More Mental Mojo

Cleaning House for the Holiday

noreply@blogger.com (Thomas Hardman) — Tue, 29 May 2012 19:24:00 +0000

Recently, someone I know from way back in high-school days calls me up and tells me I ought to go to the Rockville (MD) Hometown Holidays.

I have long since decided that I want to be extremely scant, as a rule, in any information I give out to him, or anyone for that matter, over the phone when I can't see who all else is in the room listening to the speakerphone. And as a rule I usually try to be polite when I demur invitations to grace this or that affair with my presence. However, I think I might have been a little rude at first and increasingly moreso as the call progressed. My final words were pretty much "you've got a lot of nerve to even ask me and I say not just No but FUCK NO". Not quite so forcefully said, but that's pretty much it.

I'm pretty much boycotting Rockville and have been doing so for some years. This mostly stems from the fact that the Rockville Police Department was hamstrung, along with all other Maryland police forces, by the fact that there were very few crimes for which officers who weren't also witnesses could move forward with investigation or arrest unless the victim went to a Commissioner of Police and swore out a complaint. I used to be pretty well abused anytime I went across Rock Creek into Rockville and on those occasions where it hurt me enough to actually complain to the cops, they basically told me to fuck off and get lost. Then again, for years and years -- about 15 or so -- I got the exact same treatment from the County cops, who could have saved me a lot of time by just telling me "we're not empowered to enforce the law without a warrant from the Commissioner". Yet such is the difference in professionalism between the two departments that at least the County officers politely listened and did nothing, while the Rockville police radiated hostility and then did nothing. And when my complaints are received with hostility by the police force of some jurisdiction, that's a jurisdiction in which I shall spend as little time as possible, and certainly no money I can spend in places more welcoming.

Then there was that little double-incident on March 17th where I dared to try to buy groceries in Rockville -- and got bird-dogged by two different cops that the City claims don't work for them. That was just icing on the cake, so to speak, and the cherry on top of the icing was when I tried to work through their chain of command and as near as I can tell, was made the subject of a multiple-agency SWAT operation that was aborted only seconds before a forced entry on the basis that I was a probably psychotic terrorist with known militia wackjob tendencies. Well, that's Rockville for you. Comport yourself with dignity and the locals will untie your shoelaces and stab you in the back of the neck, and the cops will organize try to arrest or kill you if you dare to complain.

But I digress.

The close of Probate draws near. Much of the interior contents of the house have been removed to consignment for liquidation, and the rest of it will be going soon.

However, whatever remains here remains under my responsibility, and although it is covered by a combination of the homeowner's insurance redounding to the Estate and renter's insurance I got to double-cover my own properties, I still don't want to have to deal with the paperwork or the shopping that would be required if the place gets burglarized.

Before too long, there won't be much in the house that's not far too big to carry off, and most of everything else will be insured and generic and easily replaced. Even then, I will be trying to clear out the place. While there's no great need to repair or replace anything in the interior, it's time to tear out some wallpaper and paint the interior, that sort of thing. The less furniture I have here, the less things I need to cover with tarps. The ultimate goal is to clear out the place to the point where everything I have can be easily and quickly squeezed into a rather small shipping container.

But do I once again digress?

As I told my homeboy on the phone, he's got to be nuts if he thinks I'm going to go hang out in Rockville at some pretentious little bash the city puts on every year to pat itself on the back and let the politicians think they're doing something useful. No, I do not like crowds, you know, I told him, and as time goes on I like them less and less.

But you used to go down to DC to this and that event, he says, and that's a fact and I agree, with the explanation: that was because I was going some place to do something, or to see someone. I didn't tell him this but it should go without saying: Generally speaking, the District doesn't weird me out just because it's the District. If it wasn't a half-hour drive with no free parking anywhere, I'd spend most of my time there, because unlike Rockville, it's actually important, and actually interesting things happen there.

The District doesn't weird me out, and quite a lot of people who are actually from there (or close enough to be considered locals) know me well enough to point me out as someone you respect enough to hang out with and occasionally invite to parties. There are people down there I've been boozing it up with since the mid-1980s and we might not be close friends but we are known quantities not at odds with each other. Many of the spies and vampires might mutter "son of a bitch" when they see me, but even they will shut down anyone trying to diss me as a God Damn Tourist, by telling them "he lives here".

And in my heart, I do. Such a shame I can't make it down there anymore. There are few things more spectacular than watching the sun rise over the Capital Building, and watching them run up the flags. You can really feel the love. That's something I've never felt in Rockville, or any of the surrounding areas.

There's something special about that building, you know. From the National Archives (correspondence between the Commissioners to Thomas Jefferson regarding construction of the Capitol and White House)

On December 24, 1792, Thomas Hardman, overseer, and 24 laborers working under him were paid for 64 days service for assisting the surveyors [...] a December 1794, payroll lists 26 laborers working under Hardman. Only thirteen were slaves [...]

There's other stuff floating around, something to do with being in charge of counting salmon colored bricks.

I probably should have found or made a way to move back downtown, but it was not to be.

Noted in passing:

Today was "snake day" along the Rock Creek Park Trail. Just off of the trail, a good sized King Snake, clearly on the hunt. Also, a tiny little thing, splotched with shades of brown, lying right there in the middle of the trail. I'm pretty sure it was a baby copperhead. With a stick, I prodded him until he crawled off into the weeds, where he won't get run over by cyclists.
Though "Dust Wars" activity is down somewhat, it's still ongoing. Over the holiday, it was pretty much every other car that was blowing visible clouds of nasty dust out of their windows, making signs at nose height, and then hanging their arms out of the car windows like they just proved they were a man or somesuch simian crap. Yet another reason to not hang out in crowd. Or for that matter, go shopping. Clearly these people don't want me to come out of my house and spend money at local businesses. I think that I agree: so long as they are on the streets, I don't spend one cent here which I don't actually need to spend.

Frankly, I think the cops need to do the obvious thing, which is to put a lot of plainclothes officers in quite a few unmarked cars and cruise up and down various secondary arterials. East-bound Bobby can call West-bound Larry and say "I see 12 cars down Larry, and the hispanic asshole in the crappy blue Camry five cars ahead of you just dusted me"... and about 20 cars behind East-bound Bobby, East-bound Arturo comes across the double-yellow line into a crappy blue Camry and totals both cars. While Arturo and the perpetrator are duking it out, West-bound Larry comes up and snags the evidence, which will probably be in a 10cc screw-top vial rolling around on the floorboards. It will be interesting to know the composition of this stuff. Is it just plain old-fashioned Goofer Dust or is it something more... Taliban? You know, something liberated from the Libyan weapons stores and foisted off on superstitious boneheads here with the explanation "it gonna fix that white devil you don't like".

Anyway. I am on a consumer strike until this shit stops, and remember, "justice left unseen is justice left undone". Further, I think it's very important that these terrorists win, so as I am cleaning house for the holiday, I'm packing to move away.

It Takes A Village to Raise A Village Idiot, Part 1

noreply@blogger.com (Thomas Hardman) — Tue, 22 May 2012 18:45:00 +0000

First, an apology for my over-the-top postings over the last few weeks. I always get seriously outraged when we have Dust Wars.

These always occur to some some degree towards the close of the school year, at least in the last five or so years. Yet in most years "they" don't go so madly buzzing about filling the air with nastiness. This year, for me at least, it started when I put signs in my yard about upcoming meeting of the Aspen Hill Civic Association, Inc. And interestingly enough, the night of their semi-annual General Membership meeting, the moment I took the signs down and took them back to their owner, the harassment stopped. Totally. On that instant. I'd call that pretty damn well an obvious case of cause and effect.

I can only associate this with the whole sad affair being a political gang action to dissuade me from attending. However, anyone who thinks that I'm a big enough risk to their political ambitions so as to warrant sending around a couple dozen or so minions to play chemical warfare, well, I'm pretty sure that you got noticed for what you are and how you operate. And I'm perfectly able to communicate my opinions without showing up at public meetings where I am in any case already quite uncomfortable. If anyone was hoping to keep me from showing up and voicing a well-reasoned argument in support of something, anything, to replace the dead space of the former BAE Building in the Aspen Hill Central Business District, I certainly didn't show up... but people you dare not harass did show up and there will be motion in the direction we want. And if it was to keep me from speaking out against relaxing the rules for Accessory Apartments, let's just say that it's a lot more people than just me who will force the issue to be resolved in our favor at the Planning Board and County Council. That is all. Chemical warfare from foreign gangsters notwithstanding. You might be able to keep me pinned down inside, but you can't do it to everyone. If you even try, on the one hand you'll be dealing with the Department of Homeland Security and on the other hand you'll be dealing with open revolution from people who have had about enough of the American Hating Foreign Racists and Assholes Who Instigate Them.

That's all of the over-the-top that you're getting from me today.

Well, here's a little video experiment in Irony and Altitude.

I should mention that this was filmed with one of the first of the New Generation of remote-controlled model helicopters. This is a smallish one -- the bare bones unit is about the size of a shoebox -- and there will soon be much less-expensive models which have even greater capabilities. This one is marketed to the semi-skilled technophile, the sort of person who is adept with their iPod(tm) or Android(tm). The Next Generation which should start hitting the markets within 18 months are far more capable:

Note that FAA is relaxing rules on drone operations on US soil amid significant privacy concerns.

I should mention, in passing, that my own unit is, of course, Made In China, although the developers and the originators of the software are a French company, Parrot.

Of course, privacy is an evolving concern in the modern day. For example, despite repeated attempts to build a laptop-based controller using the vendor's software-development kit ("SDK"), I was never able to get that to work, and had to buy an iPod Touch(tm), a tiny little device that comes equipped with a 3-axis gyro and accelerometer sensor set along with everything else. The app for that works great.

Yet having paid for this device with a debit card, to get much use out of it at all, I had to provide almost as much information as I'd have to supply to apply for a passport, everything except for the Social Security number. I predict that this handy gadget will spend most of its time at home plugged into a charger and turned off, unless I'm bored enough to play Angry Birds or actually pay attention to Twitter... or if I'm using it for a drone controller. Frankly I have privacy concerns, mostly to do with the eventuality that if I carried it everywhere and had the location reporter activated, it would not likely be long before it started sending me alerts to super hot deals every time I walked into any store.

Yet most people seem to accept a total loss of privacy as being a price of progress.

One question that might seem reasonable is this: given that the Supreme Court has long since ruled that searches may be considered reasonable of conducted from the air, which might not be reasonable if conducted on the ground, should people be worried about the proliferation of such devices as my little hobby toy?

You see, if I was a police officer, and you were smoking marijuana in your back yard where I could not see you, and the wind was blowing in such a way that I could not smell you, if I were to enter into your back yard and arrest you, almost any court would invalidate the arrest. There was (and could be) no reasonable suspicion not stemming from actual trespassing without a warrant.

If, however, I was a police officer flying in a plane, and looked down and saw someone smoking marijuana in their back yard, I could certainly transmit that reasonable suspicion to an officer on the ground and he could maneuver until he could smell it, and there's reasonable suspicion and you're busted. That one, or a variant or three on that theme, has been to the Supreme Court and they allowed it.

Airplanes are expensive and fuel is also costly. Helicopters used to fill the air, and now you hardly ever hear them chopping by, now that fuel costs eight times as much as it did in 1980. Yet my little hobby toy is electrical, very lightweight, and not large at all. It can ascend to and hover at about three times the altitude seen in the video, above, and if I were a police officer, I could see a heck of a lot of backyards. The drone types now allowed by the FAA, and affordable mostly to organizations of a minimum size comparable to your average fire department or police department, have far greater capabilities in terms of time aloft, reliable control link distances, and potentially for onboard equipment such as signals intercept or multiple cameras with high-quality optics and telephoto lenses.

Yet let's not just look at the ramifications of ubiquitous law enforcement in the form of a hovering camera drone at every 4-way stop sign, despite the fact that this would be a tax bonanza far beyond even the avaricious dreams of people who put speed cameras on every other block.

Let's look at the ramifications of a time perhaps 30 years from now, when all of the hot young techie gals have aged into suspicious matrons who really want to know whose kids are doing what over there at the park.

More to come! (We promise that we personally will, like German broadcast television, never retain or broadcast any images whatsoever of attractive females.)

Nazi Punks Fuck Off, Or, Waving Goodbye With A Smile

noreply@blogger.com (Thomas Hardman) — Sat, 12 May 2012 12:27:00 +0000

But before they lay down,
the men of the city,
even the men of Sodom,
compassed the house round,
both young and old,
all the people from every quarter; [...]

As of next August, I will have lived here for 50 years.

Where's "here"?

"Here" is Aspen Hill, Montgomery County Maryland, in the Greater Washington DC Metropolitan Area of the United States. It goes without saying that this is on the homeworld Earth, but I thought I'd mention it anyway.

This place once had a great many things to recommend it. First, in the beginning, in the 1960s, Montgomery County had some of the most excellent schools in the nation, and given that so many of the parental generation at the time were some of the best and brightest people alive, working in the service of their nation as employees of the Federal government or its many technical contracting firms, the greatest asset of the community was the people, both the parent generation and their children.

When we moved here, the neighborhood was far from complete. We lived at one extreme end of a subdivision where houses were still being built or had just been completed. A very few trees remained from before the subdivision and development, but mostly this was a lot of former farmer's fields which still had the occasional fence posts in this or that yard, still studded with scraps of barbed wire. In my back yard is a beech tree, a mature specimen which I could once encircle with both of my childish hands. Now it's far too large to reach embrace with both arms. Face it. I'm a tree hugger. I was a tree hugger then, and I'm a tree hugger now, even when the trees are too big to hug, and even when they are -- much like myself -- well entered into the ending phases of their lives.

When I was a kid, I liked the people just fine, most of them, anyway. Now, having lived here almost 50 years, I barely speak to any of them. I don't go out from my yard other than because I must, to shop for essentials or to get some exercise. When I take a walk, I don't take it on the streets of my neighborhood because quite frankly they are unsafe. It's not because of the sort of crime that you find in police statistics, however. So what is it that keeps me effectively a prisoner without conviction, or even visible jailers?

Second Witch
   By the pricking of my Thumbs,
   Something wicked this way comes.
   Open, Locks,
   Whoever knocks.

[Enter Macbeth.]

Macbeth
   How now, you secret, black, and midnight Hags?
   What is't you do?

All
        A deed without a name.

My mother's dead, and seeing her through her declining years was the main reason I've stayed when, quite frankly, far too many the locals have gone so far out of their way to be unbearable pricks that if it weren't for Mom I'd have preferred to be homeless anyplace else rather than have a home here.

There's a really great movie called Europa, Europa, in which a Jewish teenager escapes the Holocaust -- just barely -- by pretending to be an Aryan and joining the Hitler Youth.

There are some scenes in there that really resonate with me. No, not the part about him spending hours a day trying to stretch his foreskin so that he will look uncircumcised and could fearlessly shower with his Nazi "friends". There's a part where he's almost ready to confess to his girlfriend, and she starts talking about how horrid are the Jews and how she longs for the day when they're all dead, and says something to the effect of how she hopes that they save a few for her to kill. Through this fine (if chilling) performance by the young and lovely Julie Delpy, one sees a fine depiction of one of the more frightening and yet deeply human emotions: a bloodthirsty race hatred. Yes, as she speaks in sweet tones of longing and passion about murder of every last Jew in the world, you can see every last tooth in her head as the protagonist finally realizes that she's not smiling at him with affection, she's smiling like she can't wait to lock her teeth into someone's spurting neck. And that if at that moment he had confessed, he probably would have been that someone.

I see that smile all too often hereabouts. Quite frequently it's on the face of someone who has just uttered the word "bloodsucker". Frankly I'm less worried about any supposed bloodsuckers and more worried about the people smiling their bloodthirsty smiles of racist rapture and talking about "kill them all". Because, thinking back to "Europa, Europa", the only reason that Delpy's character wasn't out there actually participating in "kill them all" was the fact that in the story, she was slightly too young a teenager.

Here in the occasional modern eruption of bloodthirsty race hatred that washes across Aspen Hill and the greater region, no teenager is considered too young.

Once they'd seen what the Christian Germans were capable of becoming and doing, those Jews that survived almost universally left that part of Europe. I cannot imagine anyone going through that three times and still remaining. Not even if it had the best schools on the continent and lots of ethnic restaurants.

I'm not sure, to tell the truth, how anyone could call schools "the best" when they don't take really extreme measures to cover the history and the horror of mass perversion of mob psychology, and aggressively teach all students how important it is to have their own solid moral and ethical standards which intentionally shy away from mob action, or even mob affiliation. Regardless of academic standards and top flight instructional process, I couldn't call a school system "best" which seems to promote a state of alert readiness to organize and aggressively develop mobs and their chain-of-command or communications systems.

And to judge from recent observations, "why of course we have a smartphone App for that!" Whether it's developed, released and controlled by the schools or a consortium of local religious institutions, I couldn't say, but I think that unless the local, state, and federal governments want to be in the position of looking as if they don't just condone but actively support this, they need to be able to say. Publicly, and with authority. As in "there will be immense fines and significant prison time".

During the recent irruption of mass psychosis, I see two girls walking home from school with another much smaller girl. Watching the body language and listening as best I could from across the street, the older teens were informing the younger one of what was going on and how she could be expected to participate... and they were smiling that bloodthirsty nazi smile. Other bizarre stuff was happening, such as a police officer setting up a checkpoint at my intersection, etc. A little while later, the officer left, and back up the street came the two teens, looking glum as if someone had just stolen their cookie jar, reading texts off of their cellphones, with their little girl charge in tow. And as they passed, the little girl kept looking at me, and looking at them, and all of it back and forth, and all with the same smile we see on Julie Delpy's face in "Europa, Europa"... and she's asking "can we do it now? Can we?" Out of the mouths of babes you shall hear truth.

And that's why I'm clearing out the house to ready it for sale. I do not want to live someplace where the teenagers are instructed by their cellphones to teach first-graders to look forward to satisfying their nazi bloodthirst...

And that's just one tip of an iceberg in an Arctic ocean full of them.

Ringleader, Ringleader, Henchman, Stooge

noreply@blogger.com (Thomas Hardman) — Wed, 09 May 2012 20:03:00 +0000

It's astonishing how many people hear that there's a riot in progress and decide that they're going to run right out and join in.

But that's Montgomery County, Maryland, for you.

I have no idea what sets these people off, other than that they think they smell blood in the water and they do their best imitation of sharks in a feeding frenzy.

It's really difficult to even try to imagine how any collection of people could be more contemptible. Yet there's a saying that comes right out of Scripture that for the sake of 10 good men, a city or nation or world could be preserved. The willful sinners will of course get their own reward in their own way and in their own time, this is something on which almost all religions and ethical systems agree.

Yet I cannot wait until the next time I see them running around in the streets waving their hands and wailing about how bad things are, when I know them so very well and can realistically say that they didn't get a tenth of what they deserve.

I think I'll go crash some stock markets now.

Perhaps A Little Explanation Is Long Overdue

noreply@blogger.com (Thomas Hardman) — Tue, 08 May 2012 21:12:00 +0000

It may have come to the attention of certain powers that be that upon occasion, I will be out working in my yard, smoking a cigarette, trying to relax, whatever... and someone will go driving by and I immediately give them the finger and look pretty goddamn furious.

Here's the explanation. I am in fact furious. But first some background...

There are various chemicals out there which are listed as "generally regarded as safe", or "GRAS" in terms of the Food and Drug Administration and industries which answer to that Federal agency.

"GRAS" products have in the past included such things as peanuts, peanut butter and other peanut-derived products, white glue, and gelatin. White glue and gelatine are no longer on the GRAS list, or are listed in a sidebar to the GRAS list, because of the threat of prionic diseases, to wit, "Mad Cow" disease. Both white glue and gelatin are made of parts of cattle generally not considered fit for human consumption, with the gelatin being much more finely treated to render it suitable for eating.

Please note that in recent years, so many people have developed allergies to peanuts and related products that now it's required to post a sign that peanuts are in use, and to prominently label products which contain peanuts as such. Why? Because someone MIGHT DIE if they aren't warned.

Now imagine that some asshole -- and I mean a genuine fucking asshole of the sort that ought to be kicked up and down the street by any and all decent persons -- finds out that someone is allergic to peanuts, and makes a powder out of crushed dried peanuts. They then follow a person who is allergic to peanuts, and throw peanut powder on them. You know, just enough to make the allergic person really really sick, you know. Further, they find other assholes of their own type and caliber, and enlist them to their team. The poor bastard with the allergies to peanuts may have no idea, at first, what it going on. They go out of their way to be sure they aren't missing some signs warning them of peanut products in use, they double-wash all of their apparel to be sure there isn't some sort of contamination, and eventually they notice that usually when the symptoms of "mild to medium reaction" to peanuts start, it's right after they've passed a certain asshole, or his friends... and further, at the moment that symptoms begin, these certain assholes make a very specific gesture that nobody else makes. They hold their hands in a very specific way, and then point that gesture at their nose.

Our allergy victim quickly learns to recognize that when they see that gesture, they are about to get sick, or are just starting to get sick from the peanut dust to which they were just intentionally exposed. Pavlovian conditioning, operant conditioning, whatever you want to call it, starts setting in.

And I guarantee you, pretty darn soon, every time they see that gesture being made, they're going to give the finger to whoever is doing it. Long after the peanut dust stops flying, the sight of that gesture is going to remind the allergy victim of the perhaps hundreds of times they felt their throat close up and started choking, felt the hives forming, or even fell out on the ground and had to be rushed to the hospital.

This is pure fucking TERRORISM on the part of the assholes -- smirking fuckwads who think they're just so funny and clever -- and there is no other way for a moral or ethical person to see this. Terrorism. That's all.

Now, this has happened to me and it occasionally still happens to me. Peanuts isn't my particular allergen and I won't divulge what is my particular allergen, but let me point out something.

Body language quite frequently translates easily into words. Giving someone the finger basically means "fuck off and die". To our peanut-allergy victim, that particular gesture given by a terrorizing gang of utter fuckwads means "I just poisoned you, and you can't do anything about it". Damned right the victim can't do anything about it, because they're experiencing anaphylactic shock. Chasing after the bastards will probably only get them a greater exposure, and quite possibly death.

Maryland being Maryland, there appears to be no law against this, and Marylanders being Marylanders, assholes just fucking abound: and in fact local culture seems to far prefer assholes to civility. Maybe it's not really that bad, and maybe it only takes about one in ten people being a complete shithead to make an entire State look like it's overrun with shit-for-brains fucktards who ought to be jailed for decades instead of left at large to terrorize any victims they can hunt up.

These fuckheads and their "antics" terrorized me out of college and I'd rather be a volunteer for a dental school during a novacaine shortage rather than set foot in College Park. I wound up getting hired by the Federal government shortly after I dropped out, and the same smirking fuckheads (or at least their fellow fuckwads with that same subcultural trick and gesture) followed me into work and drove me out of my Federal job, although it took three miserable years before I finally abandoned hopes of that career track. I fled across the country three times and wherever I wound up, it wasn't long before the terrorism began again, although to the credit of the police of Austin Texas they put a quick stop to that, because although Texas has no shortage of assholes, they are serious about enforcing their laws. Unlike certain other States, which don't seem to have any law against it and wouldn't enforce it if they did. In Maryland, harassment is in fact a crime but good luck getting this one prosecuted without a cop catching someone right in the act of flinging "GRAS" powder around. Most people won't even notice it. People sensitive to that chemical or set of chemicals live in absolute fear, PTSD, and increasing madness, thinking moreso every day that it's not just terrorists, it's terrorists with a personal vendetta.

Of course, these smirking fuckwads are having a hilariously fun time unstoppably harassing their special victims into madness and potentially worse things. And when I see them, I'm furious, and I do in fact give them the finger. And if you're a cop and you see me giving the finger to some smirking fuckwad flinging shit out the window of their car, making that special gesture with their hand held "just so" up to their face, keep in mind that it may not bother you, but somewhere in your rear-view mirror is someone who is allergic to some chemical that doesn't bother you, but which is killing that person with the allergies. You just witnessed participation in gangster terrorism and didn't do shit about it, presumably because you did not know. Well, now you know.

When I am out there looking furious and giving someone the finger, that's the same finger I'd give to Osama Bin Laden or any other TERRORIST.

Taxing My Wits in Mid-April 2012

noreply@blogger.com (Thomas Hardman) — Sat, 21 Apr 2012 18:45:00 +0000

Greetings to all, happy Tax Day to all and sundry.

Noted in passing, as I didn't have much income last year, I didn't pay a lot in Federal taxes. I barely made it to the level where I was required to file, but I did make it to that level, and I did file.

Electronic filing was new to me, and frankly it's a lot easier and faster than filling out hardcopy forms and mailing them. Yet the site I chose was one which will do the State and local taxes at the same time it does the Federal taxes, and I elected that option. Imagine my amazement when it turned out that the combined Maryland and Montgomery taxes amounted to almost double my Federal taxes.

This shit has gotten just way the fuck out of hand.

Moving right along, reasonable people will understand that I've been a bit depressed recently, and you can't much blame me for that. Even before my parents finally passed from this life, I had a laundry list of "reasons to be uncheerful".

I suppose I should share some of the more obvious ones:

When I returned to the area in 1996 or so, the District of Columbia was on the verge of economic collapse, and if you're not depressed by the impending fiscal and cultural implosion of your own nation's capital, you're definitely no sort of patriot. Yet there was something I could do, and I did it. At a slightly different website, I developed what was probably one of the very first "blogs", not that I called it that. This project -- a sidebar to me teaching myself the ins-and-outs of UNIX-like operating systems and applications -- may be seen at the archive of Washington DC -- Not A Pretty Site (nor sight). Yet it was a bitter struggle for me to even pretend to anything other than blatant angst of the heart-on-your-sleeve variety. Mostly I was hanging out -- online and in real life -- with folks in the Gothic movement, since for one thing they cared about the arts and the intellectual pursuits as much as I did, and for another thing, if I was seriously depressed and for good reasons, they mostly felt about the same way.
Even as the DCFRA "Control Board" created by Congress to take over the affairs of the District government went ahead and started fixing things, even as Tony Williams from Accounting got drafted to run for Mayor, the nation was being invaded. It was a generally peaceful invasion of at least a million persons per year, most of whom filled hard-to-fill jobs in agriculture, at least when they first arrived. Those jobs were hard to fill for a reason, and as soon as any other position could be found, these people would move on, only to be replaced by the people coming right behind them, who would also move on. And to where did they move on? Construction, light industrial work, fast food jobs, and they came to dominate the entry-level job markets and eventually they excluded almost everyone else from access to entry level positions and when people started organizing against them -- most were not here legally by any measure or definition -- it turns out that these millions upon millions of illegal aliens were far more organized than the locals. The locals offered no significant opposition in any real way, and were outnumbered on the one hand by the well-organized millions and on the other side were oppressed by political figures and their appointees, all of whom had deep-pockets campaign-contributors seeking exploitable cheap labor. 15 years later, in 2012, the sort of entry-level and labor positions which once were the recourse of returning Veterans and the salvation of many homeless, these positions are available only to the gangster-organized labor rackets' faithful tithe payers. You've gotta have some money to make some money, and good luck even then if you do not speak Spanish.
After getting myself to a level of competence amounting to "professional", I was working in the IT field as a network administration tech, not too far below the rank of "network engineer". In a pinch I could do most of that job, too, and was getting paid to do it. Then in mid-2000 came the "dot bomb" and half of the industry was sent packing to flood the ranks of the unemployed. The usual stand-by work ("yes, I am working at FastFood Inc right now but before, I was an engineer") was not available, having been flooded by well-organized illegal aliens. Alternatives in technical fields weren't available either; due to a so-called "shortage of skilled labor" the H-1B Visa was deeply abused. While tens of thousands of citizens with engineering degrees and experience went on unemployment because they couldn't even get a job flipping burgers, 60,000 foreigners were imported to completely fill every last technical job available in the country... at wages far less than the local engineers would have had to be paid even in this downturn.
September 11, 2001 came and went and with it went a lot of national innocence. Far from being at peace in a peace-loving world after the collapse of the Soviet Empire, we lived in a world where it seemed that everyone almost everywhere hated the USA and its few remaining allies, hated them enough to organize suicide missions striking terror into our cities and killing thousands outright. The nation went to war, and more than a decade later, we're still in fucking Afghanistan. Meanwhile, back in the States, my own specialties in IT were increasingly "offshored". Management and other corporate types had realized that if they could import foreign workers to work on the cheap, how much less expensive would it be to move the work to the foreign workers. I tried everything, cutting my rates, working as a 1099 contractor rather than seeing W-4 work, not any bites and not much of a nibble. Most of the nibbles consisted of people who intended to use H-1B but had to advertise before deciding, and a lot of these told me as much. Brief stints on the periphery of the military or intelligence community contractors didn't go well as their mindset and outlook is pretty alien to me. Hey, I just like to tend servers and deploy applications and generate content, not destroy people's countries or sneak around other people's countries making sure it never comes to that.
The economy comes back from the double-whammy of the Dot Bomb and then Nine-Eleven, and just as it seems I might get hired back to a full time job, a rise in fuel prices caused a decline in housing value and that revealed a half-decade of Wall Street's total irresponsibility and playing strange games with Other People's Money. This caused an implosion in the world financial markets, and follow-on waves of economic near-collapse and delayed collapse continue to wash through the global markets and economies. Further, the cost of fuel is up at the same levels as triggered the last meltdown.
Last, but not least, even if there was work -- and work in my field -- available to me in the last 3 or so years, I couldn't take it because I was the live-in elder-care person at my mom's house. And now that I no longer need to be in that role, for reasons which should be obvious to actual human beings, damned if I feel like doing much at all. Even if I somehow could stop feeling so terrible over the loss of not one, but both, parents within 6 months of each other, intellectually I should be able to look at the last decade and see how it was: every time I dared to hope for a better immediate future, unforeseen and frequently bizarre events entirely outside of my ken or control came and slammed the world (or my industry) so hard that hope would have been symptomatic of a total disconnect with reality.

In summary, then, why yes I am just not too goddamn happy.

Well, life does go on. At least, it goes on if you bother to eat and drink and breathe and wear clothing and have housing suitable to the weather. Yet rolling through mere existence isn't enough.

Various things have provided some solace and distraction. Some things have had to be avoided.

Retail therapy has had some value, but to be honest most of that is simply me catching up with required maintenance or upgrade expenses, but now with a little more cash in hand than I'd been saving from my stipend, all of the maintenance or upgrade is pretty much done, and spending any more money than necessary would be effectively frivolous. At this point in my life, I don't do frivolous well; too far out of practice.

Some home-improvement efforts were long overdue and I am "getting around to it". Long overdue, better lighting in the upstairs hallway, and a contractor has been secured who does good work and handles all of the permitting paperwork. Also long overdue, I'm going to wait until the weather is just perfect and then pressure-wash the house and repaint it. I need to get a permit to rebuild the porch and I guess I'll do that, too.

Yet it seems that finding and doing busy-work isn't going to be enough to lift me out of depression, or so it seems. I'm told that the passage of time will do wonders, but what I think I really need is a mission.

I also need to go outside and do some yard work, and this has been enough background and update. If I figure out a mission, something to do that will get me out of my funk and my rut, I'll be sure to let you know. Maybe even here...

April Fooling Writer's Block; and, Fragment Generation

noreply@blogger.com (Thomas Hardman) — Sun, 01 Apr 2012 20:27:00 +0000

(2012 April 2, very minor edit for clarity. Stet.)

Yesterday I was a listening-only participant in a "webinar", or "web seminar". This gave me a chance to listen to some speechifying by some well-respected published SF writers, among them Nancy Kress. Given her track record of writing, publication, and sales, when Nancy Kress speaks, I listen and take notes. I won't go into too much detail, but she covered the concept of creating tension within stories, at every level from the sentence, through the section, through the entire work. I suppose I can try to start applying her advice as best I can, wherever possible.

Meanwhile, back to the current collection of fragments-of-story...

(fragment 120401-1, copyright 2012 TJ Hardman Jr and no doubt this is total fiction.)

"Never trust a cop that doesn't call for backup."

"Wheels, there's got to be some reason you make these remarks just totally out of the blue!"

"Wheels" Barrow rolled his eyes a little bit, sipped coffee, rolled his eyes a bit more as he lifted his ball cap and scratched behind his ear, then said, "Well, seriously. I know a man who got in serious trouble because he didn't know that rule."

"How so?"

"Lemme tell you a story. Has to do with our current case, tangentially, so it's not entirely out of the blue. Okay, this guy thinks he's being harassed by not one, but two police officers and he can't figure out why. So, he tries to work his way up the ladder of the chain of command, and all he's getting is a lot of folks telling him that nothing happened, nobody knows anything, the person who would know isn't here, they'll be back next week, etc etc etc. Our man is getting a trifle annoyed, presses a little too hard, next thing he knows he gets a voicemail telling him to call so-and-so, so-and-so has a secretary who tells our man to hang around the phone and wait for a call from the person he wants to contact, etc etc. So, the call comes, the superior our man wanted to reach is getting the idea that our man is a wackjob, or worse yet he's a terrorist trying to push people's buttons to see what happens, determine procedure or lack thereof, whatever. So he's got the whole damn SWAT team parked a block over, snipers are dressing up as bushes and infiltrating neighboring properties, the whole nine yards."

Wheels paused for effect. His partner's phone chirped and she expertly unclipped the back and pulled the battery. Wheels favored her with something like a mild grin. "Do go on," she said. The grin got bigger and Wheels continued:

"Meanwhile, our guy barely has any idea that the number three man in a city police department has got the whole squad and all of their cousins loaded for bear and camping in his back yard. He's trying to figure out what happened, did he maybe look like someone wanted for questioning, is he the near-twin of the neighborhood child molester, did one of his business rivals try to pull a fast one by dropping the dime on him the day before bidding opens... maybe his ex-wife or old girlfriend is having conniptions and sicced the cops on him, in not one incident, but in two places in two hours on opposite ends of town. He's not a happy camper. The officer on the other end of the phone is running a stock script to push at all of the standard buttons that are all well-known to set off wackjobs, and he's dropping just enough clues to make any spy or other information seeker jump up and down in ecstasy. Depending on how our man answers, the officer can figure out whether to give the Go Code or just write this off as some sort of unplanned exercise in protocol.

"Meanwhile, our man is getting more and more annoyed because as near as he can tell, the officer on the other end of the line is trying to baffle him with even more bullshit than he's gotten from the rest of the department over the last week of fruitless efforts to connect. He thinks the officer is either doing that, or maybe he's a bozo who's just not listening. The officer thinks that this is the weirdest wackjob he's ever talked to and it's just getting weirder. Our man doesn't care about insider information about special -- and fictional -- programs in counterterrorism, he doesn't care about space aliens or Republicans trying to take over the government and make our kids drink fluoridated water, none of that crap. This is freaking out our officer on the other end of the line.

"Eventually he figures out that the guy on the other end of the line is sincere... but that's even worse, because the officers he described don't match the description of any of the staff of the officer talking to our guy. He asks our guy for more detail, uniform color and type, etc. The guy describes the uniform of that officer's department, and furthermore describes a car in the colors and logo of the city department, and the officer asks our guy what were the unit numbers stenciled on the vehicle. Our guy can't tell him, says he didn't even think to look. The officer stands down the strike force, and tells our guy, look, the officers you describe, well, I don't have any such officers in our department.

"Our guy tells the officer that he can't figure it out, in any case he's told the officer everything he knows, it's for the officer to figure out which of his officers are coming out of the woodwork for no apparent reason, maybe someone's giving them bad tips or something. The conversation ends with nobody being satisfied and with our guy having potentially gotten taken down for pretty much nothing, and/or our officer being left as the fall guy when a civilian gets taken down for trying to lodge a complaint against officers in his force. You see? Could have gone very badly indeed and it's probably luck that it turned out even this well."

"Well, fuck me then," muttered Jen. Wheels grinned widely, as this was his favorite thing about his sometime partner. Got a problem to solve? Stakes are high? Jen would mutter something generally obscene and dive right in. He checked his watch.

"Um!" Jen actually bounced up and down. Wheels's watch showed eight seconds had elapsed. "Got an idea?"

"Never trust a cop that doesn't call for backup, you said earlier. I asked you why and you tell me this story. Okay, what kind of cop doesn't call for backup, and then is declared by the shift commander for that time and day to not answer the description of any officer on the force?"

"Yeah," Wheels said, "Tell me what kind of cop that is."

Jen bounced again, beaming like a little kid with a new toy. "He's not a cop at all," she said.

"Buy the woman a donut, I says to myself," said Wheels. "Look, here's the description of Out of Control Officer Number Two," and he recited, and paused for effect. "Sound familiar?"

"Um..."

"Remember Client Fifteen?"

"Oh!" Concentration washed across her expression and she said, "It's the guy from the grocery store. And the liquor store. And the library. Right?"

"There's a lot of that going around eh?" Wheels smirked. "Or at least there's that one guy going around to a lot of places... and dressing up like staff, and harassing Client Fifteen... and at least half of the other clients. If it's not the same guy, it's two or more different people that all have very similar descriptions... and it would appear, they also have a collection of uniforms that they wear during their activities. Though you have to admit, it takes bravery -- or maybe desperation -- to dress up as a fake cop."

"No shit." Jen grew somber as she pondered the ramifications. "This comes pretty close to 'will stop at nothing' in terms of boldness." Her expression grew brighter for a moment. "What about the other officer? Is he fake too? And what about the city squad car?"

"I have an idea on that. Out of Control Officer Number One is the one with the squad car. And the man in my story is actually pretty observant, if a trifle nearsighted. Even if he couldn't make out the whole number in the unit stencil, he'd have gotten something... but he didn't. Out of Control Officer Number One is also someone not answering the description of anyone working that day on that shift, and those actual officers who answer something like that description all have great alibi. So where do you get a car that looks exactly like a city squad car? Without, you know, stealing one from the car yard?"

"Beats me with a rubber hose," Jen remarked. "I got nothing."

"I have an idea, and when I finish this coffee and you finish your donut, we are going to drive on over and see what people look like somewhere, see if they match descriptions of any of our cops that don't call backup, and sometimes dress up as grocery store employees or liquor store employees, or dress up in suits and wave bogus County ID at people..."

Jen bit a huge bite off of her donut. Jelly squished out and she caught it with a napkin before it could add another stain to her Frumpy Housewife disguise. She gulped and asked "So where exactly is this place?"

"A question with a question," Wheels told her, "and you missed a spot." He reached out and dabbed with a napkin at her chin. She held still for him for a second, and then said, "C'mon, the suspense is killing me..."

"We're just going to head on over and hurry up and wait, you know," he teased. She gave him her best "spill the beans, dammit" look and he leaned back and finished the last of his tepid coffee, then spoke.

"Where do you find at least a few squad cars outside of the car yard, all with perfect markings, but maybe no stencils? You know, where does the department take its cars to be painted after body work?"

Jen sat up bolt upright for about a half-second and then began scrambling out of the diner seat. "The body shop. I've been by there. Half a dozen cars are there, every damn day."

Wheels stood and dropped a twenty on the table and waved to the waitress. To Jen he said, "And what do you want to bet that one of their staffers is real good buddies with someone in the uniform supply or laundry business?"

[REVIEW] Double Header: John Carter & The Hunger Games

noreply@blogger.com (Thomas Hardman) — Fri, 23 Mar 2012 20:35:00 +0000

(Updated March 24, 2012, added footnote and link therein.)

There's nothing like IMAX unless it's IMAX-3D.

"John Carter", from Disney, at long last brings Edgar Rice Burroughs's enduring character to the screen.

Less well-known than his other famous creation, Tarzan, John Carter "of Mars" nonetheless had a devoted following. Back in the day when the radio was a superheterodyne receiver and almost nobody had one, and movies were still all silent, Burroughs's short stories and serialized novels were immensely popular and remained so well into the era of "talkies". Yet somehow, of Burroughs's vast stable of memorable characters inhabiting a multitude of alternative worlds, only Tarzan was deemed worthy of the efforts of the best production houses. It wasn't until 2009 that John Carter first made it to the screen, in a nearly atrocious Princess of Mars. Yet for all of the low-budget aspects of that film -- starring the notorious and notable Traci Lords as Dejah Thoris, Red Martian Princess of the city-state Helium, as well as Antonio Sabato Jr as John Carter -- it is in some ways more faithful to the original novel.

In the 2012 version, John Carter is a Civil War Veteran, formerly of the Army of Northern Virginia, prospecting for gold in the Old West. While in flight from an Apache war party, he discovers a legendary cave full of gold, which also contains a strange altar. When he touches it, a humanoid alien appears and attacks him from behind, and Carter shoots the alien, which drops a medallion. As the alien speaks its last words, Carter holds the medallion, and is transported elsewhere. He later learns that he is in fact on the planet "Barsoom", or Mars.

Although Barsoom is a devastated wasteland mostly populated by vast ruins amid extensive deserts, life remains in the city-state of Helium, in the better parts of the vast wastelands, and in the mobile city-state of Zodanga. Zodanga is also known as "the predator city" as it crawls the wastelands devouring the remains of former cities and recycling their components, strip-mining everything else as it travels.

Barsoomian technology is an odd mix of low and high technologies; though there are "barsoomian rays" that act as anti-gravitic or pressor-beam technologies, almost everything else is stone, wood, metal, and manpower. Aerial warfare is conducted between the cities of the humanoid Red Martians in immense "flyers" that seem like giant balsa-wood gliders held aloft mostly by the batteries of solar panels stretched across the wings, which convert the weak sunlight to just enough lift to allow crewed flight. The weapons are mostly variations on the projectile weapons familiar to humans although they have different power sources, blades, archery, and the new and formidable weapon, "the ninth ray". The Zodangans have a weapons based on the ninth ray, and Princess Dejah Thoris, head of the Science Academy of Helium, has just discovered and nearly perfected it. The Zodangans got it from the "Therns", a supremely advanced and very rare race of White Martians, who constantly shift from guise to guise and are master manipulators. It was a Thern who attacked Carter on Earth.

Martians come in three kinds: the very rare White Martians, generally thought to be extinct by the Red Martians, who are very humanoid except for being adapted to the weak gravity and arid conditions of Mars, and having blue blood. The Green Martians seem to be around in vast numbers, and like the rest of native Martian life, are based on a six-legged plan, although they stand as bipeds with four arms. They are extremely warlike and aggressive and have a culture not much less developed than that of the Red Martians, although they do not use flight.

When Carter first arrives, he is alone on a vast plain, though his wanderings and experimental adaptation to the lower gravity eventually lead him to an encounter with the Tharks, a tribe of Green Martians. Captured as a prize by Tars Tharkas, the "jeddak" or "emperor" of the Tharks, through displays of astonishing strength he convinces some of them to adopt him as a war chief. He is also treated with the "Voice of Barsoom", a drug allowing him to understand and speak with all intelligent Barsoomians. While adapting to his new role with the Tharks, he witnesses a battle between the Zodangan air fleet and the flyer belonging to Dejah Thoris, who has been promised in marriage to the prince of Zodanga to end their war. She has fled in revulsion and as Carter sees her, it's love at first sight, and the battle is on.

The plot thickens from there, and I won't spoil it for you. I'll only say that Burroughs was quite famous for his many plot twists and reversals of fortunes in his characters, both protagonist and villains. This isn't a hard story to follow, nor is it the least predictable... unless you read the books.

Although the 2009 "Princess of Mars" is in many ways more faithful to the original book, the 2012 "John Carter" brought completely to life the stories that I so loved as a tween and young teen, a dying world nonetheless populated with truly fascinating kinds of people, plants, and animals. Although I had never before noted the existence of actor Taylor Kitsch, he did quite a creditable job portraying John Carter. Actress Lynn Collins is lovely and talented and brought Dejah Thoris to life on the screen just like we'd imagined, Frank Frazetta costuming and everything only with more tattoos and muscle tone.

This film, sadly, is not doing well at the box-office, and I am not sure why. It's got action galore, it's in 3D, you can see it in IMAX-3D, an it even has the voice of the awesome Willem Dafoe as Thark "jeddak" Tars Tarkas. Really, what more could you want? Then again, kids these days seem to have barely even heard of Tarzan, and seem to have heard of that mostly from their parents... and probably most of their parents never heard of John Carter of Mars, even though their parents probably knew as much about John Carter as they knew about Tarzan. Edgar Rice Burroughs once had not only an incredible rate of output from one of the most inspired minds of his day, he had wide circulation among a very avid fan club who would read anything he wrote. He was, in effect, the Stephen King of the 1912-1930 timeframe.

The Hunger Games, the film adaptation of the novel of the same name by writer Suzanne Collins, has been labelled by some as "the next Harry Potter" or "the next Twilight". I beg to differ.

This is a deeply dark vision of a future in which a totalitarian state maintains its dominance over a widely scattered and impoverished population in recovery from some massive global disaster or war, in part, through an annual tribute of youngsters chosen by lottery to participate in the Hunger Games.

Two teenage contestants from each of the twelve Districts are selected, transported, very briefly trained, and are then sent into an arena to fight until the last survivor alone claims the title of Victor.

I won't go into any detail on the complexities of the plot, or the exceptional job of world-building done by director Gary Ross. I will say that this is a fine film which will definitely be a cult classic, even should it fail to excite the devotion of the mainstream. Yet I can hardly imagine that this will fail to excite the devotion of the mainstream; I am extremely critical of science fiction in general and of science fiction purported to be realistic and credible and aimed at the exact young adults who might wind up living in a very real and appallingly similar future. And I love this film. Go see it. If you are the parents of teenagers, or of children who will soon be teenagers, this is a film you will want to discuss with them and even if they won't be caught dead in the same theater as you when they see it -- and they probably should go see it with their peers and not their parents -- it would be wise for you to know whereof you speak... and it's a fine film for anyone over the age of, say, 13.

The lead character, Katniss Everdeen, is portrayed by the lovely and very talented Jennifer Lawrence, who gave an outstanding performance in the Sundance-winning Winter's Bone. This is a fine performance in a very well-plotted and tightly-produced thriller with very high production values.

There is a wide divergence in visions of the future, among science fiction authors. The trope of an Orwellian future State has almost fallen by the wayside, as it can't easily be trotted forth by authors living in such places as are subject to such laws as the PATRIOT Act; besides, that's been done to death and we're all accustomed to the idea of police installing GPS trackers in our vehicles, surveillance cameras everywhere you look and in lots of places we don't see, increasingly ubiquitous law-enforcement in the form of stop-light cameras, speed-zone cameras, data-surveillance on everything from our web-browsing habits to cellphone usage, and rapid emergence of a cellphone-connected and endlessly-txting Junior Anti-Sex League. It's almost refreshing to see someone once again rouse the hoary ghosts of Huxley and Orwell and kick them into clanking their chains and once again moaning. Perhaps this time someone will hear them.

More importantly, this work includes a trope which was rapidly vanishing. In perhaps the majority of modern SF, tropes circle around the theme of the Singularity, a time when the machines are smarter than we are and ever so much faster, and if we survive as a species it will only be by their sufferance should we live after that day on Earth, or any place that the Singularity can reach. The Singularity is widely considered inevitable, in the absence of any catastrophe sufficient[1] to effectively destroy the global civilization's use of -- and utter dependence on -- extensive networked computing providing everything from logistics management in production and marketing to military threat assessment and civilian administration of justice. Rather, this work falls back to the old trope, of a renascent if nasty civilization rising from the ashes of a long-ago nuclear/biochemical war.

Frankly, I find this[2] far more humanistic, far more concerned with what makes us not merely people, but decent people (or not such decent people). This is definitely no sappy three-way romance between a normal (if mopey and depressing) teenage girl and her love interests from competing and inimical supernatural tribes. It's also not the least bit concerned with magic, but more with some of the more sad and inarguably-real facts of life, history (and a possible future history) and human nature. There's love in it, alright, just not the sappy kind allowed to over-privileged teens in a really quite safe and wealthy society such as mainstream USA circa year 2012 CE. This is about the love of your family, your people, and for people like you when you are thrown into inescapable conflict with "people like them".

Again, I give this my strongest possible recommendation. See this, if you're parents. See this, if you're a teen or young adult. If you're over 13, see this.

This sort of story-telling and film-making deserves all of the support it can get, and all of the discussion the audience can stand.

Footnotes (March 24, 2012)
1. "We will soon create intelligences greater than our own. When this happens, human history will have reached a kind of singularity, an intellectual transition as impenetrable as the knotted space-time at the center of a black hole, and the world will pass far beyond our understanding. This singularity, I believe, already haunts a number of science-fiction writers. It makes realistic extrapolation to an interstellar future impossible. To write a story set more than a century hence, one needs a nuclear war in between ... so that the world remains intelligible." (Editorial. Vinge, Vernor. Omni Magazine. January 1983.)

2. It's either Hunger Games, or a world in which Skynet wins. So to speak. The middle ground where neither happens is unlikely to ever occur and surely won't exist by happy coincidence.

I Saw A Ghost!

noreply@blogger.com (Thomas Hardman) — Mon, 19 Mar 2012 17:45:00 +0000

I didn't actually see a ghost, but for a few very surreal moments, I thought I was seeing a ghost, or a zombie, or something totally supernatural or unexpected. Yet it was really just a coincidence, I am sure.

I am a bit overdue for a dental examination and cleaning, and decided that perhaps I might as well get an appointment at my poor departed mother's former dentists. Mom was a real stickler for seeing the dentist regularly, and she also knew how to comparison shop between professionals. I figured any dentist she had seen for 20 years or so would probably be a good dentist for me, as well.

I couldn't remember the dentist's name, but I had driven Mom to his suburban home/office many times. So, I drove past the place, thinking to walk in and chat up the receptionist and get an appointment. I parked the car, and walked in. And there sat my poor dead mother. But it couldn't be! I have her death certificate, I saw her dead body. I scattered her ashes around the garden last fall, and this spring the flowers are extra pretty.

This was a tall, thin, pale Germanic woman with the same iron and grey hair in the same style that my mother affected for the last 20 years or so, and with the same extremely pale grey eyes. The resemblance to my mother's appearance, as recently as 10 years ago, was astonishing. The receptionist was nowhere to be seen. I sat down. After about five minutes of watching the office's wall-mounted HDTV, and leafing through a National Geographic for a few minutes -- all of the time feeling even weirder than I usually do in medical waiting rooms -- I asked the other folks waiting there "Is the receptionist maybe off helping the doctor?" and the reply came "We haven't seen her."

I said, as I got up and moved towards the window to the receptionist's desk, "Well, I was just stopping by to make an appointment, I guess I'll just take a card and call back to make an appointment."

"I think that would be best," said the woman, with the faintest of German accents.

Look, it's just Monday, and already my week has taken a turn for the surreal. I'd ask "what next" but as the saying goes, "don't borrow trouble, enough will come to you on its own".

[Review] The Skin I Live In (La piel que habito)

noreply@blogger.com (Thomas Hardman) — Sun, 18 Mar 2012 20:42:00 +0000

This is very brief, but I have to give a glowing recommendation to all of you science-fiction and horror fans. Rent the Blu-Ray version of "The Skin I Live In (La piel que habito)", winner of "Best Film Not in the English Language" at the 65th British Academy Film Awards, as well as winner of many other awards and nominated for even more. Moreover, for students of the language, it's in a very clear and "high" Spanish, with much of the Castilian accent to be heard.

Briefly, Antonio Banderas stars as a mysterious and reclusive doctor of some obvious wealth. In his palatial villa is a locked room, under constant surveillance by many cameras. In the room is a very lovely woman (the heartbreakingly lovely Elena Anaya), practicing yoga, wearing nothing but a form-fitting full-body suit, of the type worn by victims of extensive burns. It is quickly seen that she is a captive, and suicidal. Before long, the doctor needs to do some stitching along with other touching that isn't exactly what is expected of a doctor with his patient.

We are slowly drawn in to the strange and almost loving relationship between the doctor and his captive patient, and then in the aftermath of a scene of lovemaking, we are taken back to six years earlier, and see how this relationship came to be. It's shortly after this that the viewer will start getting the creeps. I am not easily impressed by most horror film, but halfway through the show I was muttering "you twisted bastards". I had to stop to have some drinks, and then I was prepared -- I had thought -- for the rest of it. I wasn't.

With exceptional production values, some of the best names in the Spanish-language film industry, and with Antonio Banderas exuding a smoldering Latin menace and portraying the most demented of steely resolve, with all actors performing magnificently in a script that goes places that would frighten Hitchcock, this is nothing less than the best-ever thinking-man's Frankenstein for sick fucks. It is raw if subtle horror with no flashes, bangs, or crashes and probably all the more frightening because of the depth of its quietness.

As science fiction it's exceptional and far too believable as both science-fiction and as horror. This one deserves more awards for artistic excellence if not for subject matter. Run right out and rent it and do not let your kids see it. Hell, this isn't fit for most adults.

If this is what the Spanish film industry thinks of as a Mad Doctor Movie, the world must demand more Mad Spanish Doctor Movies.

Zombie B-Movies and Bad Scripting Errors

noreply@blogger.com (Thomas Hardman) — Sat, 17 Mar 2012 15:15:00 +0000

This isn't really about zombies. I just thought that the title would look good.

I once thought I might want to write a zombie movie, but the thing is, they're really all pretty much the same. The worse ones have plot holes through which you could drive Saturn V launch vehicles and the best ones might as well not have zombies at all, as they are character studies of how people either fall apart, or pull together, under pressure. The zombies might as well be plague, a giant shark, or tentacled invaders from another planet, and in those cases they'd actually be more interesting in terms of a plot outside of the characterization and interpersonal conflict and resolution.

I tried writing science fiction, and mostly what I got from that was a lot of wasted time and effort, much like blogging. Maybe I should stick to the idea of writing some zombie stuff after all, it seems to be a big market with lots of people looking to buy.

Cop dramas, of course, are perennial and easier to write than medical dramas, because I am nowhere near to being a doctor. I'm nowhere close to being a cop either, but I'm closer to that than I am to a medical degree. In any case, I can probably make more sense out of any research into the law, and its enforcement, than I could with medical mystery.

The detective walked into the drug store. It had the same general layout as most of the other stores in the chain, but this one was almost dingy, and dimly lit with all of the windows to the outside blocked by posters and stacks of boxes. In most such stores in this chain, the floors were as clean as customer traffic would allow. This store was practically empty of customers and looked like it had probably been mostly doing slow business all day. In most such stores in this chain, customers waited five or six deep in at least three lines, in the cheery sunshine streaming in through the clean and unobstructed windows if it was that sort of day, or under bright lights if the sun was down. The detective was struck by a whimsical notion, that this place looked like it had been extremely busy a few weeks ago and that nobody had come in since then, especially not to clean.

The detective got to talking with the manager, feeling him out, filling the conversation mostly with small talk, and then edging around to more meaty fare. He asked the manager, "So, what's your experience for the level of crime here and in the parking lot, and do you think it's changed much in the last six months."

"I haven't been here that long," said the manager. "I could only tell you about what I've seen in the last three weeks. And I can tell you, there's something not quite right out there. All of the places with drive-through get a fair amount of business, or at least a lot of cars drive through. There's always a lot of parked cars out there."

"New, huh?" said the detective. "I've been seeing a lot of that around here."

"New staff, too, mostly," said the manager. "District management seemed to have the idea that there was something generally wrong with the store, too much pilferage or theft losses, not enough sales, things that were flying off of the shelves in other stores don't move at all out of here, but we can't stock enough of other stuff. Weird stuff. Like, who needs case after case of bug spray and mothballs? Or corn syrup? But it sells like hotcakes. Better than hotcakes, we don't sell any of that and it's usually our best dry food item throughout the rest of the chain."

"Huh," said the detective. Silence stretched out into an awkward moment. The manager eyed him with some suspicion. The detective glanced up from a his notebook, saw the manager giving him the once-over, sighed and ran his fingers through his uneven greasy hair, pausing to scratch absently somewhere behind his ear. He inspected something under his fingernail, inspected the manager for a moment, seemed to think better of doing either of those two things, and went back to the notebook. The manager cleared his throat.

"Okay," said the detective. "Take a look at these."

He pulled a shabby medium envelope from somewhere within his oversized and dilapidated leather jacket. From within the envelope he produced a sheaf of color photographs. He held one out for the manager. "Ever seen this guy?" The manager shook his head. "No."

The detective tried again, and again. On the fourth try, the manager said "Yeah, he comes in here now and then." The detective placed the photo face down on the counter. He then produced another photo. This went on for a few minutes. On the counter was a stack amounting to perhaps one in five of the photos in the envelope. This didn't at all surprise the detective; all of the ones the manager didn't recognize were filler, stock photos from the archive meant to keep the manager guessing what this was all about.

"How about this one?" A new photo, from another envelope.

The manager's eyes practically bugged out of his head. "I keep having to throw that bastard out of the store. Keeps trying to come in here. I throw him right back out."

"Why throw him out? Troublemaker?"

"That's what I was told!"

"By whom?"

"By everybody!"

"C'mon," said the detective, "who's 'everybody'?"

"Well, we had some folks, former employees, who used to come in here, came in with some guy I don't know and they all stood there and backed each other up, said that this guy was trouble. Had his picture and everything!"

"Let me guess," said the detective, and reached back inside his jacket for another envelope full of photos. He laid them out on the counter, face down, and then began turning them up like cards at a casino.

An elderly couple. A group of day-laborers with one very much larger man standing slightly aside from them. A man in a turban. A squad of cheerleaders. Several photos of other generally nondescript young adults. A variety of middle-aged mom-and-pop types, evidently taken at a church picnic or some such event.

"Recognize any of them?" he asked the manager.

"All of them!"

"Every last one of them?"

"Well, no..." said the manager. "But, let's see... Okay, this one, this one, this one..." He kept going, usually picking one or two out of the group photos. All of the single-individual photos were picked, though. The manager added that he hadn't known that the one girl was a cheerleader, he hadn't seen her in uniform.

"These are people who came in along with former employees to tell you that certain people were trouble?"

"Pretty much," said the manager.

"Any others?"

"Do you mean," asked the manager, "other people with former employees or other people who were trouble?"

The detective just raised one eyebrow.

"Um, yes, to both."

The detective asked a few more questions, and seemed as if he'd asked his fill. A customer came in, and the manager showed signs of wanting to assist the customer (or keep an eye on her), and the detective -- who had long since packed up his audiovisual aids -- took his leave.

The manager checked with the customer, and picked up his cellphone. "Yeah, he was here too," he said to the person on the other end of the line. "You're going to pay me that hundred still, right? Excellent."

The customer bought some eye-shadow and mints, and went out to her car. She pulled out her cellphone and called the other detective.

"Barrow," he answered.

"Wheels," she said -- everyone called Detective Barrow "Wheels", for obvious reasons -- "It's another one. Did you get anything out of him?"

"Sure did. Same people spreading the same word about the same other people."

"I wonder why he told you anything."

"I guess he knew better than to try to stonewall, when he saw I came prepared. Still, he called it in, didn't he?"

The female officer was pulling out of the parking lot, but still nodded as she spoke to her hands-free earpiece. "Yes he did."

"I bet it turns out to be the same burn phone, too. One of many."

"Those hundred-dollar bills seem each to be one of many, too. Someone either lies a lot, or they've got deep pockets. From the number of burn phones, I'm guessing deep pockets. But I still bet that the manager in there doesn't get paid."

"How so? I figured the same, but I want your take on it."

"Wheels, if we've heard five of the cut-outs asking for their blood money, whoever has been paying them must figure we're going to try to intercept at the obvious place, the delivery boy shows up and we backtrack him. So the delivery boy isn't going to show up, at least not at any of the places where we had the dime dropped on us."

"My thinking exactly, Jen. Yet that is probably how we want to play it."

"Come again? Oh. If he's buying loyal reporting, unpaid employees might get a bit disgruntled."

"Well, we can't count on that, remember?"

"Ah, options two and three. They don't get paid but they're still loyal, because they all are fellow lodge members, or go to the same church."

"And in either of those cases, they'll hope to meet up at the lodge, or the church, to get their hundred dollars. All five of them. And hopefully Mister Burnphone himself."

"What if it's not a lodge or church, Wheels?"

"Let's just hope beyond hope, that we can snag the delivery boy."

"This is a weird one, though."

"Yeah it is." Wheels paused for a second to mull over some ideas and sip some coffee. "Seems to me that there ought to be some commonalities between all of the targets, just the same as there ought to be some commonalities between all of the people passing the word. Except there's none of that in the folks taking the message into the stores; they're not part of some group, they're just random messengers. I don't get it. Someone's going to a lot of trouble, but why?"

Eh, enough of that. Snappy banter, clearly beyond my capabilities. Unfolding a mystery, both in terms of exposition of the mystery itself and in the activities of the protagonists? Not so much. Even worse, a complete failure to suspend disbelief.

Maybe I'll try some more later.

Ides of March; and, Spring Fashion Edition

noreply@blogger.com (Thomas Hardman) — Fri, 16 Mar 2012 13:56:00 +0000

It has come to my attention that my last post came to the attention of various online stalkers who promptly launched into some rather hysterical txting barrages and rather predictable real-life activity, mostly of the sort of thing that doesn't quite rise to the legal State definition of "stalking". Believe it or not, sneaking up behind people with weapons in hand doesn't violate Maryland law, there has to be an actual "confrontation" face-to-face for it to constitute "stalking". Furthermore, either the complainant or their delegated spokesperson needs to directly advise the parties that such behavior is undesirable and unacceptable before such behavior becomes actionable under the statute.

Once again, Maryland law doesn't actually mean what a reasonable person ought to think it would mean. And interestingly, there's this base policy in the law, which in many ways might be thought to be very enhancing of an unencumbered lifestyle based in near perfect Freedom: until you tell someone "don't do that" or "stop it", they may in effect do as they will. Absent the posting of "no trespassing" signage, or direct personal advisement of a prohibition of trespassing, anyone has a perfect legal right to traipse all over your yard at any time of day or night. Then again, absent a prohibiting directive which evidently has to be issued by the Commissioner of Police, there's apparently no law against organizing posses of thugs to cruise around the neighborhood like they were actual undercover police, to come when called or to operate on their own initiative, or to run sneaking through people's back yards to come up behind the targets to which either their clients or their own wicked intentions direct them.

I call such posses "fake cops" or "security gangs". Like a lot of people in this area, they play fast-and-loose with the freedoms imparted by Maryland's legal presumption of permission in the absence of prohibition. Unfortunately, they're not taking advantage of this in the way that a kid can hop a fence to retrieve their lost Frisbee without having to get a signed writ of permission. Instead, their philosophy partakes deeply of a local mindset bewailed even by the Washington Post's Petula Dvorak.

Funny, coming to Bully Central
to stop bullying.

What else can you call Washington,
a city where influence is thrown around
like punches in the hallway and
legislators routinely gang up on the weak
and voiceless just to make their side happy?

"Fake Cops" and "Security Gangs" are more of a problem in Suburbia than they are on Capitol Hill, though doubtless there are assorted first-term officials who might beg to differ as regards the antics of opposition wonks and their research staffers.

"Fake Cops" might in fact be real police officers, but acting outside of official capacity, in what students of the constabulary could refer to as "a complete absence of close-coupled command authority". Another way of putting it is "when they're off the clock they're off the rails on some crazy train". Yet, in such a well-run and highly regarded Department of Police as we have here in Montgomery County, I find it hard to believe that there is a genuinely widespread and borderline criminal culture of Bad Cops hiring themselves out as an off-duty-officer Bully Brigade.

Then again, occasional rumors have reached my ears as to the sort of thing that gets passed around as jokes at the locker rooms. Well, you have to expect a certain level of "politically incorrect" from folks who have as a large part of their job description the manhandling of people who don't seem to quite understand that this is a police force.

Logic would tell me that if Good Cops are doing Bad Things, it's almost certainly because they don't know any better. And Logic further informs that in this County, the high level of education and training absolutely precludes Good Cops from doing Bad Things unless they were studiously and woefully misinformed. I'm not sure if it's a crime to give false information to police officers, in effect turning semi-uncontrolled plainclothes patrols into your own private army seeking to forestall political opposition or to suppress religious freedom -- or even mere difference of opinion -- but it seems a fair bet that it wouldn't take long for any such hypothetical officers to discover that they've been getting played and to bring back a little comeuppance to whomever thought they could use professionals as pawns in personal vendetta. Let's just say that logic -- and commonsense -- certainly keeps me from attempting anything so simultaneously foolish and fraught with peril, not to mention being awash in moral bankruptcy and ethical FAIL.

Of course, we're leaving out of our ruminations that it's just one or another unusually low-key Gang (which would of course be the most successful and long-lasting type) hiring themselves out as a "security gang".

First we must briefly mention that Spring and Summer Fashion 2012 appears to be ready to launch a new economic boom. There are plenty of reasons to shop.

After nearly a decade of being just not all that impressed with mainstream fashion, in these last few warm days I have had my head turned more than a few times by fairly inexpensive and workaday materials on fairly normal women, just because they're wearing something both "new" and attractive.

My favorites -- I am speaking as a heterosexual male with some slight bit of fashion sense; at the very least I know what I like -- include:

Cinched waists seem to be making a come-back. Outside the world of dresses, this is also assisted by the come-back of:
High-waisted pants. No more "muffin top"! I don't know about you but I'm dead sick of even hearing about muffin-top, much less actually seeing it. Additionally, this brings us to:
Waists are back and it is good to have one. I did mention "no more muffin top" and even if you are a giant mutated sweat hog from Planet Bloat, you don't need a corset with high-waisted pants. If you're a reasonably healthy non-obese female, high waistline pants show it off in about the best possible way. Additionally, there's a longstanding and very large set of traditions in fine stitch work below the beltline to adjust the fall and fit of fabric down to the top of the thigh and there so many more opportunities and so much more room to apply them when you're working from a high waistline.
Lace is back. I don't think that I have ever heard any man -- other than jealous husbands/boyfriends -- complaining about lace. That stuff looks good, which might be why one finds it on wedding dresses even when fashion dictates that you won't see it much anywhere else. Semi-sheer and lacework as seen here might be a bit of overkill for the street or office, unless overkill is what you felt you needed. Perfect for intimate parties or even in more formal settings.
Single-shoulder is back. Well, of course it never went away, but it had been more relegated to semi-formal or formal situations. Now, if you want, you can probably hang out at the park with a shoulder showing and other women will think "fashionable" instead of "floozy". I'd have to point out, though, that combining lace and single-shoulder could be a little tricky, but this sort of opportunity simply means you may have to spend a little more time shopping, and at better stores.
Florals and paisley are more fashionable this year than in most recent years, but my advice would be to use the lighter color prints for general wear, unless you're going to the sort of party where the guys will be wearing Hawaiian shirts.
"Kitten Heels" are in, it seems, and combined with floral prints, I can think of people who would love a pair of these Tapetti kitten heels.
Flatter shoes in general seem to be hitting the market in more fashionable cuts, prints, and materials. For long years relegated to the market for females too young or too poor to afford a good set of FMPs (or combat boots for the punk-rock femmes), "flats are back".
With waning winter, wave bye-bye to all of those Mukluks that nobody had a call to wear this year.
FMPs are still with us, and in case anyone forgot why they're called FMPs, I won't spell out the non-worksafe acronym but let's just say that if a lady is wearing them, the guys will try to talk to them. Here's an example of what might turn out to be very popular in this warm season, 4-1/2 inch red/black lace print stiletto heels. This is a great color and pattern, and might work even better on flats or kitten heels.

I thought I should mention all of this fashion stuff because after some years of generally ignoring the ladies (as in my case they'd probably prefer) and finding it easy to do (something which speaks poorly of fashion and those who wear it), the other day I was driving home from the hardware store, and standing at a bus-stop is a 20-30-something lady of fairly athletic form, wearing a plain white blouse of a style that in a man's shirt would be called an "oxford", button-down tab collar and everything.

Yet this bleach-white "oxford" was cut to close trim on every slim curve, and the brand-new high-top Levis put a tight wrapper on the package. Leaving out whatever might have been the cost of the extremely sensible flats and the black braided belt, this gal probably spent less than a hundred dollars for the basics of an outfit she can wear well into fall, and be dressed to kill at anything from archery to bar-hopping to hopping a jet to the Hamptons to do a little brisk-weather sailing.

And here I nearly wrecked my car. It took me a few moments to remember to reach up and shut my dropped jaw before I started drooling. After all, it's not actually illegal to look that good with that simple a style and at that low a price. And this year, it's actually in fashion.

While shopping, the Astute Observer will be looking for more than clothing and accessories, of course.

Parking lots aren't the safest places, if you're shopping in such neighborhoods as the Aspen Hill Central Business District. Of course, the shopping center management companies, such as Lee Development Group or Tower Management are doing everything within reason and budgetary constraints to improve security.

Generally speaking, they tend to hire professionals, or at least they tend to hire accredited and licensed firms that employ trained and licensed staff. While the level of professionalism for such firms might not be so high as seen in (for example) the Montgomery County Department of Police, it's still a level of professionalism rather higher than what I have decided to term "security gangs". The Astute Observer who is out looking for clothing and accessories might be considering a cross between a fashion handbag and something more "sensible", as there is one drawback to the new high-waisted/cinch-waist look, and that would be that it means that the fashion-seeking lady police officer has to find a new place to hide her off-work handgun.

At the risk of crossing the line into abject silliness, I'm almost tempted to recommend the Hello Kitty Handbag in Black Leather since it looks almost durable and large enough to be a good hiding place for the obligatory Sig Sauer P226 Hello Kitty Special. Yet if you're shopping with the consideration in mind that if you have to shoot a bad guy from the inside of your carry bag, you're shopping with the consideration of less likelihood to foul the action or snag the weapon with in a fast draw situation. Thus, the P226 Hello Kitty is in fact silly, when you could have a P229 DAK for far less upfront expense, and if you want it to be Hello Kitty to go with the bag, you can customize it yourself. I do think that the "HK" handbag might be a great accessory.

But once you've got your new "HK" tote/handbag in black leather, what else are you looking for while shopping? Look for the security gangs, the people that aren't actual store security, weren't hired by the property managers either, are definitely not actual off-duty police officers, and other than that are clearly operating surveillance, checkpointing, and other security operations that seem fairly clearly to be aimed not at preventing crime, but at preventing people. Ethnic, racial, and class-perception-based operations have all been observed in past years in places such as the Aspen Hill CBD and environs.

In particular, these operations seem to try to combine a presence in the parking lots with a presence on the sidewalks, and they're not at all shy about trying to get inside the stores as well. In most cases, they don't approach management with the idea of "informal security"; management usually knows the risks and also usually has instructions from their district managers (or head offices in the case of smaller chains) that security arrangements are handled from far higher up than storefront management. Because they avoid management, these "security gangs" tend to approach employees of the stores. Presumably they sleaze up to them in non-work off-site contexts, listen to discover whomever is most annoyed with difficult or "weird" customers, and then arrangements are made. Almost without their knowledge, the employee is sucked into the venue of the cult-like (perhaps even an actual cult!) world of the "security gang". See also the curious case of off-duty officers in Clearwater, Florida, being allowed to be employed in large numbers as security for the Church of Scientology there, to the degree that Pinellas-Pasco [FL] Circuit Judge Thomas Penick [...] noted, "They are coming very dangerously close to becoming a private security force for the Church of Scientology."

In particular, though there seems to be no involvement here by the Church of Scientology, we do see harassment of persons who are clearly, or only purported to be, mentally ill.

This seems to be understandable, yet psychiatric disabilities are in fact covered by the Americans With Disabilities Act. Yes, that's the same far-reaching Progressive legislation that put wheelchair access in public facilities all across the country so that your disabled friends and relatives can go places and do things.

The first prong of the ADA's meaning is that all facilities open to the public must make a "reasonable accommodation" to persons with disabilities. It seems to me -- and I bet that any judge anywhere would agree, as would any jury -- the most basic and essential of reasonable accommodations is to not harass people because of their disability. Yet this simple fact escapes either the understanding, or more likely the intention to care, of the "security gang" folks and their in-store patsies. They might not go so far -- yet -- as kicking crutches out from under people with MS or ALS, but it's probably just a matter of time until they start rolling people in wheelchairs off of the parking lots out into traffic. This may all sort out as a case of someone organizing people with borderline personality disorders to harass and oust people with schizoaffective-axis disorders, but in any case it's pretty close to Oscar Wilde's characterization of fox-hunting, "the pursuit of the inedible by the unspeakable".

Having spent the last 18 months or so consulting with managers (and sometimes district managers) of the anchor stores in various CBD shopping centers, I've managed to get across to them that it's really much better for business, as well as therapeutic for customers, to be sure to try to welcome and support their customers with psychiatric disabilities. Despite its many failings, Maryland in general and Montgomery in particular wish to present to the world that they are sharing, caring jurisdictions which practice equal protection of the law and even wish to give special protection to those who are most vulnerable, especially those who are most vulnerable to abuse, harassment, discrimination, and outright mass terrorism by people who pretend to be "security" and who mostly wouldn't qualify to be employed as dog-catchers, much less as sworn police officers.

Perhaps Maryland and Montgomery can try to work a little harder to clarify to certain parties that enforcing the law is the business of law-enforcement, not of every group of folks who decide to organize committees of vigilante "justice" and hire themselves out as "dial-a-ninja" or "Billy Bob's Local Security and Ku Klux Klan Klavern".

Judge Overturns Maryland Concealed Carry Permit Law

noreply@blogger.com (Thomas Hardman) — Wed, 14 Mar 2012 04:32:00 +0000

Recently, U.S. District Judge Benson E. Legg overturned a major provision in Maryland's unconstitutional handgun carry permit law, calling the provision requiring a demonstration of a "good and substantial reason" no more effective at preventing crime than "a law indiscriminately limiting the issuance of a permit to every tenth applicant".

The opinion is posted here, thanks to the Baltimore Sun.

Particularly troubling in Maryland's permitting law as reference in this case:

Of significance to this case, the Secretary must also
make a determination that the applicant ―has good
and substantial reason to wear, carry, or transport a handgun,
such as a finding that the permit is necessary
as a reasonable precaution against apprehended danger.

Here's a clue for all of you ignorant fucks.

To get a permit, you need to tell the State Police why you need a handgun to defend yourself, should push come to shove.

Although it is not written as such in the law, here's the process.

The State Police, having been informed by your permit application as to the reason you think you've got sufficient problems as to need a permit to carry a concealed weapon for self-defense, are expected to investigate your alleged reason.

If the State Police decide that it's not something they can handle (as in, they see no actionable cause), they send back a recommendation of "do not issue".

The major problem here: the State Police can decide that they cannot handle it for fiscal reasons, to-wit, they can't afford the manpower or other resources, they still report that they can handle it. In fact, they report "there is no problem". Effectively, they declare that their incapacity equates to a reason stated in the application is nonsense, delusion, fabrications, or hysteria. Or they say "you're on your own, or you would be on your own except that we DO NOT ALLOW THAT."

To be honest, most people who have real reasons in the state of Maryland to need a handgun can get one, because the State Police will say "there's definitely a problem but it's the problem of this individual, not the problem of the police departments".

The other side of the coin is when the State Police are informed of the alleged reasons of needing a handgun. and they report back "we do indeed see a problem but it can be handled by law-enforcement, there is no need nor reason to permit this person to defend themselves as the law-enforcement community can and shall defend them and will do it professionally".

Here's the really big problem: the law-enforcement community may have no manpower, no fiscal resources, may have much bigger problems elsewhere, or are simply incompetent to actually provide the protection they claim they can provide and for which they are paid. This amounts to them saying "sure, we've got it covered", and then they do not in any way have it covered. Effectively they lie and say "we can handle it" and leave the potential victim out in the cold. It gets even worse. They actively start looking to see if the applicant is trying to acquire the means of self-defense even though the force admits to itself -- in internal memoranda filed with the State Police that -- that they cannot themselves provide defense. Then they arrest the applicant for trying to go through the legal process first and then taking essential measures when the legal process is demonstrated to be broken and detrimental to public safety. It's a madhouse, and this judge knows it.

It's not up to the State Police, nor is it up to the decision-making of any local police force that admits that they can not do their jobs, to deny to any citizen the tools to defend their lives or the lives of their loved ones. If they are going to disarm people, they need to be able to protect them. If they cannot provide full protection, it is unconstitutional of them and moreso it is also morally bankrupt to deny people, who they have disarmed, the ability to arm themselves to protect themselves where the police cannot.

Final cut? The State does indeed have a right and duty to prevent people from acquiring arms if they are felons convicted of crimes of violence, if they are mentally incapable of acting with moral restraint and within the law, and this is all well and good. But as the Constitution has been interpreted to mean that the right to keep and bear arms is an individual right which the State may not infringe, the State must in all cases infringe the least possible amount. If someone is demonstrably competent, of law-abiding record, and passes a certification exam of reasonable qualifications, the State should issue a license for the concealed carry of a regulation firearm. Note that competence and good record are already required to legally purchase a gun, and the State should regulate only the certification of skill and knowledge of the requirements of the law as regards use of deadly force.

Telling people "you're not scared enough for us to issue a permit" is bogus and unconstitutional and that's all there is to the matter. The Astute Observer will note that the State of Maryland is in no hurry at all to challenge this up to SCOTUS which probably would not accept the case, as they've just had their say in Heller v. District of Columbia. Stare decisis, stet. That's all, folks.

Idle Tasks and Screensavers

noreply@blogger.com (Thomas Hardman) — Fri, 09 Mar 2012 16:09:00 +0000

I am sitting around trying to get my spirits up and to generally recover from what has been a rather sad last few months. First, my mom passes and my recent career as resident elder-care assistant in an aging-in-place situation is over. Next, five months to the day, my father passes on as well.

I suppose I should have seen this coming, and I suppose that in many ways I did see it coming, I just didn't want to think about it too much, not the sort of thing you want to dwell on before it happens, and not the sort of thing you can really escape dwelling on once it does happen... as much as you might wish you could.

I did hop a jet out to California, arriving at the Ontario (California) International Airport around dinnertime, California time. From there, a trip to a not-too-bad hotel in Riverside. No bug problem in this one, thank goodness, and after a good night's sleep, the family met at Riverside National Cemetery for my father's memorial service. It was a beautiful day in a beautiful memorial park and after the dignified and stately service, I went right back to Ontario International and caught the next flight out. I didn't cry too much as there were already enough tears on hand. Yet, as they say, "in the midst of life, we are in death"... and though lives do end, yet the world goes on and we who remain in this life need to leave the dead to their rest, and go on with our lives.

I need to figure out how to do that.

Yes, there is video, and it is for friends and family only. I also need to update and expand and revise my eulogy posted here in recent weeks. That will be posted elsewhere, if at all, and I'll just do a little correction on my previous posting here, in the interest of making it more accurate for genealogists doing research.

I should note, in passing, that looking at the Veterans Administration's National Gravesite Locator, there are a lot of people named "Hardman" who are buried in the nation's military cemeteries.

I've been trying to stay somewhat busy to help improve my mood.

Aside from getting out into the unseasonably warm weather and doing the pre-springtime preparations of the yard -- clearing leaves and twigs from the lawn and garden areas -- I've been trying to plan for how to move forward as affairs of estate are settled here.

Where will I live, for example, is something I need to decide. For now, everything upstairs has to be maintained as it was, or cleaned and polished, in anticipation of the Estate Sale. Everything that isn't being sold needs to be moved, and that means I have to punch up through my morose ennui and motivate myself. Vacuuming seems to be a good idea.

Some weeks ago, I posted about the joys of owning a new Bissell upright vacuum.

I must interject a noted of caution here, if you are thinking of buying one.

First, it's a fine vacuum cleaner but I've already had one scary problem with it.

Here's a clue. When you're using attachments on the hose, the brush in the base of the upright section may still be rotating, and in this model it's driven by a 12-amp motor. That's a lot of power, and if that brush sucks in a blanket while you're looking the other way using attachments on the hose, big problems can develop fast. The blanket was made of that recycled plastic "fleece", and the friction of the plastic bristles on the rotating brush heated both the brush and fleece to the melting point. They melted together, the brush stopped rotating, yet the motor kept turning while the drive belt was immobilized. I was alerted to this by the smell of burning plastic and rubber and shut down the machine before there could be a fire. Interestingly, there was no loss of suction at the hose/attachments end of things. I'm glad I have an acute sense of smell when it comes to the odors of mechanical failure.

This is not covered under warranty, as it's considered "wear and tear" or even "abuse", even though the machine was not yet quite a month in my possession. Good news, the cost of repair wasn't that high, only about $50.00. So now I can resume the deep vacuuming with the repaired machine. In the meanwhile, the trusty Roomba has been doing double duty.

Also doing double duty, the document shredder. There was a lot of paper here that doesn't need to go into the public library ahem excuse me, doesn't need to go into the recycling bin in readable form. My sisters took care of all of Mom's documents that needed shredding, but I need to clear out space in my own living area. At least as regards paper, I don't think anyone could begin to apply the diagnosis of "hoarding" to me. This is ongoing, of course, with everything from old dead lists of the telephone numbers of people I can no longer recall, through old college chemistry lab books, to several years of expired vehicle registration cards, it's all in the shredder bin.

I have full sets of entire series of those Time-Life Books, and I'd donate them to libraries except the libraries don't want them, they're too out-of-date as they come from the mid to late 1960s. Even the Astute Reader may be surprised to learn that I've actually read them all. I used to sit by the front door waiting for the mailman to bring them, like a dog waits for master to get home to take him for a walk. I'll probably put them in boxed sets and take them down to the dump and cry as I see them dwindling in the rearview mirror of my old pickup truck. Likewise, though I won't shed too many tears for these, my mom's rather large collection of feminist manifestos and "liberation theology" will go to her former church. Considering the amount of time and energy Mom put into the Presbyterian Women organization, that might even become the seed of the Irene A Hardman Presbyterian Women Library. Or perhaps the church, like this house, will need the space and they too will have to take a run down to the dump to unload some hardcopy.

Everything that isn't to be sold needs to go, either out in the garage or shed, or down in the basement, or off to the dump.

One day at a time, one step at a time... that's all I can plan for right now. Yet, having made basic plans -- one step at a time -- I see how the steps start to add up into something resembling long-range plans. Yet I don't want long-range plans, I want flexibility. I'd love to have a dog, and almost got one within the recent months after my mother died. Yet if I'd had a puppy, it would have been far more difficult to just drop everything and hop a jet -- twice -- to California and back. I don't really like to fly, although clearly it's the way to go if you have to quickly go from coast to coast, and I don't at all dislike it, it's just that I seldom have the need to be packed like a sardine into a big metal box and be launched miles into the air. If I was going to do it for fun, I'd rather be the staff than the passenger, and the pilot rather than the staff. But I digress; my point was that I would like my life to be less complicated, less cluttered, more ready to go places and do things, such as take a job farther away from here than would be in ready travel time to and from the home of my elderly and ailing mother.

What is the taste of freedom?

After years of being unable to have a pet -- I couldn't really afford to live elsewhere for years, and then it became more of a case that my mom's care couldn't afford for me to live elsewhere for years -- freedom might have tasted like a puppy or a kitten, not that I'd even think of eating them. No, freedom would have tasted like love and responsibility, however contradictory that might sound. Freedom is a relative thing; one very often isn't simply free, but free of something. Freedom from responsibility, or even a sense of responsibility, from elder-care, might actually translate to even more responsibility, for the occasionally just-as-demanding cares and responsibilities for household pets.

If I wanted freedom, though, could I turn my back and walk away from some poor dog that gave me unconditional love and big puppy eyes and a slowly wagging tail, beseeching me to not leave, hoping for an invitation to wag the tail faster and leap forward to cover me with doggie kisses? I doubt I could walk away from that, especially if I was looking at that for the last time as I walked away from its cage at the pound, or at someone else's home. Could I even walk away from a pile of sleepy cats on the sofa? I doubt it, though it's an easy thing to consider while cleaning the cat-box. I could probably walk away from the greedy little fleabag squirrels in the back yard without too much trouble, and considering how badly I have been treated by them for some decades now, I could walk away from the people of Aspen Hill with a smile on my face reaching damn near from ear to ear. I might just do that.

But first the house needs to be put in order. The Estate Sale needs to happen, all of the storage and books and records need to go away, the house needs to be prepared for sale but first it needs to be brought up to code for rental either as a whole unit or as rooms for rent. Modernization is needed, though not much repair.

And what about my InterNet servers?

My servers are designed to be pretty much exactly that: servers. Most are "headless", meaning that all of their input and output is from and to the internet. Basically, they're just boxes full o' chips and boards, and most are getting pretty old, far from cutting edge, much like myself.

Such value as they have is really in the content, and like most of the documents I've shredded, content can have a negative value as well as a positive value. Considering that it took years or even decades to develop that content, I'm as loath to let it go and just walk away from it as I'd be to abandon an old dog by locking it up to starve. Yet sometimes you just have to realize that it's just attachment to possession, and under certain systems of valuation, it's only valuable insofar as it benefits anyone. Probably for some years it hasn't done much good for anyone and it's about as useful as a voice crying in the wilderness "prepare ye the way of the Lord". Excellent advice, that, if there was anyone there to hear it.

The content, the servers themselves, they're just hard-drives and data, binaries and scripts in execution and with connection to global networks. As nobody except for me and some stalkers seems to give a rats ass about any content I've generated, I might as well put the content in a box, pull the hard-drives and lock 'em up in a fire-safe and file that in some warehouse somewhere.

Yet the servers do serve some function. The more modern, faster, ones are crunching numbers for the good of mankind, and I like to do that. I participate in the Berkeley BOINC Project and the Stanford Folding@Home Project. On one of my machines, everytime the screensaver activates, all of the idle time is converted to real work, modeling protein folding, or climate change, or trying to find cures for all sorts of icky maladies. On another machine, if it's not actively serving a web page or accepting/sending mail, it's dedicating its full and not-inconsiderable power towards the same ends. So to speak, these are old dogs I'd hate to abandon. Yet these servers don't have to be here, they could be anywhere that's attached to the internet. They're just another part of The Cloud, at least as far as BOINC or Folding@Home is concerned.

Yet the older machines can probably be consolidated into one of the newer ones, their content archived and boxed up and warehoused somewhere, with the newer machines being relocated. Again so to speak, it doesn't matter how much you love your old dog or refuse to abandon it, his time is going to come sooner or later and when it does, he's got to be buried or you'll have to live with the stink.

So here I am, as it were, cleaning up around the deathbed and just waiting for the time to be right to go bury all of the things I love that I didn't just already bury. And will that then be the smell of freedom I smell seeping into the house to replace all of the things that had piled up here, useless, over the years?

Noted: A Passing

noreply@blogger.com (Thomas Hardman) — Thu, 16 Feb 2012 14:32:00 +0000

I finally broke down and resorted to fogging the house in order to deal with the infestation.

I'm still not entirely certain what all had managed to get into the house, or of the origins. Of one thing I am fairly certain, and that would be that I don't think I will be staying again in the Best Western in Pasadena, California. Although I was bit itchy when I departed here in a hurry on or about February 2nd, by the second night in the motel, I was scratching to the point of sleeplessness.

By the time I returned here on February 8th, I was an unhappy camper, and I spent most of Valentine's Day slathered from head to toe with insect repellent as I wandered the house with a bottle of flea-killer, soaking down the baseboards and wetting every last nook and cranny I could find. I also had to wet down all of my own nooks and crannies with a delousing shampoo, and yesterday I decided it was time for a final solution to the bastards. An entire six-pack of "Real Kill" total-release foggers were set off inside the place and another two cans were distributed to deal with the garage and shed. After an hour taking a walk and a visit to Kmart to buy some fans, I set about the task of venting the fumes from the place. It took almost 4 hours to clear out the air in the place, and this gives me some ideas about home-improvement for this house, on the matter of better positive ventilation.

I was just getting settled in to watch Access Hollywood when the phone rang. I almost didn't answer it, but picked up anyway, and it was well that I did. It was my eldest sister, calling me to tell me that my father had just died.

California is a fascinating place. I had last been there when I was four years old, or so, and we had driven from my home in Farmington, New Mexico, all across one heck of a lot of desert not incredibly different from the deserts around Farmington. The difference was this: at the destination was my aunt Mildred's house, and not incidentally, Disneyland.

That was a visit of which I have little memory other than having lots of fun on the rides. This would be a visit I would not remember as fun. Aside from the problem with the itching, it was really tough seeing my father in his present condition. He was developing bedsores, had circulation problems leading to a darkening color in his extremities, he wasn't very hungry, but he was glad to see all of his kids all in one place at one time. Never much of a conversationalist in recent years, his deafness had progressed to the point where you never quite knew if he'd really heard you or if he was just offering generic responses because he'd seen your lips move. Yet I think, I hope, he was able to hear me when I told him that for everything he'd ever said or done that I hadn't liked, I forgave him, for the things I liked and/or which benefited me, I thanked him, and that regardless of anything else, I loved him.

We kids had all dropped everything and hopped the first available jets out of town when we heard from Dad's current wife -- and heard it confirmed by Dad's doctor -- that he was at death's door. By the time my return ticket date arrived, Dad seemed to have stabilized and didn't seem nearly so sick or weak. But a few days later, indeed it has been five months to the day since the passing of my mother, my father finally succumbed to circulatory failure and passed from this world having nearly reached the age of ninety-five.

Thomas J Hardman was born in Kansas in 1917, one of many children on what was at the time a fairly prosperous farm. Yet that prosperity -- such as it was -- came to an end for his family, as it did for so many others across the Midwest, with the start of the Dust Bowl. It cannot have been easy for him to spend his adolescence in struggle and devastation yet somehow he survived. Later, with President Franklin D Roosevelt's creation of the Civil Conservation Corps, Dad found some relief and much opportunity, as did a great many other men. After the attack on Pearl Harbor, Dad sought to enlist. He once told me he was turned down by everyone except for the Navy. He thought that was a little ironic as he had never learned to swim.

Among his other talents, evidently living a fairly rough-and-tumble life back in Kansas and beyond had given dad a certain skill with fighting, enough so that for a time he was in the Shore Patrol, manhandling drunken sailors and Marines. From there, he somehow volunteered for a new outfit called the Beach Jumpers. They were a special unit operating in and around North Africa and the Mediterranean Theater, and I never could get Dad to talk much about them, though bits and pieces build a nebulous and shadowy picture of lots of stuff getting blown up real good, with many of the enemy tricked and defeated. It may have helped that he spoke a little German and came, in large part, from German ancestry. (Family legend has it that the Hardmans came from "Elsass", or Alsace-Lorraine.)

Somehow during this time, he met, and eventually married my mother:

Not too long thereafter, my eldest sister was born in Newfoundland (later a part of Canada), and in short order along came my middle sister, born in Kansas.

Times were often tough for the family before I was born some ten years after my middle sister. Eventually Dad found steady work with the Department of the Interior (Bureau of Mines) at their Helium refinery in Shiprock, New Mexico. Steady work came along with some associated problems in the community. Some clues might be found at the web page of writers David and Aimée Thurlo. David Thurlo is a contemporary of my sisters (and his father would have been a co-worker with mine), and will attest to some of the problems in and around Shiprock, minor details such as entire neighborhoods contaminated with radioactivity, etc.

Overwork and high altitude (and terrible diet) combined to give my father his first heart attack. My mother had been working as an administrative assistant (actually, the administrator in all but name) at the hospital in Farmington, and the family relocated there, and dad began to slowly recover while his wife became my mother. While Dad was given a very poor prognosis, Mom became the breadwinner and began to climb a career ladder that would relocate us to Aspen Hill, Maryland, in 1963.

As Dad became more able to work, he pursued home-study in electronics and got several certifications along with experience at a variety of fairly small local or locally-based firms. He eventually got a job working as a audio-visual technician for Montgomery County Schools. He had a route covering most of northwestern Montgomery County, from the foot of Sugarloaf Mountain down to Gaithersburg. Eventually he got a full retirement from them in the late 1970s, to add to his retirement and disability pension from the Department of the Interior.

Home life with Dad was not always pleasant, to say the least. What the modern world has come to know, and expect from Veterans, as Post-Traumatic Stress disorder, was not exactly present in a full-blown state, but if Dad got mad enough, on the one hand he would get as adrenalized as if he were back in North Africa kicking some Nazi ass. On the other hand, that would set off his angina pectoris. Making Dad mad wasn't a good idea, in many ways. To be positive, he generally tried to keep himself in a good mood, or at least a level mood; it was necessary for his health. We kids, also to be positive, learned to not get too emotional as we might set off Dad's anger and/or angina. I personally learned a lot of self-control at a fairly young age, though as an adolescent I tended to forget to use it. By then, Dad's condition had much improved.

He liked to go camping, and was an avid "Rockhound"", and loved to camp anyplace there were interesting geologic formations. Sometimes he and I would drive nearly a day to find a good camping spot. Usually we preferred to camp someplace where there were interesting rocks and good fishing, fishing being his other passion. He preferred fly fishing and I preferred having fish for dinner, so I tended towards hooks baited with salmon eggs. Dad got me a very early start in the path of Conservationism and this comes as no surprise given his years with the Civil Conservation Corps.

In later years, Mom and Dad started to fight like cats and dogs, and right about the time I graduated from highschool in 1976, they decided to call quits to the marriage. By the early 1980s, with his divorce finalized, Dad moved back to Farmington, New Mexico, where he had lots of friends from the old days at the Helium Plant. He also loved everything about the high desert, and he had been a fair supervisor to a great many Navajo who worked there. He had a fair number of friends among the Dineh people. He got to be a Rockhound all he wanted, and he learned to do some silversmithing to mount some of the fine specimens he found in the desert and ground into shape back at the homestead. Eventually he met, and later married, Sally Currie, in the 1990s. Not long ago, they moved to Pasadena, California.

Pasadena, California, is a really nice place, the sort of place where the climate is the envy of most of the rest of the world, where they have an actual fork in the road in a fork in the road, a lovely "Water-Wise Public Garden of drylands flora, a very tidy and somewhat posh downtown, and the cleanest streets I have ever beheld. It had an excellent little Carniceria near the motel, where you could get excellent pupusas if you didn't mind sitting around for a half-hour while they were made.

Yet I don't think I'll go back to visit anytime soon... because right across the street from a world-class hospital, in a clean and very well-run little convalescent home, attended by polite and competent staffers, my father passed from this life, peacefully and in his sleep after a good lunch, at the age of ninety-four.

Shaving a Yak, Once Again...

noreply@blogger.com (Thomas Hardman) — Sun, 12 Feb 2012 21:03:00 +0000

Whatever is biting me isn't fleas, or there would be fleas in the flea-trap, or so I am informed. No fleas in the flea-trap. Not fleas.

However, the anti-flea spray I am using, "Ortho Total Flea Control", works pretty well on whatever is biting me. One little problem remains. I need to spray the stuff absolutely everywhere if I want to solve my problem. This means that I have to do two things: move absolutely everything, and clean absolutely everything.

Progress is slow. Among other things, "no safe harbor" process must be observed. Start with one room, and clean out absolutely everything and treat every last corner. Allow time for the treatment to work, and when things are moved back in, they have to have been treated as well.

The nice new Bissell vacuum cleaner is getting quite a workout, as is the Dustbuster(tm). So is the sprayer full of bug spray. The laundry machinery is running pretty much non-stop and I will be washing everything washable that can be fit into the machines.

I'm asking myself one question over and over... "How the hell did I accumulate so much crap?".

"Shaving a Yak" is a phrase with the meaning of finding one's self practically lost, buried within prerequisites.

Let's see: Washing all of my socks and underwear is a simple task, one would think. Yet this means that after emptying out all of the drawers in the IKEA dresser, I need to spray the insides of those drawers. This means that I first need to clean out the drawers. Removing the drawers brings to light the fact that the IKEA dresser set is about to fall apart, mostly because it wasn't assembled as well as possible.

I got this IKEA furniture from a nice lady named Dale, who used to be a near neighbor. She evidently got dog tired of the general area, and transferred back to Florida. She got me to haul a few loads of "stuff" to the dump, and told me that if I wanted the IKEA stuff, I could have it. I accepted her kind offer.

I did not yet understand one of the main facts about IKEA cabinetry. I understand it now, and decided to apply it today. Not to be totally sexist, but if women are assembling their own IKEA furniture, they should really use power tools such as electric screwdrivers or electric drills with screwdriver attachments. (Don't over-do it, or you can strip out the screw holes.)

So here I am, screwdriver in hand, tightening down the screws to make the IKEA dresser less of a rickety flopping thing, and more of a sturdy piece of utilitarian furniture, in blonde wood veneer, of course. Shaving a yak to get rid of bugs.

Having moved the dresser out of the closet, I have to get in there with a foxtail brush (bench brush) and dust down all surfaces. The ceiling, the walls, the light socket, the mop-boards, the slats of the closet doors. Now vacuum with edge tool, "turbo mini tool", and the full upright. Spray. Dust all surfaces of the dresser, inside and out. Spray drawer interiors. Move dresser frame to desired location. Insert drawers into dresser frame.

Now I have someplace to put the socks and underwear I just ran through the washing machine, letting them soak for 30 minutes in a splash of bug spray mixed into the detergent and very hot water. Now I can do another load.

All of this to clean and treat for invisible bugs? It's so worth it to me, so that I can get a sound night's sleep. A sound night's sleep means a lot to me. If I keep waking up because of bugs, and then trying to drift off, I will have really annoying dreams.

So why am I shaving the yak? Is it because of the damned biting arthropods, or is getting rid of those just another step in the yak-shaving process?

Well, must go for now... more laundry to do, more IKEA to tighten.

It's so damned much work -- though clearly long overdue -- just to get a good night's sleep.

Brief Observations; or, I See London, I See France...

noreply@blogger.com (Thomas Hardman) — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 22:52:00 +0000

Ah, the old childrens' rhyme, reserved for special occasions around the schoolyard:

I see London
I see France
I see a snitch's
Underpants

Immediately this is to be followed by the biggest wedgie that can be wreaked.

In a recent post, I mentioned "subtlety" as something which had some value.

Yet this can't be understood as me intending to suggest that it is preferable to be a backstabbing snitch. Really, the ideal course is to engage the sort of subtlety that works like this: people don't bother other people, and everyone gets along. Additionally, if there is a legitimate complaint, you take it directly to the person or people, and if that doesn't get what you want, then you take it to the professional people of authority who are trained and legally empowered to arbitrate, or adjudicate.

Of course, if you are trying to evade being noticed by such authorities, and just want them to forget that you ever existed, you can always try to create "a cat's paw".

This comes from the old story about the monkey that saw a man roasting some chestnuts, but was afraid to go steal one for himself. He convinced a cat that it would be a matter of cleverness and honor for the cat to fetch the chestnut, to prove that the cat was smarter than the man. The cat, seeking to puff up his pride, got close to where the man was roasting chestnuts, and reached out with his paw to pull a chestnut from the brazier. Of course, the fur on the cat's paw caught fire, and he was terribly burned, but the chestnut fell off of the brazier as the man tried to catch the cat and put out the fire which it started by running hither and yon.

All was total chaos! And the monkey climbed down to the ground, got his roasted chestnut, and climbed back up a tree to eat his prize. Eventually, the cat came by and saw the monkey eating his chestnut and asked the monkey "where is my honor now?" -and the monkey threw the chestnut shell at the cat, striking him on his injured paw, and the monkey jumped up and down and called the cat an idiot.

The moral of the story? Do not be the cat's paw, for you will get nothing other than insult added to injury.

Greedy Little Flea-Bags; or, Intentional Breeding of Squirrels

noreply@blogger.com (Thomas Hardman) — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 16:46:00 +0000

Well, a little clean-up and follow-through is in order before I begin with the main exposition.

First, I had to stop by the Aspen Hill Home Depot to pick up a few things. (At the Georgia Avenue entrance were 40 or so foreign day-laborers, an actual busload.)

I should mention that the elegantly clean-and-simple and inexpensive floor lamps were all sold out, but there should be an order coming in on Thursday. The "SKU" or stock number for those is 398-505. Also out of stock, SKU 401-900, the "A19 form factor" 13W LED light bulbs that emit the same amount of light as the 60-watt A19 (standard) incandescent light bulbs they are designed to replace. Getting the same amount of light for a bit less than a quarter of the energy costs is worth a lot to some people, so I don't mind paying nearly $25.00 for a lighting unit estimated to last 40,000 hours at that rate of consumption. It's very eco-friendly, good for the planet, fights Global Warming, and creates jobs.

Or, as someone has been overheard to say -- and evidently the opinion is widely shared since there's none of those in stock today but there were plenty before I last posted about Home Depot's LED lighting section -- "He may be batshit crazy, but he damn sure knows a good deal when he sees one."

It all depends on how you define "batshit crazy", I guess.

Moving right along, I guess I have some readers in the Spanish-language community. Some guy walking past said something to the effect of "that guy say he going to boicot todos la Raza", which isn't actually true. I'm only "en boicot" of the ones who read my writing, and pass along crappy translations or outright lies to their compadres, instigating them to violence. Oh, and the violent ones themselves I also boicot (boycott) and so should everyone else to the degree it's possible. Violence has no place in the workplace or business storefronts. But some people find this hard to understand.

I remember sitting around talking with my Tejano security-guard friend, back at a day-laborer center in Austin, Texas, back in maybe early 1994 or so. A "Tejano" is a native Texan, meaning that when the Spanish came and claimed all of that land for the Royal Court of Spain, the Tejanos were there listening to them, wondering what these weird pale people were going on about. They were there when Generalissimo Santa Ana got his ass kicked by the new Texas Republic and the were there when the Civil War raged and Texas was inducted into the Union. They're still there, living on the north side of the "Rio Bravo del Norte" as the Mexicans name the Rio Grande. Nobody has suffered more than the Tejanos, from the invasion of countless millions of illegal aliens who came with nothing and steal anything along the way that they can pry loose and carry away with them. My Tejano friend told me all of this, and more. Although they are ethnically the same people, lots of Tejanos despise actual Mexicans mostly because of cultural differences rooted in nationality and different political/legal systems.

One day, this ideologically seriously-affected "organizer" social worker woman was walking past us, and my Tejano friend -- who was very large and also had a gun and nightstick -- said, "you know, if you want a Mexican to try to fight you, all you have to do is to tell them that it is well known that they don't have any impulse control".

The woman heard this, as was intended, and she halted, turned and came over, and went off, totally furious. Her harangue lasted almost 5 minutes, in extremely rapid and outraged Espa~ol. Finally she ran out of breath and/or things to say. The Tejano security-guard said something to her in Spanish, calm and slow, very laconic in the Texas tradition. The woman actually turned pale, stood as still as a statue, trembling, for almost a minute, and then she turned and walked away. "What did you tell her, man?" I asked.

"Heh," he laughed, "I told her that if it weren't true she wouldn't have gone on and on like that, and also to stop trespassing here if she's going to be yelling at people. And additionally that if she had any sense of subtlety we wouldn't be at this impasse."

Moving right along again, with a segue nobody will think is too brief and lacking in subtlety (wouldn't want to challenge anyone's impulse control) I have to mention that while at Home Depot, I bought a product called a "Victor Flea Trap". Basically, it's a Roach Motel concept glue trap, with a small incandescent bulb to provide heat to attract fleas to glue.

So how did I wind up with a Flea Problem? Short answer, Squirrels.

This year, the trees produced almost no acorns or any of the other nuts that squirrels (and deer, and other animals) eat. So, if the squirrels aren't going to starve, I am going to have to feed them. Since I have a bird-feeder, the squirrels will be eating the bird-food anyway, so I have been buying peanuts to feed the squirrels. The birds are hungry enough -- and sufficiently like peanuts in addition to sunflower-seeds -- so as to come fairly close to beg for treats. The squirrels, most of them, are practically shameless in their begging.

Part of this is due to the fact that they are really quite intelligent, and if they can sit up pretty and have people throw food at them, they understand that this is easier than working hard to look for nuts when there aren't any nuts and won't be any nuts this year. Locally, if they aren't being fed by people, intentionally or unintentionally, this is Squirrel Famine Territory. These squirrels have incentive to change their behavior.

The squirrels have also figured out that the squirrel who is most close to the person with the peanuts is the squirrel who will probably get the peanuts, and so they jostle for position. Eventually, they figure out that if they are busy fighting and chasing each other, the squirrels who are calm and patient are the ones who get the nuts.

Now, I am not the only person who hand-feeds the squirrels, nor is this the first year that they've had to be hand-fed. I don't actually hand them the nuts, I just throw them on the ground, usually a few feet away.

It's important to remember, though, that even in deep midwinter -- and this is not a "deep" midwinter -- squirrels have fleas, and fleas can jump more than a few feet.

I am lucky in that I am not one of those people who is sensitized to flea-excrement, so I don't get these big welts and instant pain when they bite, shit, and jump away. I am unlucky in that I do not much notice fleas until quite a few of them have jumped from the squirrel to me, to have me bring them inside where it is nice and warm and the perfect place to reproduce by the hundreds of thousands... all of which seem to want to latch on to me when I try to sleep. I'm the only warm-blooded thing in this house, so where else can they go?

Fleas are easy enough to kill. Ortho Total Flea Killer is one of the best solutions, as it has some sort of hormone that doesn't just kill the adults, it causes the larvae to grow wrong, something to do with not growing a new skin before they molt out of the old ones. Now that's gotta hurt, but for fleas, I don't mind.

But in the meanwhile, you don't want to spray too much of this where you sleep or eat, so I'm using the flea-trap to clean up those areas while the poison and hormones work in other places.

Because of the fleas, I don't want the squirrels to come too close. I also don't want them far enough away to forget, that they need to behave as I wish, for them to be fed.

So, by tossing peanuts almost as far as I can throw them with an easy gesture, I can have five or six squirrels sitting in a semi-circle, each with a peanut landing right in front of them at just about the time they finish the last one. This keeps the squirrels from squabbling and it also keeps them in good order. Like rats, squirrels are easy to train, and like rats, they are too smart to stay out of trouble. They like to think themselves into a jam. (So call me a squirrel, you nuts.)

Some of the squirrels don't want to wait, or they haven't figured out that all they have to do is sit in one spot every few hours, to get fed. These troublesome squirrels will walk right past the attentive and well-behaved patient squirrels, and just swarm up the pole to the bird-feeder, as bold as you please.

I should mention that the patient and well-behaved squirrels are all quite fat, and the misbehaving ones have that lean and hungry look. I trust not such squirrels. Hence the name "Cassius".

Cassius has been chased off of the bird-feeder, had hacky-sack balls thrown (gently) at him, and is getting more bold by the day.

My intention is to see that those squirrels which are the best-behaved and most attentive will be the ones who have the most and healthiest squirrel pups. I am not sure what to do with Brutus, though. Smaller and thinner than the others, he may still be a juvenile, or very young adult, while the others are the veterans of several winters. One of them is certainly about 3-to-4 years old. Sadly, despite being very cautious around motor vehicles and being very polite as a beggar, she is inept at making nests and seems unlikely to successfully reproduce. Too bad. She could have been the ancestress of a whole new line of domesticated squirrel.

Why, one may rightly ask, would one want domesticated squirrels? This is a very good question, and not merely from the standpoint of wondering who would want a pet that has huge and very sharp teeth, is very fast, and is almost astonishingly strong for a mammal of that size? Well, don't have them as pets, then, if that bothers you. Perhaps they could be trained to carry small objects to hard-to-reach places. For example, pulling a small line or wire from one point to another, by going from tree to tree. Giving alarm at trespassers in the same way they give alarms at foxes and cats. Tormenting guard dogs. Who knows?

But first, I have to work out the bugs of getting them to understand that they only get paid (in peanuts) when they do as they are required to do. Stealing from the bird-feeder is not to be allowed. Interestingly, some of the older squirrels harass the younger squirrels when they start climbing up to the bird-feeder. It's like I am witnessing the Squirrelly Wrath of elders trying to convince the youngster to not be a trouble-maker.

One has to wonder if there are any additional lessons here.

Saturday, Sanity, and Lacks Thereof, Part Whatever

noreply@blogger.com (Thomas Hardman) — Sun, 29 Jan 2012 00:01:00 +0000

It's time once again to demonstrate that not only do I take the advice of the Washington Post printed horoscope, but I also am afflicted by Perseveration and Poverty of Thought. Maybe.

There's a really well-done article on Wikipedia about Thought Process, as a subset of their article on Mental Status Examination... which I should probably seek at the nearest accredited professional's office. However, that would cost money, and endlessly posting to Blogger about my trivial little problems, and relentless woolgathering and pointless ruminations, costs nothing at all. Besides, if I went to spill my guts to a psychiatrist, the local stalker cult would just break into the files room and steal all of the paperwork and pass out copies to anyone they thought to be in need of a good laugh. So, why not protect the sanctity of professional records facilities while giving up the cheese for free.

Today's Post horoscope suggests that I should enlighten the readership as to exactly what it is that is making me mad enough to suggest that it won't take much more harassment for me to make a final decision to unload my poor dead mother's house -- my home of 48 years where I was raised and have lived most of my life -- at a 20-percent discount. Well, the horoscope wasn't exactly that specific, it was in fact as vague as are most horoscopes. Like any horoscope, you're supposed to read into it what you will, and that's what I've done.

The Astute Reader will remember that long ago I was one of the first to predict both the scale and scope -- and even I was under-estimating by almost an order of magnitude -- of the global recession that would result when the global Housing Bubble collapsed. Hey, I saw Maria Bartiromo mentioning on CNBC talking about an "overhang" or backlog of unsold new housing, back in October 2007, and simply put the facts together and followed them to the inescapable conclusion.

I'm fairly good at putting facts together, and parsing out the chain of consequence to the bitter end. (And of course, I was at the time blissfully unaware of such things as "commoditized debt obligation" and "credit default swaps", hence the underestimation by a full order of magnitude, at least.)

Yet I can still wonder about the knock-on effects of me dumping a house at 80-percent of value. Let's see. Less recordation tax goes to the county, I guess, and less to the State as they can base their tax on assessment, but assessment bases on actual sale prices. Other nearby houses of comparable design and siting would also see a decline in value assessed, as the market would be thinking that "a thing is worth what a thing will bring in a sale" and that what one thing is worth, a nearly identical thing is worth the same. So that's decreases in County and State taxes not on just one property, but on a whole neighborhood as all nearby houses in that neighborhood are suddenly revalued by the market, marked down 20-percent in reasonable first asking price.

Look, there's no reason at all that this wouldn't happen. After all, this zip-code is the second highest in the County for foreclosures, houses are on distress sales everywhere, and almost everyone that bought or refinanced anytime since about 2003 -- when the bubble really began hereabouts mostly due to the local efforts of one Alma Preciado -- is going to be Deeply Underwater already and only the moreso if single-family detached residential homes all across Aspen Hill get devalued 20-percent.

Now, at the risk of seeming perhaps just a trifle mischievous -- if not quite an outright scheming evil bastard (more on those, later) -- allow me to ask a few questions regarding strategy in the face of such a possibility.

1. As hard as it is to sell a place here now, how hard would it be if suddenly assessments dropped by 20-percent? You'd have to drop your asking price by 20-percent for starters and so would everyone else. To remain even more competitive, you might have to drop your asking price by 25 or 35 percent. And to remain competitive, so would everyone else.

2. If you're going to have to drop your price by genuinely outrageous percentages, doesn't it make sense to do it first before everyone else does just so that you'll be ahead of the curve and not be lost in the pack? Seriously: whoever waits the longest loses worst. Don't ever forget that.

3. Shouldn't you contact your Realtor first thing Monday, and make sure you're ready to be on the winning side, first on your block? Or do you want to put it off and be a LOSER.

But you out there are all too smart for me, and you can see right through all of this. It's just that wackjob Thomas Hardman tying to pull a fast one. He's so crazy, you tell yourself, that we can instantly see through his deception! He wants us to run right out and sell in a panic, the assessments drop like a stone through water, he can stay where he is and pay 20-percent less taxes! And you're telling yourself you're not going to play that game.

Well, that's because you're so smart and see right through me.

Thus, you'll be the one left holding the bag when other people don't see right through me. They'll be putting their houses on the market as fast as they can, not wanting to get stuck out there, deeper underwater, lost in the pack, last to market in a shrinking game, LOSERS. And now that you think about it, you're too smart -- aren't you? -- to get stuck in that position.

But whether you're smarter than me (or not) and see through my deception (or not) or get lost on multiple layers of trying to think it all through or simply jump to the right conclusion (and how will you know until the game is all over?), both of those threads depend on Thomas Hardman being a crazy bullshitter. If I actually dump the house at 20-percent below market, all of your being smarter (or not) is obviated by you guessing wrong about the sincerity of my stated intentions.

In any case, I have two older sisters, who can afford much better lawyers than I can, and if my mom's final codicil of the will gets broken in Probate, the house has to be sold as fast as possible. Leaving out of the equation the fact that my sisters will want their shares as fast as possible, the lawyers will want their pounds of flesh, so to speak, and will insist on an even faster sale... which means even further reductions in price, way out past my proposed 20-percent reduction. The way that you, the concerned neighbors, can best assure that this last scenario dumps a half-price house into your neighborhood market is this: in any way give some evidence that either I am too mentally incompetent to own a house, or that my mother was too mentally incompetent to bequeath me one. Um, actually, two.

I should point out a few things here, and then be "moving right along".

First, it is Saturday night, and for about the 160th Saturday night in a row, I am sitting at home and not going anywhere. There are reasons for that other than being a live-in elder-care provider, or being in mourning because I no longer need to provide elder-care.

Secondly, Google has a motto: "Don't Be Evil".

Third, I don't work for Google.

I write.

Probably lots of other people that write, who know that I write, and have seen what has become of me because I write, have flat out abandoned all hope of writing because they don't want to wind up like me.

If you are reading this, you are probably the people that they rightly fear would see to it that they ended up like me.

Of course, they could just go the traditional route, writing in private and trying to publish to the old school press, but that market and industry is damn near dead, but not so dead as the idea of being able to write something that sells (or is widely read) and retain any sort of private life. Hell, look at what happened to JD Salinger.

I tried going that route. I wrote a novel. It was almost original in its day, though if I tried to write it now, people would just yawn and say "ho hum, yet-another tawdry interspecies romance between Mortals and a Supernatural". And so it is.

And how I have suffered for writing it. In the same way that there are lots of illiterate and uncultured people who name the fictional Creature in Ms Shelley's famous novel "Frankenstein" (Frankenstein is the name of the mad scientist who makes his Creature, not the name of the Creature itself), there are people who do not seem to understand that a person who writes a novel about Vampires is not a Vampire, but rather is an Author. Probably Bram Stoker suffered from this classic idiocy, with illiterates and boneheads calling him "Dracula". And probably he also suffered somewhat at the hands of mentally-ill people who couldn't distinguish between the reality of a writer, and his creation in fiction.

Once again I have to point people at one of my short works, Strangers In Town. Call it surrealism, if you will. Or call it me taking the approach that "the best self-therapy is a good self-parody".

My suffering began pretty much as soon as I started writing that first novel, in the late 1980s, and I am now enduring the third generation of abusers as they indoctrinate the fourth generation, as best I can tell.

And here's how it goes, still, to this very day. Much as in Strangers In Town...

I walk into a public place. It could be a grocery store, a department store, a dry-goods store, hell, I have heard it in the frackin' County building on Maryland Avenue in downtown Rockville.

From someone unseen, "hey, it's Count Dracula!" Heads turn. Eyes lock on me for an instant. In recent years, people grab for their txting cellphones.

And then the fun begins. Usually "the fun" is someone sneaking up behind me and "staking" me, jamming something sharp and painful into the back of my neck. Considering that this is almost always timed to occur at the exact instant that cash changes hands, I have been tempted on many occasions to just run screaming out of the door, call a cop, and try to press charges for armed robbery, as in, "I felt a knife prick the back of my neck, and I was afraid and ran away and left my money". I doubt anyone would actually go to jail over this, but I'd love to hear what the perpetrator would have to say to a judge about how and why they were carrying on in this way.

Or someone sneaks up behind me and pours some irritant powder down the back of my shirt collar, to the point where I now very rarely wear shirts with collars. Or someone flings a handful of dust in my face, which usually burns in about the same way salt water burns if you don't wash it off with clean water, down at the beach. But this isn't salt, though it does taste sort of salty. It's not garlic, because I put garlic or garlic salt on my steaks and eggs.

This reminds me of the sort of Fucking Assholes that you see in school or college, trickster bullies dontcha know, who will drive a person to the edge of madness with endless insults and pranks. On the one hand, they can tell people "look look you can do anything to him/her and he/she won't react much", or if the victim reacts violently, they can say "I told you they were violent crazy!"

Remember how that worked back in school, folks? It's the victim, not the harasser, who gets sent to the principal's office and gets detention.

But for me, it's worse. It's widespread to the point of, well, back in the mid-1980s I was harassed endlessly at the main campus of the University of Maryland, by a pretty large subset of the student body, but I tried to convince myself that it was just Hazing, which was totally out of hand at the time in any case.

Then it followed me to work when I was a Federal employee downtown. It followed me into nightclubs, into parks, etc etc. Finally I got the idea that it was going to be following me everywhere I went in this area (DC was pretty small-town in those days, still is in most ways) and I gave up. I bailed out of the region, and it followed me still.

You'd think I would have just killed myself or something -- pretty clearly this was the intention of the harassment, to drive me to suicide, presumably so that a lot of nasty sociopath young-adults could congratulate themselves on their superiority -- but there were rays of hope.

In 1995 or so -- in Austin Texas where I was living in a car parked near a day-laborer center in the hopes of getting some work -- I was woken by something going "thunk" on the roof of my car. A louder "thunk" followed, and then a huge "thump" hit the sidewalk next to the car, a voice said loudly "Stop that right now!" and I sat up wide awake. At about 5:00AM in the morning, some Fraternity Boy types were throwing rocks and a fairly large chunk of concrete off of a parking garage, trying to hit my car. The loud voice was a city cop. He told the frat boys to get the hell gone from there or he was going to run them in, what the hell did they think they were doing. And one of them said, "he thinks he's Count Dracula!"

And the cop said: "No shit. Well, okay then, I am Count Dracula. Now what you wanna do." The frat boys took off as requested.

It's been like that through the years. Yet it seems that a lot of the same frat-boy mentality has been circulating stories even in the locker rooms down at the county police academy, a laughing matter of such hilarity that if a cop shows up to take a complaint from me, they usually can barely keep their amusement (or anger) in check. On the other hand, although I have to shamefully admit to ongoing mental illness probably mostly PTSD/abuse-victim-reaction at this point, there are at least a few cops who may have come from educational backgrounds less hostile to mental-illness than the college football cirriculum. Or perhaps they have friends or relatives who are mentally-ill and wouldn't want their friends and relatives treated with open contempt or abusiveness, and are willing to grant to total strangers what they would want for their friends and relatives at the hands of others. In any case, all of these officers have the ability to examine my spotless arrest record and utter lack of convictions or hospitalizations.

Dealing with other county agencies (formerly with State agencies as well, until the County absorbed all of those functions) has been equally problematic. In perhaps 1996 or so, one agency demanded that I be enrolled in county-provided mental healthcare, including blood testing for proof of medication compliance, before they would let me take advantage of job-training or job-placement services. They then more or less told me to get lost and not come back until I did what they said. They then switched languages to Spanish and were extremely welcoming to the illegal alien who would be receiving taxpayer funded services that I as a citizen would continue to be denied.

If I have any of this much-alleged "racism", that might be where it started, and from which starting point it only ever got worse. My evident dismay and probably evident anger clearly were circulated within the foreign language community to the point where assaults at drive-through windows became so common that I abandoned even trying to eat at such places. Trying to eat at a higher class of restaurant, with comparably foreign staffing, only resulted in a strange new phenomenon: everytime I ate at such a place with such staff, on that night I would wake suddenly from very bad nightmares in a very deep sleep, in a puddle of urine. I stopped eating in such places, and the nightmares and enuresis stopped. Of course, shortly thereafter I developed the posterior-subcapsular cataracts typical of long-term thorazine overdose and wound up on a surgeon's table twice having a doctor cut into my eyes.

My point is, the incredibly annoying and undignified harassment of previous years was ramping up into the realm of potentially life-threatening and certainly debilitating physical damage.

I don't come out of the house much now; there is no reason to do so when my life is at risk. And of course, the scandalmongers, the defamers, the slanderers, all say "he thinks he's dracula so he is hiding from the light".

So, I guess this could keep on and I could dump the house onto the market at 20, 25, 30 or even 50 percent of assessed value... and still walk away with enough money to buy some land in some State where they take slander and defamation seriously, and if you shoot someone for trying to stalk you on your own land, the jury will acquit with the foreman's statement of "he needed killin'".

But is that a victory for the fine people hereabouts?

Wouldn't you rather ease up a little bit now, so you can keep me around longer so you can torment me more later? And, you know, experience the endless joy that is teaching your children to discriminate and hate and destroy people's lives?

Robot Repair and L.E.D. Lighting; and, A Cautionary Tale

noreply@blogger.com (Thomas Hardman) — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 15:23:00 +0000

It's been almost four years since I was interviewed by US News and World Report on the subject of my Roomba Discovery.

Hence, it's probably long overdue for me to give a long-term customer review.

When first acquired, we were amazed not only by the novelty of the item, but by the fact that it worked as advertised. We quickly became somewhat dependent on it. For me, the fact that using it meant that my mother would bring in a maid service only once a month rather than once a week. Consider this: at $400, this unit seems expensive. But at $50.00 a visit for a quick once-over vacuuming by the maid service, by saving us from eight uses of the maid service, the robot paid for itself. It would only have to survive once-a-week usage for two months to reach "break even". It lasted for four years.

I never thought I'd live long enough to find myself complaining that my robot is obsolete, but "there you go" and I'm not the sort of person who likes to let things stay broken. Besides, when I was a kid, this was my favorite toy:

As it turns out, the Roomba unit is on its third battery. The original one lasted almost two years, the first mail-order replacement lasted about a month. Having taken a chance and having done some online research first, the second mail-order replacement has thus far lasted four months, under heavy usage. Yet having just bought this new battery, I discovered that the Roomba was not properly cleaning. The dust filter clogged as expected but the particle bin was not filling. This means that the brushes aren't working, and that means that either the motor is inoperative or the gears are worn down.

There are lots of helpful web pages on inspecting and repairing the Roomba. One of them gave me a clue on disassembling it to check the gears in the "brush deck". You have to pull the carapace half off and pop loose the brush deck to get to the gears, but once you've done that, it's only a few minutes work with a jeweler screwdriver to open the gearbox casing. In my case, it was a combination of dirt, grease, and wear that was the problem. The nylon plastic gears had worn down enough so that the motor couldn't transmit power to the brushes. I ordered replacement from the folks who had the best How-To guide, and for only about $50, RobotShop.com shipped me a set of replacement gears. While waiting for delivery, I cleaned out the interior of the Roomba. After assembly, it is now working about the same as it was when we first got it.

While waiting for delivery of the Roomba gears, I decided that it probably wasn't good to be so dependent on one little robot, especially as that little robot was nearly obsolete. Having realized this, in so many words that read like the beginning of some really ancient 1950s science-fiction novel by Lester Del Ray or some such author, I decided that I would like a new vacuum cleaner of the non-robotic kind.

The vacuum cleaner on hand here is an Electrolux canister, which works just about as well as when it was new. However, it was new perhaps 40 years ago, which is a testament to the Electrolux line. I decided to go shop for something more modern, and wound up selecting the Bissell "Rewind Powerhelix".

Sadly, Best Buy did not have one in stock other than the demo unit, and they wouldn't sell me that one. So, I prepaid and they said they'd call me for pickup when it came in. A week later, the call came.

Note: I had to trim out a rather overlong and very unhappy bit about something happening on my way out of the Best Buy in Rockville while picking up my vacuum cleaner. Let's just say "same old stuff" and mutter under our breath about far-reaching gangs of delusional cultists being just goddamn everywhere in this region. The only hint I'll leave right here is that far too many people's minds appear to have been rotted by all of this "Twilight" and "Vampire Diaries" and "Secret Circle" media.

Moving right along, as there are few reasons to leave the house and very many to remain inside, I might as well try and gild my cage, so to speak.

It's also good to be concerned about Global Warming and that sort of thing.

There will of course be an Estate Sale soon, and the majority of the furniture will be sold off. This means that if I want to be able to sit somewhere other than the floor, and see after nightfall, I need to get some things for the house. Right now I am working on lighting and lighting fixtures. Eco-friendly seems to me like the choice to make.

As it turns out, Home Depot carries a fairly large, if workaday, selection of lighting fixtures and lamps and lampstands. Additionally, they have recently expanded their selection of light bulb types and sizes.

As my mother was very frugal (for all of being "Fancy" Pennsylvania Dutch), we had long since mostly changed over from incandescent light bulbs to the compact-florescent bulbs. Yet despite the energy cost savings, these have their own drawbacks, notably the fact that they contain mercury, a hazardous material. Newer high-output light-emitting diode ("LED") bulbs are starting to come on the market, which are designed as swap-out replacements for standard 120 volt AC bulbs.

Home Depot carries their own "EcoSmart" (tm) brand of LED replacement bulbs as well as a few other brands. As I am slowly but surely changing over to LED I am becoming rather familiar with most or all of these products, and also I am seen with some frequency in the Home Depot in Aspen Hill.

I should note in passing that they don't seem to know quite what to make of me, though the folks in the electrical and lighting section are probably a bit annoyed by now with the odd requests I have been making in the recent past, usually for products they didn't carry. Yet perhaps those requests don't seem so odd to them now, as the products I asked about that they did not have then, they do have now. Doubtless they thought I was a wackjob. Now, if they are Astute, they will understand that I was just ahead of the curve, and knew whereof I spoke, however disjointedly might have been my speech. But I digress.

Now that Home Depot is aggressively trying to position itself at the forefront of high-efficiency and low-cost "alternative lighting", a lot of things are starting to pique my interest, for example they now carry track-lighting lamp fixtures with MR16/GU12 dual-post sockets as well as the more commonplace A or E series (screw-in) sockets. The MR16-compatible fixtures enable planning for 12-volt DC systems as well as 120-volt AC systems. Why am I interested in cutting-edge products in low-power lighting? I'm a Solar Energy enthusiast.

The EcoSmart (tm) 13-Watt (60W) A19 LED Light Bulb has about the same form-factor as a glass incandescent bulb, and in fact it's a little smaller in the bulb dimensions although the screw fitting is the same size (A19). I got one for $23.97.

Now consider the "Hampton Bay" torchiere floor lamp. I got one for $24.97. Easy to assemble, no tools required. A hint: when preparing to screw on the top section, if the assembly requires 10 twists clockwise, first twist it 10 times counterclockwise, push the wires into the staff, and then screw on the assembly. The wires will be untwisted once assembly is complete.

Put the two together? For right around $50.00, I get a very bright floor lamp, rather elegant in its severe simplicity, and a bulb that lights the whole room for only 13 watts, and that bulb may very well last as long as the lamp-stand.

Additional eco-friendly lighting is to be had at Home Depot, and for that matter it can be had at an increasingly wide selection of other hardware stores.

A note: these lights come in various sizes and form factors, as well as for a variety of functions. It's wise to choose carefully.

High-power LED lighting inherently excels as floodlights. Emissions from the semiconductor surface is highly directional. Both the Philips and EcoSmart brands offer a variety of extremely bright floodlights, with 17 watts producing as much light as a 90 watt incandescent. That's about five times more efficient!

Because of the directional nature of LED lighting, the manufacturers have had to get a little inventive to bring us omni-directional emission bulbs. Yet they've managed to offer various form-factors and lighting-temperatures (light color). For people who have large circular recessed lighting, there is a large "ambient" unit, putting out approximately the same light as a 100 watt incandescent, with about the same warm yellowish tone. It should be noted that it takes about a second to come on after the power is turned on, though most of these bright LED replacement bulbs don't have that problem. The smaller track-lighting bulbs (MR16 or GU10 socket) are generally floodlights.

As the time for the Estate Sale draws near, I'll have to buy more lighting fixtures and/or furnishings. For some reason, when this house was built, almost no lighting fixtures were installed, other than the porch lights, an entryway light, and lights in the bathrooms and dining room. For all other lighting needs, you have to buy a lamp and plug it in, although thankfully some of the wall sockets are switch controlled.

I'll also have to buy some furniture, one might think, as everything will be getting sold out from under me. Well, that's okay, I do have plastic lawn furniture, and I wouldn't be the first person in the world to make do with plastic lawn furniture in the house. Yet how much furniture do I really need?

I once traveled the country with no more belongings than could be crammed into a Volkswagen Superbeetle, and almost everything I could need was able to fit. Because I have a bad back, I sleep on the floor in any case. Any mattress much thicker or softer than a Tatami mat or futon will wreck my back, so no need to spend thousands of dollars on mattress sets.

Although I have a credenza suitable for knickknacks and tchotchkes, pretty much all of the knickknacks and tchotchkes are going in the Estate Sale, so I guess I can keep the credenza so I have some place to put the mail. A couch I will need, and a couch I have already got. It's not like I entertain guests at all, so for a chair I can make do with plastic lawn furniture.

In any case, it will be good to have the house relatively uncluttered. Minor damage from that earthquake last summer does need to be done. Minor cracks in the walls need patching, and the place is long overdue for interior painting in any case. Why live in a house that is over-full of things that I don't need or don't use?

In any case, what with all of the cultists hereabouts, I might want to move out in a hurry. I might even want to sell in a hurry, in which case I think I'd probably just dump the house on the market "priced to move" and if the cultists all have to deal with real-estate devaluation, well, they didn't have to get together to run me out of town, now did they. Yet even if I am going to be settled in for the long haul, there's something to be said for a certain Spartan simplicity, or a Japanese minimalism.

SCOTUS Bans Warrantless GPS; Maryland Won't Recall All Vehicle Tags

noreply@blogger.com (Thomas Hardman) — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 13:01:00 +0000

Monday, January 23 2012, the Supreme Court of the United States ("SCOTUS") ruled that law-enforcement may no longer attach GPS devices to cars without a warrant.

Despite longstanding rumors circulating within the Conspiracy Theorist Community, the State of Maryland will not be forced by this decision to recall all vehicle tags. (The Conspiracy Theory in question posits the notion that the Department of Motor Vehicles requires an extremely deep "vehicle safety inspection" not merely to assure vehicle safety but also to "lojack" every last vehicle that will be registered in the State.) The Conspiracy Theory Community needs to be advised that the SCOTUS ruling does not in any way restrict any parties other than governmental law-enforcement agencies:

"If long-term monitoring can be accomplished
without committing a technical trespass
-- suppose for example, that the federal government
required or persuaded auto manufacturers to include
a GPS tracking device in every car --
the court's theory would provide no protection,"
[Supreme Court Justice Samuel] Alito wrote.

Remember, folks, our politicians and bureaucrats here in Maryland are nothing if not supremely inventive in their rationalizations, so much so that they inspire comparisons alluding to Oscar Wilde's famous remark characterizing Fox Hunting as "the pursuit of the inedible, by the unspeakable". It would not be, they would quickly tell you, a "technical trespass" for them to embed a GPS and WiFi transponder in your vehicle tags, as, after all, "driving is not a right, but a privilege" and when you apply for vehicle tags and registration, you are actually soliciting the State to attach their property to yours. Invitation precludes the notion of trespassing.

(The Astute Reader will rightly, if cynically, note that with two brief sentences I have managed to express more bogus rationalization than usually comes out of Annapolis in an entire session of the Assembly. Maybe there really is a future for me in local politics.)

The only saving grace of this sort of thing would be -- and I use the Conditional tense because, as we all know, our esteemed legislators and LEO would never engage in such deviousness and thus this is firmly and rightly relegated to, and dismissed as, Conspiracy Theory -- that all tracking traces from such a universal monitoring system would become part of the public record. A diligent and curious public would of course exercise their rights to be informed. So, Delegate, your car was parked when and where next to who else's vehicle? Now that is going to raise questions during campaign season... No, clearly it is time for the State of Maryland to prohibit this sort of thing, never can tell when something like that will come back to bite you in the ass.

Moving right along, I should recommend to all and sundry who happen to be in the network-engineering or systems-administration fields, that if you haven't yet tried it, you should immediately take a look at BackTrack Linux.

I personally noticed this because I was looking for a decent "wardriving" system for my Windows-7 (tm) laptop, and while some of the packages came pretty close, none had the functionality of Kismet. The BackTrack Linux distribution had Kismet and more. Unlike the Windows(tm) software for wardriving, Kismet will find not only WiFi Access Points, but it will also find Wifi Clients (laptops which are connected to Access Points, etc.) and that can be extremely useful in professional endeavors such as penetration testing. If you're just looking for some free WiFi, the software packages available for Windows (tm) are all that you need. If you want to find out how many unauthorized client devices are probing your wireless networks trying to crack your wifi encryption, you'll need Kismet.

Of course, I personally have no need to check to see if there are unauthorized client devices probing my wireless network trying to crack the encryption; I don't rely on such weak stuff as WPA and instead use other means of securing the internet against attacks transiting my access point. The Astute Reader will of course recall that I do hold US Patent 7,464,403 which concerns itself with wireless security among other things.

Sadly, nobody seems to be the least bit interested in making use of my patent, so I have an unfortunately large amount of spare time on my hands. Hence, the wardriving as a hobby.

BackTrack Linux installed very nicely once I downloaded it from the distribution website and burnt it to an installation DVD. It even partitioned my Windows 7 drive for me, no muss and no fuss and everything works just fine. And of course, because it is Linux, I got an entire operating system and an astonishing software load for free. Combining that with a GlobalSat BU-353 USB GPS unit, I was ready to do some Wardriving.

Here's a Google Earth KML mapfile of the literal thousands of WiFi Access Points in "north Aspen Hill", Maryland. If you have Google Earth installed, this will show you all of the access-points. Some people have entertaining notions for naming their "AP", for example the folks who named their AP "FREE PORN HERE", or the folks who named their AP "Surveillance Car 3".

And the map also shows various "probe networks", assorted client machines, all that sort of stuff.

Given the context of the first section of this blog posting, I suppose I shouldn't much wonder why it seems that no matter where I was taking a reading, there was one client machine constantly signalling its attempts to join wireless ESSID named "<ANY>", with a constant MAC address. No matter where I was, the signal strength remained the same yet the geography constantly changed to match my position.

Well, I had heard that the best and most state-of-the-art GPS tracker bugs (also known as "bumper-beepers") have internal power supplies so that they cannot be detected through analysis of the vehicle's electrical system, monitoring for power drains that can't be explained by such things as the vehicle's nav/audio devices. I've also heard that the best ones also store their data and serve it up via WiFi. It couldn't reasonably do this as an AP, since the beacon signal would easily be detected even by software for Windows (tm). It would have to do it as a client. Just drive by the target with an AP in the car, the client locks on, data is exchanged, you know the drill. Kismet, of course, finds clients as well as APs.

I guess this might tend to explain why my ex-girlfriends always seem to know when and where to find me, along with explaining a lot of other things.

Well, SCOTUS says it's trespassing, so I guess I need to go clean someone else's trash off of my car.

And it seems as if even Nature agrees with SCOTUS: if your WiFi or GPS fail today, it's because our primary, Sol, is having a tantrum.

Existentialism for Idiots

noreply@blogger.com (Thomas Hardman) — Sun, 22 Jan 2012 15:15:00 +0000

(This entry is NOT SAFE FOR WORK.)

Once again, here it is Sunday morning, and once again I have to increment the count of "weekends where I didn't go anywhere and didn't do anything, especially didn't go out to a bar or club". The count's somewhere up around 150 or more. I think the last time I went out was sometime in maybe late 2009.

My "winter depression" or Seasonal Affective Disorder ("SAD") has just about gone, and the grieving process is pretty much in the background. I'm certainly not obsessing over it, though whenever my sister comes to visit to pick up mail related to the Estate or to try to dig through the records in search of something, the subject will likely come up and there's that awkward silence for a few moments and then we have to move the conversation along so as to not be picking at old wounds, so to speak. Though I am feeling better, I'm far from happy, but at least I am getting back to the level of far-from-happy to which I have been accustomed.

That's not all that positive, though. It's really pretty sad, to what levels of Anomie one can become accustomed.

Perhaps, though, it's not mere Anomie, nor even mere Accidie. Angst, maybe? Not quite, though I've certainly been there; this is something not quite so intense or pervasive. Maybe it's just Weltschmerz, a "... psychological pain caused by sadness that can occur when realizing that someone's own weaknesses are caused by the inappropriateness and cruelty of the world and (physical and social) circumstances".

One thing is for sure. I have settled into being what the Japanese call Hikikomori, basically young adults who retreat from society, generally hiding in their rooms at their parents' apartment. Maybe it's Avoidant Personality Disorder.

Or maybe, for me as for Sartre, "hell is other people".

Most people in the Greater Washington DC Metropolitan area -- or at least those who very frequently ride the Metrorail -- will completely understand that bit about "hell is other people", although they usually phrase it as "goddamn Tourists". That muttered imprecation is generally followed by the phrase "don't know nothin', and get in the way".

I personally have generally tried to fill my soul with a generous love of my fellow man, or at least a reasonable facsimile thereof, when riding down the escalator into a Metro station, only to find that a gaggle of tourists has disembarked said escalator, and then promptly have pooled up in a glob of humanity blocking the landing from said escalator. Frequently they do so with such effectiveness that you cannot get off of the escalator without pushing them out of the way. This is rude, and one shouldn't be rude if it can possibly be avoided yet when the alternative is having the soles of your shoes sanded off by the relentlessly grinding escalator steps, rudeness cannot possibly be avoided.

Yet the great pitfall of rudeness is that once one allows it in one's self, one becomes accustomed to it. Indeed, it can become a form of performance art. It might not seem that the word "elegance" could be applied to rudeness, yet during Tourist Season one may frequently witness harried commuters in open competition to see who can be the most elegantly rude to tourists. Thus, points are awarded to the clever commuter who can push through the tourists blocking the landings whispering "this way to the ticket machines" thus causing the tourists to move from their blocking point, rather than to the commuter who simply screeches "out of the frackin' way you provincial inbreds".

This too has its drawbacks... too much elegance and the level of abstraction increases. With abstraction comes incomprehensibility. It's one thing to tell a glob of tourists blocking the escalator landings "if you stand there long enough, someone will tie your laces together". It's quite another for someone to get stuck behind a glob of tourists taking up the whole width of the escalator, bend down and craftily untie shoelaces and leave them dangling over the escalator steps. Those shoelaces can get sucked into the machinery at the end of the escalator run, and that can suck people's feet into the machinery. And then the tourists will be really blocking the escalator landing.

In the same way that too much elegance and abstraction in messing with tourists can stop being a somewhat rude instruction on commuting etiquette and become little short of attempted murder, too much elegance and abstraction in other social interactions can change from helpful hints on how to get along, into outright abusiveness that has little hope of achieving the desired goal of promoting functional and polite public behavior.

Thus, it's good to be pretty straightforward and try to tell people exactly how they are offending. Simply refusing to do business with offenders quite evidently does little or nothing to cause them to see the error of their ways and work to do better. It's probably proper to try to inform people that they are being annoying.

Then again, some people enjoy being annoying, and there's nothing you can do about them but avoid them. Because if you inform them exactly why you think they are fucking assholes, they will redouble their efforts to be fucking assholes. This is due to the sad yet inarguable fact of life that only a fucking asshole thinks that it's good to be a fucking asshole, which single characteristic is in fact the ultimate basic definition of a fucking asshole.

Everyone on this earth has no doubt had the following unpleasant conversation...

YOU: Um, look, I'm not sure how to tell you this, but you're being a fucking asshole.

ASSHOLE: You betcha! Ha ha ha, ha ha ha ha!

YOU: You know, that's even more asshole-ish!

ASSHOLE: Ha ha ha, ha ha ha ha, PUSSY.

Most people leave at this point. However, sad and misguided individuals, such as myself, are either too stupid to leave or they may have some bizarre and demonstrably wrong notion about "perfectibility of humanity". They haven't yet learned that assholes enjoy being assholes and regard it as their main worthiness in life. By failing to leave, you're just giving an asshole even more opportunity to do what they most love to do.

At the risk of only giving even more fucking assholes even more insight into how better to be even bigger assholes, I must post a few basic rules on how not to offend. Most actually decent people know this already, or will quickly understand when told.

Don't Get in People's Way. Don't make yourself an obstruction to public use of public spaces and passages. This includes not taking up the whole damned sidewalk and thinking that such thoughtlessness makes you cool or something. It includes not walking out of the door of a store and then standing there with your whole extended family blocking the goddamn door while you make lengthy minor adjustments to your clothing and appearance. It includes not standing just inside the door with your whole extended family blocking the goddamn door while you zip your coats. If your whole extended family needs to stand as a group while zipping their coats, stand to the side so that you're not in the goddamn way of everyone else trying to come in or go out. Or, if you feel some bizarre culturally-based need to block the goddamn doors, at least have the common decency to say "excuse me". And then get out of the goddamn way.

Understand Personal Space. Your pet dogs may have no concept of personal space, as evidenced by the fact that they will walk right up and stick their nose in your crotch and drool down the inside of your pants leg if you allow it. They'll even do it to total strangers, because it's their way of being friendly. Yet people are not dogs, and lots of people really don't like strange dogs poking their noses in places where they are not invited. In the same way, lots of people don't like total strangers who walk up to them and stand more closely than would close family members. If you are in a line behind someone, and are close enough to pick their pockets, that's too close. If you are close enough behind them so that they can feel your breath on their neck, you are far too close. And please understand this if you understand nothing else. There is no excuse for standing too close behind someone in a line when you are the only two people in a very large store. The only thing worse is continually entering a person's Personal Space when there is a very large area allowing all people to have a lot of room.

All Public Areas Are Public to All. If a store is open to business for anyone, they are open for business to everyone. Even the Ugly Customer must be served. Even Fucking Assholes need to be served until and unless they behave in such a way as to be banned by the Management. Until they are officially banned and are banned by Management, they get the same service as everyone. Everyone should expect to get, and to give, the same as anyone else. The Parks are open to everyone, the sidewalks are open to everyone. There's no such thing as "our neighborhood" unless you live in a privately owned and privately maintained "gated community". There's no such thing as "our shopping center where we don't allow the Anglos/Blacks/Hispanics/Asians". This is one of the most basic concepts in the US and Canada. Trying to be exclusive of people in public spaces is one of the great hallmarks of Fucking Assholes.

Commentary and Criticism Are Rights. It is perfectly alright to call someone a Fucking Asshole. It is not alright at all to be a Fucking Asshole. A basic difference between someone who is a Fucking Asshole and someone who is not, is that a Fucking Asshole doesn't care if you call them a Fucking Asshole, and someone who is not a Fucking Asshole will care deeply enough to change their ways and not act like a Fucking Asshole. A Fucking Asshole, when correctly labeled, usually will escalate their behavior simply to prove they are correctly labeled, and also to prove that they can be even more so. A person who is incorrectly labeled as a Fucking Asshole will try to find out why they have that label, and any decent person will tell them. Having given the first offense of uttering the label, it is not compounded by any critique which can be addressed. Accusation becomes conversation and conversation becomes negotiation. The only person who will not follow this path is the Fucking Asshole. Just calling someone a name and then not being willing to discuss it with that someone, is infantile and idiotic. These are characteristics of the Fucking Asshole, and not of the Decent Person.

Now, I could go on and on, and in the future I doubtless shall. But that's enough for today.

At least, now some of the people out there have some idea why I don't like them, or don't like what they're doing. Generally, it's because they get in the way and stay in the way, or get too damned close when there's no reason at all for it, or do both of those things and insist on being Fucking Assholes about it.

Wasted Weekend In Review

noreply@blogger.com (Thomas Hardman) — Mon, 16 Jan 2012 15:40:00 +0000

There's not much going on here other than me continuing to struggle with a pile of upgrading brought on by Firefox's "improved" 9.0.1 version release. It's not just me, there's breakage all over the InterNet because of this. Oh well. This is not going to gain you any more market share taken away from Microsoft Internet Explorer. Meanwhile, I am about 99 percent done with "shaving the yak" just so that a relatively small percentage of likely users can see what they're supposed to see on some of my websites.

Meanwhile, there's not much else to report other than that one of my cars was damaged as part of a collision wherein one vehicle ran into a parked car which was then flung into my own parked vehicle. I should mention here that if you own a Honda Civic, you do not want to get it caught between a Cadillac Escalade and a min-1980s Oldsmobile.

Due to a complete lack of anything interesting to do which doesn't involve going out and hanging around with total strangers in some bar I don't much like, I surfed a lot of YouTube and discovered the entertainment value of watching people "Shuffle Dance". Hey, I might even learn how to do this myself, as it's not too different from skipping and it's clearly good exercise.

Here, have some Shuffle lessons.

Shaving A Yak While Dodging the Crazies...

noreply@blogger.com (Thomas Hardman) — Fri, 13 Jan 2012 01:57:00 +0000

Dodging the crazies has become something of a pastime of mine. I'd call it a hobby but hobbies are meant to provide enjoyable diversion. Want to see an example of an actual hobby? I'm "moving right along" with my solar charging system and shed-mounted utility and security lighting system. It's so fun that I made some video of it.

No, the crazies can be either of two things, two major classifications, each of which can certainly affect the other. First, "the crazies" is how I can get to thinking when excessive weirdness impinges on my life. Secondarily, "the crazies" is how I think of the sort of people who just can't stop trying to inflict excessive weirdness on my life, apparently just so that they can watch me suffer as they drive me mad with their own madness.

An example: Yesterday, Wednesday the 11th, at about 4:00Pm or so, I was out working on the final touches of the solar-system upgrade. I stepped out of the shed for a smoke, and there was a strange object which rather resembled a car-battery in my back yard, not far from the porch. I walked on over to take a look at it, and noticed it was beeping. Right about then, I noticed this one black man in workman's clothes approaching the strange object, coming from the street. Then I noticed he was holding some sort of a wand, some sort of detector, and then I noticed his vehicle parked across the street: Washington Gas. Major repairs are scheduled for my street, and this man was detecting the courses of the underground gas pipes. Perfectly reasonable.

Less reasonable... when I offered to point out where the line ran next to the house, he said "I already know where it turns", and I said "okay" and turned to go back to what I was doing. The thing is, that man's eyes about bugged out of his head at that point. I finished turning and went back to the shed. Yet still I heard another voice, not that of the man I had just seen, saying "I was ready for him".

This made no sense at the time, but as of this morning, much becomes more clear.

I saw some field-engineer types down the street and went to chat with them, to get more details on when the street and water-main repairs would start. I found out about all I needed to know, and was headed back home, when one of them was overheard saying something to the effect of having heard that I was a dangerous racist. (These two were both "white".) Now, if someone had said something like that to the crews headed out to work on my street, the actions of that Washington Gas fellow and his associate would make sense. If they had been told that, me approaching the one man might have seemed to him like that crazy racist man they warned him about was launching an attack. I guess that would explain why he actually had his eyes bugging out.

Now, of course, the question would be, who told him that, and why.

Kind of funny... I was driving on my usual schedule, off to take a walk in the park, on Monday. While at a four-way stop, I looked over and saw someone I have known for some years, but hadn't seen for several months, so I pulled over and tried to chat. He wasn't dressed for the slightly chilly weather, and said so after brief conversation, and he headed back inside and I headed off to take my walk. Part of the discussion, though, was about my "new" car, first time he had seen it. He took a nice look at it, no surprise as I was telling him how it came to me and reciting various specifications such as engine size and miles-per-gallon.

Now, for the last week or so, my life has been pretty trouble free, but the very next day, in every approaching car I saw faces looking shocked, dismayed, seriously weirded-out. I turned on the news channel, thinking that 9/11 had happened again, nothing on the news. Yet these guys are all checking out my car, and staring at me. Kind of odd, and definitely suspicious.

All of a sudden, I've got sketchy people pretty much stalking me everywhere I go shopping. It's like someone called up their cult leader and the cult leader said "let me take care of this" and then some e-alert system -- like "Amber Alert" or "Silver Alert" or "School Code Alert" -- text messaged about a hundred people to all be on the lookout for me and my car. Crap like this can make a person paranoid. Yet as I said above, "dodging the crazies" is a well-honed set of habits for me.

That doesn't mean that some appropriate ranking official in the local government should fail to look into the matter. Because if you've got cultists putting out the word to be on the lookout, and telling outrageous lies to get people to want to assist, that's not far at all from the legal element of "chain of command, overt or covert" as seen in the Maryland Anti-Gang Act of 2010. The first time one of these poor misled folks crosses the line into the basis "crimes of violence" for that Act, someone somewhere is potentially looking at 20 years... because frankly we don't need no stinking gangs in Aspen Hill (or anywhere) and just because the leadership and officer corps mostly look and act like church-goers and office ladies doesn't mean that they aren't clearly trained and practiced at raising a rabble to run wild in the streets looking for blasphemers and heretics.

There's also the little question about possible mis-use of County resources. After all, the County is about the only local entity that has such alert systems. Wouldn't it be shameful for local politicians to have to explain how any old Tom Dick or Harry can leverage the County emergency-alerts text system to launch unsuspecting and normally-decent subscribing citizens into the role of being a private army pursuing some obscure private vendetta?

"Shaving A Yak" is a phrase meaning that you've got stuck doing something which is both ridiculous and time-consuming, but which is also necessary to accomplish something that actually must be done.

For me, this problem originated with the release of the new Firefox web-browser version 9.0.1.

Many of the websites I host are based on the MediaWiki software suite, the same suite that runs WikiPedia. Firefox's new release abandons an old work-around which has become "deprecated". Thus, website features in older versions of Mediwiki which ought to appear in the left-side navigation and utility frame are now buried in the bottom of the page. It looks icky and it's hard to use.

I set out to fix this by going to the latest version of Mediawiki which doesn't have this exact problem, but discovered that first I had to upgrade my PHP (hypertext pre-processing language), which meant that I had to upgrade the MySQL database server, which meant that I had to rebuild the Apache HTTPD web-server, which didn't like the build-configuration specifications of the PHP, which had to be rebuilt and the the webserver has to be re-built and now various other things need to be dealt-with and one of those was a fairly simple library handling REGEX (Regular EXpressions) which meant that I had to break large parts of the entire server.

Fortunately, this is Debian Linux, which has the helpful apt-get Package Management System. Unfortunately, for apt-get to prevent brokenness from removing a fundamental library, it has to remove all of the things that would be broken. Then it removes the library. But don't fear, we can do a "dist-upgrade", which automagically migrates from the old base software version to the new base software version. In MicroSoft WIndows(tm) that would be like migrating from Windows Vista to Windows 7... you expect it to go smoothly, but this was not to be the case.

So once again, a rather full and large feature set is required by the new MediaWiki and those assorted features are spread across several applications and many more software libraries.

So, I've been shaving a yak, as the saying goes, but I think it's about denuded by now. Once I've got all of the yak-hair I need, I can...

Heh. Even more TL;DR.

But let's all get looking into what sort of unknown and under-the-table organization is operating in my neighborhood, which has to power to turn out at least a hundred observers and apparently even more actual stalkers and "tails" overnight, most of them apparently given whatever story will make them feed information back to their controller... even if that story puts the "subject" at mortal risk.

Noted In Passing, etc.

noreply@blogger.com (Thomas Hardman) — Thu, 05 Jan 2012 15:01:00 +0000

Noted in passing, a few things.

First, I am still boycotting Facebook, mostly because -- as I said to the FB "deactivate your account" questionnaire -- it is an "informational playground for the neighborhood stalker cult". I might even abandon Blogger for comparable reasons, and if I feel like sharing ideas or opinions in a freely-available format online, I can do it from a server where I have full access to the log files. I've done it before, and frankly, it was such an ego boost back in the day to see the logs tracking back to house.gov and senate.gov. It let me know I was doing something right, or at least something interesting. Of course, that was back in the days before everyone cyberstalked via the medium of Google Web Cache. Even when Google started caching every page they crawled -- unless you actually paid them to not do so -- most people didn't bother using the google caches to read blog posts.

Now, in the modern day, most people are sufficiently paranoid so as to actually read blog posts via google cache. Well, I just have to face it: everyone cyberstalks everyone else. And everyone who posts anything anywhere knows that somewhere, someone is cyberstalking them, above and beyond merely being part of a passing audience or even a sometime fan. So a person can either be silent and do their best to leave no "paper trail", or you can just go ahead and be forthright and offer your opinion, knowing that the whole panoply of personality types can be reading you: the honestly interested persons you intended to reach, the clueless types you might hope to enlighten, and inevitably the histrionic biddies and alarmist bozos who want to seize on anything you say as somehow supporting their delusions or wackjob agendas.

And of course, there are the actual stalkers who could be anything from political types trying to figure out if you're thinking of running again (hell no. Just no) through people who are trying to figure out your schedule from afar so that they know when to burglarize, to people who could be seeking more input to add to whatever mad concepts of self-or-other are running through their misguided little brains.

For whom, exactly, am I intending to write?

Mostly, I am intending to write for and to people who are more or less on an even keel, mature enough to have emerged from their teen sociopath mentation and group-seeking instinct, yet young enough to be concerned with matters more pressing than whether or not the folks down the block are keeping every last flake of leaf off of the lawn.

And speaking of keeping stuff off of my lawn, whoever has in the last five days left a used hypodermic and a home-made crack pipe at the bus-stop in front of my house, maybe you ought to stop doing that. Just thought I'd mention it. To be, you know, polite.

I'm trying to write for the folks who don't just think for themselves, but who wonder what other people think... and welcome diversity of thought and opinion. As for the people who wonder what other people think so that they can condemn them for Thoughtcrime, they are cordially invited to take a flying frack at a gobbling goose. Frankly I prefer the junkies who leave their used "works" on my lawn simply because they're not too judgmental of other people, since after all they have problems of their own. Of course, I wish they'd take their problems some place other than the bus stop in front of my house. Just don't try to take my property with you when you go. The same goes for the demented crackheads who like to get all hopped up and then run around the neighborhood talking smack about how messed up I am because I don't want to socialize with their sorry asses.

I'm in a somewhat rotten mood, in case nobody noticed.

First, there's the folks who leave trash at the bus-stop. That was bad enough, even when it wasn't used drug paraphernalia.

Secondly, this is something of a predictable side-effect of me emerging from Winter Depression, but it's probably more to do with me being about sick to death of media coverage of the Iowa Caucuses and the day-by-day reporting of changes in poll rankings of the Republican candidates. I should mention that I have nothing against either the Democrats or the Republicans, as a rule. Perhaps I'm just getting old and cranky -- that's pretty likely -- or perhaps I really should be disappointed that neither party seems to be able to push anyone genuinely admirably Presidential into the running. Santorum seems to be "a good man" though I don't know that I'd share all of his views, especially not since the Republican Party seems to be veering straight into the course of attempting to impose a duly-elected Theocracy on the USA.

Third, I'd love to say that I'm just over losing my mother not quite four months ago, but I am not. Yet I am getting to the point where it's clear that whatever my feelings, life has to go on and I need to get my head together to the point where I can go on with my life... which frankly has been on hold, to varying degrees, for the last decade.

Fourth, I'm not quite down with a cold or flu or something undefined, but that whole sniffling sneezing aching can't get any rest you need some Nyquil sort of feeling is wearing me down. Hot tea with lime juice and brown sugar seems to be helping a lot.

Fifth, the simple fact is that gradual alcohol withdrawal means that I don't sleep well at all. Aside from other reasons to severely limit alcohol intake, I have been advised that drinking will probably exacerbate the course of Dupuytren's Contracture. So now I'm down to less than half of my usual -- yay, I guess -- but that also means that for now at least, a good night's sleep of "a straight eight" is out of the question. It'll probably be out of the question until I've totally quit for at least a few weeks.

Sixth, as if I needed any other reasons to be grumpy, there's that whole "intimations of mortality" thing. After nearly 20 years of really quite good health aside from the occasional sneeze, first I get cataracts and now my hand is curling up to where I try to wave at someone and I look like the Pope offering a benediction. This is going to have to be dealt with, and soon. I am not going to like that, however well it might turn out. Plus it's like all of the infirmities of age one ordinarily expects in their eighties are slamming down onto me in my early fifties. This does not bode well as relates to any concepts of long-term planning.

Finally, having spent the last two years or so with my daily schedule cycling around staying out of my poor old mom's way unless she needed me for something, rather than getting up just in time to clean up after her breakfast and finishing the paper, I am moving back to my previous sleep/wake cycle. Not sleeping from not drinking is helping me move this process along. For those who are easily shocked, I should offer the warning that my ultimate goal is to be up, dressed, caffeinated, and ready to launch on warning no later than 6:00AM each and every day. Maybe earlier depending on how well I'm sleeping... and how well I can master the fine art of the Cat Nap.

Maybe I can even catch the junkie that's been leaving their used "works" at the bus stop.