These are a few of my favorite quotes

Facebook has a "favorite quotations" feature, and I once had it filled with things, but then it just seemed that "less is more" so I whittled it down to two that would fit on the profile page without a user having to select the "see more" button. However in the interest of self-indulgence, I thought I should still offer up the rest of those favorite pithy aphorisms, somewhere. Thank goodness for blogging.

First the ones that made the cut:

• Never apologize, never explain.
  
  The exact source of this quote in the annals of the English language are undetermined. Most trace it to 19th century Oxford Don Benjamin Jowett, though his phrasing was a little different; later sources include John Wayne and Gertrude Stein, among many, many others. Its exact source in the annals of my life, however, are from a former manager I had six jobs ago, a guy named Jim. At the time I met and was working for him, his advice seemed revolutionary, because it was the case that all I did was apologize and explain, about everything I did, including probably breathing. Having grown up in Passive Aggressive Miserable Scowl-Faced Just Be Happy We're Not Spitting On You (Harder) Pennsyltucky, I was used to having to be sorry for just being alive. Meeting someone who discouraged self-punnishment and actively encouraged hubris was radical and empowering, to me. Over the years the phrase kept working its way back into my mind, slowly reminding me that that is, indeed, a preferable approach to life. It's not an excuse to steamroller people; but it is an anecdote to my upbringing that taught that I should be only seen and not heard.

• If all of us are the same, some of us are redundant.
  
  I can't find a citation for this quote, so until one turns up, I take the credit. Despite the lack of humility in quoting myself (for which I don't apologize--see quote above). At the time I first said it I was steeped in dime store Myers-Briggs Jungian thinking; this was my distillation of all I learned from that mindset. It's my call for tolerance and respect for those with different personalities, skills, and outlooks--in other words, diversity. Unlike the sort of PC-minded diversity that is more interested in dehumanizing and codifying by judging outward appearance or social status, I'm much more interested in the diversity of the individual. Peter Drucker made a similar point when he talked about finding complimentary skills and personalities when assembling teams, which he summarized as "making strengths productive." It's not really all that profound; it's just common sense. Yet like most common sense things, it never seems to happen.

And now for the rest, in no particular order of profundity or, anything

• Sit back, relax, and enjoy the crash.
  
  I used this for years as my signature on my personal emails, back when those were still tolerable (ie, late 90's). So, where did I get it? I wish I could find the exact name, but it was a comedian I saw on a stand-up comedy show in the very early 1990's. He was on this show quite a bit, and the show also repeated quite a bit; in particular I remember seeing the routine that had this line in the summer of 1991, sitting in the townhouse of the girl I was love with, while she pined for someone else, and my then-current psycho girlfriend was barging in uninvited to see what I was doing (just another day in my life, then). Maybe it was the extra drama of it all, but I thought his routine was hilarious: it was him wondering, "what would life be like if the world was made of Nerf? You could jump out the window on a day when your stocks are doing well!" And so forth. And one of the lines: "this is your captain speaking...we've lost power to both engines, our electrical systems are on back-up and fading fast--so sit back, relax, and enjoy the crash."
  
  So it was a joke. But it seems profound, really. First off, if your plane really was crashing, why not enjoy it? People pay good money to experience weightlessness by jumping out of airplanes; your experience is coming for free with your ticket. Besides, you're about to die. You might as well unbuckle and do some mid-air summersaults. Because when are you going to get the chance again? But even on the ground, if the inevitable is about to happen, and there's nothing one can do to change it, maybe it is best to make the best of it. I don't think I've ever really done that. But it seems a worthy goal.

• What a gulf between impression and expression. That’s our ironic fate-–to have Shakespearean feelings and (unless by some billion-to-one chance we happen to be Shakespeare) to talk about them like automobile salesman or teen-agers or college professors. We practice alchemy in reverse–-touch gold and it turns into lead; touch the pure lyrics of experience, and they turn into the verbal equivalents of tripe and hogwash.
  
  I had this quote for years, years, and more years on the home page of my proto-blog lig.org (back when it was a geocities page even). It's spoken by a character in Aldoux Huxley's 1955 novel The Genius and the Goddess. I read it in 1998 while sitting in a furniture-less one bedroom apartment in Newark Delaware, with nothing but a borrowed PC and a lot of hope for the future, and I liked that quote so much I wrote it down right away and put it online later that night. It seemed like a funny and insightful statement that perfectly summarizes any writer's frustration. It also is a typical Huxlian observation that is the one thing I most admire about his writing. (I was going through a Huxley phase, then, I guess.) I occasionally see it quoted around the internet today, so I'm clearly not alone in thinking it's great.

• So much for the New York Times.
  
  I just read this one in the past few years, while reading about the life of Robert Goddard. It's impossible to live in this part of Maryland and not know who he is, so I thought I should know more about him than just his moniker as "the father of modern rocketry." I won't repeat the anecdote of how he came to say this, since it's well documented elsewhere; but the resulting quote sums up how I feel about pretty much anything that's revered as authoritative. Substitute the name of the newspaper with anything--an ivy league school, a government agency, a nobel laureate, a financial wizard, a guy ranting into his blog. That's about how it goes. All the more reason, then, to never apologize, never explain.
  

It's such bad form to quote one's self, not only once, but twice; but this whole thing is an exercise in self-indulgence, right?

• Who pays the rent?
  
  I probably can't really take credit for this, anymore than someone who talks about the weather could take credit for saying "it's a beautiful day." It's just too common. Or is it? The phrase simply means: when all the yapping, scheming, planning, and bloviating is finished, and the pontificating is done, who, exactly, is stuck paying for it all? Because in the end, that is the only person whose opinion matters--or should. Most of my life has been spent paying for other people's brilliant ideas. If I'd asked this question decades ago, I'd like to think my life would be a lot different right now. Maybe not even involving me talking to myself in cyberspace on a Saturday night.

But enough about me; surely all both of you who read this blog have some good quotes you'd like to share, that provide brilliant insight into your psyches and skewed life-views--so let's hear it. Leave a comment below.

Did Cathy Ever Find the Perfect Swimsuit?

If you’re sad Cathy Guisewite is calling it quits, I can help you out by writing a "Cathy Generator." It will randomly choose from one of three subjects: weight, mother, or guys. The first three panels will have Cathy making a scrunchy face showing how frustrated she is with said subject, while she either talks to someone, or with the scenes narrated in a box at the bottom. The last panel will have her looking guilty and eating a cookie while speaking in a thought balloon. To avoid copyright issues, I will feed the artwork with pencil drawings by schoolgirls from their notebooks; the style will be indistinguishable from the original.

I can program this in about 20 minutes and give it away as shareware, providing everyone with a lifetime of daily Cathy. Let me know.

The First Rule of Fight Club is to Praise the Lord

File this under Paintball for Jesus:

More Churches Promote Mixed Martial Arts to Reach Young Men

I've seen it all, and so this really doesn't surprise me. I wasn't even going to comment on it even though it would be easy to go on a whole rant about the endless ridiculousness of the need of some people to "Christianize" every single recreational activity on earth "For the Glory of the LORD" (the gay community likes to have their own version of everything too, I've noticed, so see, there is common ground between them). But I don't really care. At least, I didn't, until I got to this part:

“The man should be the overall leader of the household,” said Ryan Dobson, 39, a pastor and fan of mixed martial arts who is the son of James C. Dobson, the founder of Focus on the Family, a prominent evangelical group. “We’ve raised a generation of little boys.”

Ah, Ryan Dobson, son of that great patriarch and paragon of perfect parenting, Dr. James Dobson. The one who advocates smacking your kid around if he misbehaves. What a surprise, he raised a child who now enjoys the raw violence of MMA and has no use for girly men in his pews. Praise Jesus!

But again, that's not my issue--James Dobson and his family can enjoy whatever they want, as far as I'm concerned. My issue is that they don't extend to me the same courtesy of allowing me to enjoy whatever I want. I went into this in detail in an earlier post, but to summarize: Focus on the Family has a lobbying unit dedicated to ensuring internet gambling (including poker) is made illegal in the US. They cite studies, indicating that people with access to gambling opportunities are more likely to ruin their lives by becoming addicted. However, we all know the real reason they are working hard to make it illegal is they just don't like gambling.

But apparently they do like fighting. So perhaps they imagine if they don't put the full force of the law down on us poker degens, we'll spend our nights in front of our computers playing that wimpy godless game, no doubt turning more effete by the minute. Take that away, and, to fill the void, we'll soon be showing up at MMA Night at Bethel Evangelical Church for an evening of praise, worship, and ASS KICKING--the way God intended us to glorify Him.

Afterwards, bloodied and nursing broken bones, we'll go home and lead our families like the real men God intended us to be--spanking our kids for being "strong-willed" and teaching them that God's will for our lives is to impose OUR will on others--our children first, then our neighbors and our nation, taking away any recreational activity we find distasteful, while actively promoting anything we enjoy as unto The Glory of God.

Really, maybe I'm going about this all wrong. Maybe I just need to join the fun. "Poker Players for Jesus," anyone? As an added promotion, we'll offer betting lines on the outcomes of Christian MMA events, and pledge a tithe of the vig to Focus on the Family, to keep them going strong in keeping men on the straight and narrow path of righteous controlled rage.

Will You Be My Unfriend?

I’ve had an off-again, on-again relationship with Facebook. I first opened an account in 2007, then closed it for a while, then re-opened it, at which time I used it to give real-time updates from my father’s death bed, before closing it again because I got tired of hearing people’s Obamagasms (sorry, but at that moment in my life I just couldn’t feel like all would suddenly be right with the world just because some politician won an election—though I’m sure if challenged, some of his followers would have claimed he could raise my father from the dead).

And that was that, I thought, until this summer when some of my friends became interested in poker—a passion of mine for the last 18 months. They wanted to wade in gently, so they started with that gawd-awful Zynga Facebook app. I felt I should do my best to join in, so I first tried to use it thru Yahoo. But when that didn’t work, I swallowed the pill and re-opened my Facebook account. All so I could encourage my friends to follow me into a lifestyle of degenerate gambling.

When I re-opened it, everything was as before—I was still part of the Laszlo Systems network (which I started—it took three emails to Facebook to get them to set it up). The same old list of “friends” was there too—I use that term in quotes, because some were friends, some were co-workers, some were people who I went to highschool with but I couldn’t have told you who they were, and of course some were family. It was a bizarre intersection of people, from the very intimate to the nearly random, all from different times and walks of my life. I never cared for the strangeness and artificality of it.

So I decided on re-opening the account it was time to stop allowing anyone and everyone to just “be my friend.” I made the harsh decision to nuke my list down to a bare few, who represented people I genuinely cared deeply about—not aquaintances or someone who graduated from school the same year as me, but people I actually bonded with in some capacity outside in the real world. Most of the people who got axed were co-workers (not surprisingly, a lot of them the same ones filling my wall the year before with their Jon-Stewart-inspired O’gasims). I kept a few colleagues though—the few that I respected as something other than colleagues. They were people I’d met thru work, but I considered them friends—people I’d gladly meet outside of work to share a drink and catch up on life, any time.

One of the co-workers who made the cut was a guy on my team four jobs ago—about five years. The last two years of that job were farily horrible, to be sure. It’s a story in itself, but suffice to say, not one thing went right. After two years of struggling to finish an ambitious project, it was declaired a failure, the plug was pulled, I was fired, and eventually, so was everyone else. It was my first (and so-far) only professional failure.

What makes it particularly painful was I was at least partly reponsible. Although I didn’t start out being in charge, through a series of unfortunate events, I one day wound up running the show. I did this without actually gaining any position, of course—all the responsibility, none of the authority (and none of the priviledge—it’s not like I got a raise or a promotion).

In the midst of this tornado of bullcrap, there were two people I worked with I could trust. The person to whom this blog post is dedicated was one of them. We’ll call him Mr. B. Mr. B’s teamamtes were useless, shiftless, gormless, hacks. They were tempermental, gossipy, and spent plenty of time fighting with each other. In-between, they busied themselves bloviating into Yahoo stock message boards or staring into space or whining about how they had no idea how to do their job until I eventually hired a contractor to do it for them.

But Mr. B wasn’t like that. He was trustworthy. He was also pleasant to be around. He had, what I’d describe as, a “calm mind.” On a team of children, he was the adult. He was young, but he had tremendous potential to go very far. I greatly enjoyed his company; we spent plenty of time eating out, talking about a lot of things about life. He even once invited me to his house for dinner with his family—a real kindness I never forgot, because at that point I had been away from home eating out of boxes for months (did I mention this job was in another state? Just to add to the malaise.)

Mr. B and I certainly had our differences in opinion on how work should proceed. He had his preferred solution and expressed his desire to use his technology of choice every chance he got. I came up with arguments galore on why my way was better. In reality, I only half-believed what I said. I was really carrying a banner for someone else, my former boss, who had very strong ideas about how work should always be done. Before I was sent on my way to join this project of doom, he convinced me that I should follow in his strong-armed ways, believing he knew the management well enough that it was the right approach. I gave him my word and preached his gospel in his absence.

Unfortunately in the end my former boss was about as wrong as could be. But what did it matter to him--he no longer worked there. I was left holding the bag. Mr B. actually had the right idea all along, as it turned out. If I had to do it all over again, I wouldn’t. I could have had a few years of doing basically nothing, and Mr. B could have done things his way. We'd probably all still would have gotten fired when we did, but at least we'd have been less stressed.

Those two years were definitely the beginning of the end for me and my brain. Although it took two more years to completely lose my mind and wind up in a Dr’s office begging him to write me a note to let me take a year off (he opted instead to pump me full of seretonin reuptake inhibitors) in retrospect I can clearly see that the seeds of my mental destruction were taking root then.

A lot's changed in me since then. Five years later, I no longer care. I’ve lost all professional motivation. I would never again step in to fill a void and try to right a sinking ship. It simply doesn’t matter. While that project may have been my only one to fail, it’s not as if all the others that I slaved over are still in use—if the system itself hasn’t long been replaced, the entire company I wrote it for is gone. (Only three of my former employers still exist, all of them from the last decade, and I fully expect one of them to go nips-skyward any day.) It's taken me a long time, but I finally figured this out: if a deadline is missed, the sun rises anyway. And if I meet the deadline, it’s not as if my wallet bloats to dangerous proportions (or, eh, at all). So why kill yourself? Just show up, do a job, go home, and have a life. (And sometime, I hope to figure out how not to have to do those first two.)

Things changed for Mr. B, too, though how much, I don’t know. It’d been on my agenda for a while to try to get some lunch and catch up; the best we managed was the occasional email or IM chat. I do know that he’d found a new job at a growing company, he’d been given increasing responsibility, and he was finally able to implement systems his way. His career was moving up, just as I knew it would, and I was happy for him. The only downside, apparently, was somewhere in the midst of this, his personal life took a turn for the worse, as his marriage ended. I never heard the story why, but he described it as “very painful.”

I suppose it may be that the seeds of his marriage’s end were sown during that same project where the seeds of my mental demise were sown. I don’t know. But it might explain how the story gets to today:

A few months ago, happily emeshed in my newly pared Facebook list, I began enjoying ‘being me’ a bit more than before, posting snarky status updates, and making snarky comments on the walls of my friends. (No one gets more snark than my cousin Bill, but, it’s not like he doesn’t ask for it with his 200+ postings an hour.) Along the way I made a comment or two on Mr. B’s stream.

The first went something like this: he posted a status to the effect, “sigh, another 12-hour work day.” I responded, “hey, how comes I never got those kind of hours out of you when you worked for me?-)” That was a joke, in case anyone missed it.

Sometime later, he made some comment about where he was heading for dinner. I don’t even remember what he said—it might have had to do with him saying he was training for a 10K, and now he was off to The Cheesecake Factory. I probably said something like, “aren’t those mutually exclusive?” That was a joke, too, in case it wasn’t clear.

Apparently it wasn’t. I noticed he deleted the comments. Then I noticed he deleted me. I was taken aback a little, but, I could hardly get indignant—how many people had I deleted? I just assumed that maybe my brand of snark didn't work with the nature of his current FB list. Who knew what his Facebook was all about by then? I’d friended him a year earlier, disappeared for nearly a year, then popped back on out of the blue as if nothing happened. By then, maybe his list was full of women he was trying to date, or co-workers he was trying to impress, or members of some 12-step program he went to that he had to keep accountable to. Who knows. It occurred to me that maybe my comments were thus out of place. A note explaining as much might have been nice, but I let it go and forgot about it.

Until last week. I found myself on LinkedIn (my very first social networking site! I joined when I got fired from that job in 2005) responding to a request to connect from a contractor I’d hired on that very same project from hell (you know, to do someone else’s job because they just couldn't stop whining about how they didn't know what to dooooooo). Seeing that contractor's name reminded me of that project, and that reminded me of Mr. B. So I looked up his profile, and noticed in his status he said he was hiring.

I’m not looking for a job, but I know a few people who are, so I sent him a quick note:

From: Trebor Fenstermaker
Date: January 14, 2010
To: Mr. B
Status: Sent

What skills were you looking for for your [opening]? I do know someone...

BTW don't think I didn't notice you unfriended me from FB ;) We'll just keep it professional.

I figured that was innocuous enough. Boy, was I wrong.

From: Mr. B
Date: January 15, 2010
To: Trebor Fenstermaker
Status: Replied

The full job description is posted at [our website].

I assumed you would notice, but have you considered why?

Oh Lord. What are we in, Jr high? I should have let it go there, but, I couldn’t believe this was the same guy that I’d worked with, so I played along:

From: Trebor Fenstermaker
Date: January 15, 2010
To: Mr. B.
Status: Sent

Um, no, I hadn't thought about it too much, though I did wonder if I'd somehow offended you. But I have no idea how I could have since we never actually talk :) I just assumed you were shifting the focus of your facebook contacts; I did the same thing when I re-opened the account after a year, trying to keep my list smaller with closer friends and family.

Still, the thought crossed my mind you woke up one day and realized the two years you worked with me were the worst of your career, which I could definitely understand causing latent hostility ;)

Apparently, I was on the money:

From: Mr. B
Date: January 15, 2010
To: Trebor Fenstermaker
Status: Replied

There's no latent hostility, though you are absolutely correct that those 2 years were the worst of my professional career, and the first (and so far only) failure I've been a part of.

Frankly, you commented on my Facebook status updates twice in September, and both comments were rather "unfriendly".

To answer your first comment, yes, I frequently work 12+ hour days at [my current job]. It's amazing how much more motivated a person is when their work environment is positive, respectful, and encouraging, and when their recommendations are fairly evaluated and their contributions fairly rewarded. The [project from hell] at [our last company] was a complete failure, and while I certainly participated in the project, I don't accept responsibility for the flawed architecture, poor process, and extremely poor executive decisions (among other things).

While I have moved on with my life and achieved a fair amount of success and professional development since then (as I'm sure you have), you'll have to excuse me for being unwilling to endure any further criticism regarding my days at [our last company].

Your second comment regarding my choice of restaurants just reinforced my feeling that I'd rather not have a string of negative comments filtering out to all of my personal and professional contacts.

I won't try to claim that it's "nothing personal" as that would clearly be a blatant lie. But at the same time, I'm not mad, nor do I have any particularly negative feelings about you. I just didn't want your negative feelings towards me to be quite so visible to those I care about.

Apparently I was right about Jr. High, too, as this is the sort of nonsense we did as kids. He clearly had a chip on his shoulder and felt the need to “ignore” me, hoping I’d notice, so he could tell me how much he hated me for having made fun of him in homeroom in front of Suzie Weismuller who he TOTALLY knows that **I** know he’s COMPLETELY crushing on blah blah blah.
I was more reflective in my response, I think:

From:Trebor Fenstermaker
Date:January 15, 2010
To: Mr. B.
Status: Sent

Well, I am sorry you were offended by what was nothing more than good-natured ribbing (perhaps I forgot the smilies to make that clear). It's something I do to everyone on FB. I suspect the issue has more to do with your feelings about that time than anything in particular that I said; which is fine, I certainly understand that.

Good luck to you.

I really do understand feeling angry about a time of one's life. God knows, I have entire decades I’m angry about. There are probably people from my past who I think very lowly of and resent, who, if they were to contact me today, might be surprised to learn that all was not well between us. I hope that’s not true—I hope the few people I truly despise for the way they treated me in my career, know full well that if I ever see them again, it probably won’t end well for their testicles. But maybe not.

Because after-all, our perception of the past changes as we grow. I myself felt increasing anger at my parents, after I had kids of my own and started raising them. I’d think about how my parents handled certain situations, and how I was handling them, and think, “WHAT THE EFF? YOU COULDN’T HAVE BEEN THIS UNDERSTANDING OF ME WHILE I WAS GOING THRU THIS AS A KID?” I'm sure my dad (the only remaining parent at that time) wouldn't have appreciated me showing up on his door ranting about something he did in 1973; how was he to know I was stuck in the past, reliving it as if it was today?

Perhaps Mr. B, now that he’s found his professional space where he’s doing just what he wants and gains respect for it, realizes by way of contrast that he felt small and useless in those two years. Maybe he blames me, since it was me that mostly overruled him and his ideas. I thought I did it professionally and with no ill-will, but people remember what they want to remember and believe what they want to believe.

Take Mr. B’s seemingly altrustic statement that he’s sure I’ve found career success. If he knew me, he’d know, I have had anything but. Perhaps he imagines me ruling some hapless team of spinless programmers with an iron fist, drumming into their heads my ideas at the expense of their own career satisfaction. And that this somehow makes me happy and wealthy. (Instead I sit in a cube and wonder if I really will be doing this until I die. But you knew that already.)

Regardless. If his goal was to change my perception of him from being an extremely capable and talented software engineer with a compassionate personality that was a pleasure to be around, into a whiny snivling self-absorbed child in need of counseling and medication, he succeeded. I was very proud to say I worked with him and was looking forward to someday getting that lunch with him and catching up on his life. Now I’m embarrased I ever had the guy in my contact list and am half worried in his fit of piques he sticks pins in a voodoo doll shaped like me.

I didn’t of course come to that conclusion the instant I got his email. First, I did some soul-searching. I pleaded with my remaining Facebook friends to let me know if my sarcasim was too much for them (they responded that they were offended by the lack of sarcasim in that question). I chatted about it with some close friends in email, one of whom shared a similar experience he’d had with an old co-worker, saying he’d come to the same conclusion—that the specifics don’t matter; it’s all just such a bad memory, that any bond you once had is lost in a morass of hate and bitterness over time wasted in a dead-end job. You might remember the co-worker as a friend; he just remembers you as part of the whole horrible ordeal.

I deleted Mr. B from my LinkedIn account. I did it as an act of compassion at first. I figured if he was that irked by my comments, just seeing my name must take him back to an increasingly unhappy time of his life. Perhaps his marriage started to falter there, maybe even because of the stress of work. I don' t know.

Of course, that was Friday. Today is Sunday. By now, my compassion has turned to disgust. Now I'm glad I deleted him since clearly I never want to hear from him again and certainly don’t want to be associated with him. After a few days of this nonsense sucking up more brainpower than it ever deserved, I now feel betrayed and hurt, and maybe a little stupid for clearly having the wrong perception of him all these years. Every time a friendship is betrayed a little bit more of a person dies; they become a little bit colder. That’s all I needed, especially these days.

But sometimes the past just can’t be fixed, either. He was just a co-worker, one of probably hundreds from the last 20 years, in a career that has been nothing but a giant waste of my time. With luck, by this time next week, this too, will mean as much to me as, say, a two-year-long project failing on my watch. That is to say, nothing.

If I were a Rich Man, Pt 2

I never did provide part II of that earlier entry on what I would do if I ever became beyond rich. One of the things at the top of the list: fully fund an aggressive, Manhattan-project style research effort to make teleportation a reality. Really, does anything ruin a vacation more than the stress of having to fly to get back home? Roaring through the air at 500+ mph is great, and beats driving at 1/10 that speed. But when I get in my car, the only set of inane rules I need to worry about are the ones documented the in driver's handbook we all read when we were 16. And, in fact, those rules aren't innane--they're actually mostly sensible laws designed to protect us from others (except seat belt laws; the insurance industry does get to write a few of their own I guess). About the most you have to worry about is making sure you're not the fastest person on the road, or that that large Crown Victoria behind you is being driving by anyone other than a 90 year old.

Contrast that to what you have to remember when flying: unbendable, arbitrary, and constantly changing rules set by multiple different entities, most of whom do nothing to work with each other. First the airline has endlessly complex rules about how soon you have to check your bag; what you can and can't pack and bring on board with you; what you can and can't do based on what kind of ticket you bought; what kind of seat you can sit in (it's not as simple as first-class/economy any more--you can be charged more to sit in certain seats IN economy, and every airline--and sometimes every airline's plane--is different). If you need to change or fix something, each fix results in more money flying out of your wallet--so there's a careful resource-balancing game you have to play to maximize your comfort while minimizing your financial outlay. In the real world people would spend weeks writing PERT charts to determine this but you have to do it while also dealing with...

...the TSA, who invent rules by the hour, all designed to--well, heck if I know. The latest arbitrary rules are designed to keep passengers from igniting their underpants during the last hour of the flight. But true to form, I'm not even sure at the moment if those rules apply to domestic-only flights. I guess that's the idea--keep me, the potential terrorist, guessing. Except I'm not a potential terrorist--I'm the friggin customer. Anyway, running afoul of these rules can result in, at best, missing your flight, causing you to have to resort to the airline's unbending rules (see item above), or at worst, a criminal record. No pressure there to get it right your first try, no sir.

And finally there's everyone else involved. Each airport has its own kabuki dance to follow--where you can pull up, how easy-going they are about standing while unloading, whether there's curbside check-in, how close things are to each other and how easy it is to get around vs walking for miles or waiting for some infrequent people-mover (or, like Dulles, a bizarre "mobile lounge"). Better factor in all that if you want to know how many hundreds of hours beforehand to show up.

As a special treat, unless you cabbed it around, you probably rented a car. Someday I'll write an entire rambling essay on the rental car experience. Aside from being the most taxed item in the US (I can probably provide proof of this), it, too, is designed for maximum dollar extraction by the rental agency. The scam of wanting to charge me--this is not an exaggeration--$6.99 a gallon for gas if I don't return the car full requires I stop and fill the tank just before returning the car. Strangely, most airports have a dearth of gas stations near them, so be sure to add 20 minutes to drive around looking for one, unless you enjoy the stress of getting lost looking for an Exxon while trying to catch a flight. In addition, more and more airports are building "consolidated rental car facilities," which is a bond-issuable way of saying "for your convenience, we moved all the car rental counters out of the terminal and into a building 10 miles away to which we provide bus service every 15 minutes." Even that, however, is preferable to the particular nightmare I've experienced here in San Diego, where all the "on-site" airport rental agencies are scattered in a five-mile radius far away from the terminal, each providing their own shuttle service that runs on their own schedules--and since each is in a different place (no different than any other business) there isn't even a helpful sign that says "rental car returns." Be sure to have the exact address of your rental agency programmed into your GPS and add 40 more minutes, to get there, wait for someone to inspect your car, give you your paperwork, and then, you know, eventually drive you to the airport.

So yeah, whew, all that so you can race home 8 miles in the air. It is truly amazing to me how something that was designed to be fast and convenient has had just about every conceivable restriction put on it to make it anything but. That's a sure sign that the technology hasn't kept pace with our needs. So look for that research foundation of mine to someday take shape so we can beam ourselves to warmer weather, while simultaneously putting out of business a dozen industries and government agencies. I'd say that the kind of shake-up we need next. Until then, I look forward to having every ounce of relaxation of this vacation obliterated as I navigate the morass of all that all so I can jet home to 20 degree weather and a Monday morning at my desk at work.

Interview Tip No 73: Bring Your Binky

Among the many, many reasons I hate what I do for a living is the fact that I often have to brush against an endless stream of smug children who have accomplished nothing, yet believe my profession began the day they decided to turn on a computer. Here's a prime example: in a recent article in the Wall Street Journal and linked on Yahoo!'s front page, on the growing acceptance of heads of state wearing blue jeans to international gatherings, there's a quote from someone named Andrew Dumont, the Vice President of Marketing at a bulk text-messaging service called Tatango.

"When someone shows up to an interview or meeting in anything other than jeans, it shows inexperience and a lack of confidence."

So let me get this straight: if I walked into the worldwide headquarters of this burgeoning, soon-to-be-worth bazillions (this is snark, by the way) start-up wearing khakis, it would be obvious to this genius from the get-go that, what, I'm lying that I've been doing this crap for twenty years? Wow, Andrew must have a wealth of experience to be so laser-like in his judegements; at least as many years under his belt as Steve Jobs, who helped start this notion that smart people only wear denim. So let's check out Andrew's LinkedIn profile and see what game-changing technologies he's brought the world:

Andrew Dumont’s Experience

Take your time reading that hefty document. He's been "Vice President" for two years; before that, he was grinding it out as a candidate in an intense, competitive management training program customer service representative answering the phones at Horizon Bank. But not to worry, even though he's only 21 years old, he's still working on that degree from Western Washington University in Psychology and Marketing.

Well, I guess with a CV like that, he's got the goods to know on sight whether you'd know which set of cheeks were higher than the other based just on what you were using to cover them. And maybe he's on to something, seeing as the customers that were big enough tools to endorse his product almost all appear to be young, and wearing suits in these headshots. Clearly it helps to be inexperienced and have a lack of confidence to pony up your organization's money for what sounds like little more than an SMS version of LISTSERV.

Interesting that LISTSERV technology has been around for about as long as I've been putting food on my table doing this stuff. It's interesting too, that that's about as long as Andrew has been alive. To think that when I put on my new suit to go to my first interview, Andrew was having someone put on a new diaper.

Yes, I am being particularly rude here, but that's only because I have had my share of sitting across the table in interviews with 21-year-old "Senior Architects" who have dismissed me as "needing more experience." I can only hope that as these people plod along (assuming they're still in this field, and haven't gone back to bussing tables) they'll spend an hour of their life talking to someone like Andrew, who will already have written them off because they clearly didn't have the experience to know that you should dress like a child.

Happy No Mail or Banking Day!

Ah, Columbus Day. I don't really know what the point of this holiday is, but when I worked for a bank, I appreciated having off a random day in October. Of course, that just means I'm an imperialist patriarchial opressor, since this most inane of days has to spark controversy amongs the chattering classes like no other.

For example, on Facebook, there was a posting on the Smithsonian's page:

Smithsonian Institution When Columbus first landed in the Caribbean more than 500 years ago, he was setting foot on a continent that had been inhabited for thousands of years by people who built thriving cultures and societies. Explore some of the artifacts, artwork and photos of the descendants of the first Americans in the National Museum of the American Indian’s online collection gallery

This is a fine thing to mention, I suppose, since there's more than one side to any story, and that's a good story to learn. But of course, such posts also inspire instant quantities of assholier-than-thou yapping; opined a Facebook user named Amber Rush:

I'm truly shocked that there are still so many defenders of Columbus out there. Columbus was a nut, even Isabella and Fernando threw his ass in jail because they realized too late their mistake in sending an ego-maniacal madman to the "New World" on their behalf. The only thing Columbus cared about was gold and furthermore, he never even set foot on the North American continent, yet our government has seen fit to dedicate a national holiday to this dubious character. My nine year old daughter put it best when she said that we should focus on celebrating real heroes in our country like Martin Luther King. The holiday honoring him is much more valid and based in meaningful reality.

Well Amber, you're onto something here, clearly. I am now appalled that a liberal-minded institution like the Smithsonian would even have its headquarters in a city thoughtlessly named after such a tyrant. It's time to fight back and demand the District of Columbia change its name. All those other Columbias, too, including my favorite, Columbia Maryland (a progressive community--HAH!) So too should we change the name of the capitol of Ohio, Columbus. And all those other cities named Columbus, in Georgia, Indiana, Mississippi, and Wisconsin.

Let's not just cleanse our own fair borders, though--the Canadians heap shame on themselves with a province named British Columbia--a double whammy of Imperial aggrandizing! And the entire country of Columbia...WHAT WERE THEY THINKING?

Indeed I just noticed I'm wearing a shirt from the Columbia sportswear company. I'm going to immediately tear it off and donate the scraps to some victim of life.

Yes, this day is absolutely not worthy to honor that tyrant and rapist. But--it's only one federal holiday out of many. Veterans Day: glorifying the sacrifice of life for the needs of the state. Thanksgiving: perpetrating that myth of a coming together of Indians and Pilgrims (when we all know what those imperialist bigots really thought of the natives), celebrated today as an act of over-eating--do we care NOTHING of the obesity epidemic? Washington's Birthday: a day honoring a slaveholder?!? (Don't be fooled by that attempt at bowdlerizing the holiday with that cutesy "President's Day," its official name is "Washington's Birthday.") And dear God, don't even get started on the hegemony practiced by the state when it recognizes that white male Christian patriarchal holiday in December!!!

It's time to cleans our maps and our calendars of this thoughtlessness and press forward to a brave new future--preferrably one without any holidays for government workers, who hardly need an official excuse to do nothing. In fact, that's pretty much what I pointed out in my response to Amber Rush on that Facebook thread:

Here's a point for all of you: if it wasn't for this holiday celebrating this "insidious man" you'd have to actually be at work today instead of bloviating into Facebook. God bless the Federal Government that has to find ten reasons a year to not do anything.

(By the way, Amber did respond: "It's great to have a day off but it should be for the right reasons." She then goes on to talk about the efforts of renaming it Indiginous People's Day. I'm still waiting to hear if she did the right thing and her holiday pay to that cause.)

Alright then, now that we're done talking about the truly useless that only the overfed and overeducated could care about, let's raise a glass to what today is truly important for: the birth of my oldest daughter. Happy 9 years on this ridiculous planet, baby!

These Are The People We Need To Impress

You know how you had to hear for eight years how, because we elected the 'wrong' person, we'd lost the respect of the world? And how all of a sudden one night in November we just got it all back because now we elected the 'right' person? And how important this all was?

Here's an article from one of those really important people:

http://www.dnaindia.com/lifestyle/report_no-roses-for-president-obama_1280552

Yes, this quasi-literate little fable (see if you can tell who's speaking when--I can't) that may or may not have actually happened, written by some chamber-of-commerce-ish flunkie who's quite proud of the fact his first-and-only trip to our country trip resulted in a "photo-op" out by the fence surrounding the White House, will make you hang your head in shame at our rampant ignorant provincialism.

Like all these more-brilliant-than-us-stoopid-Americans to whom we're all supposed to defer, he has a deeper-than-thou grasp of our intricate and complex domestic policies. In this case he read an article in his complimentary copy of US Today they shoved under his door at the Hilton, and now understands better than us exactly why it's incredibly necessary for our President to ram through, practically overnight, a healthcare bill that also happens to be one of the most complex pieces of government legislation written.

And even as our Brilliant World Traveller supposedly (yet I somehow doubt it) idly chats with one of those American Success stories--I think, if I understood him, the clerk he was talking to was of Indian descent--after listening to her concerns, he dismisses them as "So Republican." Since, of course, Republicans couldn't possibly have legitimate objections to this legislation. (I guess that means the Blue Dog Democrats who object to this as well are "so Republican". But maybe he's never heard of them, seeing as they may not have covered that in that article he read while sitting on the can the morning before his flight.) This poor girl, if only her parents (or their parents) hadn't immigrated to the US, she wouldn't be so ignorant.

Summing it all up for me is the statement he makes that Obama is the "hottest thing to have happened to America in a while." Because you see, all those brilliant people from other countries who are so much better traveled than we have their complete and deep-rooted knowledge of America fed to them by CNN or other made-for-TV-newscasts. A country of 300+ million people made up of immigrants and their children from every country on earth has nothing going on except their president, apparently, since that's what dominates their TV coverage of the states. Good to know--thanks for enlightening me.

I need to clearly align my thinking more with these more-brilliant-than-I citizens-of-the-world.

Get Lobbying Rustbelters!

eCousin Chris was recently bemoaning how despite the downturn in the economy and the healthcare "crisis," the only growth area seemed to be a proliferation of fast food eateries. Yet really, what else can one hope for in a place like Lebanon County, PA?

Well, maybe it's time for the small towns and dying brownfields of America to start thinking ahead. Funny Chris mentioned that "crisis" in heathcare. While the politicians debate the details, one underlying assumption seems to have been made without any comment: the federal government will, on a large scale, begin immersing itself deeply in healthcare within the next few years.

And therein lies the opportunity! A brand new, bloated, bursting-at-seams government agency is about to be born! Civil servants by the THOUSANDS will be hired to solve this "crisis" with the wisdom that can only come from central planning at the federal level. TENS of thousands more contractors will line up to do all the things these employees never seem to be able to do themselves. This thing will be at LEAST a hundred times bigger than Social Security in terms of its administrative overhead. And Social Security is huge (though just how huge I can't find at the moment, but if I manage to get an employee count--never mind contractors--I'll post it).

So if you're tired of seeing the only economic development in your faded town being the construction of new Burger Kings,call your congressman NOW and tell him you want the new Department of Homeland Health (or whatever it's going to be called) to be headquartered in your district. Your local economy will explode faster than the federal deficit.

Of course, all those hard-working functionaries will need someplace to eat, so you'll be thankful for that new BK in due time.

And So My Life Continues To Become History

I was just sitting at work today listening to Blossom Dearie's rendition of Wave and thinking, hey, I wonder if she's still performing. It'd been a while since I heard anything about her--in fact, the last time I heard her mentioned anywhere was in March 2008, when I caught the tail end of the movie My Life Without Me, when one of the characters is playing a CD of her in his car, explaining how she's this tiny, old woman with a little girl voice who still performs nearly every night in New York.

So I thought I'd look up how she's doing, and found myself reading the same old essay over at the All Media Guide that I'd read a few years ago--except this time I noticed they were discussing her in the past tense.

Blossom Dearie Dies at 84

Somehow in the rush of celebrity deaths this year, I missed one that I actually really care about. When I saw that she was gone--and had been for six months--I can't describe the depression I suddenly felt. I was still listening to her sing Wave in a slow, melancholy manner; and then it ended, the last track on the last album she ever recorded. I played it again, but had turn it off half-way through.

Many people my age may know her better for her work with the 1970's series Schoolhouse Rock; she sang one of my personal favorites, Unpack Your Adjectives (Conjunction Junction be dammed). I'm sure that's where I first heard of her, in fact. Despite growing up with that, I can't say I've been a huge Blossom Dearie fan my whole life, and in fact I never even had any of her music until recently, thanks to a CD collection of a friend that I'm borrowing while he's recuperating in an extended care facility. He has several of her titles, and a few even on vinyl. (Shortly after I got my hands on them, I played a few of the CD's for Jen on a long car ride, and she managed to make it through most of the second disc before deciding the rendition of I Hear Music was too fey and started mocking it--hardly the romantic heartbreaking scene from the aforementioned movie where the love interest shared his passion for this music with his dying lover, but, that's my life.)

So why is it so depressing to know she's gone? Because just six months ago she wasn't, and three years ago, I could have still bought a ticket to see her perform. But now I can't. And she's just one more person whose lifespan crossed mine, but who I never got to meet, or enjoy in person, despite the fact she lived only a few hundred miles from me. Were she the only one, maybe it wouldn't be so demoralizing. But more and more names from my youth slip away each year--in fact at this rate, it's practically every day. There are the politicians, like Gerry Ford, who I always said was the one politician I always wanted to meet. The closest I got to him was a few feet from his coffin as he lay in state in the Rotunda. There are the Watergate-era names, now nearly all gone, even Howard Hunt. There was my favorite blowhard commentator, William F. Buckley Jr who I enjoyed dissecting, parodying, and secretly admiring in many ways, back in college--well he died last year.

There are the other musicians, too. I almost went to see Jimmy Smith play in Annapolis back in 2000, but I couldn't get anyone to go with me. He died in 2005. I always thought it would be cool to see Billy Preston, too. He died in 2006.

Many more names from the radio of my youth have passed on in the last few years, too--Paul Davis, Laura Branigan, Robert Palmer, Dan Fogelberg, Maurice Gibb. I liked all their music, and they're gone. How depressing.

There's really not much left from my youth. My parents are both gone, and with them, whatever stories they had. I only heard a few. The things of my youth--old toys, and so forth--are being picked through and sorted and taken away, as I deal with the sad practical reality that I have to, you know, get rid of stuff.

Add to that the rush of recent celeb deaths--everyone from Karl Malden to Billy Mays--and what I also feel slipping away now is the culture that was around me, however vapid. It might not have been Shakespeare, but it was part of the substrate I lived in. In twenty years, no one will know who these people were, except me and my dying memories.

The movie Up was strangely depressing this way. The first ten minutes were a montage of a life of two people growing old together, before one of them dies. The rest of the movie is basically about how no one cares except the one who survived. This will be me someday. Maybe not now in my 40's, but maybe not as far into the future as I think, either. As the stuff around me disintegrates slowly and becomes the forgotten folderol of the first part of my life, it becomes more and more clear how little time I have left, really. Even if I have another 40 years, it's hard to imagine what I'm going to make much of a difference all of a sudden, if I haven't started by now.

Suddenly this small pile of Blossom Dearie CDs and albums has instantly transformed from something that made me smile and feel happy to just one more fading photograph that gives me vague pangs that I don't want to deal with. So now what do I listen to to get me through the day?

If I Were a Rich Man, Pt 1

What's a space in the electronic bloviationsphere without some blather about the passing of Michael Jackson? I learned of the news around 6p ET the day of, by listening to....can you guess? The BBC World Service. At the time, they hadn't confirmed he'd died, only that he'd been "rushed to hospital." (As a side note, will someone who speaks with RP please explain the aversion to using an article before the noun "hospital?")

TWENTY FOUR HOURS LATER, at 6p the next night, they were still "banging on" about it, admitting they were getting nasty emails from the world 'round asking why they didn't leave such "tosh" to the "tabloids," but pressing on with coverage anyway. It was interesting to them, because it was interesting to the world. It was clear he was bigger overseas these days than he was in the US (which explains why he was going to have his "comeback tour" entirely in London).

This being the BBC, not all was interview with weepy fans in Kuala Lumpur or breathless retrospectives from music journalists: they also interviewed a reporter from the Wall Street Journal, who discussed the fact that, just a few months ago, they'd run an article estimating that Jackson was nearly a half-billion dollars in debt. This was hardly news, to me anyway. But it reminded me once again of a conversation I'd had with my personal trainer a few years ago.

Somehow the topic of Michael Jackson came up, and the fact he was broke. My trainer said he doubted this was true, since he owned the publishing rights to the Beatles. I explained that he'd long ago mortgaged the future royalties from that and spent the money. But on what? he wondered. This led me to conclude with a thought that, quite honestly, has run through my mind at least once a week since:

If I ever become very rich, I will NOT spend the money buying a giraffe.

I've met people who have said, "I wouldn't want to be rich." They relate stories of people--sometimes very sensible people--who strike it big, and suddenly can't stop spending. From lottery winners to dot-commers, there's a notion that people who suddenly win big become untethered from reality and begin a spiral of endless consumption that, in the end, consumes them.

Every time I hear someone say this, I say: there is no rule that says if you get rich, you need to spend it on your own in-house bowling alley, a fleet of Italian cars, and other nonsense. There is a great deal of need in this world. You could fund research into rare diseases that no one cares about because they only kill a few people a year. Or you could help fund better police services in Bulgaria to help stop the sex slave trade that openly occurs there. Or give help to Romania's orphans. In fact half these things I learned just by listening to the BBC World Service (which normally isn't talking about pop stars).

So just what would I do if I had a big nut in desperate need of sheltering from communist wealth-redistribution inheritance taxes? Well first, here are a few things I would NOT spend money on, that many people who want to "do good" always seem drawn to:

1. Scholarships or educational endowments
I'm sorry, but too many people already go to too many crappy colleges to learn too little. Schools are little more than cubicle-fodder producers, and most of the people who go to college don't come out educated about much of anything. I see no reason to perpetuate the disease.

2. Political action committees
Even though there's a need for my voice to be heard politically, and it would be tempting to amplify it with the best loudspeaker in America (cash), I'd rather certain other money-sinks in politics refocus their efforts. Rather than me starting yet another thinktank/PAC/whatever, I'd rather work with certain failed political organizations in making them reinvent themselves into something useful.

3. Social programs
What is the point of this, when some liberal think-tank will just come along and mandate the government do it? If you ever wondered why churches no longer run non-profit hospitals, you might well look at the history of government "mandates" in healthcare in the last 30 years. Or, if that's too obtuse, just look at the number of programs the Ford Foundation started that got co-opted by the Great Society. I could never stick future generations with my half-baked ideas that worked OK when it was some rich guy giving away his money but that now require half the yearly budget to run.

4. Religious work
Sorry my Christian friends. The longer I live, the more I see churches and most of their "works" as a giant waste of money. This particularly rankles me when they get involved in politics--like all the churches here in Maryland that fought legalizing slots. All I could think, every time I heard The Reverend Bigmouth of the First Church of Up Your Tush ranting, was, "hey, why not do your part to alleviate our state's fiscal crisis, and PAY PROPERTY TAX."

So just what I would do with my mythical millions? Well let me sleep on it (because it's only by sleeping hard that I'll get rich!) and post later.

Let's Muscle!

Hey kids, check out this great new game from Namco available now for your Wii!

Just in time for a certain Middle School principal to enjoy on his release!

The People's Republic of Maryland

There's a reason I call it The People's Republic of Maryland, and now, here are the data to back it up: a study by the Mercatus Center of George Mason University ranks Maryland as the fifth-least-free state in the union. By "free" they mean "libertarian," and that concept is completely null here. It's a pure nanny state, and my thoughts, concerns, and requests are largely irrelevant. The politicians run this state, and pay virtually no attention to their constituents, judging my the general lack of response I get to my letters at all levels of government. I really don't know why I live here, except I can't think of another place to live at the moment.

Anyway, here's the report's summary of our Glorious Republic:

Maryland is the fifth least free state in the country. The state is 34th in economic freedom but a distant 50th in personal freedom. Maryland’s impositions on personal freedom include the second-strictest gun laws in the country, and marijuana laws are fairly harsh (except that the first offense of high-level possession is a misdemeanor, and there is a weak medical marijuana law), motorists’ freedoms are highly restricted, gambling laws are tight, home schooling laws are burdensome (curricula must be approved by the government), centralized land-use planning is very advanced, eminent domain abuse is totally unreformed, victimless crimes arrest rates are high, and civil unions are not recognized. On the plus side, taxes on beer, wine, and spirits are fairly low, and overall Maryland has one of the least restrictive alcohol control systems in the country. Surprisingly, the state has not enacted complete smoking bans yet. On economic regulation, the state has the usual left-of center failings on labor law, but more strikingly it has the second-most health insurance mandates in the country (they add 67 percent to the cost).

It is true you can buy fairly cheap booze here. Having grown up in PA, which has arcane and unintuitive beer distribution laws and a state-run communist-era retail network (yes, the clerk standing behind the desk at the "Wine and Spirit Shoppe" is a full-blown employee of the Commonwealth), I find it nice to be able to buy beer and wine in whatever form I want, from a variety of competing of businesses. I still can't buy wine thru the mail, though, and some counties, like Montgomery, have a government-run monopoly on the distribution to the retailers and restaurants. But let's not forget how Marlyand earned its nickname The Free State. Ironic, isn't it?

Anyway read the report yourself and see where your state ranks. I'll bet it's not as low as this place.

Teaching my Children to Divide

I was enjoying a typical disjointed dinner with my family this evening--half of them had already left the room--when my six year old said, "Daddy am I from Europe?" I said, "uh, you're from Silver Spring, Maryland." She responded, "my kindergarden teacher said white people like me are from Europe."

Well, good thing I was on a diet anyway, since I lost what little was left of my appetite. When Jen returned to the room I said, "hey, Jen, did you know our daughter is from Europe?" At which point my daughter reiterated what she'd learned today.

Jen paused a moment, but then, ever the good liberal taught never to question the wisdom of The State, responded "well, it's true." I said, "oh? What color are the people who live in Russia?" She gave me her typical smirk that said she knew I was right, which of course means nothing, since she always has an answer to show that I'm not: in this case, after recovering her composure, she said, "half of them look Asian." Oh, uh, OK.

I responded, "well I don't have any ties to Europe--do you?" knowing she didn't. Still not wanting to agree with me, she said, "my parents were half-Irish half-English" or somesuch. Except she was adopted, as was I, so neither of us have any idea what particular European country we might or might not have descended from--maybe we're Russian. Since we don't know, our kids will never know either.

There's a simple solution to all this, and it's what I explained to my daughter: I prefer to think of myself as an American. I said the idea she's "from Europe" is an attempt to define her racially, which I dislike. However I'm pretty sure what I said had no gravitas, since I'm just a parent, one who was told by his mother-in-law eight years ago that me and my wife were unfit to homeschool our children and was pleased as punch when we didn't and instead sent them to public school.

In case you're wondering, that public school is in Prince George's County, which is majority black. My daughter is just about the only white person in her class. I normally wouldn't bother with this detail as, quite frankly, I consider it irrelevant. But apparently this school is very interested in instilling a sense of racial identity at a very young age. I am trying to imagine what people would think if a black six-year-old in a majority white county who was the only one of his kind in his class was told by his white teacher where he came from.

Always Looking Out For ME

Thanks, Focus on the Family, for using my government to save me from myself.

Really, now, someone please explain to me the difference between this organization, and, say, a group called ZAP telling Los Angelians they can't use leaf blowers.

[Update]

Let me expand some on my irritation with Focus on the Family. I guess I'm not really sure what they are trying to do. They seem very unconcerned with the "conditions of men's souls" and more concerned with how we all behave--that is, they appear more interested in the appearance. To that end, I'd like to know how they can legitimately consider themselves a Christian organization. In my mind, the values they expound are perfectly lived by Mormons--Mormons are family and community centric, and live very "pure" lives free of alcohol, drugs, gambling, tobacco, and R-rated movies. (I can't find it now, but I know I read an article once about a guy making a killing in Utah selling home-made versions of mainstream DVDs with the "naughty bits" edited out.) And, the Mormons are also very effective at using the legislature to enforce their morality--forget their backing of Prop 8 in California; until a few years ago, it was illegal for a waitress in Salt Lake City to ask you if you wanted a drink with your dinner because that was considered promoting alcohol consumption. So clearly these people should be charter members of Focus on the Family.

Unfortunately, the majority of Christians do not consider Mormons to be part of their faith. I'll leave that debate to the theologians, but I am pretty sure a fundamentalist view, like the one of James Dobson, would not include Mormons on the list of "saved." So what is he really getting at? Does he really believe that if he can rescue all those apparently pathological gamblers-in-waiting from unleashing their dormant addiction by ensuring internet poker never becomes a US-regulated industry, that they will then use that extra time to suddenly accept Jesus Christ as their Lord and Savior? It shouldn't need proving how ridiculous that thought is, but if he needs proof, I'd think the Mormons would provide it.

If he wants to run a lobbying organization to promote a particular lifestyle that is based on some nostalgic view of a Protestant nuclear family, fine. But what makes my head explode is that he considers this synonymous with Christianity and a faith in Christ. See my post below on my own views of Jesus. But tell me that that view is somehow "less Godly" than James Dobson believing he can legislate Christ into the fabric of our society by lobbying for his own biases.

By the bye, a long time ago I read part of his book The Strong Willed Child. I realize it's since been revised, but it struck me then as an incredibly primitive piece of schlock dressed up as a sophisticated parenting technique. I will make this clear: while I guess some people believe that spanking is a successful technique for disciplining their children (when done as a deliberate consequence stated up-front, rather than in anger and as a surprise), I think that hitting is never acceptable. If you hit your kids, even in "love," don't be surprised if they hit other kids, and don't be surprised if they grow up with latent anger issues that could lead to violence.

Given my view of his book, I wonder how Focus on the Family would feel if I was rich and powerful enough to have a lobbying organization that sought to regulate the distribution of a book I think causes increased incidents of domestic violence?

A Contre-Courant

I’m occasionally fascinated by the technology behind CDDB. It’s usually pretty fool-proof, but occasionally it goofs. This evening, I popped in a CD by Corsican singer Alizée (because, you know, sometimes one just wants to hear the studio version of J.B.G.), and iTunes responded with this:



I had been under the impression CBBD used a unique identifier found on each CD title, but a few years ago, a guy in New York uncovered a major scandal of plagiarized classical recordings attributed to the recently deceased pianist Joyce Hatto, just by sticking one of her CDs into his computer--whereby iTunes promptly identified it as a recording by the real pianist. Supposedly it did this by comparing the track lengths; obviously not using any kind of unique identifier.

So: is Alizée's 2000 album Gourmandises really a recording of Dvorak’s greatest hits? This would be an interesting twist, considering her second album contains a song that sounds remarkably like the song Joe Satriani is suing Coldplay for supposedly stealing—except hers predates both of theirs by years. (Youtube once had numerous mash-ups of all three songs all together and versus one another, until Evil Music Industry Records pulled them all for copyright violations--go figure. This is the best I can find if you want to make up your own mind.)

Now clearly Dvorak is involved…the plot thickens :)

First they came for the pokers sites...

Are any of you feeling the outrage yet?

The State's Department of Public Safety served notice on 11 national and regional telephone and Internet service providers this week telling them to prohibit access of all Minnesota-based computers to those gambling sites.

Golly, and here a month ago I was shaking my head at Australia implementing a mandatory nationwide blacklist (a secret list, selected by a government agency--secret until it was leaked, of course). I thought, "wow, that's bad, you'd never see something like that in America." Oh well.

At least the Aussies were only trying to block Internet sites. Minnesota has decided that's not enough, because someone could still use the phone:

Not only will Internet Service Providers be asked to block computers in Minnesota from the list of online gambling sites, the written notice also provides the sites' telephone numbers so Minnesotans can't call those numbers either.

The list of sites at least isn't a secret, but is of course fairly arbitrary. There are sites listed that already do not accept US players thanks to the chilling effect of the 2006 Unlawful Internet Gaming Enforcement Act (UIGEA). So, uh, what are they trying to save people from? Meanwhile there are sites, like pokerstars.com (the world's largest online poker room) that do accept US players, that are spared. Who knows why? Maybe because the functionary who made up the list missed it?

But nevermind that. This is undoubtedly starting out as a typical cash-grab, similar to the ridiculous action by Kentucky to take ownership of over 100 domain names of gambling sites. (Think about that this weekend as you hear about The Kentucky Derby.) Or maybe Minnesota is just one of those states with a stick up its rear, like Washington State, which can confiscate your house and charge you with a Class C Felony for playing online poker--because they say the state has "interests in protecting its citizens from the ills associated with gambling." (Except of course when it's running the games itself, then it needs to sell its citizens on the need to play.)

But this is far more serious. Even if you dislike gambling, you should dislike this even more. The precedent of a state ordering its ISPs to block websites and its telcos to block phone numbers is frightening. Today it's gambling sites; tomorrow, what, the opposition party?

There needs to be more outrage at this, or one day you'll wake up and wonder where it all went.

Losing My Religion

I made the mistake this evening of wandering the religion stacks of a Barnes and Noble. I was there mostly by accident, since I was looking for something else--anything else, to get my mind off of my depressing troubles. Let me assure you that if you're looking for a pick-me-up, the religion department isn't the place to go. In this case, I managed to stumble on a book called Godless: How an Evangelical Preacher Became One of America's Leading Atheists. This story isn't really all that unusual. A lot of hard-core evangelicals--especially Charismatics and Pentecostals, it seems, lose their faith rather dramatically. Sam Kinison is a fine example.

I'm somewhat sympathetic. I can understand the appeal of a belief system that has an answer for everything; that frames each struggle of life in cosmic terms. We're larger than ourselves, and our problems are smaller than the universe. It provides an anecdote to the seemingly pejorative nature of the world--things CAN get better, with Christ.

I can also understand how centering one's life on such things to an extreme can set up a person for disappointment. I too once found a lot of comfort in the concrete, black-and-white nature of such a faith. But I was perplexed by the endless shades of gray that would reveal themselves, that didn't have a perfect antithesis. As often happens to people as they grow, I was drawn to a firm moral system when I was a young adult looking for structure to take the place of childhood restrictions; I drew away from the certainty of it as I got older and experienced more of life and saw that not everything was so easily explained.

In my case though I didn't become an atheist, or even an agnostic. I flirted with atheism before in my life, and concluded I couldn't accept it. I still occasionally think about it and realize it is just not likely to ever happen. I cannot say for certain why not--perhaps because I just get too much comfort from the idea that there is someone watching all this, and guiding it in gentle but beneficial ways. I would say this is exactly how my life seems to progress, in fact, so I could even claim anecdotal, personal evidence.

But what I have stopped doing is thinking I have something to tell others about faith, and I guess that's where I and someone like Dan Barker, the author of Godless, differ. He's like many I met in the faith--such as a former radical member of the Weather Underground who claims he was devoted to the overthrow of the US Government in the 1970's, who of course is now a loudmouthed know-it-all pastor committed to defeating Satan. Is there really a difference between his new life in Christ as a know-it-all, and a young hippy know-it-all? Likewise, is there any difference between Dan Barker standing on a street corner in Mexico looking for converts (as he apparently did when he was 15), and his new role as "American's leading atheist," initiating lawsuit after lawsuit over church-and-state issues as part of his assholier-than-thou Freedom From Religion organization? (These listen-to-me-NOW-I'm-right flip-flops are hardly unique to matters of faith, of course--look at that bloviating jackass David Horowitz).

No, what I came to conclude when my certainty slipped away was that it wasn't really about setting a straight line that required people to follow. Instead, it's about the beauty of finding our way individually, and taking what comes our way. At least, that's the best I can describe it. In fact, I find it to be somewhat undescribable--it's a mystery. Yet it's something I experience and feel every day. It's my faith.

I consider it a Christian faith--that is, I accept that Christ died and was resurrected as a fulfillment of the Jewish law requiring sacrafices, making it possible for us to have a relationship with God. I have reasons for believing this that are somewhat theological and I won't get into it here.

Beyond that, I don't know. This is why I consider it individualistic and non-dogmatic. I do not know, for example, that I necessarily believe everything that is written in the New Testament was the inspired word of God. A good reason for this can be found by watching a series of DVDs from the Teaching Company called Lost Christianities: Christian Scriptures and the Battles over Authentication, which present an explanation of the struggle within the first few centuries of Christianity of the establishment of what is now called orthodoxy, over other versions of Christianity such as Marcionism, the Ebionites, and the ever-popular Gnosticism. While I think the orthodox had the right idea and the right views, it's clear they altered texts now included in the cannon to make it harder for their heretical enemies to quote scriptures defending their views.

But this doesn't mean I reject the Bible, or its primacy in directing the Christian faith. It does mean I'm dubious of building entire complex theologies on fine points of scripture, however, and it does mean that I sometimes wonder what we do really know and how we know it. As such it's difficult for me to speak with a great certainty, with a dogmatic view.

So I just don't speak about it much at all. I can share my own experiences and my own beliefs, and the comfort I get from them. Beyond that I'm not certain. Maybe someday I'll become certain, one way or another. Perhaps I'll become a boring tool of some movement or another, excreting book after book of deep thoughts making the case for why everyone should shove themselves up their rear-ends for my view. But until then, all I can do is look at such rants and feel even more depressed at the misery and divisiveness of it all.

Thankfully this evening I eventually made my way to the poker book section where I bought a couple of books by Doyle Brunson. Nothing cheers me up more than reading yet more books that sell me on the illusion that I will someday actually not rot at that game.

Appealing Your Prince George's County Tax Assessment, Part II

So, after over a year of effort, nearly $500 in fees to an appraiser for two different appraisals, and $5 to park my car at the courthouse, the Prince George's County Property Tax Assessment Appeals Board sent me a note telling me that as far as they're concerned, their assessment of my home for $80K more than the appraiser thinks it's worth is "just and correct".

There is no explanation, of course, but that's not usually the bailiwick of a board to explain its decision, I guess. Yes, this is extremely frustrating, considering I believe I presented more than enough evidence through the course of this appeal that their assessment is just unrealistically high. The simple reality is, there is absolutely no way I could have realized a sale in the first quarter of 2008 for the amount they assessed this house. The market simply moved too fast, and I have shown that more than enough times in more that enough ways. I cannot imagine what rationnale they think they can use to say that it's accurate.

I will file an appeal to the Tax Court, and will also file for an out-of-cycle review based my property's current value. The latter, if accepted, will take effect January 1st, 2010, and as I mentioned elsewhere, is sixty-five thousand dollars less than what I argue the 2008 value was.

I can find no reason just to give in until I've completely exhausted the process. I am not going to "just let it go." It is an unjust and inaccurate assessment and no one should ever allow their government to do this to them without a fight.

New Media Sure Is the Place to Go For News, Eh?

Hahah, I just found a year-old article on Wonkette, still heavily linked from current ones, endorsing Ron Paul's opponent in the Republican primary for his congressional seat:

http://wonkette.com/361456/meet-ron-pauls-congressional-opponent/

Yeah, so, how did that work out, Wonketts? What a brilliant bunch of first-rate brains those folks are....and they call people like me "tards." Well maybe someday if I work really hard I can be as smart as them.

Obsessed with TV

I've been obsessed with cable wiring and other similar things these past few months. I have another house I'm currently responsible for, and the simple act of wanting to watch TV in the room I was using for a bedroom required I go through an unreal kabuki dance. But I was hooked. It's somehow very exciting to me to have my dwelling wired for the latest.

Tonight's exercise was installing an old-fashioned 80" beam antenna in the garage attic, and wiring it into the ancient existing CATV wiring that was installed with the house twenty years ago. The original cable system used dual lead (a-b switch) which is a happy accident, since it means every room that got cable now has two lines run to it.

When I moved here, I didn't bother with this antique system, however; instead I signed up for the Dish Network. Their installer chose to run a line from the dish on the roof of the garage and into one of these original cables. That was eight years ago. Today I finally looked at what he did, and it confused me to no end. I saw a mass of wires coming out of a hole in the wall in my garage; all but one of them was tied up in a bundle and left dangling there.

The idea I had with the beam antenna was to run a coax line down into the garage, out the hole in the wall, and into the OTHER feed of the original A-B line--the one not being used by the Dish network. But I couldn't understand why there were five other coax lines hanging outside--I thought there'd be only one.

After some crawling around in the garage attic and other trial and error, I finally figured out that the original cable signal was immediately split into three separate lines over six wires--two wires for each line. The twin lines then ran to different rooms--one is the family room, where the Dish receiver has always been; the other is the master bedroom, which has never been used. The third...well, I have no idea where it goes, though there is a blank wall plate in the kitchen that hides a pair of never-terminated coax cables. I guess the original installation had provided for a counter-top TV in the kitchen, that no one ever bothered to use.

I finally figured out which of the original twin feeds went to the family room, and wired in the new antenna to the unused half. I anxiously hooked up my TV, expecting to see crystal clear digital wonder. And, I did. But, not from the DC stations, like I'd expected. Instead, strangely, the Baltimore stations--in the complete opposite direction of where I pointed the antenna--came in beautifully. (Maybe I pointed it backwards?) The DC stations were very pixilated. What to do?

I realized that there was no reason to run a 50' cable from the antenna, down into the garage, out the wall, and into the original cable, only to have that cable come back up the wall and into the attic, where it then disappeared into the wall down into the family room. So I fed the original wire back up from outside and into the attic and straight into the antenna. (If I wasn't so paranoid about needing that whole length of wire again someday, I'd probably cut the excess, to eliminate the twenty additional feet that are now just laying on the floor of the attic. The shorter the wire, I figure, the less the degradation.)

That helped quite a bit--but not enough. The DC stations still have digital artifacts in both the picture and sound. I don't know why this is. It may be I have physically pointed the antenna the wrong way. It may be that the Baltimore stations are physically closer to me than the DC stations. I need to scour over the antennaweb.org and tv fool maps, again, I guess, to confirm both of these.

It may not matter though. If repointing the antenna doesn't work, that's it. I can't find space for a bigger antenna in this attic; this one barely fits as it is. Signal boosters do not help, for reasons that are explained elsewhere. The only thing left I can think of is to replace the ancient original cable. It is, without doubt, outmoded RG-59; RG-6 would probably help. (While I'm at it, it would probably help the Dish network feed as well, which I don't think is very good since I upgraded it to HD.) But replacing that will be a living nightmare, involving a wall-fish exercise that absolutely will need holes cut in walls and such. And after all that, there'd still be no guarantee that that will fix it.

Maybe it won't matter. I'm happy enough watching the primary network stations from Baltimore. In fact, this is a nice compliment to the DC stations I get on the Dish network. I have never watched the Baltimore stations before, ever, since the old analogue signals were way too weak, and the Dish network claimed they were constrained by the FCC on offering me only the DC stations, because my address was officially in the Washington DMA (nevermind that the cable company could offer both cities).

Even better, I get Maryland Public Television now, very nicely. This has been a non-stop complaint of mine since moving to this area, that their signal just would NOT come in over-the-air, no matter what. Worse, the Dish network wouldn't carry it, for reasons that maybe I'll rant about in a different post (I've actually considered suing them over of this).

Finally, I do get the two channels that drove me to this entire exercise in the first place. One of them was PBS Kids, which WETA had taken completely off their main channel and put on a separate side digital channel that is not yet (ever?) carried by Dish. My kids were not able to watch their favorite PBS shows after school thanks to this burst of brilliance from DC's premier PBS station.

The other is Universal Sports, which is an amazing channel that carries all the "olympic sports" that you don't see except, well, during the olympics: downhill ski, skeleton, bobsled, super-g, half-pipe--that's just the winter sports. I imagine in the summer we'll see the track and field and other games that are ignored for three out of four years.

This latter channel is a side digital channel of the DC NBC affiliate. It looks horrible. So does WETA's PBS Kids. However, this is probably a function of how they're broadcast. Or maybe it's because they're from DC.

I get a few other digital-only goodies. Among them: I now have a half-dozen local weather channels broadcast by all the mjor network affiliates in both cities. I really don't need six different 24/7 doppler radar feeds, but it is nice to have a local weather outlet now. Another disadvantage of the Dish network is that "local weather on the 8s" on the Weather Channel wasn't, well, local. Instead I saw the temperatures for every major airport in the country during the Smooth Jazz break. There are some other channels, especially on the PBS stations, that I haven't yet explored at all, yet.

I'm having fun with this as you can tell, but I am at a loss on what to do about the crummy DC signals. Any suggestions are greatly appreciated.

Appealing Your Prince George's County Tax Assessment

I just got back from the Prince George's County courthouse, where I had a hearing with the county tax assessor. It went well, and I'll know in a month whether they'll accept my argument that my assessment for the 2008 cycle was too high. But I thought I'd include some tips for others, based on what I learned.

• Don't show up with print-outs from the internet of current listings of homes for sale in your neighborhood. The assessor will make the case, and rightly so, that this is not about the home's current value--it's about the value at the time of the assessment period. In my case, that was Jan 1 2008.


• If you do bring comparable sales relevant to your case, be sure to know if they're short-sales (foreclosures) or other non-arms-length transactions. The assessor may question this.

I came prepared for point one, but not point two. I actually had an independent appraisal done based on historical comparables from late 2007, and presented this as the basis for my argument, noting that the assessor had based his estimate on comparables from early 2007, and that the market moved very rapidly downward starting in the middle of that year. However, the assessor asked if any of my comparables were short-sales, as he felt the sale prices were suspiciously low. I couldn't answer the question right then, though after the hearing I realized I happened to have a print-out from the sdat website of one of the comparables, showing more detail on the nature of the sale. I came back to the hearing room with this, the clerk kindly copied the print-out for me to distribute to the review board, and during a break in another case they allowed me to add it to my file with the assessor's approval.

Much of this information, by the way, I learned from talking with that clerk. She's very helpful, so if you're in the midst of this process, I strongly suggest you call her office with any questions. If I hadn't called to check the time of the hearing, I would not have known that showing up with an appraisal of today's value would have been useless--she mentioned it to me offhand before I hung up. Because of that information, I was able to delay the hearing two weeks, and have my appraiser revise his estimate based on historical comparables.

Whether any of this will help me remains to be seen, but there is one more step after this if my appeal is denied; I can take the matter to tax court. There is also another approach to solving the problem of being assessed too high in a declining market: I can file for an out-of-cycle appeal. Because I had originally paid the appraiser for a current estimate (which I have, but did not use today), I now have something I can use to make the case that my assessed value should be revised downward even further--since my current appraised value is $70,000 less than the value as of 1/1/08 (which I am arguing is about $80,000 less than the assessed value, making today's total about $150,000 less than the assessment!)

This isn't, by the way, really about saving a little money on my tax bill--because I'm not even sure that it's going to be that much in terms of a bi-yearly amount, even if they do approve of my numbers. Rather, I believe it is in every homeowner's best interest to ensure the assessment is fairly accurate, particularly in light of the falling market, because I can forsee the state deciding to change the way it allows assessments in the near future. Suppose instead of a fair market value based on comparable sales, the state decides to allow assessment offices to just assume 5% annual growth? You cannot assume that in three years (the length of the assessment period in this county) that the current process will still be in place, and that your too-high value will be corrected then. Means of taxation are highly politicized and thus subject to the whims of a legislature--always a dangerous thing.

And if I may wax libertarian for a moment: the real problem of course is the taxation of property in the first place, made worse by an attempt to base that on the ephemeral nature of current market values (though I admit I greatly prefer that to simply assessing it at the time of sale, then cranking up the tax rate to generate more revenue, like they do in PA). It is discouraging to know that you can never really "own" your home, that it is in essence always leased from the government. I believe there really has got to be a better way to raise revenue to pay for local services.

But enough of that. If you are appealing your Prince George's County tax assessment, let me know how it goes and if you have any additional tips.

Firing Your Doctor As The Cure

I had an appointment today with my shrink, for the first time in six months. It was a reschedule, you see; I was reminded that I was supposed to actually see him earlier this month--when I got a bill for the missed appointment. His office never bothered with the courtesy call, despite the fact I made the appointment half a year ago. (However, they managed to get the bill in the mail within minutes after the missed appointment, judging from the postmark.)

I protested to him when I came in today that I didn't want to pay the $45 he charged, since his office never called. He retorted that it was my responsibility to remember my appointments no matter how many decades in advance they're made, and his office isn't any obligation to remind me. I knew he'd say that, and he's technically right. But so what. I'm paying for this crap, so that makes me the customer. As such I don't like people with whom I am doing business telling me what their rules are and acting like I have no choice to follow them. Sorry, this isn't communist Russia circa 1974. Everything is negotiable.

Except this, apparently. So after several minutes of my session being wasted going back and forth on this topic, I let it go. Sort-of. The rest of the time was instead wasted on other useless things, like him giving me interview tips, and talking about Sean Penn. Absolutely worthless information droned out while he scribbled perscriptions for another six month's worth of head drugs. Typical of my meetings with him, but this time I didn't shrug it off--I couldn't help but fume the entire time.

When I wandered out of his office all of six or seven minutes later, I continued a conversation I'd started before my meeting with him at the desk of the billing clerk. Before my session, I spent about 15 minutes going over back bills with her. Before I left, I spent another five reviewing the situation. Apparently, somehow the office has managed to not be reimbused by the insurance company for nearly all my appointments, from the day I started going there--two years ago.

This is de riguer for doctors offices in Prince George's County. I had a knock-down fight with a clerk at a dentists office who was attempting to salt me with a bill for my wife's check-up from two year's previous. They'd never bothered to submit it, and now it was past the submission date. So they gleefully pointed to the clause that said I was responsible for anything not paid by the insurance company (while ignoring me pointing out the clause before that that said they would make every reasonable attempt to get paid). I resolved the dispute by telling them to cram it and storming out of the office. No doubt in another 10 years I'll suddenly get a call from a collections agency.

I've had similar issues with not one, but two different optomistrists handing me unitemized bills for work performed a year or more earlier. I appreciate that billing insurance companies is difficult and time-consuming for any doctor and a real headache for them, but I am beyond flummoxed that they are apprently the only business in the world that thinks they can send bills to people years after the fact. I am now on the hook for over $500 for this shrink, thought their office said they would continue to work it.

However I know they'll fail. At this point the bills are, yes, out of range for being submitted again. In all likelihood, the insurance company misapplied the rules of my insurance repeatedly. They are one of those that doesn't bother to send summaries of services paid, so I can't readily keep tabs on what has and hasn't been processed. Instead, I just get hit with a "well look at this balance!" issue at random intervals--in this case right when I'm already fuming over the $45 I'm expected to pay because "we were all sitting around waiting for you" (to which I responded, "well you should have called--I was home and 5 minutes down the road.")

Also it got me thinking about these head meds I take anyway. I started this nonsense 2 years ago, ostensibly because I'd been pushed a little too far by some spoiled prick video game programmer Harvard grad who stabbed me in the back to my boss. I'd never felt so horrible and panicked in my life. I sought help, and after three minutes of chat, was immediately diagnosed with depression and handed a pharmacopeia of mind-altering chemicals, I guess to make me back into a healthy productive worker. Two years later I continue this regime because I still deal with stressful, miserable things that make me sick.

But I swear all these drugs do is enable me to endure. Why endure? Especially why endure when I need something artificially to make me endure? I have a better answer: flush the crap out of my life. I felt good when Harvard Gamer Prick quit Laszlo two months after his back-stab; I felt even better when Laszlo RIF'ed me 18 months after that. Voila, career nausea solved. Seems a valid model.

So tonight I fired my shrink. I just left him voicemail and told him to send me my records so I could take them elsewhere. I also told him to just send me a detailed bill for the two year's worth of sessions that weren't paid correctly. I will just pay him and then I'll spend the eight hours on the phone with Aetna trying to get reimbursed. Why do that, you say, when they said they'll do it? Because then I'll know it's done, and I won't get one more bill two years from now.

I may or may not bother to find a replacement shrink. I may just decide that if life feels uncomfortable and I feel sick, that instead of swallowing my pride along with that Prozac, I'll instead pull the lever and flush the crap down the sewer back from whence it came. There has to be a time in my life when I take a stand and decide I'm done being everyone's ass rag, right? If it's not going to happen at age 40, I might as well just set aside money now for my heirs to pay off the bills they'll receive two years after I die. This has got to be the best time of life ever to be an adult, it seems, especially since I feel like I've spent my whole life being one anyway.