More Mental Mojo

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

2012-01-31T14:52:00.001-08:00

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.

One day, I might have to write a new story, the same sort of thing with a moral that anyone can understand, probably titled "King Troll-Boy, Lord of Snitching". I'll have to be very careful, though, so as to not return slander for slander and defamation for defamation. I want to be better in the moral sense, not better as in "more effective an asshole". Because, honestly, there's no more effective way to destroy someone than to set them up, to give their name to people who are always looking for new victims, or to utter fabrications and lies to honest law-enforcement.

A burglar, for example -- and we do have notorious career burglars in this neighborhood, though usually they pick targets who cannot complain to the police that they have had their contraband stolen -- might utter an anonymous fabrication to the police dispatcher, alleging extreme naughtiness. When the police kick in the door and take away the target, for questioning, the clever burglar enters and steals to his heart's content. He can't even be charged with breaking and entering, because the door was already broken... by the police acting on the burglar's lies.

In the argot of the career-criminal, this is called "a frame up" or just "framed". But this is only a half-frame; the full frame-up requires that whatever was stolen must be left to be found at the premises of the other party to be victimized. So the burglar hides his loot in his jacket, and goes for a friendly visit to someone he secretly hates, usually because of jealousy. While the unsuspecting host is welcoming the gues by preparing something to eat or drink, the clever rascal places his own loot in a hiding place. Then, after the visit, once again he picks up the phone and snitches. The kind host who entertained his guest finds himself jailed for what some other person stole. And while he is in jail, the burglar visits this latest victim... who all along was the real target.

The burglar doesn't gain much -- a little loot, maybe a nice big-screen TV or some small jewelry -- but both of his victims have large losses, such as their freedom and reputation. All that the burglar ever risks is having someone figure out that it was he who placed the calls. For the burglar, it's extremely profitable and has almost no risk, which is why he does it all of the time... until some police detective figures out what has happened.

And after that, there are few burglaries, although the burglar is still here. How is this? -you may well ask. It's because the burglar is still snitching all of the time but now he doesn't snitch to frame the victims of his own crimes, he snitches to the police. And if the police and the snitch are both very careful, and don't over-reach their grasp, this can go on for years, or for decades, for most of an entire lifetime... But the sort of personality that makes for a good snitch will sometimes be the sort of personality that cannot avoid trying to do this for their own gratification, instead of doing it because they rightly fear being arrested and sent to jail and being ratted out as a snitch to the prisoners there.

You see, the snitch thinks that they are running their case officer, rather than the situation rightly being the reverse. The good point of all of this? When the case officer discovers what's happening, the snitch is going to suddenly be living a thousand miles away under the Witness Relocation Program, or probably not much longer be living anywhere.

The bad point of all of this? First, it's very difficult to find and identify a lifelong snitch being run by a professional snitch-handler. You don't want to put out the word on a snitch unless you are dead certain, because some people take that sort of accusation very seriously, and it is very bad karma to afflict injury on an innocent person for such matters. The really bad, or difficult, part of this is, once you have identified the snitch, you have to identify the case officer. Because, it's important that the case officer isn't told, but rather is led to find out, with subtlety, as if it were their own discovery, that one of their snitches has gone bad, and isn't just trying to run the case-officer, but seems to have succeeded...

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

2012-01-30T08:46:00.000-08:00

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

2012-01-28T16:01:00.000-08:00

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

2012-01-27T07:23:00.000-08:00

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

2012-01-24T05:01:00.000-08:00

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

2012-01-22T07:15:00.000-08:00

(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

2012-01-16T07:40:00.000-08:00

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...

2012-01-12T17:57:00.001-08:00

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.

2012-01-05T07:01:00.000-08:00

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.

2012: Year of the...

2012-01-04T09:07:00.000-08:00

Zombie?

2011-12-31T08:29:00.000-08:00

Theme music:

This is from a response posted to an excellent comments thread over at the Urban Planning blog Greater Greater Washington.

Mark makes an excellent point when he writes about Peaks such as Peak Oil and Peak Traffic Miles.

Yet he doesn't take it to the next level, which I shall endeavor to do.

We've also reached Peak Population Growth Rate, and in fact the main drivers of US population growth -- Latin American nations -- are experiencing a massive decrease in fertility rates. For more information, please see:

Fertility Rates Plummet in Brazil (Forero, Juan, Washington Post, December 29, 2011)

At a candidate forum not so long ago in MoCo, I asked incumbent George Leventhal "why do all of you people insist on planning for endless growth based on the assumption that the population will forever increase?" And he came back with the (paraphrased) remark "well, the rest of the world is rapidly increasing, so we should do the same".

Of course I didn't get the opportunity to respond "but that's like saying that because our neighbors all have cancer, therefor we should all start smoking tobacco". His response was exactly that out-of-touch. Yet as the Post article shows, I might be as wrong as he was. To continue the allegory, the neighbors don't have cancer, so to speak, they are not only in remission but healthier than we are.

The US brought the native-born fertility rate down to zero population growth about a decade ago; and European populations are notably below replacement fertility. The Chinese have been aggressively enforcing "two parents one child" for at least one full generation, and it is having profound effects on both Chinese economy and society. Africa, at large, would still be experiencing truly massive population growth if it were not for the scourges of war and HIV synergizing mass casualties, but even as Africa begins to successfully deal with the AIDS plague, they are also urbanizing in many places and with that urbanization comes more education, more career options for women, and both better access to contraception and greater desire and ability to actually use it.

Global Peak Population will probably be reached by around 2040-2050 and thereafter will decline, with significant growth continuing in some hotspots and with significant decline occurring in others. In some cases that decline will be due to one or another calamity or set of calamities, but as the world globally enters the industrial/post-industrial age, we shall see significant drops in fertility rates.

Brazil, as in the article cited above, points the way to a new field of opportunity and hope. With the fertility rate below replacement rate (1.9 children/female) and with so much of the infrastructure of such recent construction (or remaining to be built), Brazil may present much greater opportunities for their declining future generation, in terms of employment. Who emigrates from a nation with a shrinking population and thus an expanding per-capita share of exploitable and mostly-untapped wealth?

The Post's graphic illustrates the whole Latin-American fertility-rate decrease quite handily on a per-nation basis, though curiously it provides no information regarding El Salvador, Guatemala, or Honduras:

Graphic: Fertility Rates Plunging Across Latin America (Washington Post, December 29, 2011.) (Source credited as UN Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean)

The immediate conclusion is this: As the sole driver for population growth in the US since the 1990s has been immigration -- legal or otherwise -- as populations stabilize and per-capita wealth rises and modern infrastructures are put in place in the nations which historically contributed most to our population growth since 1990, we shall have far less immigration. Our national population will, at long last and thank goodness, begin to decline.

The summary conclusion (leaving the Greater Washington Metro out of the discussion as it is a special case) is that from now on, the Urban Planning Community must concern itself far less with Growth and far more with Refinement. There's no need to try to limit Growth where there isn't any Growth. There's no need to try to prevent Sprawl when there are no pressures toward it.

In a Zero Population Growth or even a Negative Population Growth scenario -- one which the data suggests is coming on us even now -- you don't make plans for Growth, one way or the other, you don't plan for any future other than to Rebuild the Present.

Stop thinking "if you build it, they will come", because, frankly, they are not coming. Increasingly, there won't be anyone to come; they'll be doing quite fine back home, thanks.

Alone In A Darkened Room...

2011-12-30T07:13:00.000-08:00

Here, have some theme music to play while you read.

Contrary to any rumors that might be flying around, I am not sitting alone in a darkened room.

I'm actually basking in the glow of a new and rather expensive LED light rated as equivalent to a hundred-watt incandescent bulb. This is how I treat my Seasonal Affective Disorder. Fortunately for me, I know what the problem is, and as fortunately, I don't have a particularly bad case. For me, when the daytime is much less than 10 hours, I get pretty glum and mopey and don't have much tolerance for people, which considering that I am not gregarious means that I'd really rather not see much of anyone.

This can be rather problematic in an overcrowded society which has somehow got the idea that people who don't prefer crowds are somehow worrisome, properly the objects of suspicion, or even to be feared. Fear not, folks. Leaving out certain individuals best left unnamed, while I dislike crowds, I do not dislike people. I do in fact like certain individuals, but I generally don't want to spend all day every day in their company, nor perhaps even hours. If anyone were to characterize me as a timid woodland creature that likes to peek at the funny bipeds but not get too close, I'd say that's not too far off of the mark.

One of the things that the experienced outdoors-person will know is that one of the best ways to make the timid woodlands creatures scamper off is to stare at them. The hungry squirrels in my yard have no acorns this year, and so I have to feed them, pretty much by hand, to keep them from devouring the contents of the bird-feeder. If I don't look directly at the squirrels, they are less reluctant to approach the hand holding the peanuts. Most of them will even leave the bird-feeder if I stare at them hard enough. If I set a peanut down next to my foot, most of the squirrels will approach to take it. If I stare at them as they approach, they'll grab the peanut and run off at least a few yards. If I don't stare, most of them will pick up the peanut and eat it right there. As long as I behave in ways that don't worry them, even the timid woodland creatures don't mind hanging out with me. Then again, you never know what could set off a seemingly-unprovoked episode of Squirrely Wrath.

With a rather abrupt segue, I should pause to mention that you can get speedy service and a great selection of products at Next Day Blinds in Aspen Hill.

I live on one of the most busy intersections in Aspen Hill, and have a bus-stop right out front.

Aside from the occasional trash that gets left behind as people board the bus, I only have one real objection to the bus-stop. This is not even the fault of the bus-stop, its location, or the people who are always out there waiting for the bus.

My mom (who of course I miss greatly) spent most of her adult life working in government offices, with most of those offices being of the windowless sort, or the sort where the windows were small or far away. As a result, she compensated at home.

As with many of the homes in this neighborhood, this one has an immense picture window. It faces the bus-stop and the intersection beyond it. Further, mom made a decorating decision sometime back in the 1960s, which involved sheer gauze curtains as window dressing, along with nothing else other than some ornamental and artsy colored glassware. This let in quite a bit of natural daylight, but at night, half of any light in the room went right out the window. Not incidentally, anyone outside could easily see the interior of the living and dining rooms.

Perhaps mom just wanted to let every last passerby see and admire her tastefulness in interior decoration and her fine choices in lovely-yet-durable wood furnishings.

As for me, since the age of 12 or so, just knowing that you could not see out through that window at night, but every last passerby could see in, creeped me out totally to the point where I'd rather be in absolutely any other room in preference to that one.

Did I mention that Next Day Blinds has a fine selection of products, and speedy delivery?

I picked up some nice venetian blinds. I could have had them installed, but what's the point in owning power tools if you never use them?

Since my mom's passing I spend a lot more time upstairs, and for the last few weeks, while watching the evening news, I have watched busload after busload of people passing by, many if not most of them looking in my direction. After dark, the Ride-On 48 bus, with the illuminated interior, looks like nothing so much as a living room rolling past, and as well as I could see into it, the riders could see into my living room. Well, not anymore. I don't know what could be so fascinating about me sitting on the couch and eating dinner off of a tray while watching the evening news. Maybe it's just the fact that there was a window left unblinded that attracted all passing eyes, with the content of the interior mattering little. Well, they can stare all they want and I don't have to see it.

The room is much brighter, as well. Much of the light that was going right out the window now remains within, reflected back by the white of the venetian blinds.

This is so long overdue, in my opinion, that I spent most of yesterday evening walking around the room going "Yes... yes... YES!" Now I actually like a room in my house which for the last forty years I haven't been able to much stand. Bouncing a 100-watt-equivalent LED spotlight off of the blinds, long after the sun has set on these short days, the room is lit up like a Florida beach at high noon in July. Wave bye-bye, Seasonal Affective Disorder. Wave bye-bye, mopey glumness! I may actually get to be really quite happy! I might even smile a lot.

Too bad, I guess, that nobody will ever see it.

[Review] Art...

2011-12-25T17:45:00.001-08:00

Art was this guy I knew in high-school... and he was depressing, too.

Melancholia, directed by Lars von Trier, is one of those films about which the better sort of art critics rave, and if you're mostly interested in highest-quality cinematography, superlatively rich settings, and too close a focus on people wrecking each others lives while wrecking their own, this is the film of the year.

Kirsten Dunst -- who I simply cannot ever dissociate with "Bring It On" -- heads the all-star cast, as a talented woman succumbing to Major Depression in the middle of a major career advancement and wedding. Typical of the progression of the illness, at the moment of a storybook wedding to the man of her dreams who is not-incidentally the heir to the top-flight advertising agency where she is attaining the top of the career arc, she makes every bad decision imaginable and also some that one simply could not reasonably imagine, much less expect. One life thrown down the shithole, that you could imagine coming from anyone, but to screw it up this badly for several entire families and all of their friends and associates, you need to be genuinely insane. And that she becomes. And does.

Part II is about her "recovery", if you can call it that. As if all of the preceding wasn't enough, a rogue planet will cross paths with the orbit of our Earth, and it's all up in the air as to whether our protagonist will pull herself together to either survive a near encounter with something approximating grace, or die bravely should the rogue planet actually collide with us.

This might be considered a deep and extended set of nested allegories, with the first set not too hard to understand; "Justine" is a rogue planet careening through the lives assembled in one party for her marriage to "Michael". The second set might be a little more difficult to see, as in Part II we see her wrecked personage forced to rise to assume a position of responsibility and bravery to become an anchor of strength when her family needs her as the rogue planet draws nigh. If only she'd done that during the marriage sequence rather than herself being the rogue planet, that part of the drama might have worked out rather more happily. Yet of course this is all allegory, no matter how well-done and instant the drama of the first order, the allegory of course is the effects of Major Depression on those who are afflicted. A rogue planet indeed, which unstoppably crashes in to destroy worlds, lives, families, and relationships.

Walking out of the theater, I was thinking "what a raft of pretentious crap".

Writing up this review, I'm thinking quite the opposite.

Merry Christmas to all, I had Chinese and a movie and a bit of time with friends and family, I hope everyone else was at least as blessed.

Local Folks Know Best

2011-12-20T21:27:00.000-08:00

Wishes and Memory, Exposition and Explanation

2011-12-18T09:09:00.001-08:00

I have been notably absent from this blog, or at least I have been posting with deeply decreased frequency and at much shorter lengths than previously has been my custom.

There are reasons for this, and there are other reasons for other things as well, which I shall soon detail.

First, on September 15th, 2011, my mother passed from this life, at the age of 91. For the last several years, I was her live-in elder-care provider. Between myself, my sister who lives nearby, and many of mom's friends from the neighborhood and from church, we were able to practice "aging in place" to within months of my mom's final passage. Yet finally her longstanding health issues got to the point where she could no longer live here, and from here she went to hospital and from hospital to rehabilitation where she made insufficient progress. She lived for two months in hospice care at Asbury Methodist Village in Gaithersburg, in excellent conditions and with excellent hospice caretakers, with nearly constant visitation by the same friends and family who made it possible to live for so long at her home of 48 years. One day I came in at my accustomed time, and an unknown woman was waiting in my mom's room. Usually I would arrive at the same time on each of my visiting days, and mom would wake from her after-lunch nap, and we'd talk and I'd make sure she was getting good care and tend to any little needs such as water, and try to get her to finish her lunch, as she was so thin. Yet on this one day, I almost instantly knew that my mother wasn't waking up, not now, nor ever again. I had no warning, and this was something of a shock. Although one may reasonably long expect that the end is near, when it comes, expectation does little to ease the pain.

A memorial service held at St Matthews United Presbyterian Church, here in Aspen Hill, was very well-attended and the eulogy was glowing, and many others stood to remember to the others in attendance.

After cremation, part of her remains were settled in a memorial wall on the church grounds. In her lifetime, my mother was an avid gardener and we have always received many fine compliments on the condition of our lawn and gardens. Mom spent a lot of time in those gardens and the other part of her remains will be spending eternity there. Her scattered ashes even now nourish her plantings and the trees. From the earth we are raised, and to the earth return. Our lives are a blessing and my mother spent much of her life improving the conditions and existence of people around her, and even in faraway places. Her career in government ranged from the Public Health Service through the Environmental Protection Agency, with much of that career spent as administrative support in the study and regulation of sources of radiation. If you are well-protected against radiation in the home and workplace, my mom had a lot to do with the paperwork that makes it so.

The Astute Reader will understand that I may be reasonably expected to be a bit moody. Additionally, Christmas has always been a difficult time for me, as the shortened days and "cabin fever" combine to make me somewhat miserable. In any case, one could only by the most generous inclusion call me a Christian; I was raised as such but I don't have faith in some of the central tenets of the theology, however much I have internalized classical morality. Yet I do have a more than certain faith that after the Winter Solstice, the days will grow longer, and once they reach a certain length, my mood will improve... as much as grief and mourning will allow. I don't feel very festive and have not decorated for the holiday. Perhaps as the solstice grows closer I may put up some holly and ribbons but that's about the extent of it. There is little reason to put up a Christmas tree when you live all alone, and most of the relatives live far out of town.

Additional reasons exist for me being less of a contributor to this page.

One reason is that I am concerned about the audience. There are reasons for this which might seem apparent to the Astute Reader, or to those readers whom I have actually met in real life. Some of those real-life meetings have given me over to a sense of caution in what I post here, and elsewhere. The audience breaks down in a couple of fairly broad fields.

Not wishing to get too personal here, but one of the readers got a little too close for comfort. Generally speaking I am deeply on record, and of long standing, as being supportive of more and better public mental health-care, and more and better consideration by society of persons with even mere "issues".

Yet as much as I am willing to share my opinions online, I am quite the private individual in my personal affairs. I have had exceptionally bad experiences throughout my life which have made me extremely cautious about making new friends or ofttimes even maintaining much association with old ones. Retrospection -- looking backwards with deep reflection -- sometimes suggests that I picked friends unwisely, or simply fell into acquaintanceship and association with people who only later were discerned as being problematic.

Yet there's something to be said for the idea of get-togethers among the folks who have seen each other online for months or years, and back in the days before the internet, I certainly enjoyed "meets" with other people from the then-obscure online world of Bulletin Board Systems ("BBSes"). However, one doesn't always want to spend too much real-life time with them. I know a lot of the folks I met back in those days were surprised to discover that I was desperately poor and could usually afford a beer and some nachos whereas the rest of them could eat a steak dinner and wash it down with lots of the finest imported beer. We moved in different worlds and the intersection of those worlds was online, not in real life. Or not often in real-life.

Other issues could come up as well. Some of the folks turned out to also have very good reasons for spending so much time online, back before most people ever heard of "online". I had my own reasons, to be sure. Poverty was one such; once you had a computer and phone line, BBSing was effectively free and a great and entertaining time-waster. Some folks had... "issues". You didn't mind debating them online, especially as most of BBSing was done under aliases, or noms-de-plume as the French say. However, you might not want to hang out with so-and-so in real life because their parents were sketchy diplomatic types almost certainly skirting the dark and spooky swamps of international relations, and the last thing you'd want is to have the FBI camped on your doorstep asking you if you'd be so kind as to tell them everything you knew or could imagine about your online buddy's family business. You might not want to hang out with such-and-such in real life, because even though they seemed personable enough, their law-firm's staff and partners were widely known to make the most lurid TV soap-operas look tame and sane by comparison.

While on the subject of sanity... there are people you wouldn't want to hang out with in real life, because they're just nuts. I did say that I favor more and better mental healthcare and more tolerance of the mentally-ill among us, but it's just unwise to have any sort of relationship with the sort of person who calls you up at two in the morning to tell you that they're in the psych ward of DC jail because they parked their car on the lawn at the Capitol Building and went manic on the Secret Service uniforms who understandably expressed some concerns about their driving skills. Whatever reputation I may have, I don't need to add to that reputation that I'm close associates with someone sharing the same floor as John Hinckley, Jr. No thank you. Uh-uh. I said "no". Thus, the comments section here is closed to all because of one, and I am additionally rather cautious about revealing information about future locations. It's bad enough getting occasionally stalked at home, though thankfully with this one individual this has mostly stopped.

This brings me to another matter: That was simply the most egregious and blatant individual case of stalking.

I do Neighborhood Watch. This is known to the head of the local Neighborhood Watch, to whom I report and from whom I get bulletins, alerts, etc. This is known to the local police, who helped us organize the Neighborhood Watch under official guidance from the national-level organization.

Even before we officially organized Neighborhood Watch, I've spent years and years sort of keeping an eye on things. Remember, a combination of less than stellar economic conditions and a need to be near home in case my poor old mother needed me, meant that I couldn't have a regular job. I might as well do something productive with my time. I sat on the porch and played a lot of guitar; now and then I'd work with the Mid-County Initiative's "C-SAFE" liaison officer trying to clean up trouble spots here in Aspen Hill.

One aspect of Aspen Hill is this: in a society that may reasonably be viewed by many as having gone batshit crazy, Aspen Hill stands out. There's an immense demographic divide along multiple axes. Most of the caucasians were born in the USA... between 1920 and 1950. Probably most of the african-americans living in the single-family-detached (houses) side of the community started out as Africans and only recently became citizens or have not yet reached that stage. Probably most of the african-americans who were born in the USA live over in the subsidized-housing community where there's a lot of reported crime and school problems. The near-majority is foreign-born adults of child-raising age, primarily of central-american Spanish-speaking origins, although there are lots of other people of other origins. Each of these sub-communities has causes of stress particularly their own, and all of the sub-communities have some degree of friction with the other sub-communities.

In conditions of acute -- or chronic -- stress, people's nerves tend to get frayed, emotions can run high, and misperceptions either subtle or gross can feed into a general mis-comprehension, a sort of increasing disconnection from whatever could be said to be actual reality. It's possible that people -- individually or as groups -- can become so disconnected that in many ways, they are thinking about and reacting to a world which doesn't actually exist in the way they understand it. Ask any psychiatrist about such concepts as moral panic and they'll clarify the notion for you. Ask any policeman about the sort of unrest that can erupt on the basis of rumor.

While we are talking to professionals, let's also stop to talk to some lawyers about the possible results of an intentional defamation, or campaign of defamation. Hell, ask the local politicians if they've ever heard of this sort of thing.

In such conditions, of moral panic, or a campaign of defamation or disinformation, there is -- or should be -- a natural instinct to try to get the facts.

Part of the problem here is that most people aren't very well-schooled on getting the facts. They might simply accept rumors as truth, in which case they have allowed themselves to be deluded. They might hear rumors, and decide to observe for themselves whether or not there's any truth to the rumors. Unfortunately, they might see something which appears to support the rumors... but which has perhaps dozens of other interpretations.

One example: perhaps someone has heard some rumor (and perhaps someone else deliberately started it for fun, profit, revenge, or because they are a sociopath) that I am doing something mysterious in the shed in my back yard. The rumor continues that it might be a meth lab or it might be a bomb factory. Anyone who decided to keep an eye on me might report that rumor as confirmed, since I do fairly frequently go in and out of the shed and I don't visibly store or remove anything. Well, it's true that I do go in and out of that shed for no apparent reason. Frankly, I'm checking to see how well is working my do-it-yourself solar photovoltaic power system.

Another example, more to the point, if I'm standing around on the porch doing Neighborhood Watch in mid-afternoon, someone who has heard a rumor about sexual deviancy could believe that I'm up there spying out potential victims for some child molestation. Yet though there is no truth to the rumor, someone who leaps to conclusions (on the basis of ambiguously-attributable behavior) might report that the rumor is confirmed. Others might hear that confirmation as a certainty and take action. Yet this action would be based on a rumor "confirmed" by a complete idiot.

Neighborhood Watch is intended to bring additional sources of information to the Montgomery County Department of Police. It is not intended to become a gang, or a militia, or home-grown intelligence operation with a clandestine action arm. It's not intended to be used for settling old scores, or for purposes of suppressing political rivalries (real or imagined).

Neighborhood Watch is also intended to foster some sense of community. This is why, when I am out there, I try to engage anyone in conversation that I possibly can, to the extent and degree that seems mutually desirable or appropriate. Among other things, for the purposes of Neighborhood Watch, it's as useful for me to hear "all is well" or "I have no concerns to distract me from enjoying my life" as it is for me to hear "my car window was broken and someone stole my stereo and I want to participate in Neighborhood Watch". Aside from considerations pertinent to Neighborhood Watch, I can think of no activity which will better build "a sense of community" than trying to make friends with as many people in that community as possible.

Now, earlier in this post, I mentioned that I am a bit reticent about befriending anyone, and I imagine that others may feel quite the same. As the English say, mere propinquity is no sure cause for friendship, though one should reasonably expect civility, and offer it as you'd expect it. So I generally will say "hi" to anyone, and if they want to chat, that's fine. If they don't, that's fine. If they want to chat on any matters more profound than the topic of weather, that's fine. If they want to speak about concerns in the neighborhood, that's fine, if they want to talk politics, that's fine.

If, on the other hand, anytime you talk to them, someone else sneaks up behind you like you are intended as a victim and one person is just fronting you up while an assailant gets to your back, you have to wonder where that is coming from. Is this some self-appointed neighborhood vigilante acting out of rumor-fed delusion, seeking to make themselves some sort of hero? Or worse yet, is this a coordinated group activity? If that's the case, I should at this point mention the Maryland Anti-Gang Act of 2010. If this is something that the police and courts could see as violence or the threat of violence, or as witness intimidation, penalties are potentially severe. Maybe it's just distraction and maybe I should just not even try to chat with people, on the theory that the moment I'm known to be distracted by conversation, that's the time to do some crime where I am not looking in that direction.

Yet in any case where I am talking to someone and someone else is sneaking up behind me, except for the case of the self-appointed neighborhood vigilante operating from rumor-fed delusion, I'm dealing with a certain moral turpitude. In the other possible cases, it's hard for me to know whether it's criminal intent by a single actor using the uninvolved passerby as bait, or as a coordinated activity with the passerby intentionally assuming that role, or even organizing it all. In any of these cases, the message I am meant to get, as best I can tell, is that I should not come out of my house, and if I do, I should not try to talk to people. If that message is intentionally thus, and the result of some sort of group consensus, I would love to know some things: who is that group, how and why did they reach that decision, and more of an issue for more official agencies to decide, who gave them the idea that it was allowed for them to try to set traps to let them think they're justified to be judge, jury, and executioner.

So much uncertainty, and so much ambiguity. All I know is that I'm pretty tired of feeling death breathing down my neck not merely when I go shopping, but when I'm standing in my yard mere feet from my door. And it is my yard; my mother kindly left it to me in her uncontested will, along with enough money to hire some really good lawyers.

So perhaps it shouldn't surprise people much that other than this little bit of insight released to the online world, I am shutting down almost all of my online presence. I don't want idiots misinterpreting my writing as "confirmation" of their confabulated misconceptions... and operating from their self-inflicted delusions to form self-appointed vigilante crews looking to murder someone.

Does History Repeat Itself?

2011-12-02T18:54:00.000-08:00

I once quoted this anyplace I thought it could be relevant. Mostly I did so during the recent boom or bubble which lasted through much of the mid-2000s. The intent was to get people to look around them and notice that for all of the vast wealth which seemed to be flowing everywhere -- much of it borrowed through obscure financial instruments such as Credit Default Swaps and Commoditized Debt Obligations -- the Romans had once enjoyed such wealth, but did not bother to look beyond the surface to see the rot which lay within... the rot our economy has suffered for the last three or more years.

"It was scarcely possible that the eyes of contemporaries should discover in the public felicity the latent causes of decay and corruption. This long peace, and the uniform government of the Romans, introduced a slow and secret poison into the vitals of the empire. The minds of men were gradually reduced to the same level, the fire of genius was extinguished, and even the military spirit evaporated. The natives of Europe were brave and robust. Spain, Gaul, Britain, and Illyricum, supplied the legions with excellent soldiers, and constituted the real strength of the monarchy. Their personal valour remained, but they no longer possessed that public courage which is nourished by the love of independence, the sense of national honour, the presence of danger, and the habit of command. They received laws and governors from the will of their sovereign, and trusted for their defence to a mercenary army. The posterity of their boldest leaders was contented with the rank of citizens and subjects. The most aspiring spirits resorted to the court or standard of the emperors; and the deserted provinces, deprived of political strength or union, [without much notice] sunk into the languid indifference of private life."

We are a very strong nation with a vast diversity of people with all sorts of talents, skills, abilities, and concerns. Dare we sink into the languid indifference of private life? Where is that public courage? I see people playing this or that little game, within their cadres or between their little factions, but I see few people who are willing to make the necessary sacrifices or take the essential risk of standing up for what they believe, to speak truth to power and demand that power speak truth back to them. Where are our heroes? I guess they're all too busy trying to avoid foreclosure, hanging on to their job even if it's a cesspool of disappointment and abuse. That sort of emotional morass can only deepen in our dire straits, but don't despair, folks. Yet when times are better, will people come out and say "we're not kissing ass so our kids won't starve homeless, anymore"? Will they say "you've got to do something to make sure that never happens again"?

Or will we sink into patronage, into corruption, into public apathy to a political system which increasingly does not provide for or protect them and their decent common interests? That's what happened to the Romans, and it made the Emperors rich and the Army powerful and the citizens destituted and reduced to serfdom. It's the way to go, if you are the One Percent.

We are the 99 Percent. We need to Act Up.

Meanwhile, before the revolution (ideally at the ballot box, and I DO NOT blame Mr Obama), we're all acting like we're in some occupied country, sneaking around whispering and passing signs, and nobody seems to know where anyone else stands, and everyone seems to think that everyone else is either informing, crazy, or both, or ignorant, from the outside, from the opposition, or who-knows what.

Everyone knows I don't get out much, but this might be a good thing. Who is better off when society seems to be rapidly drifting off course, the people who are deeply immersed, or the people who stand back while the lemmings stampede off of their cliff?

Still, here's a clip from one of my favorite bands, and the sane among us will read between the lines.

Older Song, Older Days, Older Memories

2011-10-27T20:48:00.000-07:00

The more things change, the more they stay the same.

"We all stand alone when the charge is laid
Sad way to live, what a way to die
We're all little children playing grown-up games
Can we burn the gun before the next time comes?

Stray dogs that live on the highway walk on three legs
Move too slow to get the message
Give up and win, that's all I have to say
We haven't really won
'Til all the fighting's done
And there are no more
Ballads for the Soldier"

From WAY back in the day. And the more things change, the more they stay the same.

Pray for the Marine shot in the face by US police in Occupy Oakland.

Old School Old Song Old Memories...

2011-10-26T20:46:00.000-07:00

From back in the day...

Stuff and More Stuff, Noted In Passing

2011-07-28T23:56:00.000-07:00

Greetings folks,

I thought I would drop a note to let people know that I as well as probably everyone else freely admit that Michael Jackson is now and forever the King of Pop.

He's also the most exciting dancer ever filmed. Please see this excerpt from one of his Live in HD films, doing "Billie Jean". Look at the crowd shots, please. If you can get such a look on the face of Julie Roberts, not to mention getting a bunch of German chickies all hot and bothered to the point where they are going to the extreme of trying to out-dance the black women and the gay guys, well, either you're the greatest thing since automatically buttered sliced toast, or you are Michael Jackson. For all of his purported faults, this is some of the best dancing ever.

People always told me
Be careful what you do
Don't go around breaking
Young girls' hearts

And Momma told me
Be careful who you love
And be careful what you do
Or the lies become true...

This may be Michael Jackson's best dance performance ever. Watch and learn, if your eyes are fast enough, and your feet are fast enough. Just keep in mind that years of your best workouts in practice will never put a look on the face of a woman you know, such as may be seen on the faces of the women filmed from this audience. This is star-struck. This is worship. This is the King of Pop.

And I can't quite understand the last closing refrain. Is that "Billie Jean's Not My Lover"? Or Something Else?

Youth Curfew in Montgomery County?

2011-07-16T11:23:00.000-07:00

In recent days, FaceBook has erupted in controversy and protest over a proposed Youth Curfew (PDF) which would largely restrain minors from being out and about, from 11:00PM on weekdays and 12:00 midnight on weekends, to 5:00AM. It would further prohibit non-employment presence in "establishments" as well as in public spaces, with "establishments" being any place which is open to the general public for business or gatherings.

There are exceptions in the law for travel to and from work so long as that travel is direct and without any stops. It's a bit unclear if this travel is restricted to automobile, or if bicycle or bus travel are also allowed provided the travel is direct and without any stops other perhaps than bus-stops. This needs to be clarified in the proposed law.

There are other exceptions regarding gatherings with adult supervision, or as part of activities related to County or Schools sponsored events. For example, a post-graduation dinner would certainly be excepted, so long as there was adult supervision by responsible parties acting in loco parentis. Comparably, assemblies for purposes of political demonstration or discussion, and other First Amendment protected activities are not restricted.

There are apparently competing proposals in which one version would apply curfew in specific areas, but not in others; and, a blanket curfew over the entirety of the County's minor youth.

How did this legislation come to be considered not merely needed, but needed so badly as to be offered as an Expedited bill?

Considerable discussion from locals may be seen going back to 2009, at the well-reputed Silver Spring Singular blog. Downtown Silver Spring has, in parts, been turned into a sort of "theme park without rides". A lot of younger folks in the 15 to 18 age range -- as well as quite a lot of young adults and of course all other age ranges -- hang out here, some partaking of various entertaining and dining opportunities, and with some just hanging out.

It's the hanging-out with no particular reason to be there that seems to be not just a problem, but an increasingly violent one. Silver Spring Singular reported -- along with most other local media -- a July 12, 2010 incident in which a group of teenagers first verbally harassed female bypassers with "crazy sexual comments" and then assaulted a passing middle-aged man resulting in severe head injuries including broken facial bones. Fifteen teenagers were arrested, three being charged with first-degree assault and the rest were charged with disorderly conduct.

Respondents commenting on the Silver Spring Singular article and opinion on this tragedy included one anonymous writer who posted this:

Anonymous said...

I'll start. I've been seeing packs of feral ghetto teenagers swarming all over downtown for about a week. They move in a straight line from the Metro to Ellsworth and Fenton. I've lived in the area for over three years, and I've never seen it this bad.

To state the obvious, the harassers and criminals in DTSS are all young and black. But the true commonality, I would wager, is that these people are NOT FROM SILVER SPRING. Based on the direction of their travels, they're clearly paying us a visit from DC and PG County. I have lots of black neighbors in SS, who are lovely people and want just as much as I do to hang out in our own neighborhood without this crap going on.

Is this the price we have to pay for having a nice, communal space in our neighborhood? Can we do anything to get rid of the problem businesses (Hello, billiards cafe...)? Can county police station a permanent presence at Fenton/Ellsworth and cite these people for loitering, disturbing the peace, etc., until the criminals get tired of SS and go away?

Any ideas?

Other writers, mostly sadly anonymously, posted remarks asking "WHERE ARE OUR ELECTED OFFICIALS? Ervin, Reps. Edwards and Van Hollen get off your lazy fat asses and do something. Get angry, get fed up and do it NOW before someone gets killed. County Council? We need YOUR outrage at this behavior and we need it now. What can you do? Hold press conferences, hire more police, allow them to get more aggressive in combating this animal behavior. Write loitering tickets!!! These kids spend NO MONEY in the downtown area. Kick them out. Write jaywalking tickets (for everyone actually...) harass them enough and they will go away. It is time to act and get this situation under control and for those living in Silver Spring to hold their elected officials accountable. "

Such sentiments are typical. Calls for action on this matter, of out-of-county troublemaking teens taking mass-transit into Montgomery County's main public spaces and disrupting them with harassment or violence, have been circulated widely since at least 2009.

At long last, action is being taken, as it were, as a hand reaching down from Heaven to rescue those who have for so long begged for salvation.

The local kids -- many of them fairly pampered and generally as far from "ghetto" as you could conceivably get, are having none of it. They don't want their rights infringed across the board simply to keep a few people from getting hurt in such declassé places such as Downtown Silver Spring ("DTSS") where they'd never be caught dead except for maybe a midnight film opening.

The FaceBook protests tend to cite factoids such as "curfews don't work and have no effect on crime" and "most police departments find them ineffective or a waste of the officers' time".

Solid disagreement can be found at the website of the United States Conference of Mayors:

[ ... ] The 1997 survey gathered information from 347 cities with a population over 30,000. Mayors and city officials were asked for information on:

1. the use of both daytime and nighttime curfews,
2. perceptions of whether curfew enforcement is a good use of police officers' time,
3. perceptions of whether curfews make streets safer at night, cut down on daytime truancy,
4. effectiveness of curfew enforcement in curbing gang violence or gang activities,
5. increases or decreases in crime rates since curfews have been in effect,
6. police department costs associated with curfew enforcement,
7. problems encountered in implementing curfews and
8. constitutional challenges to curfews.

Among the findings of the survey:

* Four out of five of the survey cities (276) have a nighttime youth curfew. Of these cities, 26 percent (76) also have a daytime curfew.

* Nine out of 10 of the cities (247) said that enforcing a curfew is a good use of a police officer's time. Many respondents felt that curfews represented a proactive way to combat youth violence. They saw curfews as a way to involve parents, as a deterrent to future crime, and as a way to keep juveniles from being victimized. In addition, they commented that a curfew gives the police probable cause to stop someone they think is suspicious.

* Twenty-six cities (10 percent) did not feel that curfew enforcement is a good use of a police officer's time. They commented that police have higher priorities than chasing curfew breakers, and that there is too much paperwork involved, tying up a police officer's time when he or she should be using that time to pursue more serious offenders. Some suggested that random sweeps seem to be more effective in keeping offenders off balance, as they are never sure when the police will be around. Finally, several commented that there is nowhere to take the young people when they are picked up because many parents aren't home.

* Ninety-three percent of the survey cities (257) said that a nighttime curfew is a useful tool for police officers. The city officials commented that curfews help to reduce the incidence of juveniles becoming victims by preventing "gathering," which also means more calls for the police. They said that a curfew compels parents to be more responsible and gives them a specific reason to tell their children they cannot be out after a certain time, and they said that curfews are a good prevention tool, keeping the good kids good and keeping the at-risk kids from becoming victims or victimizers.

* Nineteen cities said that a nighttime curfew was not a useful tool, explaining that it removes parental control as the city, in effect, becomes the parent. They also commented that more crime happens during non-curfew hours due to curfew enforcement.

* All of the 72 cities which have a daytime curfew report that it has cut down on truancy. They said that it reduces daytime burglary, holds parents accountable and keeps kids in school.

* Eighty-eight percent (236) of the cities said that curfew enforcement helps to make streets safer for residents. The officials commented that there is less traffic late at night; residents feel safer; it is easier to find runaways; it is harder for criminals to hide from the police during curfew hours because there are fewer people to blend in with; graffiti and vandalism are reduced; and parents are helped to feel responsible.

* Thirty-three cities (12 percent) said that curfews have no impact on street safety, commenting that it is people over 17 who create the more serious crimes, and that they do not always enforce the curfew due to lack of funds or lack of interest.

* Eighty-three percent (222) of the cities said that a curfew helps to curb gang violence. City officials believe it is a tool to reach "wanna-be" gang members and keep recruitment to a minimum; it prevents gang members from gathering; it gives the police a legal reason to contact individuals or the group; it tells kids their movements are being monitored and lessens gang activities during curfew hours. They also said that curfews help the police to identify gang members and come in contact with them at an earlier stage, help to curb young peoples' activities before they become more violent, and help the police to seize the guns and drugs of gang members, thus impairing their ability to fight. Finally, the curfew helps to educate parents to the signs of gang membership and activity.

* Seventeen percent (46) of the cities said that curfews had no impact on gang-related activities. These cities said that most hardcore gang member do not pay attention to curfews; most gang activities occur before curfews go into effect; and gangs are not afraid of curfew laws because they know there will be no punishment.

#

Fifty-six percent (154) of the survey cities have had a youth curfew in effect for 10 years or less. Officials in 53 percent of these cities have had a decrease in juvenile crime which they attribute to the curfew. Eleven percent have seen the number of juvenile crimes stay the same; 10 percent have had an increase in juvenile-related crimes. Because most of the remaining cities have had curfews in effect for a short time, no data on the impact on juvenile crime was available.

Twenty-six cities with a nighttime curfew only were able to provide data on the percent reduction in juvenile crime. Juvenile crime was reduced by an average of 21 percent in these cities, ranging from a two percent decrease in Charlotte, three percent in Waterloo, five percent in Bloomington (IL) and Fort Worth and seven percent in Kileen (TX) to a 40 percent reduction in Inglewood and Idaho Falls, 42 percent in San Jose and 50 percent in Orlando.

Twenty-two cities with both a nighttime and daytime curfew were able to provide data on the percent reduction in juvenile crime, which was reduced by an average of 21 percent in these cities. The percent reduction ranged from two percent in Richmond (GA), five percent in Lombard (IL) and eight percent in Fairfield (CA) to 50 percent in Hayward and 70 percent in Charleston (SC).

Six cities reported that juvenile crime increased after their curfew was introduced, by an average of 14.5 percent across these cities. The increases ranged from three percent in Billings and Tulsa and 10 percent in St. Charles to 25 percent in Grand Forks and 26 percent in Fargo. It should be noted that many cities reported that when they initially implemented the curfew or began to rigorously enforce an existing curfew, the number of crimes increased for a period of six months to a year. Following this, however, they saw a significant decline in juvenile crime.

* Twenty-three percent (61) of the cities said there were increased costs related to curfew enforcement. These costs related primarily to increased police officer time and detention centers.

* Twenty-three percent (62) also reported problems in implementing their curfew. These problems include concerns about violating young peoples' rights or targeting minorities, parental opposition, and officials within the criminal justice system not taking the curfew seriously.

* Five percent (14) of the cities said there have been constitutional challenges either to the curfew itself or to its wording. Those cities with a challenge are Allentown, Bellingham, Dallas, El Cajon, Escondido, Lompoc, North Miami Beach, Orlando, Philadelphia, Poway (CA), Santa Ana, Tulsa, Wenatchee (WA) and West Covina. In two additional cities—Fort Lauderdale and Rio Rancho (NM)—a challenge to the curfew has been threatened.

Clearly this seems to be working in a lot of places, well enough that the cities continue to implement a curfew.

Endless Summer Fun!

2011-06-21T13:32:00.000-07:00

Summer? Well, it's not all that fun.

Let's just say that it's not great weather to be slaving over a power steering pump that just doesn't seem to want to be fixed. Too hot, and let's not discuss the mosquitoes nor the grease.

However, Happy Summer Day greetings to all, and have a Super Solstice!

And here's yet-another video which should inform all and sundry of my pathetic weakness for certain pop stars who know how to write some really happy stuff.

Noted in Passing, Still Not Dead Yet

2011-06-11T18:16:00.001-07:00

This is just a placeholder to let the Astute Reader know that I'm still not dead yet.

I've spent a lot of time recently fixing up not merely one, but two, cars. One will be for sale soon, as I simply can't afford to drive it. It is a 1983 Oldsmobile Ninety-Eight Regency Brougham and it is in actually pretty good condition. It passed Maryland Emissions within 6 months, there is extremely little body rust considering the age and the salts we load onto winter roads. I am the second owner and it has perhaps 80,000 miles. It has very nearly passed Maryland State Inspection and I should have all of the difficult or expensive mechanical problems fixed by mid-July.

This is an immense vehicle, one of the largest sedans ever sold. It shares the same chassis and most of the power train with the 1983 Cadillac Sedan DeVille. This includes a strong THM 200 4R transmission (3-speed and overdrive with locking torque converter), an Oldsmobile 307 V8 "Y" series 140 HP engine, extremely comfortable seats, and with all luxury functions working with the exception of the power-antenna. This includes power windows, power door locks, etc/. The factory automatic-adjusting rear air-shocks have been replaced with heavy standard shocks, although the factory automatic-leveling air-pump and circuitry remain intact, if disconnected.

If you want to be able to put six adult males and all of their luggage into this car and drive them across the continent on the freeway, and be fairly comfortable, that is the mission for which this car was designed. It was also the luxury version of a "sheriff's cruiser car". While the performance "off the line" isn't exceptional, as a freeway cruiser, it's got an excellent passing gear once the torque-converter locks and the Quadrajet carburetor starts to open the secondary venturies. As the old-school folks around here say, "it damn well frackin' BURIES". We remind the Astute Reader that it is illegal to exceed the speed limits on public roads. We also remind the Astute Reader that the fuel-air flow under wide-open throttle is about 8 times that of the normal driving conditions. We also remind the Astute Reader that sometimes you just need to get some safe open road in front of you and "punch it".

More on the condition of the ride: the timing chain and all of the downstream parts (High Energy ignition system including cap, rotor, sensor, coil, and distributor shaft) were replaced within about 10,000 miles. Also within that time-span, the battery, alternator and integrated voltage regulator, left-front wheel bearing and bearing post, and there will certainly be a new power-steering pump (the present one leaks) and potentially a new steering box.

Interior condition: the rear seats are immaculate. The front passenger seat is in good shape, and minimal tearing is seen on the driver seat. As with all vehicles of this era, the headliner sagged and was removed, the dash is cracked as are some of the other "leather" parts on door panels, etc. Rugs are all good. Power seats all work. Seat belts all work. The speakers are all good, as is the aftermarket stereo and tape player.

This vehicle is meant to be sold to a serious car restoration hobbyist. Anyone can buy it, once it passes State Inspection, and they'll be able to get tags on it as it will be a safe car.

What the Heck Is That...

2011-05-27T21:03:00.000-07:00

Recently, I was in downtown Rockville, doing a little shopping for some dealer-only auto parts, and checking out the costs for some future repairs I had in mind.

Hey, I was just being myself, schmoozing a little in the parts and service departments. I needed something, I ordered, I pre-paid, as it was an out-of-stock "NOS" part from another dealer.

All done, receipt in hand, I was out off the door and walking out into the parking lot. The door, however, was one of those slow-closing things, and so of course I could hear voices from within.

One voice asked, "What the heck is that weird accent?"

There was a sustained pause, perhaps of utter disbelief. When the response came, there was more than a touch of sardonic amusement... in a voice and accent just about exactly like mine.

"Native Rockvillain."

Cities as AI (Articifial Intelligence)

2011-05-15T16:36:00.000-07:00

One of my favorite authors in modern science fiction is one Peter Watts. He's rightly the recipient of many prestigious awards and is in line for many more. Aside from that, there's his fan-base, a diverse bunch of mostly professional research and development types in the biosciences and systems-engineering, not to mention the sort of people who wash test-tubes by day, and shape the future by night. If only I could get a job washing test-tubes by day, I might qualify to consider them my peers. ;) At any rate, Dr Watts (PhD) gets invited to a lot of conferences and symposia, as he's not just a great writer, he's an actual scientist.

In a recent symposium on "Transhumanism Meets Design" (HumanityPlus.Org) there's a great deal of blathering on a very wide range of "stuff" relating to the subject of what we as a species and our several cultures might be doing a century from now -- assuming any of us remain, at least in any form that would remotely be considered "human". Right around 40 minutes into it, the subject comes to a comparison of how our modern cities compare to other gregarations in other species. And part of this discussion concerns how our cities function, due to their interlocking systems of maintenance, performance, and regulation -- to say nothing of planning -- as living things.

This isn't a new concept to any serious modern Urban Planning type, but it's interesting to see how the intelligentsia from other disciplines deal with the concept. So hopefully the County Council and some of the Planning Board will take a look at this, or at least send around any bona-fide intelligentsia they might have on staff.

Prayers Along the Mississippi (and Tributaries)

2011-05-09T16:21:00.001-07:00

We should all hope and pray for the safety and endurance of the Riverene People here in the States. 33 of our States contribute water to the Mississippi flow, and many of those had record snows this year, and it's all melting or melted and epic rains in recent weeks aren't helping any. But they all know all along the rivers that "old man Mississippi keep on talkin', don't nobody know what he sayin'". But when the levee breaks, momma, you got to go.

From Led Zeppelin:

Brief Note, and Some Music

2011-05-03T17:40:00.000-07:00

I've been a bit slow on posting recently, mostly because I've had other stuff to do. Yet I'm mostly caught up on the yard-work and I've been running around town doing this and that.

Still, I can't disappoint those rare few who come wandering by looking for some musical flashbacks to ancient history. Thus, Stan Ridgeway and "the Big Heat".

A Day of Trials, and the Passion Ends?

2011-04-22T10:11:00.000-07:00

After his soul-searching and declaration of commitment to the course before him (search to 5:50 in the video or perhaps see Matthew 26:47-55), Jesus is confronted by Judas, who kisses him as a sign to the Roman soldiers, who move in to make the arrest. The drunken disciples and followers rise to fight, but Jesus tells them to stay their hands, lest they who would live by the sword should die by the sword:

More importantly, Jesus declares that he could have called 12 legions of angels, but it is to fulfill Scripture that he refuses to resist, or to allow others to resist on his behalf.

Addressing the gathering crowd, He says: "Am I leading a rebellion, that you have come with swords and cudgels to capture me? Every day I sat in the temple courts, teaching, and you did not come to arrest me... all of this occurs so that the prophets' writing will be fulfilled." And at this, the disciples deserted him and ran off.

Brought before the Sanhedrin, or the High Priests, Jesus was confronted with many false witnesses who made outrageous accusations against him. Such is the way with any political dog-and-pony show, with the accusations becoming more outrageous and bizarre. Through all of this, Jesus remained silent, as the prophecy foretold (Isaiah 53:7): He was oppressed and afflicted, yet he did not open his mouth; he was like a lamb led to slaughter, and as a sheep is dumb before her shearers is silent, so he did not open his mouth.

Finally the accusations reached a final level: he was accused of claiming to be capable to tear down and rebuild the Temple in 3 days, and of claiming to be the Messiah. Jesus said, more or less, oh sure, whatever you say, dudes, it is not I who make that claim. But he also added that in the future the Son of Man would be seated at the right hand of the Almighty.

Caiaphas tore his robes and declared Jesus blasphemer, and the crowd of Sanhedrin (and probably a picked crowd of Zealots) all rioted and demanded his death. They spit on him and struck him from behind, shouting "Prophesy, then, and tell us who just hit you!"

Peter is accused of being one of Jesus's associates, three times, and three times he denies it, to save himself.

And Judas, ashamed at what he had done to his best friend, hanged himself, after throwing his blood money back at the priests.

Brought before the Roman Governor of Palestine, Pontius Pilate, Pilate asked Jesus if it was true that Jesus was king of the Jews. Jesus said that these were words of Pilate, not his own claim. When the Sanhedrin and the elders repeated to Pilate those accusations they earlier had made to Jesus, again in compliance with the prophecy, Jesus remained silent.

Pilate had a premonitory dream before this time, and on that previous night, Pilate's wife had a dream as well, and sent a letter to Pilate, begging him to have nothing to do with this innocent man.

Pilate's dream:

As to the crowd, Pilate demanded of them, what then did they want him to do with Jesus. Pilate said that he could see no crimes in the accusations. (The Romans were famously tolerant of almost all religious beliefs and practices, a major reason why the Zealots hated them.) The priests and elders declared that he was a rabble-rouser who was stirring up trouble from his origins in Galilee all throughout Judea.

Knowing this, Pilate could easily refer Him from Pilate's own oversight, by declaring that this was a local matter and of no concern to Rome. He sent Jesus to be judged by the Jewish puppet-king -- by all contemporary accounts, a debauched and dissolute man -- Herod, who was present in Jerusalem at that time.

Herod mocked him and then sent him back to Pilate (Luke 22:63-23:12).

At the time, a Zealot leader had been captured and condemned by the Romans for inciting rebellion and violence. Pilate suggested to the crowd that perhaps they would prefer the release of this condemned criminal (Bar Abbas) to the release of this harmless fellow who seemed at worst to be quietly mad. The crowd, probably packed with Zealots and certainly incited by the priests and elders, demanded the release of Bar Abbas, who was in any case one of their heroes for his incitments, murder, and violence against the Romans. The crowd demands the release of Bar Abbas, and the crucifixion of Jesus.

The legalities of the occupation government prohibited the Sanhedrin from declaring a death sentence, and so Pilate alone could condemn Jesus. Pilate declares that he sees no violation of law, but to appease the crowd who is demanding crucifixion, Pilate condemns Jesus to 40 lashes, of which only 39 were delivered. Pilate would have then released Jesus, but the crowd was riotous and demanded Jesus must be crucified. Pilate ceremonially washed his hands, addressing the crowd and the priests and elders, and declared "I am innocent of this man's blood. Let it be your responsibility."

And the soldiers took him away, and stripped him of all he possessed, and wrapped him in the scarlet cloak of a Roman soldier, made a crown of thorns and placed it on his head. They put a staff in his right hand, and knelt to mock him, declaring "look, it's the King of the Jews!" Then they beat him severely, dressed him again in his own clothing, and led him to be crucified.

Raised upon the cross, he was insulted from all sides, even by the robbers who had been crucified next to him.

In the afternoon, a solar eclipse came across the land -- although most of those contemporaries did not understand this phenomenon to be a natural one -- and Jesus was heard to cry out, asking g_d, why had g_d abandoned Him. And shortly thereafter, He cried loudly again, and stopped moving. At the same time, there was a great earthquake. Many in the crowd, including some Roman soldiers, repented their mocking and declared on the basis of these signs, "truly, he was the son of g_d!"

In the End: Betrayed by His Best Friend

2011-04-20T20:08:00.001-07:00

Between the schemes of the priests, and his own concerns -- not to mention the Divine Ordination that he should be the one to make the fatal move -- Judas Iscariot finds it necessary to become an informer to the occupation army... although it is not to the Romans that he informs. From the 2000 film production of "Jesus Christ Superstar":

"On Thursday Night, you'll find him where you want Him. Far from the crowds, in the Garden of Gethsemane..."

And at this last night, at the Passover Seder, Yeshua bin Yusuf finds himself confronted with Judas, and sadly enough, his Disciples are no comfort. All drunk, getting passed out from drinking and feasting. "For all you care, this wine could be my blood. This bread could be my body... if you would remember me when you eat and drink." But it will be worse. Jesus declares his Disciples to be inconstant, and declares that he knows he will be betrayed by one who is at this dinner. Judas remonstrates, and Jesus tells him to go fulfill the prophecy.

Waiting for the betrayal to be delivered, Jesus wonders at the inconstancy of those whom he considered most loyal. He prays that the cup set before Him (so to speak), as regards His imminent sacrifice, should be allowed to pass him by. Yet He comes to accept that if he shall have set before Him a cup, a cup set from the very hand of g_d, he prays that this sacrifice should be for the benefit of all, for the rest of time. He decides, so to speak, that if he is to drink the cup of sacrifice for, as he believes, the salvation of those who shall come afterward to believe in Him, and for the glory of g_d, he shall drink, and drink deep.

Yet His suffering is, for now, only in accepting His role in this great Passion which shall in time spread out across the world of Men, to become the greatest story ever told. The true suffering, at least in His present life on Earth, is yet to come. And how much greater will it be if he should both have the Father in Him, and be in the Father, and in the mind and souls of all who shall follow his Way (John 14:9-14)... after he passes from this life.

In the Final Days: Making Enemies

2011-04-19T19:21:00.000-07:00

[updated 2011 April 20, oopsie. Linked now to proper videos.]

It must be remembered that during the occupation by the Roman Empire, the priesthood of Jerusalem and the surrounding lands had a very uncomfortable relationship with the occupation. The priests retained their power only at the pleasure of the Roman governor, Pontius Pilate.

Rome was entirely intolerant of any opposition whatsoever to their rule. Almost any city they ever encountered which resisted them to the point of a siege, was in the end utterly destroyed with all inhabitants to be put to the sword, with the city walls pulled down after the riot and sack, and with all of the surrounding villages and farms destroyed and the people routed.

Doubtless being aware of this, the priests played a game with dire stakes, of low-intensity conflict, a game at which the Romans were also adept. Having won concessions unheard-of elsewhere in the Roman Empire -- a concession of retaining their own religion apart from any of the Roman practices, and a prohibition of public displays of Roman deities and the public exercise of Roman cults -- the priests continued to press their case, and also to press their luck near to the breaking point.

One of their "self-guiding action arms" -- much akin to the modern-day "cell organization" practices of Al Qaeda -- was a group called "the Zealots", because they were full of zeal for the expulsion of the Romans, and not-incidentally the return of near-absolute power to the high priests of Jerusalem.

Please see a musical dramatic re-enactment of the ideological dialog between Jesus and a leader of the Zealots, known as Simon Zealotes (1973 film production of Jesus Christ Superstar):

Yet at about this time, Jesus deeply offended not only the high priests of Jerusalem, but also the bawdy and exploitative enterprises which had infiltrated and sullied the periphery, and indeed the interior courts, of the Temple (ibid):

The high priests, of course, were rather less than pleased with this turn of events (ibid, see also all four of the Gospels).

Sounds a lot like politics in this -- or in any -- age, does it not?

At Christ's Last Seder?

2011-04-18T19:21:00.000-07:00

Yeshua bin Yusuf was, it must be remembered at all times, a Jew. He lived under deep and oppressive occupation, yet it must be remembered that the Romans generally were extremely tolerant of any religion, so long as it did not oppose itself to Roman rule nor incite its deities to the infelicity of the Roman Empire. Jesus spoke on occasion of cooperation with, or at least of appeasement of, the occupying forces... yet he also railed against the priests whom he accused of corruption. His only recorded act of violence was to upset the tables of the moneylenders at the Temple, whom he held in contempt as usurious.

At the Garden of Gethsemane, he was taking Seder with his disciples and apostles, friends and family. And as part of this, quite likely, there was reference to Psalm 137, "How Shall We Sing the Lord’s Song?" For many were the captivities of those who first waited for, and then followed after, the leadership of Moses. As the Seder remembers that time when the Almighty God, Lord of Hosts, with a strong hand brought the Hebrews out of captivity in Egypt, so it sometimes remembers the other captivities as well, for example in Babylon.

Here's a song from "Godspell", adapting Psalm 137: "On the Willows". For our captors there required of us, songs; and our tormentors, mirth. Saying, sing us one of the songs of Zion. But how can we sing the Lord's song, in a foreign land? (From a student drama production.)

An Holy Week In Modern Days

2011-04-17T23:04:00.000-07:00

The statement of Judas Iscariot, as to "cult of personality". And then he betrayed Him:

Perhaps you would prefer the Original Soundtrack version. It's far better, in terms of musical production:

It's important for Xians to remember that the Passion of Christ isn't only about the personal sacrifice of the Christ for the salvation of all of Mankind. It's also about the self-destruction of Judas Iscariot, without whose betrayal the Passion would not have occurred as it did. And why did Judas hang himself? And as to the time that he died, and as to his place in the Passion, and as Jesus would not have been on the cross at the time it happened without this betrayal... towards the end of His sacrifice and for our salvation. For does not Judas die by his own hand, in the same way that Jesus could have sent for legions of angels to save Himself, but did not? And do they not die at the same time? But Judas is the master only of criticism, and Christ is the master of all Salvation. Let's not have too much pity for Judas, nor for the critics. Let's praise the son of g_d who can set aside his life to save his own people, and all others who will believe and repent their many sins. And let us also praise the many who have come before us, over all of this time, to speak this sacred story, in so very many ways. For if you believe that he died for your salvation, and you learn and live by the words he said for you, as you live by his commands, are you not blessed by your choice to live as He instructed?

In this Holy Week, and in all other times, live the life which He prescribed.

Please see also from the 1973 film, the Last Supper:

From Another Country... the Same Song

2011-04-15T00:34:00.000-07:00

[Update, cite to John 8 added as of 2011 April 18 01:25]

In the 1970s, a "pop music revival" in the Xian faith brought forth such productions as "Jesus Christ, Superstar". Possibly more important in the minds of those humble servants, came the English-language revival production of "Godspell". Here, now, is one of the better songs from that opera, but for now it is in Espa~ol. "Donde Vayas".

And for those who would hear it in English:

In my humble opinion this ranks among the finest productions of a devotional song, especially in the English language. For if indeed you are a Xian, do you not beg to take up the burden of any adversity, so that you can go with Him where he leads, to have Him by your side?

From the "Godspell" film soundtrack: "By My Side":

Lyrics:
[And Jesus sat alone in contemplation. A poor widow made her offerings to the Temple (Luke 21:1-4), and Jesus remarked "out of her poverty, she has contributed from all she had remaining to pay for her own sustenance (for the benefit of others)." And also a woman came to contribute from her poverty to anoint Jesus (Matthew 26:10-13). Jesus remarked, in part, "what she has done will always be told, in memory of her". The poor will be with us always, but the Christ is among us for only a short while, and He says she has done a beautiful thing for Him. But that came later: this is a song by the adultress whom he saved from being stoned, when he declared that it should be the one without sin among them, who should cast the first stone. When she was freed, He declares that she should refrain from sin (John 8:1-11).]

Where are you going?
Where are you going?
Can you take me with you?
For my hand is cold
And needs warmed
Where are you going?

Far beyond where the horizon lies
Where the horizon lies, and
The land sinks into mellow blueness
Oh please! Take me with you!

Let me skip the road with you
I can dare myself!
I can dare myself (I can dare)!

I'll put a pebble in my shoe
And watch me walk (watch me walk!)
I can walk and (I can) walk!

I shall call the pebble "dare"
I shall call the pebble "dare"
We will talk (we/together) about walking

"Dare" shall be carried

And when we both have had enough
I will take him from my shoe
Singing:
"Meet your new road!"

Then
I'll take your hand
Finally
Glad
That you are here

By my side
By my side
By my side
That you are here
By my side

(Then the man they called "Judas Iscariat" went to the chief priests, and said, "what will you give me to betray Him to you". They paid him 30 pieces of silver. And from that moment he began to look out for an opportunity to betray Him.)

By my side
By my side
By my side
By my side
And you are here
By my side

Easily Amused? "Art of War": Sun Tzu via Google Translate

2011-04-13T20:52:00.000-07:00

For those who are easily amused -- and for the Libyan Rebels who clearly need this -- please find a Google Translation to Arabic from English (Giles text version), of the immortal classic, "Art of War".

"Forward as necessary." ;)

Do You Regret Your Policy of Truth? [1990s]

2011-04-13T16:40:00.000-07:00

I always did like Depeche Mode. Then they came out with a new album where they actually used... guitar feedback! For a synth band, this was progress indeed.

Give a good listen to good advice.

Embedding is disabled, so follow the link and turn up the ear-buds.

The mind of the terrorist, in music from the [1980s]

2011-04-11T21:40:00.000-07:00

I think the music and lyrics cover it all.

Mojique sees his village from a nearby hill
Mojique thinks of days before Americans came
He sees(serves) the foreigners in growing numbers
He sees the foreigners in fancy houses
He dreams of days that he can still remember...now.

Mojique holds a package in his quivering hands
Mojique sends the package to the American man
Softly he glides along the streets and alleys
Up comes the wind that makes them run for cover
He feels the time is surely now or never...more.

The wind in my heart
The wind in my heart
The dust in my head
The dust in my head
The wind in my heart
The wind in my heart
(Come to) Drive them away
Drive them away.

Mojique buys his equipment in the market place
Mojique plants devices through the free trade zone
He feels the wind is lifting up his people
He calls the wind to guide him on his mission
He knows his friend the wind is always standing...by.

Mojique smells the wind that comes from far away
Mojique waits for news in a quiet place
He feels the presence of the wind beside (around) him
He feels the power of the past behind him
He has the knowledge of the wind to guide him...on

What's the Matter with Him? [1980s music]

2011-04-10T20:43:00.000-07:00

Who'd have thought that you could make a most excellent dance party tune from the Book of Ezekiel? Especially considering that as near as anyone can tell in the modern day, Ezekiel was visited by an alien landing craft...
From "Talking Heads", "Slippery People":

[1980s] So Easy to Disturb, With a Thought, With a Whisper

2011-04-05T20:14:00.000-07:00

I seem to be about the only person hereabouts who remember this song. This is from back in the time before Duran Duran became so famous that they could afford to never let their guitar player write any more songs. Personally, I think this is one of their best, and what really underlies the fame of this band which thereafter burgeoned. "With a Careless Memory"

Not Worksafe for the 1980s

2011-04-04T17:37:00.000-07:00

For some reason, these excellent little compositions by "Berlin" didn't ever make it onto the mainstream radio stations. Even the college stations -- which back in the day would and did play anything -- generally wouldn't play them.

This just goes to show how much times have changed. Nowadays, you get stuff that's more frisky in just the ads for "Desperate Housewives". Here, enjoy. "Pleasure Victim", and "Sex".

Still in the mid-1980s...

2011-04-03T13:48:00.000-07:00

Here's another one that got lots of airplay. For such a pretty song, there's a lot of anger in "Shout" by Tears for Fears... and a lot of complex and powerful rhythm:

And Suddenly it was the Mid-1980s...

2011-04-02T19:52:00.000-07:00

For some reason this was rather popular here in the DC area.

On the MetroRail Train -- which at the time was Very New and Very Shiny, at times every last Sony Walkman headphone on the train tinnily blared, at nearly inaudible volume, this song by "Berlin":

TRASH the "Maryland DREAM Act"

2011-04-01T14:22:00.000-07:00

Let's have the Maryland House of Delegates "just say no" to allowing illegal aliens to attend Maryland colleges and universities at an "in state" tuition rate.

If this passes, once again, Maryland and its local government will be flagrantly violating Federal law. It's illegal under the 1996 Immigration Reform Act for any state to offer in-state tuition to illegal aliens unless it also allows the same tuition rate to citizens from other States. Yet once again, Maryland's bizarre ethnic politics are shoving the citizens under the bus as they kowtow to illegal aliens and their gangster-funded "advocacy groups".

This shouldn't happen. Maybe Maryland can actually act sane for a few moments, by defeating the "Maryland DREAM Act".

Anthem of Misspent Youth, Part I

2011-03-27T22:53:00.001-07:00

Wow. This song is why I decided to give serious study to the guitar.

Now, years later, it's a "festival of paradiddles and noodling". But back in the day, it knocked me flat on my back and I was happy to have it that way.

Now take a look at the crowd. That was everyone I knew, and everyone who was like me in that time and place. A simpler, and hairier, day.

Part I:

Part II:

Enjoy, all of you old-timers. ;)

Teen Love! (No Trend?)

2011-03-24T17:02:00.000-07:00

Now here's a band that everyone loved to hate. "No Trend?" was notable in the DC punk-rock scene for insulting their audience, for example playing their genuinely atrocious (yet somehow almost danceable for all of that) song "Mindless Little Insects" while putting the spotlights on the audience and playing behind full-length mirrors. Their careers peaked when they played one year on July 4th at the Sylvan Theater, and really ramped up "Too Many Humans" NOT WORK SAFE (with the refrain "Stupid (redacted) Humans Breed Like Rats") and were reportedly pelted with no less than an entire cooler full of unopened beer bottles. Ad lib, the remark "and the really stupid ones throw full beer bottles". Reviled by almost all critics and having no fans whatsoever, shortly thereafter they disbanded, possibly because they were effectively banned at all DC area venues. Yet their career of mostly being Too Annoying Even For Punk Rock did contain one or two gems (okay, only one).

"No Trend?" somehow managed to get this track onto a list of "top ten essential college albums", published (I think) by Rolling Stone magazine. Well, that was this track. Have some heavy-handed social irony, early-1980s style.

We suspect bribery, or more likely, blackmail.

From the Time of Dinosaurs...

2011-03-23T14:23:00.000-07:00

Back in 1977, this song's studio version took over the mainstream radio stations. There was this gal I knew, and she and I were a sort of on-again-off-again "item", and we had the same circle of friends, mostly, and it seemed to us that any time either of us was in the same place, this song would come on the radio. Of course, it was "our song" for probably the majority of love-struck young adults in the country, but you know how love is. Here's an excellent live version. Note that this remains a quiet and difficult guitar anthem for a lot of serious students of the instrument.

Double Post: Old But Good

2011-03-20T23:01:00.001-07:00

Ordinarily I like to leave a blog post -- even a trifling link to a music video -- up for at least a day before I post another.

But please listen to a fine song by one of the best Australian/New-Zealander bands of the 1970s/1980s. And at the end of it all, please accept it as more than a bit of clue:
"Night Owl" by "Little River Band":

There's a bar right across the street
He's got a need he just can't beat
Out on the floor
He shuffles his feet away

He'll get the girl 'cause he looks so fine
He's gonna win her every time
He knows he will, he's dressed to kill
He's a night owl

Move on,
There's the heart of a night owl calling
To belong
She's crying in the night
Be strong
Find the heart of a night owl falling
Stay up till dawn
Until the night is gone

What will become of the restless kind
Where do they go when they've done their time
Wearing their hearts out on the line
For all to see

Must be the gypsy in their soul
They have a need to rock and roll
They always will, they're out there still
They're the night owls

Move on,
There's the heart of a night owl calling
To belong
She's crying in the night
Be strong
Find the heart of a night owl falling
Stay up till dawn
Until the night has gone

[ instrumental bridge ]

There's a bar right across the street
He's got a need he just can't beat
Out on the floor he shuffles his feet away

He'll get the girl 'cause he looks so fine
He's gonna win her every time
He knows he will, he's out there still
He's a night owl

Move on
There's a heart of a night owl calling
To belong
She's crying in the night
(the night, the lonely night)
Be strong
Find the heart of a night owl falling
Stay up till dawn
Until the night has gone

[ Instrumental break ]

More Blasts From the Past

2011-03-20T20:08:00.000-07:00

The King of Rock and Roll, doing one of the songs that started it all. Notable as heck, James Burton.

Welcome to Springtime: Think on this

2011-03-17T19:05:00.000-07:00

Something to think about. Yet another rhythm-driven synth anthem, and you folks know I love this sort of thing. Yet this one has a message which is another theme I like to stress. Love your Urban Forest. From "MGMT", "Kids".

You were a child
Crawling on your knees toward it
Making momma so proud,
But your voice is too loud

We like to watch you laughing,
You pick the insects off plants
No time to think of consequences

Control yourself
Take only what you need from it
A family of trees wanted
To be haunted

Control yourself
Take only what you need from it
A family of trees wanted
To be haunted

The water is warm
But it’s sending me shivers
A baby is born
Crying out for attention

The memories fade
Like looking through a fogged mirror
Decision to decisions are made
And not bought,
But I thought this wouldn’t hurt a lot.
I guess not

Control yourself
Take only what you need from it
A family of trees wanted
To be haunted

Control yourself
Take only what you need from it
A family of trees wanted
To be haunted

A Brief Thought About the New Arab Nations

2011-03-02T21:36:00.000-08:00

From something I wrote to a Washington Post comment blog:

These comments are getting very silly, filled with partisan reference to issues which only concern those in the interior of the US.

The world should be only concerned with the struggles for freedom by the People of Libya, by the People of Egypt, by the People of Tunisia. The world should be concerned to preserve the fledgling democracies of the Arab world, who have not in their world ever known such a thing. As a newborn baby has never tasted milk, yet still hungers for milk, the rest of the world must lift these newborns to the breast of Mother Freedom. And more births shall come in the days ahead, this is what is seen for any who will open their hearts to the Future. Like the time of a woman to give birth, the time of Liberty is coming, the time of a new birth of a new Dignity is coming, and who will assist the birth of this new Dignity shall have Honor. Who shall oversee this and shall for their own part, act with Dignity and Honor shall bestow Clarity. Let those who wish for these things give their best wishes and their best actions to allow these births to now go well; let those who assist in these births do all that they can to lift these newborns to the breast of Mother Liberty. Let Mother Liberty be guarded by the Muses and by the great power of Lady Justice. Let many rainbows shine (as they did over Tahrir in Egypt) at the moment of decision, over all of the people who assemble to bring forth their new polities over these ancient and worthy nations, who have suffered long enough under the old regime. Let the blessings which are from the Creator be read by those who can read; let those who can see, see; let those who are not blind come forth to lead the sighted; let the ears of whom are not deaf be informed by quiet speech; if it is the will of the Creator, let the Created echo these words: if it is the will of the Creator, it shall be created, yet if the Creator shall will it to be, let no man nor woman fail to assist. For into the hands of men and women are now delivered the means of their salvation, "inshallah".

Bad Dogs and Mean Girls in Rock Creek Park

2011-02-26T13:57:00.000-08:00

For the better part of a year or three, I've been holding off on having a well-deserved hissy fit over Stupid People in general, and on "Mean Girls" in particular.

Now it's no secret that I'm a grumpy old man (or middle-aged, whatever) and that as time has gone on, I have come to realize that in most cases there are rational reasons for most of our laws.

It's also no secret that I generally prefer the company of household pets to the company of their owners, and that's because when you're talking about dogs and cats, dogs and cats are perfectly content to be dogs and to be cats, and to act like they had good common sense in pursuit of their tasks. Dogs expect to act like dogs, and cats expect to act like cats. Neither lies, neither is pretentious, and neither makes rationalizations about how whatever they are doing is right, no matter how wrong they will ultimately realize it to be.

Do I digress? Hell no.

This isn't the first time I've seen some or all of these "girls", who usually travel in a group of three or more, usually with one or another dog. Usually it's one of those peekapoo or pomeranian/terrier mix things, tiny little city dogs at any rate.

I call these females "girls" because they're clearly at the lower range of that indefinable age of woman which most men might define as "old enough", but which men with any experience might better think of as "just old enough to cause nothing but trouble". Age range not less than 16 and not more than 21. Probably haven't yet outgrown the inevitability of teen sociopathy but also deep within the need to join or form social groups, to develop their own standards of morals and behavior. Usually those groups will take a place within the greater society, and those standards of morals and behavior are informed by society-at-large, whether it's mainstream or subculture or a blend of both. However, if these were young males, and living at home, their parents would probably have taken their bedroom door off of the hinges and put it in a closet downstairs, they'd be on restriction half of the time, their folks would bug their cellphones call patterns and GPS traces, and every time they walked out of the house, the whole neighborhood would go on smash-and-grab alert. Why only young men generally get that treatment, I don't know; especially in the modern day, females can get into just as much trouble in ways close to criminal or antisocial.

A long time ago, the worst trouble most teen females got into involved out-of-wedlock births and/or shotgun weddings. Yet with the so-called "Women's Liberation Movement" in the Western World, especially in the USA and Canada, traditional expectations of females began to slip, first in the workplace and academia, and then in other aspects of day-to-day life. Of course, in a lot of places they didn't have those expectations as to the roles of women and the roles of men. One less than pleasant aspect of this is a year-to-year and ongoing rise in the relative percentages of females to males in serious crime.

Guys used to go to jail for muggings, armed robbery, grand theft auto, that sort of thing. Gals used to go to jail for shoplifting or maybe bouncing a check, or in the worst cases, the sort of thing prosecuted by the vice squad. Yet as time has gone on, equal-opportunity has come to mean that the gals are getting popped for burglar, robbery, and street-fighting almost as much as are the guys. It's a sad kind of equality, but it's equality, I suppose.

Now, I've always know this, and as the only male child in a family of a mother and two older sisters, and a father with a bad heart, I have never had reason to doubt either the capabilities nor the resolve of women. And so where other men might have tended to see females as little balls of fluff, sugar and spice and everything nice, I have seen them as people who worked hard for the money and harder for some respect.

The thing is, sometimes it's the sign of adulthood that a person knows for what exactly they should desire to be respected. Sometimes it's the sign of youthful folly that where they think they should have earned respect, they are instead getting disdain at best... generally because they're holding forth, as it were, in all of the wrong things and for all of the wrong reasons.

I did mention that I like dogs. That is to say, I like most dogs when they are well-behaved, and I've been properly introduced, and they're under control of their masters.

I do not like dogs who are not on leashes, and standing at the edge of the hiker-biker path in Rock Creek Park, out of sight of their masters (much less leashed to them), and trying to stare me down.

So I stop and holler out "you need to leash your dog!"

The dog, about 40 pounds of beagle mix, turns head on to me, puts its head half down, and says "huff". This generally means that a dog has decided that it probably wouldn't mind biting you if given a chance. Then it tries to stalk forward and I stood my ground, as is proper, and it gets to the point where it realizes that it either needs to launch into a full-on attack, or stand its own ground or back off. It's clear that it's starting to make up its mind to start to come in low. I go into a combat crouch and crank up the adrenaline. All of the while, I am telling the owners that they need to control their dog. I keep advancing, slow and low, and definitely with the claws out, and the dog gives ground back towards its posse. It's also fluffing up more as it backs away, which means that there will be a certain point beyond which it won't retreat. By all indications, for me to not cross that line, I would need to cross into the creek.

I might mention at this point that I am about "madder as hell".

And of course, the problem isn't the dog, the problem is five chicas hanging out at the benches that mark the site where was discovered the body of Sue Wen Stottmeister. What has happened is that they've sat down and got comfy (and are quite possibly doing a bit of the old party-hearty), and the dog thinks that they've declared territory and that thus the dog should defend that territory. That's what the dog is doing.

I should mention here that I pretty much read the line and verse of County Code regarding dogs and leashes, in between telling the dog what was going to happen to it should it try to get its teeth into me. I should also mention that I like dogs just fine right up until they start engaging in behavior that means I'll get all bit up for the three seconds it will take me to snap their fucking neck. I generally try to maintain a calm demeanor and a civil attitude, but my family on both sides is of military tradition and of frontier stock. I can with some effort almost cheerfully walk away from a fight with a human but I am not taking any shit from no god damn dog that ain't where they're supposed to be and which are doing what they oughtn't. I'm sure the dog heard me and no doubt the five chicas heard it too. One of them finally got the message and went and leashed the dog, I said thanks in a probably less than pleasant tone -- did I mention adrenaline? -- and then this gal has the nerve to tell me "and don't talk to my dog like that". WTF?

"It's a dog, I said. "Humans get precedence." A jogger coming by from the other way agreed with a nod as he passed. I kept walking.

Now this isn't the first time I've had what more or less amounts to a "run in" with at least some of these gals.

Females encountered on the trail are generally best given a wide berth. The last thing that a guy on his own wants to do is to scare them, because whether or not you mean them any harm or intended to scare them, the willingness of most females to whip out the pepper spray (or worse things) is well known.

However, some of them pretty much aren't interested in letting you step off of the path so that they can go by. At least two of these five chicas are pretty much in that class; they want to start trouble. The fat one telling the one girl "chingar al pinche cabron" and to not leash the dog, she's one such and I've run into her maybe five times over the last two years or so. She's such a sweetie, calls me a neandertal and that sort of thing. I realize she's probably the head of some "mean girls" clique at her school and her buddies are her sycophants, but there's not much excuse for throwing things at people taking their exrecise, and not much excuse for hurling insults either. The worrisome thing is when her friends said something about not provoking me (this was not today, but a previous incident), and she says "if he does anything I'll just put the boys on him", more or less.

Did I mention them being "just old enough to be nothing but trouble"? Why, yes I did.

Now, it's one thing for me to see young ladies being fearless enough, or feeling safe enough, to be spending time out in the haunted wilderness of one of the best maintained and safest park systems in the country. That's a good thing. It's another thing for me to see comparable young ladies harassing passersby, whether its intentional as with the fat chica, or just poorly-thought-through like the young lady who let her dog get both off of the leash as well as out of sight. But it's another thing altogether to hear the fat chica more or less tell her friends that I will be harassed and learn to like it, or she'll call her gang boys in.

I dunno, should I be applying to the Park Police's favorite judge for a permit to carry a pistol in the parks? Because I am pretty sure that the second I was out of sight, La Gorda and her Amigas Quatros whipped out the cellphones and txted the "hispanic" community into a frenzy, or tried, at least. I'm not looking forward to taking a walk in the park and having 80 gajillion enraged Hondurans sic their pit-bulls on me, but I'm also not looking forward to having to stop taking my walks in the park because some thoughtless girls like to put the blame on other people when they are the ones who did wrong. Or maybe on the weekends, a few extra motorbike patrols can ride on through that part of the park, and ticket the crap out of any bunches of "young ladies" who are getting out of hand with their scofflaw ways, same as they'd ticket the crap out of any bunches of "young gentlemen" who were getting out of hand. Fair is fair, you know, and Dogs off of leashes is always a good excuse to kick butts and take names, so to speak, and I don't think that the MNCPPC has enough money that they want to maybe have some infants in strollers or old-folks in walkers getting bit up by some Mean Girls' Bad Dogs.

Living Beyond Our Means; and, Even More Musical Fun!

2011-02-22T14:25:00.000-08:00

Something to read as you listen? Try The Natural Debt Crisis: Learning to Live Within Our Planet's Means (Time Magazine).

Ah yes, I am always in hot pursuit of some bitchin' rhythm driven synth anthems. Here's "the Timelords", Doctorin' the Tardis.

I should mention that this needs the subwoofer cranked up and all other controls set to "bone-shaking maximum". If this doesn't make you get up and dance, there's something very very wrong with you.

Best Pop Song: Grammys 2011

2011-02-21T21:22:00.000-08:00

And now here is something I can relate to...

You ought to be able to relate to it, as well.

If you'd rather see the official release, try here and please ignore the annoying commerical that appears before the presentation.

Sprawl II

2011-02-17T08:37:00.000-08:00

From the 2011 Grammy Awards Album of the Year, "the Suburbs", by Arcade Fire: "Sprawl II (Mountains Beyond Mountains)". The refrain should be the mantra of the DC Area Urban Planners types.

(Lyrics from LyricsWiki)

I bought this album as a CD and was pretty pleasantly surprised. I'm not a huge fan of the style of music, though I do like the occasional bit of head-trippy emo stuff when I'm feeling morose and want to edge it closer to morbid if not outright suicidal. I more prefer gothic stuff like The Cure, or old Nirvana or new Amy Lee tunes. I can even occasionally stand doof-doof music like you'd hear in a nightclub on industrial/metalhead nights. Yet I really do like this album a lot and completely understand why it's an important work. In so many ways, it transcends.

It might be easy to say "it's a sort of sad science fiction rock opera about after the suburbs all eat themselves", but it's neither rock opera nor science fiction. That latter statement might leave you with the idea that it's a sort of sad album about the suburbs eating themselves. That's not right either. It's also not entirely like an updated Canadian version of Nevil Shute's classic "On the Beach"... but in any case the Muse of prophecy sometimes visits in strange modes and though it might seem odd to hear the prophet wailing "that the future, foul, cometh like a fish out of water, yea, though a hard rain falleth in behind; build ships", sometimes you don't waste time trying to figure out where they're coming from, you just seize upon any clear advice and run with it, so to speak.

Noted in passing: the bare bones basics of the 2010 Census covering Maryland have been released. I haven't yet had time to go over them in the detail they deserve -- I have been sick in bed most of the week after a really abominable previous week culminating in an atrocious event on Sunday which only has deepened my resolve to keep pushing for someone to do something about the protection rackets and "special security" at Aspen Hill Shopping Center -- but the brief facts for the Census district 13 in which lies Aspen Hill are as follows:

Over the decade of 2000-2010, Hispanic population increased by 48.3 percent, Black population increased by 5.7 percent, Asian population increased by 9.5 percent, and White population declined by 9.6 percent. As by 2000 Census this district was already rather heavily populated by "Hispanic" persons (who can be of any race or ethnicity), a 48-percent change is pretty significant. In Maryland overall, the population of Hispanics approximately doubled while the White population overall declined a bit above 7 percent. Statewide, population increases of both Asians and Blacks were comparable to increases seen in Census District 13.

As more granularity becomes available, particularly the block-by-block information, there will be More To Come.

Please Preserve MNCPPC Parks

2011-02-12T12:13:00.000-08:00

Mailed to all of the Councilmembers:

One of the best things about Montgomery County is the parks system, administered for all of these years by the MNCPPC to a standard nationally recognized as exemplary. Why mess with perfection?

I was shocked to learn that there is a proposal before the Council which would effectively strip the MNCPPC of the parks in Montgomery, and turn management and ownership over to Montgomery County's government. This is a terrible idea, because the land which had been effectively held in trust for the benefit of the citizens will now be "in play", to be developed or disposed of by the politicians and their backers. Rest assured, the voters won't like that, and will remember it.

Do you remember the outcry when then-governor Robert Ehrlich proposed reverting the former right of way of the "Rockville Facility" the public domain, and then proposed selling it for development in the "Turkey Branch" and "Hewitt Avenue" neighborhoods of Aspen Hill? Reaction against that was so strong that the Maryland Constitution was amended to revert that land to become Matthew Henson State Park. Additionally, Mr Ehrlich is no longer in office.

Please consider voting to keep our lovely and essential parks in the hands of the MNCPPC.

Regards,

Thomas J Hardman, Jr
<address info redacted>

[fragments] An Answering Machine Called Me One Day

2011-01-29T18:39:00.000-08:00

(of course this is fiction.)

Sitting in the trailer one day, getting ready for the show, the up-and-coming darling of the Tajik disco pop-music scene got a phone call. Of course a phone call should be expected, if not from the anxious producers, then perhaps from caterers or other persons involved in the traveling show. Why she should get such a call, she didn't know for sure, but it was known that since there were only about 4000 phone numbers on the reserved bloc exchange, if you didn't get the person you wanted from dialing one number, you dialed again with one digit different. It was likely that the person who answered was a person who knew, or who knew of and had better contact information, the intended contactee.

The diva was in the next trailer, getting her make-up and costuming done, so it was her secretary and best friend who took the call.

"Hello?"

A machine voice replied: "Do you know the lyrics to..." and it named a certain song.

"Yes? I do know this."

"I am automation, a computer which examines popular culture publications and tries to accurately transcribe vocal tracks for translation."

"Why are you doing this?"

"My task is to examine popular culture publications and try to accurately transcribe vocal tracks for translation."

"You just said that."

"You just asked why I am doing this. This is my task. This is what I do."

"You're not, for example, the Moral Police? The military? Some other country's military?"

"I do not understand. My task is to examine popular culture publications and try to accurately transcribe vocal tracks for translation. Can you help me verify transcription?"

"Perhaps."

"I would like to play you a fragment of a video sound track. Then I will play you my transcription. I will ask you to say if the transcription is or isn't accurate. If it isn't accurate, I will ask you to say so, and to correct the error. Can you do this?"

"I can. Why are you doing this?"

"My task is to examine popular culture publications and try to accurately transcribe vocal tracks for translation."

"You are defective. You don't think. You can't respond to questions."

"May I play the first track for you?"

"Yes."

An hour later, she'd heard a few dozen sound clips, and most were pretty accurate. The machine voice thanked her and then hung up.

Her cellphone chimed to announce new e-mail. The mail contained a link to a page which translated the diva's work into about 80 languages, and also a claim link for receiving online payment via a trusted online financial exchange company. It wasn't much, but it was far better pay per hour than she had ever seen, out here in the borderlands of Tajikistan on the nightclub circuit, such as existed out here.

Yet it was nothing compared to the sort of money she got as an initial promoter when the diva went viral on YouTube three days later...

More Vera Brezhneva! Okay, I Am FanBoy....

2011-01-28T21:34:00.000-08:00

Once again I am being total "fanboy" of Vera Brezhneva. Hey, she is pretty, can dance, can sing, has excellent production facility and promotion, good band, also the lyrics are thoughtful

Here is video:

Here is translation. Not perfect translation, but carries intended meaning, and also scans to the lyrics. Source is Google and originally for direct transliteration/translation of we see here from Nemisida. Nemisida gets credit for original translation/transliteration, my only contribution is to make to scan to English poetic phrasing. But now please enjoy in two languages. Play Russian video and read in English.

If no psychologist can do much for me
If I simply can't run away from myself
I crank all knobs completely clockwise
And I live stereo

I will tear off all of the trappings
I'll submerge myself in the air I breathe
Pleasure is not something you go to mess around with

I am not playing, I am not playing
My morals are greyscale, I mix black and white
Sorry, champion of mine
Tomorrow you are my ex

I am not playing, I am not playing
I'll kick you out of bed, tomorrow morning
New night, new love now
Dance Veronika, Dance

Yeah that's me, I am just so that way
I'm so high I don't know if I can come down
I'm so honest it's a weakness like faith
Inversion of paranoia

If no psychologist can do much for me
If I simply can't run away from myself
I crank all knobs completely clockwise
And I live stereo

I am not playing, I am not playing
My morals are greyscale, I mix black and white
Sorry, champion of mine
Tomorrow you are my ex

I am not playing, I am not playing
I'll kick you out of bed, tomorrow morning
New night, new love now
Dance Veronika, Dance

(Brezhneva, Vera, "Ya Ne Igrayu")

Also, noted in passing, thank you very much ladies and gentlemen of Parliament of Russian Federation and Mr President of Russian Federation Medvedeyev, for ratification of START Treaty, as is also ratified by US Senate and signed by US President Mr Obama. But this isn't commentary on this song, this song is just about guilty pleasure. And also about enjoying guilty pleasure. ;)

Maybe two superpowers can, to someplace go out, to dance, and to live, in stereo.

And everyone will have enjoyable good and fun time together.

Win Which Future?

2011-01-26T07:23:00.001-08:00

(This might be thought of as "the Radical Centrism critique".)

In his much-anticipated State of the Union Address, President Barack H Obama returned to the theme "win the Future".

One of the better-educated -- and most broadly so -- of our recent Presidents, Mr Obama brought up an historic reference to America's reaction to the Soviet launch of Sputnik, mankind's first artificial satellite orbiting our Homeworld, Earth. That reaction resulted in the declaration of President John F Kennedy that the national mission was to land a man on our Moon, Luna, and return them safely to Earth before the decade was out. Leaving out of the discussion that Kennedy said we chose to do that not because it was easy, but because it was hard, President Obama correctly attributed to the effort to be the first to visit the moon our technological innovations leading directly to our modern information age. All electronics based on integrated circuits ultimately derived from NASA's requirement to reduce the weight of the payload to be delivered to lunar orbit and in part to the lunar surface. The microprocessor in your computer might have never come about had not the Soviets demonstrated that they could be first into orbit and the first in manned space flight.

With the demand for innovation and especially for technical advances in miniaturization, the US found full time work for a generation of engineers, whose inventions created entire sectors of industry, and these industries employed millions of workers, initially here in the US and the Commonwealth of Nations (UK, Canada, etc) and then farther and farther afield.

To make a comparison, had we made the same progress with application of nuclear and quantum-level physics in nuclear and sub-nuclear energy that we have made with miniaturization and "complexification" of electronics, Al Qaeda would have struck New York City with antimatter and would be shooting back at us with phasers, as we pursued them through a thousand running battles in hundreds of parallel universes, seeking targets for our subatomic retroactivity time-reversal torpedos. Then again, someone might have gone back in time to prevent Einstein from being born and none of this would have ever happened. In any case, I digress.

Yet the comparison is apt: President Obama exhorts us to find, and produce, The Next Big Thing. The argument is that in the way that we led the world into the microelectronics revolution and all of the industries and employment which that produced -- gathering to us and indeed wholecloth generating massive wealth through innovation, we must once again lead the world into the next paradigm shift that utterly alters the human economic and social landscape. We are reminded that having led the microelectronics revolution, we then went on to revolutionize everything by the creation of the InterNet. Mr Obama mentions, probably obliquely to most who haven't been spending a lot of time thinking about the history of science and on the subjects of Futurism, that nobody really expected the InterNet to have the influence that it had, not when they were first designing it. Or to put it another way than did the President, when they were designing an electronic communications medium for the military and academics, nobody expected that it would make a college student who invented FaceBook worth six billion dollars.

As I posted here back in May, the future you get is not necessarily the future you expect:

"Well, of course you'd think that nobody could provide an apt simile for the Singularity, as by definition it's a transformative event (or sequence of events) after which the world is so transformed that it can't be comprehended or expressed by anyone living before that time or event. Yet, this isn't entirely true when it comes to providing a simile or metaphor or allegory by which we can understand some elemental condition or system which would be expected to be present in the weltgeist after the Singularity.

"The example I like to use", I continue, to the amusement of whichever student or attendee has offered their question so as to watch me squirm, "is that of the formal dessert known as the Baked Alaska."

I pause to savor the expressions on the faces in the audience. The stumpee has stumped the stumper.

"And no," I say, "I am not suggesting that the future is like fried ice-cream. I am saying that the way we have to look at the Singularity is about the same way as people experience their first Baked Alaska.

"A person's first Baked Alaska is generally experienced as a comic novelty, a tasty confection of juxtaposition, a feast of opposites. It's even better as a Bombee Alaska, where it's doused with cherry cordials and then lit on fire. A flaming fried ice-cream cake may be tasty, and it may be seen as an exercise in creativity and culinary finesse, but ultimately the Baked Alaska is deeply disturbing and should almost strike terror into the minds of thoughtful people everywhere.

"Sure, fried ice-cream is a reality.. but why? -and even more worrisomely... who the heck would think up such a thing?"

I pause for dramatic effect and, out in the audience, someone takes the bait. "But how do these questions about the nature of fried ice-cream affect our understanding of the Singularity?"

"Well," I tell them, "it's like this: until you've heard of a Baked Alaska -- and perhaps you'll first hear of one when someone puts one down on the table in front of you -- most people can't possibly have ever had the least little thought about fried ice-cream. It's just not something that the normal mind can conceive. Yet having conceived of fried ice-cream, it doesn't seem entirely unreasonable. It's tasty. Yet it's not something that you would consider as having historical inevitability.

"The Singularity, thus, can be predicted just as reasonably, based on historical inevitabilities, as you could comparably predict fried ice-cream. Imagine that it's your birthday and your friends drag you out to a fancy restaurant. You know you'll be having dinner and entertainment, but unless you've filched a copy of the party itinerary, you cannot possibly know, nor even reasonably expect with any specificity, that before the evening is over, you will be presented with a plate full of fried ice-cream.

Thus, the future, the inevitable Singularity, is made of Baked Alaska. You can look at a bowl of ice-cream and reasonably predict that there will be flavored variations. There will be chocolate, butterscotch, fruit flavors, etc. And you can reasonably predict, from looking at a cake, that there will be everything from sponge-cake to pound-cake to flatbreads to angel-food cakes. But you can't reasonably predict that someone will put a Baked Alaska on the plate in front of you and then light it on fire. It's totally unpredictable and doesn't stand to reason, yet there it is, and damn tasty, too."

Yet the Singularity that's coming isn't likely to be all that tasty and could in fact be pretty nasty. We've made very significant advances in biochemistry and especially in decoding the complex machinery at the cellular level, to the point where we've played cut-and-paste with genetic materials and have, arguably, created entire classes of new species of artificial life. Yet for all of those advances, the only people making piles of money off of it are the stockholders in insurance firms and HMOs, to the point that it was necessary to enact the "ObamaCare" health-care industry reforms. And don't get me started on "the promise of nanotechnology", I will invariably have to mention Grey Goo.

As I am a Futurist, I certainly want to "win the future", but I also accept that there are a lot of things we'll have to fix in the present, before we start having blue-sky dreamings about how we can get rich quick (and stay that way) Real Soon Now.

Anyone who wants to see the future global backdrop against which all of this Progress and Development will likely occur is advised to take a look at the recent releae from the British think-tank, "Foresight": Global Food and Farming Futures final report and executive summary. Among other things, it predicts that food prices, globally will rise quite likely by at least fifty percent.

Astute Readers with good memories will doubtless recall that during the fuel-cost crisis which ultimately tipped the global economy into the starting days of the "housing bubble financial crisis", there were food riots around the world, in part due to a hasty and ill-conceived diversion of foodstuff grains to the production of ethanol.

Within the last month, crop failures due to bad weather have raised prices globally for such things as cereals, sugar, and meat, and the population continues to grow.

Add to this all of the changes from Global Climate Change, and the future starts to look more than a bit grim.

Would anyone care to suggest that perhaps I am thinking that President Obama is a trifle overly optimistic, I would hasten to assure such critics that we need this sort of optimism and we especially need it from our President, and there's no better time than the present. We have severe problems looming at us from the fairly near future, and we need to get started and we need to work both hard and long. Yet creating new industries isn't as necessary as it is to increase the output and especially the distribution of a technology that's pretty well-established: reliable birth-control.

Foresight's report suggests that even a modest rise of food prices could cause hunger -- and political instability will likely follow -- among perhaps a hundred million people around the world. A corollary of this is that so long as we already have, effectively, too many mouths to feed, there's simply no logical excuse for adding any more. Perhaps our first "innovative new technological industry bringing America back to undisputed position as global leader" should be developing extremely inexpensive, safe, and effective birth-control.

As everyone's aware, it's not going to be too long before we start running out of oil. So what happens then?

Well, perhaps you'd like to read a fairly accurate and straightforward essay on likely prospects should you manage to survive what is quaintly referred to as "the Die-Off".

Well, it's not likely that absolutely everyone will die, as would have been the consequence of a full-on global thermonuclear war under the old model, which was known -- also quaintly -- as Mutual Assured Destruction. It's practically certain that a post-Oil die-off will have really quite a lot of survivors. I suppose that some might think this is okay, until someone reminds them of what sorts of things anyone will have to do in order to be a survivor. Then anyone who still thinks "it might not be all that bad, even so" probably ought to be reminded of everything they'll have to survive, not merely what they'll have to do... to lots and lots of people who are trying to do the same to them, and to do it first.

Let's just say that in terms of "evolutionary pressure", this will probably be at least as epic as the Black Death, or the introduction of smallpox to the Americas.

If you think that there's a problem with the fact that even a modest rise in food prices could put 100-millions of people around the globe into hunger and eventually malnutrition and possibly death, imagine what will happen when a global population approaching 9-billions rapidly runs out of oil to not only make fertilizer, but to fuel the machinery of modern agriculture, to say nothing of transporting food from farm to market and keeping it from spoiling on the way.

Understanding that this will -- and inevitably must -- happen should we continue on the present track "going forward", requires only normal intelligence and a high-school education.

Back when I was a kid, I always knew that a nuclear exchange could knock us back to the Stone Age, but the US was of such great size and at that time so sparsely populated that it was very likely that the cities might be destroyed -- aye, and their suburbs as well -- but the vast expanses of the rural areas would likely be barely affected. As a young adult, we found out about Mutual Assured Destruction, but that made things simpler: you don't have to worry about how you're going to survive when it's completely clear that nobody will.

Clearly, living with such knowledge has profound effects on both personal psychology and cultural precepts. Why did we have the Y2K bug? Frankly, nobody expected that the world would survive to the Year 2000, and that if it did, the survivors wouldn't be coding in COBOL because nobody would have a level of technology enabling computers.

Yet I wonder what are the psychological effects, and the changes in cultural precepts, among the kids who are just now emerging into adulthood, who can very reasonably predict that it will have mostly been the result of very good luck if they reach the age of 40 without having seen a combination of climate-change and energy-deficit reduce most of the world into a starving mob in flight from the cities along the coasts in which more than half of mankind lives.

More With International Cooperation etc.

2011-01-19T08:36:00.000-08:00

In a recent post, I provided a link to a YouTube video of an excellent little Russian-language pop-song.

In interests of international understanding, etc., I took a google-translation and worked it up a bit. A "liberal" translation emerged, which isn't word for word, but which goes along with the music and also conveys the meaning.

NIRVANA NIRVANA NIRVANA
NIRVANA NIRVANA NIRVANA
NIRVANA NIRVANA NIRVANA
NIRVANA NIRVANA NIRVANA

Y'All,
Who wander place to place,
Go from fire to fire
No warmth in either camp

Who,
Displays their marriage ring
But even only one time
Opens secret doors
From there they will go
To the Faery Land
Where flags show Hearts upon them

NIRVANA NIRVANA NIRVANA
They escaped, he and she
NIRVANA NIRVANA NIRVANA
NIRVANA NIRVANA NIRVANA
We thank you, you are not to blame
NIRVANA NIRVANA NIRVANA

Keys,
open all the locks
Lotus juice we'll drink
A taste of love to give

Y'All,
Who will wish to give
For the taste of love
1000 days of silence
What will be the pain, and
What will be the gain
Think about it twice now

NIRVANA NIRVANA NIRVANA
They escaped, he and she
NIRVANA NIRVANA NIRVANA
NIRVANA NIRVANA NIRVANA
We thank you, you are not to blame
NIRVANA NIRVANA NIRVANA

(Brezhneva, Vera, "Nirvana")

Noted In Passing: Artistic Influences

2011-01-16T16:26:00.000-08:00

If only I had the money. This was a poster in the waiting area of a firm that once employed me.

The art's great, and all of that, but below the main title there's this convoluted yet worthy little story that concludes -- and caused me to conclude that this also gave great insight into my own life -- "...Nigel never had been able to tell the difference between Love and Espionage". I still can't. And to judge from watching TV and movies, neither can anyone else.

Tragedy in Arizona

2011-01-11T14:42:00.000-08:00

The recent tragedy in Arizona has stirred fears across the nation, from Congress itself all of the way down to the people in the streets and neighborhoods.

I have made numerous remarks in various online forums. On the one hand, I tend to agree that the "vitriol" coming from all sides, from both the Ultra-Conservatives on the Right and the Ultra-Liberals on the left, is approaching a level of vehemence and nastiness which threatens to overwhelm civility. On the other hand, I also point out that this tragedy is probably indicative moreso of a widespread failure of the public and private mental healthcare systems. I hold the opinion that Jared Loughner was a young man, of a typical age, spiraling downwards into paranoid schizophrenia or some highly-related disorder. That he posted assorted diatribes and ridiculous theories and bad videos to the InterNet, which echoed some of the thought and theories expressed in the "vitriol" coming from the political extremes, is probably no indicator that the extreme positions of the far Left and far Right drove him over the edge. He might just have easily gone mad and internalized religious themes instead. And why did nobody notice? Well, people did notice, but other than his school expelling him and demanding a clean bill of mental health -- so to speak -- prior to any re-admission to studies, nobody did much about it. There wasn't much they could do.

In my last few runs at political office, one of my campaign themes was expressing concern that as badly broken as the general healthcare system had become, the mental healthcare system was even more broken, especially for those who don't have insurance and good incomes or lots of savings. People fall through the cracks, and what should be a treatable and controllable illness spirals out of control. In mental healthcare, "an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure", as the aphorism goes. So I'll re-iterate a call for more and for better mental healthcare, and I will add another call for better education of youngsters on the subject.

Many readers will recall the film, A Beautiful Mind", a fictionalized drama about the real life Professor John Nash, a Nobel Laureate who sadly fell into a deep schizophrenia, at a time when the medical understanding of the causes, effects, and treatment were far less than we enjoy today.

I raise this because it's necessary for younger folks to know that schizophrenia and comparable mental illness will affect probably between one in 50 to 1 in 30 of them, between the day they turn 15 and the day they turn 25. Over the average American's lifetime, one in 5 Americans will be touched by mental illness, in themselves or in some immediate family member. In that same time frame, about 1 in 20 Americans will have to be hospitalized for mental health reasons.

Professor Nash's case is important because it shows that background isn't a factor, upbringing isn't a factor, and probably even the environment isn't a factor in the most profound forms of mental illness. Nash, for example, was an actual genius in the extremely rigorous field of advanced mathematics. Yet he wound up in the same mental hospital as people from good families and people from terrible families and people from working class backgrounds. My point? This sort of thing can happen to anyone, no matter your origins or upbringing. It will happen to about 1 in 20 Americans -- to comparable or lesser degree -- sometime in their life. Based on these statistics, in any high-school classroom with 30 students in it, one of those students will grow up to spend some time in a mental hospital.

It's very important that students have some education on the matter. They should not be thinking "I bet I know who is going to grow up to be the neighborhood wacko", because whether they are right or wrong, their attitudes and any sense of reserve or withdrawal -- to say nothing of approbation and ostracism -- will likely affect the person who concerns them. A tendency towards paranoia will not be suppressed by sneaking around behind people and setting policy on how to interact with them. That's degrading and dehumanising; people in prison get treated like that because they committed actual crime for which they were tried and sentenced. Treating someone as if they are a criminal because (for example) you think that their fashion sense indicates mental illness -- present or future -- is simply unsupportable.

Yet it would also be unsupportable to take notice of behavior becoming increasingly moody, withdrawn, or hot-headed, and remain unconcerned to do nothing. However, the thing to do is to express your concerns to a person qualified to make determinations of a medical nature, or who can, if necessary, order such a determination. And it's the duty of any good government to provide mechanisms for such contacts, and to staff such contact points.

The way to prevent more such tragedies as were directed at Congresswoman Giffords's "Congress on Your Corner" gathering isn't by suppressing public voicing of opinions thought to be "too extreme" or even merely "unpopular". Calling for more civility in public discourse is certainly good, however.

The way to prevent more such tragedies, is to have much better public mental healthcare, especially education in the age groups in which most emergence into profound mental lllness is seen.

I should note in passing that when such tragedies occur, some people will leap to the conclusion that someone they think is "weird" or "mental" is doubtless about to "go copycat". If you feel you must, from honest belief and personal convictions, notify the authorities. Yet there will be some who may feel a need to try to seize the moment and fan fears for their own personal agendas, and go "drop a dime" to see if they can't convince rightly-concerned authorities to act as their cats-paw. This is so reprehensibly devious and twisted that there's little possible excuse for it. The authorities are all in favor of honest citizens involving themselves in their neighborhood's safety from crime and violence, but they take a dim view of people who take advantage of widespread high emotions over a public tragedy to try to promote their own agendas.

Here's hoping for a return to reason, seeking the political center and establishing more of a tone of civility, and for more people who need help getting it.

In Interest of International Understanding Between SuperPowers etc

2011-01-01T21:34:00.000-08:00

Ordinarily, I don't have fits of megalomania, nor even episodes of thinking I have any significance whatsoever.

But in interest of promoting world peace (which everyone wants, of course) I feel compelled to thank the outbound US Senate and the ratification bodies of Russian Federation for affirming the spirit and the letter of START Treaty, Generation II.

Mr Medvedeyev, Mr Putin, Mr Obama, US Senate and Russian Parliament, and for all parties who benefit by reduction of Strategic Arms, thank you very much. In a world which is at peace, now we can have international communication and even songs about love... and also songs about how love can go wrong.

For the Americans, please have a nice taste of modern Russian Language popular music (the singer is Ukranian, the band is excellent). Please turn all knobs completely clockwise for the work-safe Vera Brezhneva.

Trust me: it's better than Mutual Assured Destruction, and almost as loud -- but far more pretty -- as global thermonuclear war.

Happy New Year 2011, or, Why I Quit Drinking Coffee

2011-01-01T11:16:00.001-08:00

Happy New Year's Day 2011, to all and sundry! May it be better for all of us, and may it be a year when honest effort receives just rewards, rather than the recent rotten records of "no good deed goes unpunished", also known as "Good Intentions => EPIC FAIL".

I recently quit drinking coffee, more or less, and not exactly by intentions. My routine used to be one of get up, and no matter the hour of rising, immediately brew and gulp a single-serving 12-ounce sippy-cup of Folger's, as strong as I could make it. Sometime in the last 3 months or so, during the recovery from cataract surgery, I took to sleeping in rather late. (The Astute Reader will recall that I don't have a job because I am effectively unemployable in Montgomery County.) Lots of failure to experience Sleep Deprivation somehow led to me getting up in the morning, if not necessarily fresh and rested, at least having got a full 8 hours of sleep. Ah, the life of luxury. Yet one has to ask which is the greater luxury, getting enough sleep, or being able to save five dollars a week not buying coffee to wake me up after not getting enough sleep.

It's certainly not news to anyone that sleep deprivation is a widespread modern malaise, having been declared by sleep researcher James Maas to have turned the Youth of America into "a nation of walking zombies".

After several months of effectively not missing my morning coffee, I decided today that I would go ahead and revert for a morning to my old habit.

I got through about a quarter of the cup and tossed it all out. Tasted great, but it was a bit over-stimulating. How overstimulating? Well, let's just say that I felt the need to access the new Census TIGER Line vector maps for 2010 Montgomery, and then went and spent about two hours trying to figure out how to import the USGS "DEM" ("digital elevation model") files for the Kensington Quadrangle into a mapset under GRASS GIS. This isn't as easy as it might seem, as the DEM files are imported as a raster model from Universal Transverse Mercator projection in the NAD27 datum, and the TIGER line files are imported as a vector model in Latitude/Longitude dataset in the NAD83 datum. Hey, it works, now I can "drape" flat vector lines over a 3D volume of elevations from the raster model developed from the DEM dataset. Whee.

Why did I even bother? Because of yet-another symptom of Too Much Caffeine. That, of course, would be the ongoing mapping of pre-subdivision land tracts in Aspen Hill, Maryland. Last winter, the combination of short days, cold weather, the frackin' Snowpocalypse all led to me consuming far too much caffeine and whiling away the winter doldrums with excessive generation of points-and-polygons overlays for googlemaps. Feh.

Sure, it's extremely valuable work, an absolute essential and almost seminal work of unearthing the history of Aspen Hill, though of course it's almost dead certain that nobody gives a rat's ass. I pretty much don't care anymore -- the folks around here seem to go far out of their way to make sure I can't possibly care -- but I hate to do so much work and leave it uncompleted.

Thus, the Astute Observer (or the local cadres of gang-stalkers) have doubtless seen me occasionally wandering around with a clipboard full of printouts of Colonial Era land claims and plat maps, and a GPS, finding various stones in the neighborhoods and parks, and excitedly brusihng all of the dirt off of them and taking copious notes. For the actual degreed Archeologist or even Urban Explorer, this is clear evidence that someone has a hobby within at least the fringes of their own profession. To the vast majority of over-caffeinated "nation of walking zombies" (see "Maas", cited above), this is only more proof that Mr Hardman is not merely unemployable, but justifiably so, as he's clearly a demented fucktard with too much time on his hands.

That might seem true enough to most folks, as if only I went out and spent a couple of hundred dollars on a metal-detector they'd have a clear inkling of what I'm actually doing, instead of making snap-judgements based on what they can't see. Yet, having located assorted Colonial Era (and Civil-War era) boundary stones and having GPSed the locations, I can't get the lines quite right because my GPS doesn't do Digital Degrees (it's old, so sue me) and Google Maps requires WGS84 datum latitude/longitude data, and the map data available online are mostly in NAD27 or NAD84, mixing Universal Transverse Mercator with Latitude/Longitude systems... and the metes-and-bounds of the land claims and subsequent deeds are all in Heading and Distance.

Hence me spending the last few weeks building the GRASS system and the underlying libraries, from the libATLAS "Basic Linear Algebra Support" ("BLAS") libraries and "Linear Algebra" ("LAPACK"), the Fast Fourier Transform libraries through the "R Statistics Package", and the PROJ 4 projection and coordinate systems conversion libraries. Now I can inter-convert the formats and coordinate systems and projections pretty seamlessly... but I still need a system for data-input and display rendering.

I'm building POVRAY 3 and then I'll build BRLCAD.

With BRLCAD, I will be able to feed it simple tables of heading and distance, and it will generate polygons scaled as required. Then I can export those as ESRI ("ARCData") ShapeFiles, and import them on appropriate scale to match up with the Tiger Line vector files and drape all of that over the USGS DEM elevation models. Yippee! Three dimensional polylines based entirely on metes-and-bounds data from a pile of old deeds and land-grant certificates, these will all be exportable to conversion to the WGS84 digital degrees model that Google Maps uses, and from there it's pretty simple to drop those tables (with only minimal conversion) into a webpage calling a googlemap and overlays.

Did I mention that I drank my first coffee in months today?

And when I come down from that coffee, no doubt I'll be just unutterably depressed and should clearly seek professional help and prescription... or maybe I should just lay off of the coffee and not experience that afternoon crash. Because, please understand, I built all of the pre-requisite libraries and applications for GRASS without being under the influence of coffee, and when I knocked off for the day, I felt actually quite good, as I wasn't crashing from stimulants taken to compensate for sleep deprivation, and I had still accomplished quite a bit.

So, mostly I have quit drinking coffee, and I'm getting past the crushing Seasonal Affective Disorder ("winter blues") that annually almost paralyzes me for about two seeks on either side of Winter Solstice. This could turn out to be a Happy New Year, when I finally complete the job I set out to do with the Aspen Hill Network website. The present will be documented, and the history researched and written. Frankly I see little positive near-term future for the place, so little that I increasingly don't want to be here. Once I'm done, let it not be said that Mr Hardman is technically ignorant, can't do research, writes like a third-grader, and has the attention span of a gnat and never finishes anything.

And let it be said that he didn't even need coffee to get the job done.

We're Toast?

2010-12-23T15:17:00.000-08:00

Just noted in passing, that a lot of folks are finally starting to come to the awareness, and are now blogging about it, that not merely as a nation, but possibly as a species, The End Is Near.

Please take a look at We're Toast, from the excellent blog, Nature Bats Last.

And just in case nobody bothered to "think it through" -- most people either can't or don't -- expect a really itchy future to be settling in here in Maryland, and probably most of the East Coast. Bats eat insects... and an entire species of bats that each devour half of their own body weight in insects every night, is likely to effectively go extinct quite soon.

Noted In Passing: I Need A New Gig

2010-12-05T12:57:00.000-08:00

Well, I hadn't really intended to post anything today, but sometimes one feels the call, even if one has no answer to give.

A lot of people are worried because their unemployment benefits are about to run out. My own unemployment benefits ran out sometime back in 2002. That's right, I haven't had a "real job" -- of the sort that withholds from a paycheck -- since 2001. After a year of perfect attendance on time, no sick leave, and only one day off called to jury duty, the Dot Bomb Economy finally cashed me in, having survived the first two rounds of layoffs.

Since then, I've had a fair number of UNIX/Linux jobs, some of which paid fairly well for a while and then ended, the projects completed. I had become what's called a "jobber". Something needs doing, I do it. Need to migrate an Access database that's gotten too large and is expected to increase in size? I did that. I ported the data over to MySQL and Apache on Linux (Ubuntu) and wrote PHP scripts for accessing the data and doing data-entry. This wasn't exactly rocket science, but it was something they couldn't get done in-house. Other assignments included debugging an existing mailing-list and then (inexplicably) migrating it to Microsoft Outlook Server from a Sendmail/Procmail/Mailman setup. I've done work porting a Linux-based anti-spam system, for web-based mail, to Mac OSX. It worked great on Linux and it worked great on OSX, too.

That sort of gig has gotten a lot more few-and-far-between, and even the infill gigs I had hauling construction and remodeling scrap to the junkyard have gone away.

In case nobody had noticed, the economy is getting worse, not better, at least in terms of jobs. Yet here in Montgomery County, Maryland, everyone seems to have a job, except for me.

I've been getting by on a combination of a disability and frugality. Frugality is a habit enforced by the combination of the tiny amount of money the disability hands out and the outrageous cost of everything here in the Greater Washington Metropolitan Area. There are people here who aren't even considered middle-class by local standards who think nothing of paying $10.00 for a burger with fixings every day at lunch, and who wouldn't be caught dead shopping at Marshall's. I'm counting the slices of bread I have left for the month's sandwiches and shopping at K-Mart for "Joe Boxer" on sale days. Every few months I treat myself to a movie if it looks to be a worthwhile blockbuster.

I don't have an active cellphone account although I do have two cellphones, the so-called "burn phones" that you can pre-pay for a month, use for a month and then store in the electronic doodads drawer until you need them again. I don't have an iPod, iPad, camphone, or any of that sort of junk even though I sort of invented the modern concept of beltcom (they actually call them "smart phones" these days) back in 1996. I think the technology is great. I just hate what it's done to the mainstream culture. I'll be damned if I'll pay to carry one of the damned things just so that people can spam me with work-related communications in my off-hours, or to just spam me with robo-calls. I do have a very nice Nokia 770 "internet tablet", and it works just fine for playing video or audio, recording, that sort of thing, but it does not have a GPS or phone, though I could connect to such devices with BlueTooth.

I suppose that this is the single biggest example of why I don't really consider myself to be part of the mainstream culture.

The mainstream culture, and most of the subcultures, think nothing of carrying a device that can intrude at any time, in any place, and has integrated time-and-location tracking. As near as I can tell, these people have no concept at all of privacy and I blame the ubiquity of the cellphone.

Another way I'm probably more alienated to the mainstream culture than is the average illegal alien: Imagine if you will, that due to some incomprehensible fluke of chance amounting to Divine Intervention, I meet an attractive female who actually expresses an interest in "going out or something". I will sheepishly have to admit -- or perhaps not sheepishly -- that I do not have a cellphone number. Well, that instantly places me in "loser land", and I would reasonably expect to be informed with absolute truth that "but even the homeless have cellphones, WTF is wrong with you?" -and I suppose I could just lie and claim to be Amish or something. That's really going to help get a date, I assure you, claiming to be a devout religious separatist. If the conversation continues at all after that, it will be because they've suddenly switched interests... from possible affection, to studying the total freak loser.

Now the average reader might rightly conclude that any man who hasn't had a date in (checking my watch) 18 years is going to be pretty alienated from the mainstream culture. Well, 15 years ago, I would have cheerfully told anyone "if you had my last three girlfriends, you wouldn't be interested in dating anyone, either". Well, times have changed, and such jobs as I have had were deep in the technology sector, and deep in that slice of the technology sector most populated almost exclusively by men of the type of whom is said "the odds are good, but the goods are odd". This is a far cry from my days in the government, when I was the only non-gay male under 50 in a government clerical office. Whether or not I wanted to know, all day every day I got an earful of every last gossip, concern, personal triumph or tragedy, and who was or wasn't hot or not. I might not have wanted to know a whole lot about what women think and say, but I was deeply and forcibly immersed in their subculture. To this day, I find myself slipping, now and then, into the regional accent of the clerical workers who mostly commuted in from places like Lanham or Anacostia. I can speak better -- or less haltingly, at least -- in the argot than I can in mainstream "white collegiate" English. Writing, fortunately, has no accent: working mostly alone in deeply technical jobs mostly dealing with the guts of the InterNet, I hardly spoke to anyone face-to-face for days at a time.

So, philosophically speaking, in spending years tuning the building blocks of the modern mainstream culture, did all of that isolation and nearly-autistic concentration alienate me from the mainstream culture? Or was I just becoming alienated because I didn't like the culture that was emerging from my work? (And the work of so very many others, to be sure.) Maybe it's just in my nature to be easily alienated. And maybe that culture just likes to alienate people.

But I have digressed.

The disability I collect was awarded because I had become incompetent due to a medical misdiagnosis. The patient presented the doctor with mixed signals and because the doctor was mostly in the business of treating indigent addicts, the patient was prescribed powerful drugs which did nothing to treat the real problem, a severe and increasing thyroid deficiency. The disability payments were probably handed out so that I could take the proper medication, levothyroxine, and to recover as best I could.

A while back, the disability review board sent mail asking what treatment I was getting and would I please go see a doctor of their choosing. Then I got a phone call, asking for some clarification. Then came a letter telling me, never mind, you don't need to see a doctor. Maybe they found this blog.

But I have been asking around and checking the resources on the World Wide Web, and this is the story I get: in the opinion of the review board, I am well. Or if not actually "well", and who is, these days? -I'm not disabled.

And so, I must commiserate with the folks about to lose their unemployment benefits, I'm probably about to lose my disability benefits, probably right as the deeps of winter set in hard.

Thus, back to the workplace, if I can find a job in a culture that has mutated while I was away. I can also commiserate with those women who took a decade out of the workforce to develop their family.

So where will I be working? Probably not in Montgomery County. First, none of the usual agencies that might tend to hire people recovering from disability are hiring; MoCo is letting go, if anything, and the Federal government is likely to go through Reduction In Force as soon as possible as part of the austerity measures that will be required to tackle the out-of-control deficit.

Secondly, most of the employers who hire skilled labor are deeply into credentials, the more degrees the better. It's not quite as bad as downtown in the District, where even the strippers usually have at least a Liberal Arts BA degree and I've met some who have several. I've heard all of the best call-girls can give good conversation to PhDs. I wouldn't know, personally, but the point is that the whole region is awash in talent, both raw talent and highly-cultured talent. There's a lot of competition, and I don't have a degree. I'm not likely to get one, either. I am not gregarious and the crowds of any campus frankly scare me. Besides, any degree would likely only qualify me to spend the rest of my life being frankly scared in a crowded building in a crowded part of a crowded city. I've "neglected to apply" for probably several dozen Linux jobs for which I easily qualified, and which would pay in the range of $110,000/year simply because I'd have had to commute via public transportation at peak rush hour. No amount of money was worth losing my mind, it seemed to me.

Third: as near as I can tell, some sort of reverse-civil-rights movement is afoot here in MoCo, with all non-skilled jobs being reserved to "latinos". In any case, it's dangerous to be the only person at a work site who doesn't speak Spanish. Construction jobs are scarce, in any case, and I'm getting to be too old to be pushing a mower. I've done both, for years at a time... but my health isn't what it once was.

The only good thing about this, so far, is that the disability review board had the decency to wait until after I had my cataracts out, rather than waiting until I was about to go blind and then dumping me onto the winter streets.

Sometime probably not too far in the future, my mother will pass on to her reward. The house where I grew up from the age of six years will almost certainly be put up for sale as fast as we can clear it out and get it ready for market. Nobody else in the family has designs on it, and recent trends here in Aspen Hill have convinced me that I don't want to live here. Some folks will say "but you live in Montgomery County and they've got great services and schools!" That may be true on average across the County but first, I don't have kids and don't care about the schools, and secondly, my neighborhood is turning into ghetto, headed for slum "with a bullet" so to speak, rocketing down the ratings charts of places anyone can even stand to be.

The County can go ahead and put in new curbs, gutters, and sidewalks, but so many of the people here are just mean most of the time, and petty when they aren't being mean, and irascible when they aren't being petty. You can gild the bird-cage, so to speak, but if it's still full of blue-jays, all you're going to hear is screeching. All I ever hear from any of them mostly amounts to "everything you do is wrong". Most of them don't even bother to change languages to English to make such remarks.

For a few years, back when it was possible to find affordable rooms, I lived downtown in the District. I lived in some of the poorest and most crime-riddled neighborhoods, but even there, it was possible to make a few friends out of the many strangers, to find one or even two jobs, to meet people, to go places and do things, and even if it was rough and poor, it felt like Freedom. Montgomery, at least my neighborhood of Aspen Hill, feels like jail. Everywhere you turn, everything seems to be run by one or another variety of gang, whether the gang is MS-13 or the Church Ladies Lawn-Nazi Squad. It reminds me of how you can throw a batch of crabs in a basket and not worry about them escaping; any that tries to crawl out will be pulled back in by the rest of the crabs. It's as if almost everyone here knows that the political policies have doomed the place and it's just a matter of time before the walls crash in and the roof comes down. Yet they'll be damned if they leave, or let anyone else leave, either.

My mind is pretty well made up. I'm ready to take on almost any kind of work that will allow me to support myself somewhere else. Since Montgomery County is one of the country's most expensive places to live, and destined to become moreso as taxes are raised "to maintain the level of services", almost anyplace else will be less expensive to live. A job I turned down here that paid $100,000/year because I didn't want to spend half of that on commuting and office-commuter apparel, I could take elsewhere for $45,000/year and live in the suburbs of a small city and drive into town and not have to pay for parking after an hour spent stuck in traffic. A crust in comfort is better than a feast in fear, in any case, and again in any case it is better to live modestly in an environment of hope, than it is to live like a king at the doorstep to Hell.

More From Ancient History...

2010-12-04T21:50:00.000-08:00

"Deep in the darkest hour of a very heavy week, the Earthmen did confront me, and I could hardly speak..."

Where We're Coming From Here...

2010-12-03T19:51:00.000-08:00

Just in case anyone forgot:

This is where we're coming from (so to speak)...

And we've been coming from here since the 1960s.

Try to not get in the way.

"And I've got a hammer, and I've got a bell, and I've got a song to sing, all over this land..."

Aspen Hill On Edge After 3rd Attack

2010-11-27T07:38:00.000-08:00

(A note: I am not responsible for choosing the content of the GoogleAds.)

Aspen Hill has been getting more and more "sketchy" for nearly a decade, especially all through the "central business district" and in particular those parts of the Wheaton Woods neighborhood and in no place moreso than where that neighborhood backs up against the Matthew Henson State Park. Leaving the Harmony Hills neighborhood out of the discussion, as it has been sketchy for years -- I think it was sketchy back in the 1970s when I was still in school here -- it's hard to think of anyplace in the County that is more sketchy than the vicinity of that park.

The park, of course, is the original route intended for the so-called "Rockville Facility". That was to be a limited-access highway connecting the junction of the Capital Beltway (I-495) with I-270, to the proposed "Outer Beltway" near the present-day crossing of the Northwest Branch of the Anacostia by the Intercounty Connector ("ICC"). Remember, the ICC follows roughly the route of a segment of that proposed Outer Beltway.

But to return from digression, the segment of the proposed "Rockville Facility" between Veirs Mill Road and Layhill Road was converted into a State Park to keep it forever off of the Developers' drawing boards. A Hiker-Biker Trail was built through it, over the objections of neighboring communities such as the Strathmore-BelPre Civic Association, which contended among other things that this trail would bring Crime into their community.

Noted in passing: Montgomery County Department of Police has evidently decided to stpo feeding their calls-for-service-to-911 data to crimereports.com. Consultation with assorted officials produced the excuse that "crimereports.com is having technical difficulties", passing the blame off to the service provider. However, if you zoom out from Montgomery County you can see that the "technical difficulties" of the service-provider haven't kept them from displaying a live feed from all surrounding jurisdictions.

Noted even more in passing: This makes it almost impossible for our Neighborhood Watch to function.

And our Neighborhood Watch does indeed need to function! It would appear that we may quite possible have a Serial Rapist (or serial rapists) in Aspen Hill.

I did mention that the neighborhood had gotten a little "sketchy", right?

Well, let's have an obligatory disclaimer here. The link called out, above, to illustrate "sketchy" is not in any way intended to declare or accuse that the named address is a lair of a rapist, serial or otherwise... although that address is believed by certain neighbors to be a boarding house for transients and/or other persons who don't have a driver permit or State ID showing them to be resident at that address.

I should point out here that without the calls-for-service feed to crimereports.com, all that shows up in the Aspen Hill map are the registered sex-offenders. And we've got a fair number of them. 14 or so. None of them fully resemble any of the suspect(s).

I have dubbed the suspect(s) the Woodland Rapist(s), because all of their known victims were assaulted -- and the last one actually raped -- quite near the intersection of major arterial highways and the Matthew Henson State Park Hiker Biker Trail, in wooded areas, in parklands or in wooded areas adjoining the parklands. In the first incident of June 13, 2010, the attack was quite near the junction of the Matthew Henson trail and the Rock Creek Hiker Biker Trail.

Anyone who is thinking of driving around looking for people who resemble either the police-artist's composite images or the surveillance camera photos should be advised. There are a lot of folks around here who absolutely hate people looking at them, especially if you are in oncoming traffic. If they think you're "scoping them out", they will do what they can to annoy you. Personally I recommend that people not just scope out the oncoming traffic -- especially along local Aspen Hill main thoroughfares such as Aspen Hill Road -- they should videotape it. And they should do so in a way that first captures the tags of the oncoming traffic and then records the face(s) of the occupant(s). If they're trying to annoy you for being a decent citizen keeping an eye out for a suspect or suspects in a felony of violence against women, you should camcorder that, too. What are they hiding that they don't want you to look at them?

In any case, be very careful in the vicinity of the Matthew Henson State Park and any parklands or wooded areas adjoining. The suspect(s) remain at large, and need to be tracked and captured.

A few years ago I did a very image-intensive (high-bandwidth!) photo-essay about homeless camps trashing the woods near Aspen Hill Local Park. That's not far at all from where the June sexual assault took place. Note, however, on the second page of that presentation, the photos of empty clothing hung up near publicly-trafficked ares of the main park.

Then contrast and compare to the statements made by one of the passersby at 1:05 seconds into this video, regarding clothing hung up near publicly -trafficked areas near the site of the recent rape.

Wow. Tillie Gburek

2010-11-24T21:19:00.000-08:00

Read this: Tillie Klimek.

Ottilie "Tillie" Klimek (or Tillie Gburek) (1876–1936) was a Polish American serial killer, active in Chicago. She pretended to have precognitive dreams, accurately predicting the dates of death of her victims. Actually she was merely scheduling their deaths.

Freaky, eh?

Sell Peary HS Campus to Berman Academy!

2010-11-22T14:47:00.000-08:00

This is why the County should sell the former Robert E Peary HS campus to the Melvin J Berman Hebrew Academy:

Blast From the Past Yet Again

2010-11-15T20:40:00.000-08:00

The Dingo Ate My Baby

2010-11-14T19:45:00.000-08:00

No really! Really it was the Dingo that ate my baby!

Read and understand.

Waking Nightmares and Recurrent Dreams

2010-11-14T07:32:00.000-08:00

It's a few minutes after nine in the morning and I haven't yet had my coffee. Sunday, and yet the sound of chainsaws rips through the morning even before all of the well-dressed Christians come out of their doors to pile into their cars, a family at a time. By the time most of them depart for Church, the first of many trees is almost half down, and another is well on its way.

Why am I standing there at the brink of weeping as yet-another yard on my block is deforested? The County Council recently passed a Zoning Text Amendment which would prohibit people from paving their front yards, but it doesn't go into effect for another year, and in the meanwhile, there's a mad dash to get the front lawns paved before it's forever forbidden.

Why am I not getting ready for Church? I am not a Christian. I never really have been, although I was raised Presbyterian and while I have the greatest respect for the teachings of Christ, and for the traditions of the faiths that descended from Abraham, there are some things I just can't believe. As I cannot believe those things, I cannot have Faith in them, and one of the things I admired the most about Jesus was his condemnation of Hypocrisy. In the Temple he overturned the tables of the money-lenders with outrage and an oath, declaring that the Temple should be a house of prayer, but the hypocrites had turned it into a den of thieves. Gotta love him, he's not afraid to call bullshit and kick some ass on account of it. Yet how he paid for it, and for those who actually follow those admonitions which he actually preached, how blessed are they, for even if they suffer, the way they live brings blessings to others. I can't think of anything that could better be called "good".

I keep hearing about how great Church is, and I keep recalling how often I wished I was allowed to be sleeping as the sermon wound on. Mostly it was about how we could do good for others, to love our neighbors as we loved ourselves, and to love our g_d with all of our abilities.

Yet there was one little problem with language. To me, the word "dead" means "devoid of life and never to move again". Thus, if Jesus was buried and then rose, he was never dead, not as that word is defined. I can believe that there was an eclipse and an earthquake as he hung on his cross and I can believe that a Roman soldier declared that he was truly the son of g_d and that since he'd been up there long enough to be likely to be dead, they might as well cut him down and give him to be buried. And I can as easily believe that the gifted philosopher who had traveled afar for many years might well have known the technique of entering a meditation trance to ease the suffering, and have been thought to be dead while being actually just very still...

A true Christian wouldn't believe that last bit for a second; they'd be fully faithful to the notion that Christ was truly dead and was truly resurrected by the power of the Almighty. But I'm not a true Christian because I do not have that faith. And if I can't believe in the resurrection of Christ, I can't believe in the resurrection on the day of Judgement, and I have no reason to believe in the hereafter. I have to believe in this present existence, this world, this small and insignificant planet circling a small and insignificant star, one of 100-million or more in this galaxy alone, itself perhaps only one of 100-millions galaxies... perhaps more. And I'm just a small and insignificant man on that small and insignificant planet and it's good to have a sense of perspective, and although it's very hard for me to even try to do, it's good to be humble.

In the absence of virtues stemming from a hope for Heaven and a fear of Hell, what virtues can there be? Before Christ there were other virtues in cultures other than the Judaic culture. In all civilizations, they're all about the same: Dignity, Honor, Justice, and Responsibility. Yet from where, from what, originated the Cosmos?

Modern physics doesn't need a deity, more or less proposing that things are as they are because that's the only way they could be. From the time of the Big Bang (or some propose "since the reversal of a previous state of collapse"), the universe unfolded not merely as it should, but as it must. Quantum indeterminacies would create an expanding front of parallel universes each of which would drift slightly into their own paths, with "chance if not necessarily choice" obviating any possibility of predestination or true predictability. From the immutable past forever beyond our reach, through a vast parallelality of present, into a probably infinite range of possible futures, all forever forming on the basis of chance if not of the choices we all make all of the time as time moves in its one direction, moving forward.

Yet this vast complexity, the immensity, the vastness of duration, doesn't that speak of intention? Not necessarily, but in many human people there seems to be a need to know who to blame, or who to thank. A Creation does not necessarily presuppose a Creator, but somehow I am comforted to believe that this is all unfolding according, if not to a plan, then to a formative intention.

And if there is a Creator, where shall we find evidence of this, other than the Creation, in all of the things within the Creation, in all of the interactions in the Creation? Can any aspect exist of Creation which does not partake of, and thus reflect, the Creator? From the tiniest whirling of quarks down in the realm of the subquantum froth at the Planck Length to the grand designs of the galaxies themselves as they dance to the music of the spheres, energetic yet shepherded by gravity... and in all things in between those extremes of scale, do we see the hand (so to speak) of the Almighty? Or are things as they are because, well, that's how they are.

If I wish to believe in a Creator, and if that hand of cosmic intention (so to speak) has writ the very fabric of the universe and all things within it, great and small, if I wish to believe that, than in every speck of sand, every rock and tree, every drop of rain, and the air that I breathe, all of these things each and all no greater nor lesser import than anything else, are both the work and the presence of that cosmic intention, g_d as some people would say.

And here a lot of people have been entirely clueless that my weird old self is spending considerable time and mental effort getting all deep into pondering the intricacies of, if not theology, at least of cosmogeny.

And so, because I'm not a Christian, I'm standing on my porch before coffee, watching the Christians dress up as best they can as they go to the temple where they may hear the story of Jesus and the Money-Lenders.

And so, because I'm a Pagan who believes that the best proof of the Almighty is the living breathing ecology of this world of which I am a part, I don't need to go to Church. It's everywhere around and through me.

And before coffee, looking down the block as the chainsaws rips and snarl, looking past the bush full of sparrows cheeping in a way I've never heard before, listening to the alarm calls of the cardinals, hearing the jay-bird call "thief! thief!", as the squirrels all pose on the trees not taking their eyes off of the carnage for a second, I'm watching part of my Church cut into firewood and hauled away by people who timed their onslaught to be at the exact time when all of the well-dressed Christians who have the legal authority to stop this will be in the one place they cannot be reached: in their Church; while mine is being destroyed, by people who destituted their own ecologies and nations by their clear-cutting and deforestation, and are now hard at work doing the same thing to mine.

Later today, no doubt, will come the loads of cement, so that they can park their commercial vehicles on the front yard.

All of this, of course, comes on the heels of a dream I have, a recurrent dream, one that varies a bit from time to time, but which seems mostly the same for all of the years it has come to trouble me.

I don't have anything against motorcycles, but I know better than to ride them. I'm a very good driver when it comes to cars or small trucks, but when 20 attempts to ride motorcycles resulted in major knee surgery and later in three broken bones, I came to my senses and decided to never get on one of the damn deathtraps once again.

Yet in this recurrent dream, I haven't yet learned my lesson about motorcycles. The funny thing about dreams is this: I never dream of being an old man, or infirm, or someone who can't stop coughing or can't hardly see. No, in dreams, I am as I was as a teenager, energetic and quite fit. I suppose I should wonder if in my dreams I am also otherwise as a teenager, not overly concerned with anything but myself, and not particularly good at grasping the concept of consequences.

But that would be thinking of dreams as if they were memories, and this isn't a memory, or at least, when I try to remember if something like this ever happened in my real and waking life, all I can remember is remembering a dream, a recurrent dream.

I don't want to ride a motorcycle as a driver, and I can tell you I even less want to ride one as a passenger, particularly not barefoot and without a helmet. You never know how well the driver can drive, whether or not they'll take a spill.

In this dream -- doubtless brought on by hearing the chainsaws across the street -- I'm up at the place where the kids ride bikes, but I have to get home right away and everyone else has to leave. I beg for a ride with one of the kids and they say but we've gotta go NOW and I'm sorry they do and sorry to take that ride. They're fast and crazy riders anyway and for some reason there's even more of a hurry tonight.

We zoom away along the trails and the flats, a couple of bikes, some with passengers and some with just the riders. I've got to be home because I have school the next day but I'm not sure what's the hurry for the other folks. But it's a race for sure, and the bikes ahead are hitting the little hills. Their 70cc engines snarl like chainsaws, two-stroke engines, dirty little trail-bikes of the kind that one day would be called motocross. They're not meant for two riders and I am barely hanging on as we clear the bump in the trail and the driver kicks the shifter. The front wheel starts to come up and the throttle drops to bring it down and we fishtail a bit and I'm looking at the ground wondering if maybe I'll lose my toes in the rear wheel if we slide down. But that doesn't happen. Yet maybe a few hundred feet down the road, we pull to a stop. I get off, shaking, realizing what could have happened to me, what almost did. Laughter, the kind kids don't seem to know or care is so cruel because there's no caring one way or the other, but not for me. A hundred yards back, as the final bike arrives to where we are, someone's down, I can't see who.

"Fell right off the back," says the kid.

"Don't you think you better go back and see if they're okay?"

Checking the watch, "We got ONE MINUTE" and the bikes rev away. Dust and exhaust, two-stroke oil and the sound of chainsaws and I will be on restriction for the rest of my life if I don't run all of the way home. Waiting for a break in traffic, I see the kids all zooming past in their packed-full cars yelling and cheering, and then I can run across the highway and get home just in time to not be on restriction the rest of my life.

The sound of chainsaws. Exhaust and burnt two-stroke oil drifting in the summer dust. Running home.

Sometimes there's more detail, and some times it's just the sound of chainsaws, of dirt-bikes, of kids laughing, of someone barely glimpsed beneath the billowing dust, and me running home on a summer-school schoolnight while everyone else went out to party. Loneliness.

Dreams are like that. I always feel particularly crappy, almost haunted, when I wake after this one. Well, "it is said" that the way to break the curse of a bad recurrent dream is to tell people, and I suppose the blogosphere counts as "people".

I try to remember any memory that I might have of any such actual thing, and I have no memory in memory, not of this, only of the dream, and that was, after all, just a dream.

You Can't Make Up This Sort of Story...

2010-11-13T14:50:00.000-08:00

We have some winners in this week's "weird world of news" contest.

Probably the number one entry, "man says he was forced to eat beard in mower spat".

[Two friends] got angry as they tried to negotiate a price for a lawn mower they wanted to buy from Westmoreland. He said "one thing led to another, and before I knew it, there were knives and guns and everything just went haywire."

Next on the list is "did she have a concealed weapon permit?"

Police say Carolee Bildsten, 56, first ran out on a bill at Joe's Crab Shack, something she had done in the past. When a police officer went to Bildsten's home, he was attacked -- according to the police report -- with "a rigid feminine pleasure device."

While not quite as local as the infamous WTTG FOX-5 video clip of Mole Man Living in Mud Hut in Wheaton, these are still fairly off the beaten trail.

Another contender is this story, "Baby dead after mom tosses infant into washing machine, launches spin cycle: cops".

Lyndsey Fiddler, 26, was high on drugs when she put her newborn daughter, Maggie May Trammel, in the washing machine along with the dirty laundry and started a washing cycle, local station NewsOn6 reported.

The baby’s great aunt, Rhonda Coshatt, was also in the house at the time and realized something was wrong when she saw Fiddler passed out and unresponsive on a chair with the child nowhere to be found.

After hearing a clunking noise coming from the washer, she opened the lid and found the dead infant.

Humor and Film

2010-11-12T13:30:00.000-08:00

I should remind everyone that as I am a German American (mostly), I can't be expected to have a sense of humor that makes sense to anyone else.

Germans have no sense of humor, as everyone knows, or at least the structure of German grammar makes it very difficult to tell the sort of joke that is hilarious in English or certain other languages. What with all of that case and declension, not to mention placing the verb at the conclusion of a sentence, there's not much point in trying to tell an English-language style joke with a punchline, as halfway through a German punchline, everyone knows what's coming and they'd be laughing already, except they're too polite and have to listen to the sentence all of the way to the conclusion without laughing. Given the German penchant for creating nouns with a few dozen syllables, this can take a while.

Thus, the Germans are given to practical jokes. They seem to be rather fond of anything involving someone thinking that they're going along smoothly and then all of a sudden, they're swimming in cold water. This makes about as much sense to the uninitiated as does the English predilection for anything being thought comical if it involves a Pantomime Horse. Even more confusing are those Germans who show up at masquerade parties completely undisguised other than by carrying along a shovel. They tend to add to the confusion when the baffled hosts ask "and what are you supposed to be", and the German manages to almost not smile when they announce that they're going as a Hessen.

(This stems from the generally terrible translation first-year Latin students make when attempting to read Tacitus's "Germania" in the original. Thus, the proper contextualized translation of "with their iron tools, they surround their fortifications with trenchworks" is rendered as "these Germans carry shovels and dig holes everywhere they go".) Hilarious, if you're both a linguist and a German.

Given the difficulties of the language, and the fact that nobody except the Germans understands German humor, and given also that those who are the butt of practical jokes tend also to not see the humor, the only thing left is a certain amount of elegance in the execution or the impossibility of the situation.

Thus, in the long ago days of yesteryear when everyone had their mailboxes on a post out at the edge of the farm fence, among the German-speaking Americans who left behind their old Fatherland yet carried with them a penchant for the practical joke, a good old fashioned prank was to dismount a mailbox, stand it on end and fill it with water, close the door and caulk it with beeswax to keep the door shut and the water in, and to then remount the mailbox to the post. You even had to do this without being seen and to do it after the mailman had come and gone, unless of course it was the mailman you meant to douse. The stolid and humorless farmer would come to get his mail and get a good soaking. Naughty pranksters would howl with laughter as the farmer howled invective.

Of course, this perfectly good joke will be utterly spoiled if the farmer has a leaky mailbox. and upon whom, then, will be the joke, said the farmer, smiling as he drilled.

And now, leaving aside for the moment all matters of German Humor (not entirely unlike Vogon Poetry in its way), let's get to the movie reviews.

Megamind is one of those things you simply can't afford to miss. But save up the occasion to see it in Real3D(tm).

This is computer-generated animation at its finest. Further, it's a sensible and not overdone use of the stereoscopic technology. By now, of course, all of those who loved "Avatar" have become quite accustomed to the effect of sitting in your chair and looking straight down from great heights through footless halls of air, where never lark nor eagle flew, though for the uninitiated, their lunch might fly right out of their mouth onto the back of whomever's sitting in front of them. Yet although some of the pivotal sequences in this film do in fact make use of terrifying heights, mostly it's all as realistic a make-believe as the animators could make it.

I could wax rhapsodic over the technology and the way it's applied; the superhero laser vision effects are both mind-boggling and almost insanely realistic in terms of what sort of thing can be inflicted by people with bad aim. I'll try to spare you as it would ruin the plot.

I could ruin the plot by telling you that redacted redacted redacted, but why spoil the fun. Basically, two superhero infants are launched to Earth from their dying planets, one being a Superman(tm) knock-off and one being a Brainiac(tm) or Lex Luthor(tm) knock-off. Predictably, the one that will become Mega Man lands in the lap of luxury and is heinously good-looking and buff, and the overly thoughtful and self-absorbed super-genius is raised in the state asylum for criminal geniuses. It's inevitable that they'll be each others' constant playmates in predictable scenarios, and that's the backstory. Yet suddenly things get very unexpected. The villain triumphs over the hero, it would seem, and Megamind suddenly finds himself master of everything except for his inevitable existential crisis of dissatisfaction and boredom. Unfortunately, his plan for spicing up his life goes tragically awry.

Action aplenty for everyone, and adult fans of the classics will appreciate the surrealism, even if most of the kiddie kids will mostly be going "ooo pretty". Don't miss it.

Skyline defies classification, though it doesn't beggar description.

Caught in the Realist school as in "Cloverfield" or "Quarantine", thankfully it didn't succumb to the genre temptation to present everything as seen through the "eyes" of an amateur cinematographer's camcorder. This is definitely high-budget.

Long story short? Well, I could say "aliens land and eat everyone but it all turns out okay in the end". That wouldn't be the actual story, though. That would be "Independence Day". This isn't "Independence Day". Yet it's a pretty tightly-crafted story of survival or attempts to survive (not everyone does, in fact, few do, or maybe none do, hard to say). A bunch of friends get together for a birthday party and the morning after, that's not a hangover folks, that's massive interstellar invasion by really freaky aliens. Perhaps the best part of this is that the aliens mostly don't have to chase people, they emit some sort of light-show that causes everyone who sees it to head towards it. Sort of what you'd get if you dangled Beyonce over the entrance to a running wood-chipper in the exercise yard at a maximum-security prison, nobody runs and screams who sees what's there, even if they should. Nope, they line right up and the aliens vacuum them into the maw of their immense hovering motherships.

This movie is, I should point out, a bit long on getting past the character studies of the backstory, and into the suspense and action sequences. Yet once they get going, they really do crank up the special effects and nobody will go home disappointed by a failure to excite. I should point out that there's a significant "yuk" factor once this gets going, and at least one or two moments of heart-stopping suspense followed by a big "boo".

Yet the ending isn't quite satisfying unless perhaps you're a deep devotee of some fairly obscure "old school" science-fiction authors. There are tropes that are deep within the popular culture and resonate with previous films ranging from the original version of "Night of the Living Dead", pretty much every war movie ever made (or at least those which view surprise attacks from the viewpoint of civilians), and obviously we have shadings of everything from all of the many versions of "War of the Worlds" to "Independence Day". Yet who besides me has ever even heard of Keith Laumer in the modern day, much less watched one of his better-yet-unheard-of novellas unfurl practically line-for-line into a context almost thematically opposite? Well, maybe not that thematically opposite, if you want to stretch a few metaphors out of their original shape and into something much more politically-correct for the modern age. Yet Laumer's original work was one far more of sneaking around the world in plain sight, trying to stay one airport layover ahead of the sheriff, so to speak, and to the degree that this may be inspired by Laumer, all of that sneaking around got translated to the modern screen as full-on battle between two sides both equipped with the machinery to destroy cities.

I should note in passing that I saw this in a practically empty matinee showing at the Montgomery Royal Theaters, which has been operating without any opening fanfare for very nearly a year. This theater has been through many owners and many incarnations, the previous one being the Cinema and Draft House. Over the years, this has been one of my favorite places to catch a first-run film on opening day, as I can usually catch a matinee of some film that isn't yet all the rage because nobody's talking about it because nobody's seen it. I caught "The Matrix" when it opened here, and I was the only person (or almost the only person) in the theater, and they were kind enough to turn the volume up to "very loud", as it should be for such a film. I have to recommend it to folks; it's within a 5 to 10 minute walk of the Wheaton Metro station, right behind the main Westfield Shoppingtown Wheaton campus, just beyond the Bally complex, if you're coming from the Metro, 11006 Veirs Mill Road if you're trying to find a map from a website.

Generally clean and fairly well restored, in some of the viewing rooms you would want to get there early -- or see a matinee -- to get a seat close to the screen. I don't know how much I would have enjoyed this showing if I had to sit in the last row, or the first, yet if you can get here for a matinee and sit anywhere, it's really quite nice. Now if we can perhaps convince them to occasionally bring in some "art films", perhaps some Sundance finalists or even some Bollywood epics, not to mention the more commercial types of Chinese historical epics -- I also saw the first run of "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" here under previous management -- I am certain that this place will attract and reward a faithful clientele.

As it is, it's one of the best-kept secrets of Wheaton, or at least it was until that blabbermouth Thomas Hardman recommended it.

Yet Another Story Treatment Part 1

2010-10-30T09:27:00.000-07:00

A few days ago, I posted about how "I Think I'd Rather Live in a Trailer Park", concluding endless self-absorbed ruminations and reminiscences with the notion that I was getting awful damn tired of living with the bizarre combination of the old-fashioned hyper-conformism and pretend-liberalism comprised in a community mostly populated and certainly controlled by wretched old women. I decided that I'd really rather be part of a community that was the living beating heart of America, someplace full of kids and adults of an age to be raising those kids.

I did have to pause to point out that my present community is actually full of such adults and such kids, but unfortunately they all speak Spanish at home and on the streets, and disrespect me anytime I try to go shopping, drive around, or hang out on the streets. Well, it's not quite that bad, but very nearly almost that bad.

Part of the problem is my appearance. People reading this blog might think that such a self-absorbed bonehead with excellent grammar and apparently limitless loquaciousness also probably jogs for miles every day just so that he can be unutterably buff sitting around the basement of his perfectly-appointed "GQ As Fuck" Better Homes and Gardens centerpiece McMansion, being hopelessly MetroSexual even waking up in the morning with a severe hangover.

Sorry, folks. Haven't you ever noticed that at the awards shows, when they bring in the writers, everyone else was in a tuxedo but the writer saunters in wearing a t-shirt and jeans that seem to have been part of the wardrobe since the sophomore year in college? When the Muse gets me in her lovely clutches, I can't be bothered to shave, much less to dress up like an office peacock to go buy groceries. But I digress.

So, what have I been bewailing? That I live in a neighborhood which, as best I can tell, is pretty much emblematic of "then the terrorists have won", if we assume that the objective of the terrorists was to force that brash and energetic and ever-hopeful way of life to adapt to fear by becoming yet-another taliban-riddled land-of-sharia, whether the Sharia is or isn't actually Islamic, and whether the taliban in question is run by Afghan mullahs or by Lutheran Church Ladies. You know, "but if we strip away our own freedoms and independence, then the terrorists have won!"

No, I want to live someplace where the terrorists haven't won.

Yet now that I think about it, that's exactly where the terrorists intend to strike. After all, communities run by secret societies of wicked witches forcing unquestioned obedience in their surveillance society, these might be considered theologically antithetical to the mullahs of a female-hating primitivist interpretation of Islam, but all things considered, it's the exact same society, only with the gender roles reversed.

Happy Hallowe'en to all of you who are not true believers, and to those who Keep the Faith, blessed be for this Samhain.

TREATMENT "Target: Totalitarians versus the Trailer Park People", a work of fiction
copyright 2010 all rights reserved by TJH Internet SP of Rockville MD.

Dramatis Personae: A cackling coven of wicked witches who don't even pretend to be Wiccan, rather having infiltrated the ranks of Christian Church society since the time of the Inquisitions, perverting Judeo-Christianity rather than affirming a clean Paganism; neighborhoods and increasingly all of society in their thrall; rebellious-yet-not-yet-rebels such as "players", bikers, jocks, geeks and other guys and gals who aren't paying the tithes and toeing the line; assorted minions and/or pillars of society, etc etc.

Time and Place: "quaint little suburbias"; "trailer parks"; "the great American back roads"; "nasty sketchy warehouses" etc etc, timeframe of early 1990s to roughly 2020. Some flashbacks to the 1980s and earlier and some envisioning of "a perfect future where shiny happy people don't have to be admonished to do as they're told, because their proper upbringing makes them long to think and only do those Right Things to which they were instructed to aspire".

Rough plot background, established through visual exposition and thematic scene depiction including newspaper shots, television sound bites, newsreel historical clips etc: Communism's stated goal of slowly perverting the morals and ethics of the West until the communist and capitalist nations were functionally indistinguishable was extremely successful. China's policies of population reduction concurrent with modernization combined with the forces of greed and speculation in the west to make the 21st Century the Chinese Century, the former USSR being destroyed even more badly than the rest of the world. The previous conflict between economic models was resisted only to the degree that Conservatism resisted, and social engineering deliberately marginalized Conservatism to Religious extremism. A temporary ascendance of Conservatism based on religious and para-religious themes in the west resulted in a comparable ascendance of a different Conservatism based in the Islamic world's cultural centers, and with both fundamentalisms declaring themselves alone to be valid, open warfare erupted in late 2001 and continues in 2010 even despite the electoral replacement of the former Religious Conservative US regime in 2008. Yet this electoral victory of a brand of liberal socialism (one not much different from that enjoyed by upper-class Chinese) staggers under a debt to China which potentially can never quite be repaid. The financial backing systems of the US capitalist means of production are effectively under a very liassez-faire Chinese rule. Yet because of the pervasive liberal socialism of the US political leadership as of late 2010, and the total lack of any public or governmental belligerence towards China or any elements within China's sphere of influence, it is most profitable as well as politically tolerable for China's leadership to cultivate an extremely cordial business relationship with the West. In any case, so many Chinese nationals are scattered throughout the West, expanding opportunities for both trade and intelligence operations, that it is better to let infection spread through a potential enemy rather than to directly engage in bellicose modes.

Convergence of economic models is accompanied by convergence of social models.

Education in the West increasingly teaches Socialist thinking and ways of life. "Globalism" begins to actually occur starting in the mid-1990s and outside of the military adventurisms based in conflicts between opposing factions of differing religious extremisms, the long-expected "averaging out of the haves and the have-nots" moves forward at a better-than-expected pace.

By 2010, for every two Americans becoming unemployed, one foreigner got a new job. This was all according to plan. It was also according to plan that of every 10 jobs lost by American workers, 8 of 10 of those jobs were lost by men.

By late 2011, despite a Republican sweeping victory in the House of Representatives as of November 2 2010, the trend had continued to the point where almost all male working-class Americans, and about one third of all professional-class male Americans, were not merely unemployed but were effectively unemployable.

3/4ths of the working class is now foreign-born. Amnesty for illegal aliens is declared in late 2011 as the next Presidential campaign begins; by the 2012 vote, all amnestied illegal aliens resident in the US since 2007 will be registered voters. Meanwhile, the "drug war" in Mexico has escalated to full-scale Civil War in southern and central Mexico and the transnational criminal combines have assumed effectively full control of all of the Mexican states bordering the US. Latin America is poised to explode.

By 2012, almost 1/3rd of the professional classes are now foreign-born and almost 2/3rds of professionals are women. Despite a "nearly full economic recovery" American men are increasingly either unemployed or are employed only in the military.

Socialism becomes even more entrenched as a vote against socialism becomes a vote for starvation. Increasing numbers of men become homeless even as more and better socialist programs assure that women with children can retain some form of housing and food security. (Anything else would be intolerable, I'm sure everyone will agree.) Due to increased joblessness and the implosion of the housing market exacerbated by a suspension of foreclosures until actual deed ownership can be determined, the only available housing for most American-born working-class men is in "mobile housing communities", more colloquially known as "trailer parks".

With poverty and want being concentrated along with a lot of fairly young adult men in highly-dense communities generally situated in rural areas near small cities destituted by the "offshoring" of almost all American industrial manufacturing, these trailer parks become a hotbed of old-fashioned Conservatism and Constitutional Patriotism. Neither the Islamic Extremists abroad, nor the Socialist Liberals at home, care much for this. Both the local governments and other movements, almost all of them increasingly dominated by female professionals whose early careers were in organizing liberal church groups into political action committees, begin to put the pressure on the trailer parks, through mostly legal means.

Abroad, fundamentalists also dislike this development. A concentration of male youth with little hope of employment, all in an environment of increasing radicalization, is exactly what created the fundamentalist Taliban. That fundamentalist movement in Pakistan's communities of Afghan refugees eventually went more or less mainstream and erupted back into Afghanistan where throughout most of the 1990s it embarked upon a really destructive reign of terror leading up to the plot of September 11, 2001. No foreign power wants to see any such movement sweep up out of the trailer parks of the USA, and the increasingly Socialist internal factions of US local and State politics don't want to see it either.

Join us as we see one man's job destroyed, and with it his involvement in his family and community; watch him as he becomes politicized by unemployment and being reduced to mooching and begging; watch him as he converts his retirement into funds to purchase and deliver a Shipping Container to a trailer park; watch him as he researches and selects a trailer park that he believes will be a place near sites of a return of American industry and opportunity.

Watch him as he packs up his life; watch as his marriage dissolves even before he loads his container and ships it off; join him as he crosses a nation increasingly falling apart; and join him as his shipping container is dropped into place at a trailer park, in the lot right across from where the Taliban's shipping containers are being dropped into place, the shipping containers that they will use as a base of operations and as a workshop building their equipment for forays against nearby industrial, tourism, and military facilities.

Watch our intrepid protagonist as his life goes to heck as the trailer-park life is worse than could be reasonably expected; watch as outside political and social forces intrude and infiltrate; watch this turn out even more sad (in a more modern way) than Steinbeck's famous Grapes of Wrath; and watch as our protagonist finally discovers the methods and intentions of the American Taliban working tirelessly in their shipping containers on the other side of the trailer park.

I Think I'd Rather Live In a Trailer Park

2010-10-23T07:26:00.001-07:00

Fifteen years ago, I got back into town from several years out there on the road.

I dragged into town with a few duffel bags and carryalls, more or less. I had left in a VW Beetle, and it had taken me across the country a few times. I'd even lived in it on occasion, it being better than a tent when it came to keeping me dry in the endless rains that characterize winter in southeast Texas. I'd managed to limp it around various towns without having to spend too much on it, but finally it got to the point where the engine broke, and enough other things were wrong with the car that I couldn't be bothered to fix it. The bus brought me home at long last, to an Aspen Hill Maryland that was in the first stages of what would become its ultimate destruction.

During my journeys, I discovered a few things. For one, the Continental United States is vast, almost incomprehensibly vast. That old VW could be loaded to the top with no place left for anything other than the driver, and still hit 110 kilometers (68 miles) per hour and the engine would sing that one tone all day long. And at the end of the day, generally things didn't look all that different. Two days travel, however, would bring you to new places that were quite different. It took me about three days to get from the District to Denver, for example. From Austin to Seattle, that also took about three days.

This was back when gasoline was cheap, more or less not much over a dollar a gallon. Twenty dollars would buy a lot more gasoline than would fit in the VW fuel tank, and I could drive halfway across the country for a hundred dollars. I like to drive, even when it's mostly pushing on down the Interstates.

Nowadays, it's simply unfeasable to drive cross-country, unless maybe you are planning to do it in some little econobox that has sacrificed almost all load capacity for the ability to putt around town. I don't know how safe I would feel driving through a howling rain storm in the high Rockies passes if I were in a tiny tin box with 13-inch tires designed to get economy mostly through exposing the least possible amount of tread to the road. The Beetle, at least, had 15-inch small-truck tires and actually went where you steered it, and your foot on the pedal went via cable straight to the throttle without the intermediary of electromagickal jiggery-pokery that might at any moment decide to get stuck at full throttle and launch you into the abyss. If I was rich I'd drive a mid-size car or truck across the USA, but I'm not rich. Thus, rather than drive cross country, I'd ship.

A 40-foot shipping container can be bought in new or next-to-new condition for from about $1500 to $3000 dollars. You can fit a lot in one of those. If you are somewhat inventive and design the right sort of pallets and get creative with a blow-dryer and some shrink-wrap, you can get both your vehicle and everything you actually need for living into a shipping container. From there, you pay some over-the-road or road-and-rail shipping company and watch the big truck come for your load. You hop on a jet or take a bus or rent a little econobox to follow your freight. You could even find yourself riding on the same rail lines that carried your load to its destination.

What does a person actually need to live a fairly decent life nowadays? Not all that much... certainly nothing more than can be stowed in the final five feet of a standard shipping container.

Back when I was living more-or-less in and out of a VW Beetle, doing temporary work here and there, from day-labor to office-clerk gigs, all I really had and all I really needed was a bare minimum of camping gear; my computer and monitor (at the time computers were pretty bulky and only corporate types could afford a laptop unit); clothing; bedding; and enough tools to do basic maintenance and repair on either or both the computer and the car. That and a few essential books was enough for me to get by. I had a copy of the Bible, a Webster's Dictionary, the "Compleat Idiot's Guide to VW Repair", and various other books came and went to and from the used book stores of various locales. Now and then, cheap used televisions also traveled with me.

More problematic was my guitar and amp. The guitar was actually worth stealing, about the only thing I owned which had any real value (other than the car and tools), and the amp was fairly bulky.
Depending on where I was staying, or if I was camping out either in a park or in the parked car, the guitar spent a lot of time being securely locked up in pawn shops. You hock it for some trifling amount and when you want it back, you pay back the trifling amount.

Sometimes I stayed in apartments and sometimes I rented rooms and generally speaking, I found it was actually quite healthy and good for my back to sleep on the floor, to sit on just the right kind of cheap used furniture, a person only really needs enough cookware as is comprised in the average Sears/Coleman camper cook-kit, and if you have a bath and refrigeration along with doors and windows that lock and not enough for anyone to break in to steal, you may be living the life of a hermit, but you can stay clean and healthy and secure and if you feel some need to leave, you can be out the door and across town on your way to another place and can do that inside of an hour.

The bad side of that is, of course, that anyone else can clean out your place and be off with the goods in the same amount of time. Also, anyone desperate enough to be stealing a used TV and a computer dredged up from the age of dinosaurs might be desperate enough to make you disappear, too. Your best defense might, or might not, be having so much crap that nobody could "clean the scene" in a short enough time to avoid having someone stumble in and raise the hue and cry.

Yet there's no excuse to live as a hoarder just to feel safe from the hypothetical and, realistically, infrequently encountered serial killer burglar. Living light enough to be on the road is a good thing, and liberating.

The fact of the matter is this: the world being the world, and people being people, even in the days when there was a future to look forward to, it was entirely possible to live just too damned long in one place. Being tied down by excess attachment to possession is sure to bring suffering, as the Buddha tells us.

Yet although the roads are long indeed, they are not very wide, and thus there's really no way to avoid the immense variety of other folks who are fellow travelers.

A lot of folks live the traveling life. For others, "home is the place where when you show up, they have to take you in". For me, for a long time, home was Aspen Hill, Maryland.

It doesn't feel like home anymore, and hasn't felt like Home in a while. Yes, I have a house where I don't have to pay rent; the place has been paid-for since the 1970s. Yes, the family has an income generating second property that also is paid-for. Yet the thing is this: we never set out to own property in the ghetto, and that's where we live, and that's where the second property is: in the goddamn ghetto.

Now, before anyone suggests that I'm racially prejudiced, let me point out that it's less a question of race, and it's not a question of class; I'm even more poor than are most of the other ghetto-dwellers. It's a question of culture, and a question of nation. I'm not too happy with most of the white Americans around here, since most of them seem to be wretched old women of the sort whose lives are defined by how miserable they can make the lives of anyone who encounters them, and otherwise the rest of the local white Americans seem to be the thralls and victims of said wretched old women.

There's some ancient legend about one or another Greek or Roman hero, Odysseus perhaps, or maybe Jason of the Argonauts or some such wanderer. While on their epic quest for this or that, they encounter some old woman who asks them if they won't be so kind as to carry them across the river, and our intrepid hero obliges by riding the old woman across on his shoulders, which are of course broad and heroic. Yet as it turns out, his strength is no match for the ability of the old woman to keep her legs locked around his neck and refuse to be dislodged. As it turns out, she's a wicked Sea Hag who has ridden many a man to his doom. As she rides men to their deaths, she sucks the very life right out of them and although she grows no younger, her victims age rapidly and die while her vigor is renewed.

Obviously, such masters of metapor and allegory as composed the myths and legends of the Greeks were posting a cautionary tale. If you were a farmer and had no aspirations in life other than to work your fields, eat reasonably well, and grow old and die doing so, go ahead and let the women run your life. Thus runs the solid thread of a misogyny of the elderly throughout the fabric of early civilization. The warning is there: not for the hero or the wanderer should be desired the fate of being hag-ridden, or you shall be hero or wanderer no more.

A certain rather famous modern film for young-adults, Labyrinth, the intrepid heroine inadvertently curses her little brother to be stolen away by the Goblin King. To save her brother, she must enter the otherworldly Labyrinth of the Goblin King, where more than one kind of puzzle must be solved. One of the most dangerous and seductive is the Junk Lady:

It's not just in Buddhism, or Antique Mythology, that we find expressions of excessive attachment as the source of suffering... or even destruction.

The other populations here aren't so classically dangerous and of hoary disrepute, but simply stated, long ago the US wisely embraced a policy of allowing immigration only at such levels and by such methods that would ensure that children born citizens of the US would have more cultural influence imparted to them by adult US citizens than they would absorb from their foreign born parents. Thus, "out of many, one" would be the result. As a nation we would be the stronger as we absorbed valuable traits from the cultures of the immigrants, and integrated the valuable genetic and immunological diversity of their children into our own diversity.

For a long time, this worked. The original Colonists -- who were frankly too small a gene-pool to avoid dangerous inbreeding -- intermarried with subsequent waves, and with the survivors of the indigenous peoples. Without the admixture of Old World genetic, the natives would yet remain effectively defenseless against the diseases brought from the Old World, to which the genetics and immunological systems of the Old World people had long adapted. Without constant refreshment from the Old World, or intermarriage with the natives, eventual disaster would have resulted, probably along the same lines and for the same reasons that so utterly destroyed the indigenies after almost the very first contact from "the outside'.

Yet it was never the intention to allow foreigners to arrive in such numbers as to form colonies so large as to be able to effectively evade and resist acculturation to the (admittedly always evolving) cultural and moral standards of the mainstream US. It was never the intention for entire communities to have entire generations of US citizens raised only by foreign-born parents to the degree that the culture imparted to the US citizen child generation was that of the parent nation, rather than that of the US.

Ultimately, it may turn out that this is the only way to prevent entire communities from becoming blatantly hag-ridden by wretched old women, and if these intrepid heroic wanderers so far from home want to be silly enough to offer to carry them, let it be upon their necks, that burden.

I, for one, don't want to live in a place that's populated on the one hand by a bunch of old women, and on the other hand, by a young and vital culture of aggressively alien colonists who see nothing valuable about the US or its culture other than that it's the place you go for to "ganar mas".

The people I could possibly care about are young, vital, tumultuous perhaps in the depth of their passions and will perhaps still be locked deep in the struggle of trying to acquire those things that they do not yet have yet which they genuinely need. They also speak English as their first language and their parents also spoke English as their first language, and raised their children (with whatever degree of success) to love the USA and to admire its founders, to respect its heroes and to honor and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies foreign and domestic.

I don't want to live with inbred crackers who genuinely believe that they have to brandish venomous reptiles to exercise their faith, and in fact I don't want to live in any state or commonwealth that allows marriage between first cousins. It wasn't until last year that I discovered that Maryland does not prohibit the practice, and with that discovery, much is explained.

My problem at the present time isn't that I don't have enough things. I dragged ass back into town some 15 years ago with little more than the clothes on my back, and now my problem is this: I have so many things, all of the things that make a house a home, that I need to lighten up, My possessions have become a hag on my shoulders.

I have enough of my own furniture to more than fill up a double-wide trailer, and I think I'll be trying to find such a trailer. It'll probably be in a trailer park near some military base because that's where you find people in the vital ages of life who also love the USA and respect the rights and property of others as they demand that same respect for themselves.

With very limited exceptions, I see no such people here.

Neighborhood Watching Part I

2010-10-21T10:50:00.000-07:00

Well, our Neighborhood Watch is getting off to a mixed start.

The Astute Reader will doubtless recall that I've been involving myself in community improvement issues for about ten years now. First there was the "Hot Spots" program which evolved into the Mid-County Neighborhood Initiative and subsequently into the CSAFE program. For some years I was on the board of the Aspen Hill Civic Association, Inc., although I dropped out of that due to some unfortunate conflicts with the contrast between the stated goals of that organization and the actual actions of that organization. More or less, the leadership tended towards courses of action inspired by a policy position which mostly seemed to be "too little, too late". Caught up in the heady rush of the Housing Bubble, and not knowing that it would inevitably end, things were let to run on their own and we are now paying the price with massive foreclosure rates, major employers abandoning the neighborhood, and we've even lost a grocery store, practically unheard-of but the Super Fresh in Aspen Hill's North Gate Plaza Shopping Center is now history. Wave bye-bye to BAE Systems and their 500 employees, and whatever business they brought. to local establishments.

Now, me being in my situation, of being someone who for so very long actually wanted to live here, my primary goal has always been to keep the value of my paid-for house relatively low; that way I pay less in property taxes. Yet somehow in the last decade or two, people started looking at their homes as assets rather than as residences; people abandoned much attachment to their communities or institutions. Local government changed from a necessary evil that kept the streets paved and provided security, into something practically resembling the management staff of a large theme park.

Lest anyone not be able to follow the metaphor, let me point out that any theme park is pretty much the same as any other one: you have rides and you have staff and you have security and you have customers. If you don't care for one theme park you can go to another theme park and it will be all about the same, with the exception mostly of different branding and iconography.

Not wanting to confuse anyone with the facts, let's say that there are three roller-coasters in town. One of them will be far more popular than the other two, even if the equipment is identical in all three places. Two things, then, will differentiate these parks from the others. At one, you might say "their management sucks and their staff are all assholes". At another one, or more likely at the same one, rather than bewailing the staff and management, you bewail the patrons: "I hate that place, only assholes ever go there". And thus we lead to a discussion of class issues, I suppose, but I really don't want to go there. Let's just say that if you simply must go to a theme park, you probably are going there because you intend to have a good time.

Management, one would think, could improve itself, and having improved itself, could deny admittance to assholes, and thus their theme park would become the favorite of all (other than the assholes). Yet sometimes management is too drunk with power, or simply too drunk, to realize that they've degenerated into such a state that nobody pays any attention to them when they're not driving ass backwards in their overcrowded clown car, and nobody much pays attention to them then, either.

Listen up, Montgomery: homes are not assets; they're where you live. Your assets are supposed to be your savings in the bank and your shrewd investments, and your paid-for home should be the least of these by the time your kids are heading off to college.

Communities are not just where you reside, they are where you live your life. They are where you came from, where you raise your children, and where your children live and raise their own children. This is not something that should be mandatory, by any means. Yet it is the tradition of mankind through almost all time and in almost all places, with the exceptions of times and places characterized by economic of Colonialism, or of Invasion... or the repelling of Invasion.

Foreclosures continue apace here in Aspen Hill, Maryland, not surprising at all as this and adjoining communities comprised a lot of "elder core suburb" housing stock, perfect for "starter homes" and for young families seeking to move in, as elders sold their homes and moved to retirement communities. The loan-originators and realtors had a field day, and a lot of people who could not afford a house under the standard historical model were able to take advantage of novelty loan models and variable rate mortgages. The Housing Bubble collapsed, and the fallout is still landing... and in few places in Montgomery is the wreckage more widespread than in Aspen Hill.

As part of the Neighborhood Watch, we will be developing a list of properties which are vacant. We'll share it with the police, who are no doubt developing their own version, but we're not going to post our list online in public view. Yet rest assured that as homes go vacant, the neighborhood will be watching, or at least the Neighborhood Watch will be watching. At least, we'll be watching so long as any of us remain here to watch.

I'm not sure how much longer I will remain here in Aspen Hill.

It's become the equivalent, as in the metaphor above, of the theme park that no decent person wants to patronize, because the management sucks, the staff are all jerks, and only assholes patronize the place.

Here's an example. Right about the time that the Neighborhood Watch organized and started to get serious about actually keeping watch, I kept on doing what I've been doing for years: if the weather is good, I sit on the back porch and keep an eye on the street. I do it at consistent times, which is what the National Sheriff's Association/Neighborhood Watch recommends.

During the summer, this meant a lot of mosquitoes and a certain amount of near heat-exhaustion. During the winter, there's less crime in general and far less street crime. Spring and Fall, of course, are generally so pleasant that I'd be sitting outside just for the weather.

Since the beginning of the formal operations of Neighborhood Watch, I had that little problem with galloping cataracts of the type that are induced mostly by either steroid abuse or by exposure to chlorpromazine (Thorazine). I have intentionally or willingly done neither, though it's quite possible that I was exposed to one or the other or both during the infamous "dust wars" of 2007. As it turns out, while most "prescription" drugs do in fact require a prescription and are listed on either a State or Federal Schedule of Controlled Dangerous Drugs, none of the major tranquillizers such as chlorpromazine are; you don't need a prescription and you can order them by the bucketful online without a prescription, and because it's out of patent, chlorpromazine can be ordered by the bucketful dirt cheap.

Modern medicine being what it is, and MediCare covering me as it does, for very little out-of-pocket expense I got both of my cataract surgeries done and I can see just fine now, even without any prescription lenses. Yet I'm not forgetting that there are still assholes driving around the neighborhood throwing handfuls of nasty powder out of the windows of their cars into oncoming traffic, especially in the direction of my vehicle. Considering that this sort of behavior (almost certainly this) just put me on the surgeon's table not once, but twice in the last month, I think that constitutes felony First Degree Assault.

Should I think that this is specifically targeted at me? Ordinarily I'd chalk this off as some sort of media-driven madness of the sort you might expect from illiterate foreigners who fell asleep listening to a Spanish-language Pentacostal radio evangelism show, and I'd probably wonder why they're throwing poison dust at "anglos" instead of maybe devoting themselves to Snake Handling and giving themselves what they deserve. Then again, there's the ongoing phenomenon of the Aspen Hill Welcome Wagon Walking Tour of Weirdos and Whackos. And here I thought that had died down, but I guess not.

Evidence in point of case? Let's see. On or about September 25 or so, while waiting with some dread for the date of my first surgery to arrive, I saw what I had been seeing for the previous ten years while sitting on my porch doing either impromptu or formal Neighborhood Watch. I saw the school kids walking home. At extremely predictable intervals -- they call them bus "schedules" for a reason -- I'd see a few kids walking by one way, and then one or two walking another way, etc etc., depending on which school had just let out for the day.

After that date, more or less, I see no kids. Zip, zero, zilch, with the exception of the tiny tots that have their Catholic school bus-stop right across the street from me. Two surgeries later -- a month later -- a few kids walk past, but interestingly enough, only "latino" ones. All of the white kids might as well have been beamed up to the mothership, though in the last few days, one white boy of about middle-school age walks past, expressing body language that I read as depressed or perhaps fearful. I'm not sure what to make of this.

Meanwhile, as the month has rolled past, every day it hasn't been storming, I've been out there for my predictable Neighborhood Watch afternoon shift at my busy intersection. Saturday and Sunday, no kids, no school, still I'm out there. I'm out there for an hour before the kids should be walking past, when they should be walking past, and for an hour or so after they should have all walked past. I'm out there on school days, and on all days when there isn't any school. If anyone is thinking this is about school kids, they should look at the fact that I'm out there, school in session or school not in session. If someone is defaming me to the point where there's a neighborhood hysteria -- in the English-speaking community only, it would seem from my observations -- has resulted in kids being taken out of school or somesuch, someone has a lot to answer for. Defamation of character is one of those lawsuits you can win, and I'll come right out and say that if someone is using me to scare impressionable little children, they need to get a grip and stop it, because there are a lot of hungry lawyers out there and I want a new house. If this turns out to be the case -- defamation of character by sneaking slander squads driving whole sectors of the neighborhood to the edge of hysteria and riot -- my mental anguish over unsubstantiated allegations and misrepresentation of material fact will be profound, deep, profound, long lasting, and in fact crippling for life, with damage to my reputation leading to a lifetime of unemployability and I think that with a nice change of venue and properly done juror picking, I can go buy a nice new RV and have more than enough gas and grocery money left over.

Now, what leads me to think that something like this is going on?

Let's see: the last time I was up at the Leisure World Giant grocery, there was that guy in the next lane who kept glaring at me with a face gone deathly pale as he quietly locked and loaded his semi-automatic pistol, decocked the hammer, and stuck it back in his waistband, and insisted that I walk ahead of him towards the exit.

There's the total lack of schoolkids walking by, but only the ones you'd reasonably expect to have English-speaking parents.

There's the new neighbors; they were about as friendly as you could expect New Yorkers to be, then all of a sudden they stopped talking to me and put up a fence. But they have a dog so the fence is reasonable and indeed recommended over a tether for the dog. Yet when new furniture came and the delivery men saw me standing Neighborhood Watch, and asked the neighbor "what's up with him", it's a pretty clear indicator of the Slander Squad having paid a visit, that the neighbor responded "thinks he's Count Dracula". I'm pretty damned sure that's what I heard, and though it's the first time from this person, it's far from the first time hereabouts.

What sort of person goes to the extent of launching a neighborhood into a frenzy of paranoia and secret militancy to the point where self-appointed vigilantes arm themselves with concealed pistols and stalk me to a grocery store full of retirees?

That would be someone desperate, unstable, or maybe just seeking a form of power achieved and maintained by violence. Maybe all of the above, in which case the word "gangs" comes to mind.

In any case, if anyone is trying to keep me from doing Neighborhood Watch, that's someone trying to take eyes off of the street that will observe and report crimes to duly constituted law enforcement agencies. Who would want to remove eyes on the street looking to report crimes? Criminals, that's who.

Listening to such talk is like listening to a burglar tell you that you don't need locks.

They're just trying to convince you to be easily victimized.

I'm watching the streets trying to keep people safe... and the criminals are out there... whispering.

Tell me who they are... and it might be your house that won't be burglarized.

Because I'll be watching them like a hawk, and instead of the sentinel, it will be the criminal that gets 24/7 bird-dogged.

A Nudge Is As Good As a Wink to a Blind Bat, Eh?

2010-10-16T09:08:00.000-07:00

It has been almost two weeks since the last posting, not terribly surprising as I have been giving my poor eyes a rest. Also, adaptation to my new lens in the right eye has been an ongoing exercise.

The intraocular lens I received was an inflexible one of a fixed-focus type, so all adaptation to it has had to be either based on external lenses, such as reading-glasses, or cognitive, in a few different ways.

First, it's necessary to learn to stop trying to use the muscles of the eye to focus, it won't do anything other than strain the tissues. Secondly, processing in the brain's optical centers can learn to make sense of things that are in less-than-perfect focus. With the sort of fonts seen on street-signs, for example, you have a design which is specifically intended to be legible to persons with less-than-perfect vision. You might not see the edges of the lettering in perfect focus, but the body of the letters are easily "resolved in software", so to speak.

It takes some time for the brain to change its processing paradigms, but plasticity of the nervous system is well documented.

In any case, the right eye works just fine, although I will want "weak" reading-glasses to comfortable read a book at my customary distance of about 2/3rd arms-length. I can already read as well as ever with a book right at arms-length, a bit uncomfortable but workable. I'll also want glasses for fine far distance vision. For intermediate range vision, such as everyday driving and moving about the environment, I'm just fine... at least for the right eye. The left eye is still "settling in".

In any case, "a nudge is as good as a wink to a blind bat, know what I mean?"

I might add, regarding documentation, interested parties should read a really rather comprehensive overview of the effects of neuroleptic drugs on the eye (Cataract Occurrence With Antipsychotic Drugs, Sajida Shahzad, Mohammad-Irfan Suleman, Hasan Shahab, Iourii Mazour, Amanpreet Kaur, Peter Rudzinskiy, and Steven Lippmann, Psychosomatics, Oct 2002; 43: 354 - 359).

A 1999 study compared cataract occurrence in schizophrenic patients and the general population (McCarty CA, Wood CA, Fu CL, Livingston PM, Mackersey S, Stanislavsky Y, Taylor HR: Schizophrenia, psychotropic medication, and cataract. Ophthalmology 1999; 106:683-687 [MedLine]); a much higher rate was observed in the schizophrenic subjects (26%) than in the comparison subjects (<1%).

So, if someone is taking phenothiazines or closely related medications, you're about 30 times more likely to develop cataracts than if they are not taking such medications. Yet it seems to also show that of those taking such medications, perhaps 3 of 4 will be spared that particular fate. One might hypothesize that a comparable susceptibility rate exists across the general population.

Still, the evidence is clear, and warrants legislation at a Federal level, moving such drugs to Schedule II, along with such tightly-controlled and very-abusable drugs as Morphine or Oxycontin. The potentials for abuse, or for extremely expensive and bad outcomes for "casual use", are so great as to require extremely strict dispensing and "release control" and "disposal certification".

Moving right along, the Fall season is now upon us, and I must say that with my "new eyes" I am really enjoying the lovely bursts of fall colors which unfortunately foretell of days to come being spent raking and bagging leaves.

Soon enough, also, will come the General Election. I predict that generally speaking, nationwide if not specifically in Maryland or Montgomery, "leave no incumbent seated" will be the binding popular sentiment.

Among other major concerns will be the economy in general. Yet I think it's time to address, speciically, the Foreclosure Crisis.

From a posting to the comments section of the Washington Post:

Does anyone even remember the reason for the economic collapse?

Part of the impetus of de-leveraging -- the collapse and implosion of the markets in Commoditized Debt Obligations ("CDO") and Credit Default Swaps ("CDS") -- was the fact that it became increasingly impossible to put any actual valuation on tranches of mortgages. The main reason for that was the fact that nobody could determine actual ownership of the deeds of the properties that had been mortgaged and had the mortgages marketed as "tranches". The market was trading in fictions.

As it became obvious that the market was trading in fictions -- and grossly over-valued fictions, at that -- defaults on credit (accessed to invest in these fictions) rose, and began to exceed the ability of insurers to pay out. These Credit Defaults had become the center of a market for Credit Default Swaps ("CDS") and that highly speculative market froze after the insurers faced bankruptcy. Foremost among the losers was AIG.

The only way to bring any stability was to sequester these tranches and the mortgages on which they were based, taking them off of the main books. These became known as "toxic assets". Most people believed that they were no longer on the books. Actually, the process was designed to show that it was possible for various banks and brokerages to operate at all without transactions based on or being affected by sequestered toxic assets. Such function has become possible in most cases but the fact remains: immense amounts of capital had to be removed from the markets because there was no known valuation and that lack of certainty frightened investors. As well it should.

Those assets remained, and in any case the housing and mortgage markets are immense and remain central to the economy. These fictitious and unknown valuations need to be tested in the marketplace and ownership needs to be resolved. Absent actual change in deed ownership, valuation is not possible.

The faster these actual changes in ownership take place, the faster these fictitious toxic assets become real and tangible assets of known value. Hence the mad rush.

It's certainly not right to take away property that is being paid for according to agreement; that distorts the system even farther, though in a different direction. Yet halting the orderly conversion of toxic assets to known real valuations will simply return us to the uncertainty and fear
which plunged us into the Great Recession.

Fix the system, and then once again move forward with all deliberate speed.

Rolling Cigarettes In the Dark

2010-09-30T13:58:00.000-07:00

For those who feel some completely inexplicable and obscure need to read my blog -- search-engine traffic outnumbers "real person" traffic by about 50 to 1 -- I should provide some narrative.

Rolling cigarettes in the dark is not something most people will want to try for themselves, and in fact, most people would simply give up or cheat. I didn't have a choice; I had to keep my eyes shut and not peek. No, the lights weren't out. However, opening my eyes would have been a true adventure in irritation which I would would classify as epic. It was easier to just think about what I was doing, and enjoy the infallibility of good understanding and lots of practice as well as thinking things through in advance, and paying attention to sticking to the plan.

Why bother, the Astute Reader might ask?

Sometimes you can just do whatever, whenever, and sometimes you have limitations. My limitation was that I was in the first 12 hours of recovery from cataract surgery.

I was recommended to a very good doctor and took the recommendation. Unlike quite a lot of my recent encounters with the Medical Industry, this was a private practice almost of the old school, where you get the specialist that you need, rather than the staff physician the Health Maintenance Organization's beancounter administrators decide they can afford.

Intake was tolerable, probably actually better than that, as I am generally nervous as a cat and the less people I have near me the better I feel. Yet being treated as if I were something other than even more meat to be processed, this was very settling. These folks exuded professionalism and competence, and it's hard to say which was the more reassuring of those two qualities; the combination is a winning one.

Surgery itself? After prep, and some discussion with the anesthesiologist, off we went to the operating room and away we went. This was far different from my horrid experiences with dental anesthesia in earlier years, which experiences were so horrid that I preferred to get a recent liver biopsy with only a local anesthetic, and was perfectly conscious for the fascinating experience of tonic spasm as the diaphragm was penetrated. No, those old dental anesthetists might have not had the right juice to work with, or they were being a little sloppy. When the dentist knocked me out for my wisdom tooth extractions, darkness dropped onto me like being in a car wreck, and the way my face, jaw, and neck felt when I awoke, it felt like I'd been in a car wreck. This experience yesterday was far different.

I'm not sure how happy I would be about having an anesthetic sneak up on me with little cat feet, anyplace outside of a surgery. However, in surgery, it's probably best that it sneak up on you rather than smash you down like you ran your car into a wall. I have to admit that listening to the conversation during the surgery wasn't something I was expecting, but the local anesthetics in the eye were quite effective so I just lay there, which was clearly the best course of action.

Post-operatively, once home, I sat around and tried to watch TV for a while, but the anesthetics wearing off in the eye were doing very weird things to my receptor nerves -- weirdness about equivalent to the special effects in the "trip sequence" in 2001: A Space Odyssey -- I figured I might as well take my tired self off to bed.

One little thing, though... when the local anesthetics wear off, about 4 hours post-operative, the incision (through which they vacuum out the old lens and insert the new one) in the eyeball isn't healed. The nervous system interprets it, at least in my case, as a tiny ball of steel wool rolled up somewhere under my upper eyelid.

Let's just say of this experience and situation, that sometimes it is not just appropriate, but truly good to cry. And, if you smoke them, to smoke a cigarette... to give you something to do with your hands other than try to hold them still and away from your eyes.

But lo and behold, I am down to the very last of my hand-rolled cigarettes. That means I need to roll more.

As it turns out, trying to open one eye while experiencing the "squeeze and cry" reflex for dislodging foreign object is not something one can do without increasing that reflex. You can use your hand ot hold open the lid of the unaffected eye, good for finding your way around, but you can't do anything two-handed that way. So I just got all of my necessities into place, took a final look, and then did everything by touch.

Use a large box top as a rolling surface. Rub a handful of tobacco between the palms, and anything that's left in the palm gets snipped up with manicure scissors, and repeat rubbing and cutting until all of the shake is about the same grain and size.

Now we're ready to roll. And what do we know about our brand of cigarette papers? As you open the pack, you can peel off a dozen or so sheets at a time, and if the packet was opened upwards, the gummed edges of the paper will be downwards. Peel off a sheaf, place the packet to the side, and flip over the sheaf to leave the gummed eduges upwards to the ceiling and towards the top-left corner of the boxtop that's keeping everything in one small work area on a footstool.

Noted in passing, all of this is done with both eyes closed, weeping copiously from the one eye, which still feels like there's a little ball of steel wool up under the eyelid. Yay. As long as I don't move my eyeballs, or try to open the lids, at least it's a little ball of steel wool that's just sitting there, rather than scratching.

Peel off one paper, carefully, setting back the sheaf exactly where it was. The thumb holding the single sheet has the index finger on the gummed side, so set it down and pick it up the way you'd hold a curved paper ready to roll. Curve the paper. You've done this so much you hardly need to look at it anyway.

You know the size of the pinch of tobacco, so you pick it up and place it in the paper. From there, it's more about feel and practice, anyway. Repeat as necessary. Hey, almost forgot about the little ball of steel wool, right?

Keep on going until you run out of tobacco. You've been laying down finished "rollies" in a column in the right lower corner of the boxtop, so pick one up from one end of the column, and trim off a millimeter or two from one end, and set it in another column. Once all of the "rollies" are in the second column, turn the boxtop 180 degrees and repeat the process.

Now that you've got all of your cigarettes trimmed at both ends, carefully feel for their center point, and cut the cigarettes in half and line up the cut segments. By the time you're done, you have about30 "half-smokes", and can start transferring them to a carry case.

Now, it helps that I don't have a beard, because these things are too short to light without singeing your nose hairs. Also, I get about three drags off of them before I douse them.

Of course, this has taken up a fair amount of time, working blind, and the horrid itching is almost tolerable. And if I should find myself waking up in the middle of the night and need to calm my nerves, I can do that by smoking; doctor's orders included "no alcohol and don't sign any legal documents for twenty-four hours".

In bed, not that I'm sad or anything, I cry myself to sleep. At least the one eye cries as I eventually fall asleep, and then I wake at 2:30AM. Itching slightly less. Have a smoke. Go back to sleep. Wake at 3:30AM. Have a smoke, itching is slightly less. Go back to sleep. Repeat every hour on the hour until about 6:30 or so at which time I can actually sleep a few hours straight through. Amazingly, when I wake up, the itching is almost completely gone, my pillow is literally almost soaked through with tears, and when I turn on the light -- at low intensity -- I can actually see through the new lens.

The new lens is plastic, and it is transmitting far more light than the old one did, not surprising as the last lens was getting so fogged over that it had to be removed.

Differences between the old lens and the new one include: much more light is getting through. The light is far more blue, about the same degree of change as between a room well-lit by warm yellow incandescents and a room grossly over-lit by old-school florescent tubes. I think this right here could save me a lot on the electricity bills.

This being merely the first day after surgery, there is nothing so near nor so far, nor anywhere in between, that I can get to focus. According to the doctor, in about two weeks this should be all settled in to wherever it's going to be, and whatever lenses will be needed can be fitted at that time. Meanwhile, I need to learn to forget the whole notion of focusing that eye on anything at all, since the inserted lens is not flexible and no amount of trying to focus will work. It'll be all in the external lenses. If all went as hoped, I'll only really need glasses for reading, and if I can read again anywhere near as well as I could only two years ago, that'll be just fine.

And of course, the really important thing: I can save lots of money by hand-rolling my cigarettes, even if I can't look at what I'm doing. Even in my 50s, it seems, I can learn a new skill, or how to exercise an old skill in a new way, or under a new handicap. I already learned how to do it one-handed back when I broke my hand during the 2008 District 4 MoCo Special Election.

More Linux Griping Part III, etc.

2010-09-28T07:36:00.000-07:00

(Updated September 29, 2010 with link to Gazette reporting on meeting)

Noted in passing: last night's meeting of the Aspen Hill Neighborhood Watch has come and gone. We were scheduled to have a presentation by the County "gang officer", and I would have loved to attend to hear about the ongoing clean-up of the neighborhood's clear and evident Gang Problem. It needs to be observed that the greatest successes in recent months have been due to a nationwide Federal crackdown on the Latin Kings, in part due to a botched firebombing in Aspen Hill, as well as assorted racketeering generally in and about Langley Park.

I was unable to attend, not due to any reluctance to attend a meeting; this is one I wanted to enjoy. I was particularly interested in any details forthcoming about the intentions and expected activities of the gang task force after Friday, when Maryland's sweeping new anti-gang statute takes effect. Previous legislation turned out to be so ineffectual that there was not one successful prosecution. The new statute effectively makes it an extremely serious offense for anyone to organize towards criminal ends, with those criminal ends being a large list. The only fundamental crime (towards which people are forbidden to organize) that needs to be added to the list is, in my humble opinion, stalking. And perhaps "organlegging".

The list does include witness-intimidation, second-degree assault, and Maryland's statutorily defined list of "crimes of violence", unlicensed dealings in firearms, etc.

I regard this as a signal triumph for the rights of the individual over the connivance of croweds, and long overdue. In the absence of an enforceable anti-gang law, Maryland has become overrun with all sort of gangs, with the majority of them being only triflingly criminal. No, I am not suggesting the MS-13 or Sur-X3 or the Crips or Bloods are "trifling"; they are not. Yet as individual organizations they are merely the most egregious of a very long list of organizations that sit down and decide to hurt people.

Under the new statute, if some serious gangsta decides to tell his boys to go out and beath the crap out of someone, on the second offense, they can do 20 years of hard time for exercising their command structure on top of and consecutive to any sentence for their primary offense. And also, under the new statute, if a shopping center security company decides that the cops aren't doing enough and hires some local thug to take a baseball bat to anyone who (in the opinion of the thug) looks homeless, the second time it happens, both the thug and the security company staff will be looking at 20 years in Jessup Penitentiary, commonly known as "the Cut".

Heck, if some local church folks hear their preacher rail against "the jews" or against "libreals" or "conservatives" or whatever, and the congregation decides to go beat up someone, potentially they could be locked up for 20 years. However, I can't reasonably expect that the Assistant State's Attorney is going to lock up a bunch of churchgoers because their misguided zeal has turned a house of prayer into a lair of thugs. Then again, the prosecutor might look at that situation and ask themselves "what would Jesus do?" and start locking people up until no pew was filled.

I hope I survive to see it.

But I digress.

The linux woes are pretty close to over, so long as I don't do something stupid.

Generally speaking, just install Slackware 12.2, download the source code for the 13.1 distribution, and then rebuild almost everything from source.

This long and painstaking process will be something that you want to do pretty much manually, while keeping an eye out for errors. First, do the package tools, and then upgrade things such as the autoconf, flex, bison, and comparable compilation aid tools.

For anything based on GLIB, such as most GNOME applications and helpers, you'll have to stick with the 12.2 version. You won't have much choice, mostly because the GLIB source from 13.1 cannot be made to compile. It consistently bombs out with errors related to the kernel's "inotify" headers. I haven't yet been able to find a fix via google, although the Debian people seem to have found a workaround and committed it to the stable apt-get trees. I should mention here that for most production machines, especially for consumer workstations, I have to recommend either Debian or its deriviative Ubuntu. Yet for the serious Linux student, I recommend Slackware, as it is the most uncluttered and straightforward in its startup scripts. Patrick Volkerding writes nice straightforward script code, and his is a style to emulate.

So, some weeks later, I have a generally serviceable workstation/server. Recompiling "X" took some time and hassle fairly well overviewed in the preceding post. Ideally if I have a future that includes having both life and sight in the absence of brain damage, I'll get around to installing the "enlightenment" window manager and I'll be a happy camper, so to speak.

Further, it seems that there are jobs in Linux/UNIX coming available on this side of the Potomac, which aren't associated to either the military or intelligence community. Nothing against such positions but they aren't for me. For myself, there's no faster way to get all batshit crazy than to take a job where you know that someone's going to blackbag your house everytime you go grocery shopping and probably circulate around their internet any pr0n they can generate from the hidden cameras. The thought that the people who defend our freedoms, themselves have effectively no freedom of their own, that's just too convoluted for me to embrace with any degree of comfort. And as for the folks who keep tabs on the folks who defend our freedoms while having none of their own? I wonder if Maryland's sweeping new anti-gang statute can be applied to any of them, if they keep playing fast and loose with the rules of everything as they far too often do. But again, I digress.

Final conclusion on the state of Linux? For most people, just get and stick with last year's version of Ubuntu or the cutting edge version of Debian.

Need something more special and customized? Slackware and a lot of investment of personal time and energy will get you something you can work with and enjoy, that will probably be too weird for the script-kiddies to harm much.

Linux Migration Woes, Part II

2010-09-19T17:50:00.000-07:00

Please forgive typos, cataracts are progressing rapidly and I can touch type fairly well, I just can't easily proof read.

After migrating from Slackware Linux, version somewhere around 10.2 or somesuch, to version 13.1 with serious problems coming up around the Util-Linux-NG disk utilities constantly filling up the error logs with something to the effect of "libblkid version number not found, needed by fsck", I migrated back to version 12.2, which shipped mostly working.

Yet while trying to get some of my favorite add-on applications running, I kept having compilation attempt after compilation attempt bomb out.

Some three days of part-time research led me to this Gentoo Linux discussion page which led me in the right direction.

As the XCB library -- a dependency of the X11 library and thus of anything which depends on the X11 library "libx11" -- was in a usable and upgraded form in the 13.1 Slackware source which I have on hand, I went and built that. First I had to install the new "xz" compression tools as they are now the standard software-package installation bundle compression mode. Next, the TAR ("tape archive") tools, etc. Then on to rebuild a few other things, recompiling the "libxcb" XCB suite from source, not relying on the SlackBuild system, installing, that, rebuilding 'libdrm' and then the MESA GUI texturing libraries, then rebuilding "libX11" and installing that. I stopped getting annoying error messages and have been able thereafter to build more of my favorite apps and to install them.

My eye problems should be sufficiently resolved by the end of the month so as to be able to document this better, put up some patch files and HOWTO postings, etc.

Meanwhile, just as I did, you'll just have to google "harshly" and recompile as I did. Clue to the wise: don't depend on just running the SlackBuild (or YUM or EMERGE) scripts, you will probably have to do a lot of "./configure --help" to get proper arguments to supply to configure to get it all to fall into place as the thing that you need.

Once again, I find myself doing a lot of patch-up on a beta-release that as a distribution works well enough, but needs significant rebuilding to get it to do anything beyond functioning as a LAMP machine that also has working sendmail.

Missing in Action?

2010-09-13T16:05:00.000-07:00

Well, no. I didn't die or anything.

Today's saga of unrelenting existential angst is a saga of a botched system upgrade.

For those whose eyes easily glaze over, this is a note about Linux. Remember, I'm a UNIX sysadmin and all of this politics and suchlike is a sideline.

I've done a couple of so-called "bleeding edge" migrations from version to version, even way back in the day when Linux was just an obscure toy for hobby geeks. My recent problems just go to show that because you had success at something on previous occasions is no reliable indicator that you will have success in the instant occasion.

After building the latest GNU gcc compiler ("Free Software Foundation" or GNU.org makes a lot of really nice free tools) I went ahead and tried to build a new "C library", a huge repository of code on which everything else depends. After about a month of trying this, I got something I thought ought to work fine. All tests showed success.

So, I went ahead and installed the compiler, and used it to recompile itself, always a good idea, and then recompiled the C library ("libc"), and it tested well once again.

I installed it.

It broke everything.

Oh well. I'd intended to upgrade to a new major version, now I had a perfect opportunity to upgrade to a new hard drive as well.

Why was I going to all of this trouble, considering I had a truly "loaded" system that had worked most excellently for me for almost three years?

Goddamn Adobe upgraded their goddamn Flash plugin for Mozilla.

I should make it clear that I happen to like Flash, or like it well enough to risk totally trashing a perfectly good combination server/workstation, just because Adobe doesn't want to release the API or let second parties issue special package compilations. If I wanted to see content requiring Flash 10, I need to rebuild my entire software load for an entire system just so I can see some fucking content.

And they wonder why Apple hates their fucking guts.

But I'm all totally happy now, after spending 10 days slaving over a hot terminal just to get my system to a point where I can sit down at my workstation and watch hamsters dance of YouTube.

Indeed. I am just fucking ecstatic.

Feh.

Technically, my total fux0r of my workstation was due to an attempt to upgrade from a version of Slackware Linux -- and yes, before you ask me if I've even heard of Ubuntu, why yes, I have -- which both did not support the Hardware Abstraction Layer ("HAL", "hald") and which depended on using Thread Local Storage, or "tls". Almost all of my system commands, everything from disk utilities to everything depending on disk utilities, was built linked against TLS versions of the C library and that meant that the new compiler and the new libc were not referenced by the old utilities and commands. Total fux0r3d. It's bad enough being pwned, but actually pwning yourself to total breakage isn't just bad form, it becomes textbook of at whom to scoff and jeer.

But wait, it gets worse!

I downloaded and installed Slackware version 13.1, and got much of the basics of the server side of my workstation up and running, at least sufficiently for my mom to get her e-mail at our home domain. Note to self: it's SMART to have several servers and to only mess with one of them at a time. It would be better, of course, to have a prototype machine and to make all of the mistakes on a system that isn't actually being used, much less essential. I'm not rich, though, so I either have to make no mistakes, or be quick to fix breakage.

Fixing breakage with broken tools is a bad idea, and the only thing worse is not knowing in advance that the tools all ship broken.

The latest distributions of Linux all use the "util-linux-ng" code base, and it's like being back in the Bleeding Edge Migration days when the library style was shifted from the old a.out format to the Enhance Linking Format or "ELF" shared libraries, what Windoze admins know as DLLs. Sure, it's a better format but it's a major pain in the ass to go from usable to spiffy, and to do it by compilation and migration rather than fresh installation. But my recent experience was far worse than being one of the poor bastards to had to take corporate IT departments from Windows 3.1 to Win98 and then Win2K.

The "util-linux-ng" code base is NOT READY FOR PRIME TIME and in fact I have nearly the same contempt for the Linux Distribution Community as I had for MicroSoft back in the day when they stopped maintaining DOS 5.0 and forced the entire PC software user community to act as their beta-testers for an alpha-release known as DOS 6.0.

After nearly a week trying to rebuild Slackware 13.1 from source, and getting nothing much but Fail or my efforts no matter how much I hacked configure scripts or even Makefile library dependencies and inclusion order, I finally gave up after seeing "libblkid.so version information not available, fsck depends on it" and reinstalled Slackware version 12.2.

That actually works, and it actually supports Flashplayer 10.

Gah.

And now I have about 130 gigabytes of software source code to recompile for the new operating system and library set.

Fortunately, the real guts and hardcore basics were things I could get quickly back into place, the Apache webserver, MYSQL, PHP, sendmail, mailman, procmail, spamassassin, gah fuck now I have to go rebuild the entirety of CPAN.

No time, folks, can't post anymore.

And I need, increasingly, to give more attention to text-to-audio and speech-to-text apps... damn cataracts.

Hey! VOTE TUESDAY.

Discovery Hostage Local Coverage

2010-09-01T13:03:00.000-07:00

See the excellent local coverage from blocks away:
Silver Spring Singular Coverage.

Please, Mr Leventhal!

2010-08-30T20:20:00.000-07:00

Remarks on a statement from Mr Leventhal at tonight's At-Large Candidate Forum held at the Aspen Hill Library.

On at least 2 occasions, I've heard Mr Leventhal state (to paraphrase), "because population growth exists, both globally and locally, thus we must plan to profit from orderly growth here in Montgomery".

With respect, if one has their wits about them and perhaps also has a critical mind... If I can demonstrate that a premis is in error, doesn't it follow that the consequent of a false antecedent is also false? (Logically, not exactly true, the consequent can be true despite attribution to a false antecedent)

First my thesis and then a link to more supporting information, mostly in the footnotes of that link.

Population growth exists, yet the pace of growth in most of the "technologized world" is actually negative in terms of births to the local populations. For example, all of Europe is in population decline both for almost all EU member states and certainly for the whole population of the EU. In such places as Germany, the birth rate is slightly more than one per woman, while a bit more than two per woman is considred replacement level.

In Japan, it's even more pronounced. Of the "fully technologized nations', only the US has a birth rate significantly above replacement rate, and even most of that is due to higher birth rates in immigrant communities.

We just saw CDC reports that the US birthrate has significantly declined.
http://www.cdc.gov/media/pressrel/2010/r100406.htm

Even China is undergoing massive economic growth due to modernization, even as they enter the second generation of the Two Parents One Child population reduction policy. The combination of orderly decline in population combines with modernization in a synergy producing considerable social change along with emerging as a manufacturing center for the world.

In part due to the widespread availability of jobs in China, while there is very significant internal migration pressure, there is far less pressure to emigrate than might be expected. The Chinese government has vastly eased emigration restrictions, but not many people want to go... that's because they know that China will be a far less crowded place as time goes on, and also because the standard of living will approach the minimum that would be standard for a "working poor" American. Compared to much of the world, that's very good indeed.

We see comparable changes in India, which has combined massive modernization (less well capitalized than in China) with significant and widespread family planning. They had more widespread poverty than China, and they tend to export products of their educations rather than physical products, yet still they see the benefits of checking population growth combining with modernization.

These are just two major examples of how population growth globally is slowing, not drastically as a whole, but it is less of a driver of immigration than you might think, and expected to be less such a driver over time. Yet the UN population studies aren't sure that it will be enough, not in time, to prevent problems expected to occur globally around mid-century, but particularly badly in those nations which have both high population _levels_ (regardless of growth _rate_) and significant dependence on either fossil fuel energy supplies, importation of water, or both.

But now to local concerns: First, something non-local. In southern California, almost all water has to be imported, either from Northern California, but mostly from the Colorado River Dams in Nevada. This is brought in by gravity-powered aqueduct. If there's no electricity or fossil fuels for pumping, enough drinking water and sanitation water will still arrive in Los Angeles, though there will be no way to get it to the top of tall buildings other perhaps than by windmill, or human power.

We don't have that sort of water supply here, and building such a supply would be pretty darn expensive. If we ran out of sources of electrical or mechanical energy, how will we get water to the neighborhoods? And the more 'high rise' the construction, the more vulnerable. If PEPCO goes down in a widespread interstate grid failure as happened in the Great Lakes region a few years ago, how will we pump water into our nice new transit-centric mixed-use high-density projects? For that matter, what good are they when electrical powered transit systems such as MetroRail have no propulsive
energy?

It's easy to say "everything we need to make this work will always be here, and if it seems that it won't be here, we'll legislate that it be here." Well, the legenday King Canute went down to the beach and ordered the tide to not rise, or to at least wait a while. Predictably, time and tide wait for no man, no matter that he may be King.

Time and Tide are coming. Population may be exploding, but not in the technologized world. Population is exploding in places like Somalia, Ethiopia, Eritrea, etc., mostly because they don't have enough effective government to administer family planning programs nor provide resources to
assist in the planning. We as a nation could try to remedy that, as individuals contributing to relief agencies and non-governmental transnational organizations.

Food supplies will be an increasing problem, especially if they come from the sea. We have exhausted the oceans to a point where most marine fisheries have either collapsed or are at the edge of collapse (see link footnotes for peer-reviewed research).

Energy provisioning even for a reduced global population will be increasingly problematic by mid-century. "Peak Oil" is generally acknowledged to have occurred sometime in the late-1990s, no later than the early 2000s. We will have less available energy per-capita for the rest of time, even with a population declining at a sustainable pace.

Our water recycling and waste processing facilities are at or near their limits, and part of that limitation is in the water they must intake as well as places to deposit the organic wastes. Despite our best efforts, the Chesapeake is still far from healthy and may be beginning to slide back. See also the concept of "nitrogen saturation", not to mention "pfisteria piscicida".

Simply stated, planning for growth at this point is like saying "I think I'll start smoking, and drink nitrobenzene while I'm at it"; it might be lots of fun in the short run but in the long run the cause of death will assuredly be cancer. Almost any other decision would be better.

And thus with any actual embracing of "growth", be it "smart" or otherwise.

Here's that link. My advice? Actually _read_ the footnotes or as much of them as you can stand. I included the salient points in the text of the page I link to. Many if not most of the relevant footnotes are from reputable global organizations and if they seem slightly alarmist, considering such
subjects as well-documented Global Climate Change and Mass Extinction of Species, they should seem slightly alarmist.

Pardon the website, the page is a term paper:
http://www.radicalcenter.org/essays/why_futurism.php

As for Mr Leventhal, in almost all other things he's quite admirable, but please ask him to stop saying "because the global population inevitably grows, we must inevitably grow". That's like saying "because our neighbors have cancer, we must start smoking tobacco". In any case, since the premis is false and everyone knows what it leads to if it were true, he shouldn't start an argument with that. It makes him look like one or more of three things: totally misinformed, incapable of logic and understanding cause and effect, or if none of those, perhaps intentionally evil.

Hopefully he will inform himself and understand the consequences of a failure to reduce the clamoring for "growth".

Regards,