of something, and if you die of Alzheimer's, you've done pretty well. Look at this chart: Of all the diseases profiled, Alzheimer's has, by a fair margin, the highest age of death. Even considering that the average case of Alzheimer's lingers for 8 years, you are still going to have 77 years of perfect health and bright smiles (and a few more of putting your keys in the oven and bright smiles).

Much as people like to live a long time, though, and bankrupt the government doing it, I get the idea that fear of premature death is not what motivates them here. What upsets people who don't want to get Alzheimer's is sticky and insoluble, and it is feelings. People who don't want to be senile are afraid (as is my understanding) of A) losing their dignity B) losing their personal memories and C) becoming a burden on others.

Let's take these one at a time. Ian Shoales said that nostalgia is the most useless emotion, but I have to say it's pride. Keeping your dignity is important if you are trying to be a society matron in 1860's Atlanta. It is important if you are running for political office. What escapes me is how dignity is important for an old person, who has made all the friends and impressed all the strangers he is ever going to. Nobody is judging you. Swallow your pride and be sick. Even if you've made a hundred million enemies like Ronald Reagan, not many of them are going to have the heart to laugh at you.

Losing your memories is genuinely bad. They're pretty much all we have of conciousness. If you lose your memories you might as well be a sea sponge, and if you're a sea sponge you might as well be dead. Try to hang on to your memories as long as you can. If there's one thing stereotypes about old people tell us, it's that they are chiefly valuable for their stories. On the other hand, you are going to lose your memories, senility or no. You are going to cease to be a loveable old man, and begin to be a vegetable. Whether you have been planted in the ground or propped up in a bed should make no difference to you, from where you stand. You're unconscious either way.

Finally, the argument that you will be a burden to your descendants. They will have to feed you and clothe you and supervise you and resent you for years and years, the thinking runs. This argument has two interpretations, I think. The first is the crude cost argument. Having Alzheimer's disease is expensive, someone might say. I don't want to have to have my family shoulder the cost of my dead-inside frame. And of course, no one does. But we don't have similar nightmares about needing heart surgery or face transplants or needing to be put on an impossibly expensive medicine for the rest of our lives. Those are all awfully expensive, and I guess we worry about them from time to time, but I think the driving force of this argument is the emotional burden on one's relatives.

But, this argument is even weaker. Once again, it's bad to have Alzheimer's disease, and it's bad to have a relative with Alzheimer's disease. But it's also bad to have parents with smallpox or Chagas disease. People's parents get sick and die very often. Is senility worse? Well you have to watch them degenerate, but is that really such a bad thing? I would think that sudden deaths are the ones to fear. You wake up one morning and your grandfather is dead of a stroke. And you're probably very upset, and all the more so because you're startled. You certainly weren't expecting that. So much for all your jolly plans in the near future.

By contrast, with a long slow degenerative disease like Alzheimer's, you have plenty of time to get used to the idea of Grandpa being dead. As ghoulish as that may sound, I think that for spectators it is probably a lot more comfortable to ease into death than to jump in all at once. I don't knowwho else shares my intuition, but I would be surprised if everybody went the other way on this question. Maybe I just dislike surprises more than most people.

So I'm not sure why everybody is so jumpy about senility. It has its downsides, mainly that it is fatal, and the mental incapacity is nothing to be proud of, but you undoubtedly get used to that by degrees. In fact, given its high average age of death, I'm gonna go out on a limb and say I can't think of any disease I'd rather die of.

"Bor-" Just Tickles Me

Boron may be the most inexplicably useless element, but dig those compound names:

Real

Borane
Boromycin
Boride ion
Carborane
Organoborane
Borate
Decaborane (smells like chocolate. Thumbs up)
Borax
Borinic esters
Boronic esters

Don't exist but should:

Borase
Boryl group
Borite (mineral)
Chloroborocarbon (does this exist?)

And boron, an untapped gemstone source?



Hands up ladies, if I could win your heart with a Borazon engagement ring.

Muscle to Bone

I didn't believe it could happen either, but apparently some people have a defect that causes them to turn into bone, kind of like in that book by Roald Dahl. It sounds pretty dreadful, but like everything, it has a bright side:

"As Luciana's condition escalates, she may contort and freeze into a set position. If she's lucky she may be able to choose that position for herself, if she isn't her body will choose for her. Professor Paul Wordsworth explains that as an individual gets more and more ossification of the muscles they may have to make a very difficult decision about what they do with their life. Basically, before the body locks completely they must decide if they will spend their life sitting or standing."

Well let's assume she's lucky. Sitting and standing both have their upsides, but considering that you are going to die anyway, you might want to pick a position with more pizzaz. How about:

• A marionette

• 
  Atlas (whose arms do that?)
  
• Rodin's "Thinker"
• Hogtied (across the back, or the belly)

• 
  Dying Swan
  
• Fist in mouth
• Something dirty

• 
  Explorer
  
• "Two Grecian urns!"

• 
  Aesthete
• Marionette (strings cut)

Ways to Sit

People have a unique problem. Most other animals don't have a big problem with sitting. Dogs and cats and animals with short legs can squat, apparently comfortably. Horses and giraffes can stand their whole lives. Birds are so accustomed to standing that they do it in their sleep. No sitting for them. Most other animals can just lie down whenever the spirit moves them. They have teeny legs after all; lying is like crouching for a mouse.

People can't do any of these. There are undoubtedly hermits somewhere who spend their whole lives standing up, but that is not for me. I can't spend all my time in bed, and more to the point, I can't spend all of my non-standing time in bed. I need to spend a lot of my day sitting.

Since the Bronze age, of course, sitting has been pretty easy. Just build yourself a chair. They're not hard to build; all they need is a seat and legs. If you want to be really fancy, you can add a back and arms, but only if you want to break the prehistoric bank. But what about people who couldn't afford chairs? What about prehistoric tribesmen? What about modern people, caught in a hallway where there are no chairs? Let's look at some ways to sit without a chair.

Legs out. This involves sitting on the floor,with your back up straight and your legs out in front. This is easy for some people. You can sometimes see students sitting that way on the quad at a college. Some people need to put their arms out backwards for extra support, and some don't. I don't think I can do it at all. I don't seem to have enough tendons to simultaneously straighten my legs and bend my waist. If you can do this, let me know how it feels. I have a hunch it's still a little uncomfortable, but I could be wrong.

Indian. This is the one where you place each foot under the opposite thigh. It's pretty good if you're sitting for short periods. It tends to put strain on the lower ankle, since that is one of the three points that the body's weight is mostly being distributed to. I don't have fat ankles, as who does, so my feet tend to fall asleep if I sit this way for too long. A lot of the comfort of this style depends on the kind of shoes you have on. Boots are good because they cushion your ankles, and soft shoes are obviously better than leather soles.

Lotus style. This is the one where you place each foot over the opposite thigh. I am only including this to demonstrate how narrow is the difference between sitting and religion. My legs are too long to even think of doing this.

Seza. This is how Japanese people sometimes sit. If you think Japanese people are good, wait until you have tried their sitting. To do this, just sit on your own ankles. I am not sure which direction your feet are supposed to point, but I don't think any direction is comfortable. Try not to wear bulky shoes, or have big feet. It gets painful after about ten minutes.

Asian squat. I am told that this is how East Asian people sometimes sit. Keep your feet flat on the floor, sit on your ankles, spread your knees, and put your elbows on your knees. I guess this works for Asian people, since they tend to be small, but whenever I try it I topple over backwards. It seems like it could be comfortable.

Upright fetus. Like legs-out, but with your legs tucked up. This avoids the tendon problem, but now you have the problem of what to do with your knees. If you keep them upright, you might not be able to see over them. If you spread them, it is indecent and uncomfortable. You might need to hug them to stay upright.

Human chair. I pioneered this one. It is vital if you need to use a computer on a low desk (too low to stand), but have no chair. Stand on the toes of one foot, and place your other knee on your exposed ankle. I am told it only brings you high enough if you have long legs. You might need to steady yourself on something, but it is pretty comfortable.

So what did our stone age ancestors do? Did they drag tree trunks into their huts to sit on? How uncreative is that? It's probably what I would do if I were a caveman, since all of the above options are completely unsatisfactory. Still, it's sad to belong to a race that can't sit without props.

Where to Place Tracts

One more thing, before we leave Mr. Jesus-is-lord behind in the dust as we rattle along in our stagecoach of fun. He has some witnessing tips, including a list of places to leave tracts. I guess they're pretty effective places, but "On top of mailbox" and "on your desk at work?" Yawn. Here are some superior ideas for the new century:

• The pinnacle of Mount Everest
• Behind the toilet tank at a restaurant
• In the undercarriage of a moving train
  
• Jerusalem, AD 33
• Nailed to a tree that has partially grown around it
• In the most visible place in the world
  
• Stuffed in the mouth of a mutilated deer head
• Just hovering, 5 feet in the air
• Gingerly placed in the exact center of Times Square, completely silent, with the Kronos Quartet in the background
  
• Take them directly to Hell and witness there

The Ultimate Christian

The guy who has this website is so cool. If they have a worldwide contest to see who is the ultimate Christian, he is going to bear away the bell. You might think it was the Pope but no! He is disqualified (for being the Antichrist). Let's look at some highlights:

• The New King James Bible: Counterfeit. In short, a symbol is on the cover of the new King James Bible, and it is somebody's fault. You can see, it's pretty evil.
  
  

• Charismatic Chaos. I didn't know real Christians looked down on Charismatics. I thought they were just too uptight to get in on the fun. Although maybe that's why they do. Some fun Charismatic quotes:
  
  "Your cup is not full, your cup is not full, I want to fill it..."
  "Tongues is over with. Nobody can do that anymore."
  "Hubba da dubba--do it. Hubba da dubba dubba."
  "The more I told people what hell was like, the more they laughed."

• Is a Sense of Humor a Needful Thing? No. This guy is hardcore. Vocabulary points for needful, if it weren't so clear he stole it from the Bible.
  

• King James I of England Page. This clinches it. No other Christian in the world is cool enough to have a James I fansite. I always thought he was kind of a medium-bad king, but what do you know. He was called "England's Solomon", and if you think he was gay, you are nothing but an anti-Scots racist (the worst kind).
  On the other hand, it states that "he required constant attention." Was this great man really a whiny baby? Undoubtedly a lie, spread by partisans of the NIV and sodomite activists. Congratulations, my internet friend. Ten thousand blessings will be yours in Heaven.
  

Four Humors

The words sanguine, choleric, melancholy and phlegmatic are all equally uncommon. Not so obscure that you don't know them, and definitely not so common that you hear them every day, but all a *little* obscure. Plus, they all have different, common, English adjectivifying suffixes. They complement one another extremely well. When you come to think of it, it's pretty unlikely that it should have turned out that way.

Bonus: Bilious too. AWESOME!

Shouting

Have you ever shouted at the top of your lungs? When was the last time you shouted so hard that you positively couldn't shout any harder? I can't remember the last time I have.

I'm sure I did once. I probably did when I was a very little boy, probably with my fists all balled up and adorable. Also, it was probably more of a shriek than a yell. I don't think I have recently though. I haven't been far enough away from civilization to feel anything but self-concious while yelling.

I just don't know what to expect. What does it even feel like to yell as loud as you possibly can? Does your throat hurt? Do you run out of breath almost instantly? Does your diaphragm get exhausted?
Next time I am in the Utah desert I will probably try to shout, but what if I'm louder than I think? I could draw a rescue party from Provo by accident. On second thought, maybe I will try it next time I am in New York City. Nobody cares there, right?

Your Wikipedia Sentence For Today

"I'd really like you to make arrows" -- Sample sentence of the Pirahã language. Helps if you say it with a wink, or leer.

First Runner up:

"It is the belief of the Pirahã people that their language is the best one to speak." -- Shows commendable patriotism, but is marred by being wrong.

Second Runner up:

"He [an anthropologist] conjectures that the Pirahã had not used that phoneme in his presence before because they were ridiculed whenever non-Pirahã heard the sound." -- Awww.

Hypocrisy

The main issue this campaign season is hypocrisy, whether you like it or not. You might have hoped it was the war in Iraq, or the budget deficit or something but no, it had to be hypocrisy. It's not very surprising. Iraq is a huge complicated issue, with no good solutions, and getting worse all the time. Anybody who tries to talk about Iraq in more than the stupidest terms opens himself up to all kinds of attacks. The same is true of terrorism, abortion, taxes, and anything that might matter.

Hypocrisy is a really easy charge to bring. Here's how to do it: Go through a politician's record, and find an instance where he said X. Then look for something he did that seems to contradict X. Then all you need is the money for political ads, and you're done. You can do 5 months of campaigning in 5 minutes. And nobody can fault you. After all, your opponent really did betray his principles. It's all there in black and white.

This is not an uplifting way to run a campaign. The most obvious shortcoming is that it works against everyone. Politicians are busy people. They have to go to lots of events and make lots of speeches, and speak off-the-cuff all the time. And because it is a politician's job to agree with 50% of the electorate, a lot of weird political positions are going to get jumbled together. If a politician supports the war in Iraq, and at the same time supports the government of Saudi Arabia, some people will want to say he's a hypocrite. "You can't oppose dictators in one place and prop them up elsewhere," they'll say.

Well, yes you can. Politicians are under no obligation to be intellectually consistant. They are mouthpieces of their party, and you can't get 50 million people to adopt one set of principles. If the Republican base wants war with Iraq and also cozy relations with the Saudis, who is Sen. Jack Nobody (R-Nowhere) to defy them? At the same time, Rep. Jane Somebody (D-Big City) has to vote for legal abortion and go to Catholic church, no matter how many contortions that requires. What else can they do? Bucking your party works for guys like Ron Paul or Joe Lieberman, but the country can only stand so many mavericks.

The hypocrisy party is at its worst during sex scandals, and the Foley scandal is no different. Just like "it's not the sex, it's the lying" of the 1990's, all the furor this time is about how a gay pederast like Foley could belong to the Republican party. Fundamentalists and liberals alike are upset that Republicans claim to be the party of God, but are actually sexually harassing pages.

This misses the point entirely. Would the religious conservatives be relieved if Foley had run, and won, on a platform of lewd instant messages? If you're bothered by his social conservatism, would you be pleased to find out that Foley was pure and innocent all along, while the real harassing was done by Rep. John Libertine (D-CA)? The consequences would be the same, but the addition of hypocrisy seems to make it extra sour for some people.

You can't trust politicians, because they're just not like you and me. We are free agents, but they are, professionally at least, just creatures of their constituents. So go ahead. Demand that politicians stop being mealy-mouthed, stop disguising their true natures, and act like they say. Either these political saints will go down to hilarious defeats, or we'll start electing morons who really do believe that Iraq had WMDs. What is it you really want here?

You Can Blog Too!

It's easy and fun! Here's what you do. Go to this link. Read it, and consider for a little while. Then think of a Dungeons & Dragons joke. That joke can be the title of your blog. For the body of your blog, you can have another D&D-themed joke, or maybe a Star Trek joke like in the article. Use your imagination! Be sure to have a link to the article. Don't forget to make fun of the picture!

Jaw Pain and Obession

I'm back from my little vacation. I saw lots of things, and for each of them I thought; that would be a good thing to have an opinion about. And I seem to recall that I did have a lot of opinions. But then, I also forgot them, so we are going to have to start this thing over from scratch, you and I.

First up on my now-blank slate is this anti-caffeine person. She has written a book, "in 123 chapters", and advertised it with an ultra-serif lime green font. Then she placed it on a dark green background (for extra science). We also learn that caffeine causes, "many symptoms, including, but not limited to fever, jaw pain, PMS, heart problems, and sleep problems [obvious]."

These are all good symptoms to have, if you have to have any, but later she steps up the rhetoric to, "...anger, paranoia, delusions, spending sprees, drug use, odd behavior..." and peaks at, "... madness, mental illness, murder, obsession, suicide, and other negative situations that caffeine creates."

Then, just to prove she's not that much saner than we are, she gets all inquisitive:

Do you remember childhood? Can you recall swapping your bag of chips for Randy Murray's Hee-Haw chocolate cakes, or Susie Simon's chocolate bar? Did your first date buy you chocolate ice cream? What about Girl Scout cookie sales? How did you spend your paper route money? Do you drink coffee at breakfast? What about in traffic? Did someone give you psychiatric pills? What did you buy at the grocery store?

What, indeed.

Leaving

I have to go away for a little while. But don't worry, there's food in the fridge and the number of the hotel where I'll be staying is by the phone. Call me if there's an emergency. If there's a fire, remember to get out of the house first, and then call 911 from a neighbor's phone. Feed the dog and cats twice a day, a half cup of dry food for the dog, and a quarter cup each for the cats. Walk the dog once a day. Lastly, please explain to me how "www.unf" is an acceptable URL. It doesn't even have an extension.

Love,
Alex

Wikipedia Interlude

Wikipedia tells us some of the effects of bullying:

War
Genocide
Terrorism
Post-traumatic stress disorder
Political corruption
Emigration
Loss of tourism
Backache

Also please enjoy this overwrought Wikipedia article on Nelson Muntz. See? If you throw your characterization out the window, and just make your characters do whatever, some people will rationalize that as "complexity". You can't lose.

I Am Crass

Happy Columbus Day.
Also, my birthday.

What's in a Name?

Two things I learned today: One Massachusetts candidate for governor is a woman; the other is black. I know I don't live in Massachusetts, and I probably don't have any business paying attention to their governors. But it still seems like the sort of thing you should know. I think there are a couple things going on here:

First, Kerry Healey and Deval Patrick both have very boring last names, and very bizarre first names. I don't think a disengaged person (or me, yesterday) could tell you which one was the woman, and which one was black, merely by looking at the names.

How many other people have this problem? How many people in Massachusetts have this problem? I suppose the main way Massachusetts voters learn about their politicians is the way I do: From reading newspapers and magazines. I considered myself well-informed. I knew two people, Kerry Healey and Deval Patrick, were running for governor, but I didn't pick up on their sex and race. Do people in Massachusetts have better political reporting?

I suppose it helps that they have political ads, with the candidates forced to appear in their own ads. But surely not everybody sees those ads. I never see any political ads where I live, and I live where there are (supposedly) lots of ads. It's not important to know these sex and race things, not in a policy sense, but it would still be jarring to wake up on November 8 and discover that your governor was not a traditional old white male.

Moreover, I suppose there's nothing anybody can do about it. Inasmuch as it would inform people, it would probably hurt each candidate's chances for election if voters found out they were minorities. It is not exactly in their interest to get the word out, and besides -- it would look stupid running and ad campaign to say hey; I'm a woman. I suppose Ms. Healey could help people like me by changing her name to Angelina or something like that, but again, it would probably hurt her chances if people found out. Maybe this is just a problem I have. If so, I'm not sure how to get over it.

Wendell Willkie Cannot Catch a Break

Oh, North Korea. I warned you that underground nuclear tests were a mug's game. I told you that bad things would happen if you exploded a nuclear bomb underground, but you went and did it anyway. Conduct a secret test and it must follow, as the night the day, that nobody believes you.

If you haven't been following the news, apparently seismic data has led us to conclude that North Korea's bomb was only 550 tons, too small to be a simple nuclear weapon. At the same time, this is rather big to be a conventional weapon. If I had 55o tons of TNT, I wouldn't waste it on a fake test that most people wouldn't believe. (I would make a video and put it up on YouTube, like those Mentos & Coke guys. I would be an Internet Sensation.) I guess now we're waiting for atmospheric analysis, waiting to see if rare isotopes appear above Korea. That will take a while, and also be boring.

So North Korea, until this gets resolved one way or another, I'm going to have to rescind my dedication. You made yourself look bad, and you made me look bad, but you made Wendell Willkie look bad too. And I cannot forgive that.

Bibliography

It is important to have good grammar. Everybody knows that. If you have bad grammar, it is one of the surest signs you can give that you are a stupid person. Not an infallible sign, it's true. There are idiot savants of all kinds, waiting in the wings to falsify our claims about what is necessary for true intelligence. But let's say that grammar, having to do with how we express ourselves to the world, is awfully important.

Some people like to take this good principle too far. If a little grammar is good, then the best grammar must be as hidebound as the court of Louis XIV. And nowhere is this more apparent than in bibliographies and citations. If you have written a bibliography, then you know that it is vitally important where the commas go, where the italics go, and where the date of publication goes. It is also important whether the city of publication is followed by the state. If you do any of these things wrong, then you have what is colloquially known as a "wrong bibliography".

It's not hard to see how things got to this state. Scholars, like all people who make enough money to get by, are panicky about status. It's hard to see whether Professor A's article on the mating habits of icky bugs is more prestigious than Professor B's article deconstructing the Bible (patriarchal themes dominate). What is easy to see is that Professor B didn't indent his citations properly. Nobody wants to fall at the last fence like that, and so bibliography, like all other quantifiable things, becomes important.

You might say, why aren't these things important? They're just like grammar after all, a way to tell the world at large how smart you are, or to demonstrate your stupidity by fouling up. Why am I complaining about citations and references?

The difference is that bibliographies and prose are used for very different things. People are always saying that language is just a way to communicate information. They're wrong, but they'd be right if they were talking about citations. Nobody sits down to just read a bibliography, or complains because they're too muddled to make any sense. If somebody sets out to find the publisher of a book, they cannot possibly do better than finding the publisher. There is no way their experience could have been improved. By contrast, there are a million ways to word a sentence, and they all convey subtly different meanings (the ungrammatical sentences being worse than the grammatical ones, by and large).

So what would be lost by throwing out the rules for bibliography? I can word them however I want, just so long as the information is transmitted. If I judge that listing Author, title, date, etc. in bullet-point format is the best way, why shouldn't I? Or if I'd rather communicate the information in sonnet form, that should be my prerogative.

There would be some concern about whether non-standard bibliographies and citations really would get the information across, but that is a burden we take on anyway, whenever we write a sentence. Rules of grammar in English sentences leave a lot up to the discretion of the writer. We're allowed to write "...that that...," even if it's an awkward construction, just because we want to. Indeed, rather than prevent this sort of thing, bibliographical syntax locks us into it. Think

Nacht, Walter. Boring Research I Have Done. Somewhere: Some Press, 2005

looks awkward? Too bad. You don't have any choice. Those op cits are going to find their way into your paper whether you like it or not, and all because everybody's too scared to say "no". I doubt I will ever have to write a paper with proper citations again. I put the odds at 2-1. But if I ever do, I'm not going to play their game. I'm going to cite my sources in proper, English sentences. I learned this language, and damned if I'm not going to use it. Who's with me?

End of Assist

I hope you like this triptych-style illustration of cocaine use, according to Scientology. I think this would make a good series of sculptures, cast in bronze, with the suffering thetan's features horribly distorted. I'm not sure how you'd portray his memories, but then I'm not a sculptor. I think this calls for mixed media.

I also hope you like this explanation of How to Make a Person Sober. Once again, as with so many other facets of life, the Church of Scientology is proving the NIH wrong. Coffee can't bring you down? Only time can sober you up? More like, "The only thing that reverses the effects of alcohol is Scientology."

Falconry

I don't particularly want a falcon. I don't like hawks. They always look like they're mad, and considering that they're antisocial birds of prey, they probably always are. But if there's anything that is going to make me descend into insane libertarianism, it's falconry regulations.

The US government, for reasons all its own, had decided that one thing we need to heavily regulate is pet birds. I can understand wanting to regulate steel mills and chlorine factories and nuclear arms posession, but falcons? Here are some of the US guidelines: To own one falcon, you must, "pass a written test, have your equipment and facilities inspected, and serve a minimum of two years as an apprentice under a licensed falconer." It is illegal to ever keep more than three falcons. State laws are usually stricter still.

Now apart from the fact that it might be fun to take a falconry test ("Inspirational people can be a huge force on our lives. Describe a falconer in your life who has inspired you to overcome adversity or challenge yourself"), this is a big old nuisance. I know that falcons are hard to take care of. They presumably require a lot of exercise (or else what? They get crankier still?) and need a lot of training, being stupid and all. And I know that poaching birds from the wild is the kind of thing the government just discourages in general.

But what is the catastrophe that they are trying to prevent here? Someone has a falcon, and manages it badly, and...? The falcon attacks people? This would be an amusing outcome, but I don't think birds usually go on the rampage. They tend to avoid people. It would take a lot of training, and a lot of skill, to make your hawk into a murderer. These regulations are not going to prevent that.

Nobody likes falcon abuse, but it's not a big problem. The number of people who shell out for a raptor, then mistreat it is probably way smaller than the number of people who mistreat their dogs. We don't keep dogs under federal lock and key. The falcon problem is even less bad than the dog-and-cat problem, as a matter of fact. If you get a falcon, and discover that killer birds are not for you, just let it go. Release that bird into the wild. They revert to a feral state after a few weeks. No harm done.

Someone would probably say that these regulations are in place to track falcons and prevent destruction of nests, theft of fledglings etc. But possession of chickadees and field mice isn't regulated so harshly, even though it's a crime to capture these animals. Prosecute the destruction of nests if you want (but does the US really need another red-tailed hawk?) but look the other way if I have a little bird. I say if you want to get a pet falcon, more power to you.

North Korea

This was originally in honor of Wendell Willkie, who died on this day, but I had to rededicate it. North Korea just exploded a nuclear bomb. Willkie isn't getting any deader.


Congratulations North Korea. This is your big day. My 300th entry is dedicated to you.

Update Above (Below)

Scavenger Hunt

Okay gang, on the count of three, I want you to all scatter to the links around this site --> http://www.romantic-lyrics.com/ <-- and come back with the following items:

• 2 suggestions that would get you arrested for stalking
• 3 places to touch or kiss that are not even a little bit sexual
• 3 ways to kiss that would make you giggle too much to ever kiss anybody
  
• 6 date ideas that are clearly sublimated psychosexual games
• 6 date ideas that would be improved by getting piss-drunk first
• 5 claims that your wedding is the happiest day of your life
• 5 claims that white stands for purity
• 1 flirting tip that will land you in possession of a necktie

Emoticons

• :-Q
• :-C
• :-+
• :-@ (my second-favorite)
• :-&
• :-?
• :-G

You have to use your imagination with some of these, but once you get the hang of it, I think you'll agree that the extra effort was worth it. The great thing about people is that we can contextualize anything into a face. Hooray for evolutionary pressures.

Antisocial Personality Disorder

Also known as psychopathy. It is important to rename diseases every now and then in psychology, because they become epithets as fast as can be. I don't think APD is a slur yet, but give it a few years. I am distressed to see that, unlike every other problem that people might have, APD does not have thousands of internet support groups.

Accoring to this, "Care must be utilized by group leaders to ensure the group doesn't become a "How-to" course in criminal behavior." When you come to think of it, most supervillian organizations like SPECTRE, or those Batman partnerships, probably got started in mis-run APD support groups.

There is this one windblown outpost, but it is not attracting a lot of buzz. I don't want you to think I am making fun of people with mental problems, but at least in the case of APD, they'd do it to me if they got the chance. Anyway, I'm not sure it bothers them.

P.S. There is a link at the bottom, to an advertiser: "Aphrodite's Love Poetry." Aphrodite? You're wasting your money.

"Harper's Magazine"

If you are in search of a good time, I ask you to look up the people on http://www.blogger.com who claim to be interested in Harper's Magazine. To put it briefly, they are a bunch of froot loops. Didn't I tell you Harper's was the best magazine in the galaxy cluster?

Daniel Craig Is Not Bond

Speaks for itself. It answers one major question right away: Is Daniel Craig Bond? No.

If you like James Bond movies, you will get approximately 9000000000 times more out of this website than I will. You will probably come down for, or against, Daniel Craig. What you will appreciate, even if you are me, is the fan art: You can't prove it's not art.

Dumbness

What ever happened to dumbness as a category? It used to go, deaf -- blind -- dumb. Those were the three communications deficits people had. I think I have read several fairy tales involving three characters with these defects, respectively. I forget how the stories came out, but I am pretty sure that the hero consistently got the girl (the youngest of a prime number of daughters).

Is anybody dumb anymore? I have never met anybody who was largely normal, and could hear, but was unable to say a word. Which is not to say that I would have, if dumb people existed. I don't know any deaf or blind people, either. Are there any case studies of a mute person, who is otherwise normal?

If so, I want to be that person's friend. I bet he's a lot of fun to be around. I bet he has great handwriting. He has great mastery of facial expressions and body language. In short, he is the perfect person, and I can't understand why he hasn't already had an article dedicated to him in the New York Times Magazine (which just ran an article on thalidomide baby opera singers. Now that's lame).

You know what I think? I don't think dumb people ever existed. I think they were probably just autistic people all along. Autistic people are like the textbook definition of no fun. I'm not sure I want to read any fairy tales about them.

Sugar of Lead

A few months ago, the New Yorker ran an article about sugar substitutes. They listed all the new ones, aspartame, saccharin and sucralose. They considerately wasted many paragraphs on how each one differed from sugar in taste. As I recall, the author thought that none of them were satisfactory, but that a combination of them might be. This is not true, because all artificial sweetners taste like sweat.

They also covered some natural sweeteners, like stevia, that are favored by bad people. Those taste like baking soda. The reviewer didn't like those either. They were very thorough, but they didn't review that classic sweetener, lead acetate. As you may know, this was produced by Romans, who boiled wine in lead basins until it turned to syrup. The syrup was called sapa and some people think it made the ancient Romans insane. It did not.

The New Yorker did not review lead acetate. This is probably not a surprise to anybody, because it is a little poisonous, but I was disappointed anyway. It's not very poisonous. It's so non-toxic that a great civilization used it as a condiment. It is not so harmless as aspartame, but what is? Surely you can put a quarter-teaspoon of it in your mouth in relative safety. You can even spit it out if you want, afterwards. See? It's not so hard.

The New Yorker is supposed to be on top of these things. If they're not going to tell us what lead acetate tastes like, who is? Not me. I would make it myself, and report back to you, (when the real reporters are not doing their jobs, you turn to me) but where do you even get lead? They don't make shot out of it any more. Or pipes. Can you go to Home Depot and buy sheets of lead? I'm not sure why they would sell it. They would probably give your name to the FBI, who would think you were trying to commit clumsy terrorism.

I'm going to save us all the trouble and just guess. Sugar of lead tastes like holding a penny all day, then putting sugar on your hand and licking it off. You heard it here first.

Margin of Error

It's election season, and that means it is time for something that bothers me about polls. Actually, polls happen all the year round, because there is literally no such thing as too many polls. But seeing as the elections are about a month away, it might be an appropriate time to say that all you poll watchers are way too hidebound.

Gallup will release a new poll, with margin of error 3.5 points, showing candidate A with 40 points, and candidate B with 42 points. Some people will say, well oh, candidate B is ahead. Which is probably a facile reading, but fundamentally correct. All the evidence suggests that candidate B is ahead. He is not ahead with 95% certainty, but he is ahead with at least 50% certainty. Bet on candidate B.

Lots of people will tell you, though, that no, nothing can be inferred from this poll. The margin of error is 3.5 percent, and anything less than that is statistically insignificant. Probably if you tried to submit this poll to a sociological journal, they would reject your findings. But they would only reject your findings because 95% confidence is a convention among scholars (pollsters wish they were scholars.)

Journals could choose to run papers that found a correlation with 51% confidence, if they so desired. The papers would usually be right. The papers would tell us something. They would add to the sum of human knowledge, rather than detract. There are obvious reasons journals don't do that, most of which involve the journal wanting to parcel out its space, resources and prestige on the papers that offer the most return. The same, of course is true of newspapers, so they tend to prefer polls whose results fall outside the margin of error.

Of course with the internet these days, and increasingly hysterical partisans, the threshold for poll-acceptability is falling. And rightly so. Don't tell me that only polls that venture outside the margin of error are significant. It's a made-up number. Every poll is significant, if you have enough spare time to read it.

Oh, Snap

I'm going to say, up front: I have no idea what Aesthetic Realism is about. I am obviously suspicious of anything whose mission statement is this garbled:

3. All beauty is a making one of opposites, and the making one of opposites is what we are going after in ourselves.

But maybe it's not a cult. Maybe it's just... I don't know, something that's not a cult. Like if you thought Transcendental Meditation was not a cult, this would probably fall in the same non-cultish category for you.

If they wanted to be a cult though, they would have a head start. First, they have the obligatory sinister-smile founder:



And second, they discredit their enemies:

The method of those attacking[aesthetic realism] is to create lies so numerous and massive that a reader would feel, “There must be something to this.” It’s the “Big Lie” approach, which has been around often in history.

Most of the web pages are those of a Michael Bluejay. He is someone who, on his personal website, has published naked pictures of himself—including photos of himself in full frontal nudity, and riding a tricycle naked. He also points as a source of pride to his having worn "a dress to a strip club" without having gotten "beat up."

Mr. Bluejay? I don't want to say that you're in the wrong here. Maybe Aesthetic Realism is an evil cult. I don't know. But I gotta say, they make a good case.

Medieval Beer

People must have such a low opinion of the Middle Ages. You can't open an internet community encyclopedia these days without coming across the most popular fact in the world. They all want you to believe that beer was the medieval drink of choice, because European water tended to be contaminated. Beer was usually safe.

This is pretty dumb on somebody's part, either the medieval brewers or the present day cranks. The idea is that the beer is safer than the ambient water, because the water to make beer is either pure to begin with, or has been boiled. If the water wasn't pure, the beer would have gone bad, or died or something. So of course beer is less bacterial than water, but only because most people don't boil their drinking water beforehand (or have it imported from artesian springs). It is no easier to get drinkable beer than it is to get drinkable water.

You hear this about tea sometimes, too. Honestly? I think people drank those things because they liked them. Next, we are going to hear that people made mustard seeds into sauce because it was too dangerous to leave them like they were.

Your Wikipedia Sentence For Today

"A bank director, infinitely rich, has a mermaid in the pond of his garden, infinitely avaricious."

I know this isn't a particularly ill-formed or unintentionally meaningful sentence, but I thought I would share it with you anyway. I think an illustration of this sentence would make a good renaissance-style painting, or tarot card picture.

This Looks Wrong...

...but it feels so right.

Ellipsis

I think my favorite thing about this Mark Foley sex scandal is the e-mails. I know the instant messages were a lot of fun for everyone, but now that we have the e-mails, we can see: Congressman Foley is an ellipsis user.

I am in North Carolina.. and it was !00 in New Orleans... wow thats really hot... well do you miss DC... Its raining here but 68 degrees so who can argue..did you have fun at your conference.... what do you want for your birthday coming up...what stuff do you like to do

I do not understand why people write like that. About 25 percent of internet users punctuate everything with an ellipsis. I guess ellipses can, without looking too bad, stand in for a period or a comma, and it might be handy to have them around so you don't get stuck like the ass between the two bales of hay.

But are there people who think that using it for absolutely everything looks good? Surely they can see that normal writing doesn't look like that. This doesn't excuse most other people, but perhaps Congressman Foley just didn't have the time. If you're stupid, I guess it takes a while to think, "semicolon or period? Or is it comma?" I'm willing to accept that he is a busy man, and doesn't have the time to do more than the bare minimum of syntax.

Still, it's funny. I can just imagine him breathing heavily into mouse, pretending it's a telephone receiver, as he types. Almost whispering into it, and the elipses stand for rough, raspy breaths. I don't want to say he was typing with one hand, 'cause that's a dumb joke, but he definitely captured the spirit of molestation with his punctuation style. So watch out, internet people. From now on, if you use an ellipsis at me, I am reporting you to the page board.

I Actually Didn't Like That Story

Maybe you should read this website. It has a lot of ideas. About 5/6 of them are entertaining, and about 1/4 of them are good. I only have so many ways to recommend a website that I like, and I think I used them all up on the last entry. So. Endorsement.

Actually, the most interesting thing about this website is how closely it resembles in inverse curve. If you plotted the entries over time, they would fall approximately on the line y = c/{t - December 2, 2005}. I know most blog posting declines in this way, but I don't think I've ever seen somebody start out so prolific, and decline so far. Not that I blame him. How can anybody sustain that kind of pace for so many months in a row?

With any luck, his increasingly sluggish idea pace will mean that he never dies, but actually enters a "hibernation" state, producing only one idea a year, then every ten years, and so on. Presumably he will outlive the sun, and go on to discover a cure for heat death, like in that Asimov story.

This Profile Has Been Set... to Murder

My hat goes off to whoever designed http://www.teenwatchforparents.com. You should probably go read it. The delightful bits can scarcely be described. I want The MySpace deGeneration for my birthday. Not so much because I think it would be fun to read, but to show my appreciation. Also I think it really would be fun to read.

P.S. This website describes MySpace as "American youth's latest drug." That's ten Dr. Phil points for you, my friend.

Just Cram It In There

These are some of the foods that www.pfaf.org thinks you aren't getting enough of in your diet. I guess the idea is that as long as you're eating other things, why not stick these in there? Just open up your mouth and direct them towards the big wet hole.

Caucus of Rock

Here are some band names I thought up, if the House of Representatives ever wanted to form a rock group. I don't know anything about naming rock and roll groups, but I probably know more than Dennis Hastert.
Adapted from --> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congressional_caucus

Brain Injury Task Force
Congestion Coalition
Congressional Submarine Caucus
Nuclear Issues
Correctional Officers Caucus
Unexploded Ordnance
Addiction - Treatment - Recovery
Bipartisan Cerebral Palsy

Possible Contexts for Foreign Tongue-Twisters

Courtesy of Wikipedia, here are some occasions on which you might want to say a foreign tongue-twister:

• To explain that three words on a sign ("Kari og Ole") have been moved further away from each other.
• In a conversation between two women from Schleitheim on a train discussing whether a toddler is allowed to lick the windowpane.
• When you want to know whether you're asking whether the manager is really the manager.
• Just before you cover Eastern Europe
• "Come to the ceiling to take a look at a fly that was killed on the wallpaper." Speaks for itself.
• If your father is an ewe.
• When a (criminal) Hessian has stolen your ashtray.

The Rapping Rep

House of Representatives member Major R. Owens "writes rap lyrics that explore the most important issues of the day." They are really awesome. Major Owens, if I were Speaker, I would nominate you to be chairman of House subcommittee on raps. How can West Coast congressmen compete with:

...Fight eminent domain
Unjust strain
A civic stain
Eminent domain is
Democracy slain!

They clearly can't. Congressman Owens is out there living the raw, rough life of a House member, and writing raps that can only come from the heart. "I would like to ask my good friend, the honorable representative Charles Rangel, to beatbox for me." This is a case where there are lots of different things you can say to make fun of Congressman Owens, but I sincerely think it's sweet. Good for you, Congressman Owens. It's good to have hobbies. Keep on rapping.