Saturday, December 29, 2012

A Book A Week In 2013

I wish I could claim this as my own idea, but I didn't make this one up.  I did, however, jump on the bandwagon as soon as I heard about it.  Like I did parachute pants back in 1984.
   I'm going to try to read a book a week in 2013.
   Yup, a book a week.  That's 52 books, for those of you with weak calendar skills.  52 books.  That's a lot.  I own a lot of books, and I read a lot of stuff that's not books, but, man... 52 books is a lot of books no matter how you slice it.
   Well... how do you eat an elephant?  One bite at a time.  So I need to get a list together.  I think of necessity I'll need to branch out from my regular reading habits, because, let's face it, even the best Harlequin novels get a little formulaic after 12 or 13 of them.
  I figure I'll buy a few books, but I'll probably go to the library for most, there's a branch just down the street.  With a playground!  It's not creepy for a single guy with no kids to hang out at a library playground, is it?  Nah, didn't think so.
   But what to get?  I think I'll start by re-reading a few that I haven't in a while.  Fiction.  Like 'The Hobbit.'  I have not read that since... my junior year in high school?  Something like that.  And I'll need to read 'Fahrenheit 451' again too.  There's a non-fiction 'Rise of the Greeks' that I haven't read in 20 years.  Maybe 'Cosmos' although I don't think I could get through that in a week.
   But there has to be new stuff too.  Lots of new stuff.  New to me, at least.  Guess I need to see what's hot on the lists these days.
   Suggestions?  I'd love to hear what people who are not me are reading these days.

Sunday, December 23, 2012

You're Both Wrong

Guns.
   Guns bad.  Guns good.  Guns all melted down.  Guns on every hip.
  The 'debate' about guns in America shows how polarized every argument has become.  How fractious.  How divisive.  How insanely one-sided each side is.  Both sides are dedicated to being right, not to listening to other opinions and coming to a middle ground.  It's how all political discourse has devolved the past ten years or so.*
   Here are the two arguments, at least as far as I can pick them apart:

   1)  No guns.  No one should have any kind of gun ever, at all, for any reason.  Having a gun makes you an evil person deserving of contempt.  If we still had stockades you gun owners would be in them.  We'd advocate for your execution if that weren't such a glaring irony that even we can see it.
   2)  Guns are American.  If you don't own a gun you're a panty-waist urbanite who's probably a closeted homosexual and for sure a socialist.  The only solution to gun violence is to put more guns out there.  You're a fool if you don't own a gun, want to own a gun, or love the smell of cordite in the morning.  If you were a real American you'd have a conceal/carry permit already.

  Polar opposite arguments occupying the fringes of the reality of the situation are never the right argument to make.  Taking either of these extreme positions is a way to shut down the conversation, not to find any real solution.  The two sides that are talking are talking at cross-purposes, trying to anticipate the other side's points instead of making their own.
   Gun control - I don't think the people who advocate 'gun control' know what they mean.  Two words - three syllables - tossed into the wind do not constitute a proposed solution.  It's just someone outraged by a situation who wants that situation never to happen again.
   Gun rights - I think these people know exactly what they mean, but what they mean is 'ain't nobody gonna take my guns from me.'  This is the opposite tack, it's someone outraged by the outrage, who feels threatened and wants to protect their own interests at all costs, even to the detriment of society.

They're both wrong.  And they're both childish.  The real truth and the real solution is somewhere in the middle, but it's a middle the extremists on both side refuse to admit exists.  It's there, though, waiting for well-reasoned, rational people to have a good, hard, honest look at it.  Here are some realities America will have to acknowledge if we're going to keep crazy people from killing children:


   1.  There's no way any government is going to be able to confiscate firearms.  I don't own a gun myself, but I would fight any effort to round them up.  That's too National Socialist for me.  Yes, gun violence is bad, but so is drunk driving and we're not calling for automobile confiscations.

   2.  It is far, far, far too easy for anyone to buy a firearm.  In Texas, for instance, there are no firearm licenses.  Anyone can buy a gun from a dealer if they pass a background check.  Anyone can buy a gun from another private citizen with no check at all.  We title and license our cars, we could do the same for guns.

  3.  There is no reason for a private citizen to own a military-grade weapon designed to kill people.

  4.  There is no reason to assume that if a person owns a gun he or she is an irresponsible redneck.

  5.  You can disagree with someone without wanting to abrogate their civil rights.

  6.  You can't predict what crazy people are going to do.  That's the definition of crazy.

  7.  As a society we can't ignore those people who need mental health care or pretend they don't exist.

  8.  Legislation based on 'the last bad thing that happened' is reactionary and does no one any good.  Just think TSA and taking off our Goddamned shoes for years now. Our lawmakers need to get out in front of issues, not trudge along behind like the pooper-scoopers at a parade.

So, both sides, listen up:  no more talking points, no more high-school debate rhetorical flourishes, no more shouting past the other side instead of talking to them.  This is for-real, no-shit grownup stuff happening here, so you both need to behave like adults.  Have the tough talk, make the tough decisions, and realize that neither of you is going to get 100% of what you want.  Adults compromise, they come to an agreement, they get things done.  So do it.


*  I blame Baby Boomers, like I blame them for almost everything.

Saturday, December 8, 2012

Tales From My Past - The Rainbow

Some people have a certain talent and other people aspire to it.  This was never more apparent to me than when I went with a friend of mine to the Rainbow in LA.
  For those not 'clued in' the Rainbow is a restaurant/bar/tiny music venue on Sodom's main street, Sunset Blvd. in Los Angeles, Caliornia.  This was the last place John Belushi ate before he went back to the Chateau Marmont and let some chick inject him with a lethal cocktail of cocaine and heroin.  The Rainbow kind of wears that last meal like a badge of honor, which tells you all you need to know about Los Angeles.
  In any event, musicians can book some time in the Rainbow's upstairs 'space,' which is - no lie - their barely-converted attic.  There's room for, at best, ten people, though more often crowd in.  When the Rainbow doesn't have a real musician booked, they'll let aspiring musicians have an hour.  For free, they don't pay non-professionals.
  Which is where my friend Sergio* comes in.  Sergio* was an intellectual property attorney by day, a poet-with-a-soul-and-guitar by night.  His undergrad degree was in poetry.  Really.  So he thought of himself as a singer/songwriter like James Taylor.  He managed to get one of the weekday free-hours at the Rainbow and invited his friends to come.  So I did.  A trek to Hollywood at night is always a measure of your show of support for your friends.
  Sergio* set up, alone on the tiny stage, and he did his best.  He let his reedy voice ring out, he stumbled through the chords on his ill-tuned guitar, and he muscled through.  He was... okay.  It was his first live performance ever and it wasn't miserable and he didn't completely embarrass himself.  While it wasn't terrible, it wasn't all that good either.  Meh.
  Then the next two dudes started to set up.  This was about 11 PM on a Wednesday, and these two guys had clearly just gotten up.  Or come to.  Still with bed-head and still in the clothes they had passed out in the night before.  They had a bass drum, a snare, a high-hat, and one guitar.  Two dudes and a minimalist drum set-up.
   They killed.
   I mean it, they tore the place down, built it back up, and tore it down again.  They were fantastic, amazing, and incredible.  They put Sergio* to shame.  These two guys were musicians. Real ones.  Sergio* was just an attorney with a guitar.
   From that moment on I've always tried to measure people's aspirations versus their talents.  Sergio* had grand aspirations and a bit of talent.  I don't know what kind of aspirations those two LA wastoids had, but they had talent for music like I've seldom seen.  I wish I would have written down their names, so I could see where they are now.  Dead or millionaires, I'm guessing.
   It's an important lesson.  Know your talents, and recognize your aspirations.  If your talents overlap your aspirations you're going to be successful.  If the two are not related you'll probably spend years chasing a dream you're just not suited to.


* not his real name.  I swear.

Thursday, November 29, 2012

I Feel A Rant Coming On...

I was just over at my mother's house.  Her phone lines stopped working and she was on the phone with ATT trying to get things diagnosed and - fingers crossed - fixed.
  She handed me the phone* because she was fed up with being in voice menu Hell, and this was the 'diagnose it yourself' stuff, which I'm more comfortable with anyway.  It was the 'let's see if you're really the problem' screening, which is always more than a little insulting.  But I persevered, I pressed 1 for English, and 2 for land line, and 3 for 'more than one phone.'  And I got these instructions:  'for the next step you'll need a flathead screwdriver and a corded phone...'
   Say what?
   The nice lady continued.  'You'll need to find the ATT access box. This is usually located on the side of your house...'   It was at this point I handed the phone back to my mother, explained what the nice lady was about to ask me to do, and she hung up.
   ATT wanted me to go outside and hook up a phone to their diagnostic port.  I'm not kidding.  The screwdriver was to remove the screws holding the cover on, and the corded phone was to plug in and test to see if the problem was inside or outside the house.
   You have got to be fucking kidding me.
   I know the phone company - any of them - is evil and awful and dealing with them is an exercise is staying patient while asserting yourself with morons.  I didn't think it could get any worse.  And yet here we are.  ATT wants me to go outside and do their repair technician's job.
   The phone company has clearly taken a page from the grocery store manual, the page where it says 'devolve as much responsibility as possible onto your customers, because they're the root of all your problems.'  I can remember a time when it was technically breaking the law to get into any of the phone wiring, and you had to rent the phone you had.  Now, it seems, the only thing the phone company is responsible for is sending you the bill.
   There are probably four people I know who I would be comfortable with allowing access to the ATT-owned phone access box, including myself.  If I don't want to go outside and start unscrewing ATT's property, why is it a good idea to have a regular customer do it?  Isn't ATT inviting more problems than it solves with this advice?
  Seriously... I have to bag my own groceries and pump my own gas, now I have to service my own phone?  Where does this stop?  Will I soon have to generate my own electricity?  'Cause I can, I produce plenty of methane every day...



* cell phone because her land line was out

Sunday, November 18, 2012

Get Outta My Airport

Have you ever come across someone you knew in an airport?  I mean when you're both flying, and neither of you expects to see the other?
   Isn't it totally weird?
   I was talking to my younger niece yesterday, and she saw one of her old teachers in an airport just that day.  Aside from the freakiness of realizing your teachers are just like everyone else - they even poop - there was the added surprise of seeing someone you know in a completely unexpected setting.  It pushes you off-center, make you uncertain.
  I've had this happen to me twice.  I used to travel quite a lot for a job I had working as a government contractor, and one trip took me through the Brussels airport.*  Yes, that Brussels, in Belgium.  I was walking down a concourse and I saw a guy I'd gone to high school with coming the other way.  This was over a decade after graduation.  We both slowed down, then stopped, and we both had the same expression on our faces:
   "What the hell are you doing in my airport?"
   Very odd.  We exchanged pleasantries for a very, very brief time, less than a minute, then we were both on our way and glad of it.  Afterward I tried to figure out why we were both so eager to get away, and I think it comes down to cognitive dissonance.  The setting was just so incongruous - an airport thousands of miles away - and the meeting so unexpected that his presence clashed with my belief of what should happen in an airport in Belgium when I was flying on business.  This was a person from my childhood, who I never expected to meet again, let alone meet by chance in a foreign country.  I couldn't even imagine the odds of us meeting in a particular concourse in Brussels twelve years after parting ways in San Antonio.
   The second time was more recent, and I was flying back to Burbank after the holidays here in Texas.  I was in DFW, and I saw a woman who was in my improv class.  Though the break was jarring, it was not nearly so odd as the time in Belgium.  I called her name and eventually had to go touch her on the shoulder because she wasn't responding.  She didn't expect to meet anyone in the airport and so thought the 'Heidi' was for someone else.
   Turns out we were on the same flight back to Burbank.  Which is not odd at all, considering how few flights go in and out of Burbank.  But here's the kicker - we were assigned seats next to each other.
   Freaky.

Now, whenever I'm in an airport I have an eye out for a familiar face.  I actually say to myself 'I wonder if I'll meet someone I know?'  I do this to prepare myself for the not-so-remote possibility that I will.  I don't like feeling off-balance, it makes me feel like I'm not in control.  And however true that might be, sometimes I prefer my illusions to reality.
 

*  I was flying Sabena, and they had the hottest flight attendants.  Too bad they're out of business now.

Wednesday, October 24, 2012

My Book Life

I own a lot of books.  I mean, a LOT.  I have them in bookshelves in my house, and in boxes in my house, and in boxes in my mother's house and in boxes in a storage unit.  Air-conditioned storage unit, so they don't deteriorate.  My book purchases may have slowed the last ten years but they haven't stopped, so I'm just getting more and more and more books.  And I like that because I like books.
   But I got to thinking that maybe I needed to get rid of some of them.  By which I mean put more of them into my already-crowded storage unit.  Then I had a thought - a blasphemous thought - maybe I'd give them away.  I have a lot of cool books, I know someone would appreciate them like I do.  Maybe a library* or an old folks' home or something like that.
   I looked at one of my shelves, trying to think of which ones should go to a worthy inheritor.  But each book had a story.  I knew when I got it, gift or purchase, how long it took me to read and whether I liked it or not.  No surprise - I like most of the books I own.
   Then I moved to another book case, another shelf.  Same thing.  Each one had a story.  I picked out a few and turned to a random page.  I remembered reading them all, sometimes even to the time of day and what was happening around me.
   It hit me then, the reason I keep books, even if I keep them in boxes in a building ten miles away, is because my life is narrated by them.  Looking at these books is like archaeology into the Ancient Don.  I know what I was reading when I was in middle school, then high school, then college, then young adulthood, all the way to now.  Getting rid of them would be like erasing part of me, the part that's led to the person I am right now.
   Long story short, I'm keeping the damned books.  My new ones are going to need company.


* or liberry.  You're welcome John West, my old boss at the Abel Liberry at Austin College.

Saturday, October 20, 2012

Franchise Fantasy

I need to come up with the Next Big Thing in franchising.  Because I'm very greedy and I want a gold-plated swimming pool.  A tasteful one.
   When I was younger I imagined - maybe I was told, I don't know - that a good way to start climbing the ladder of the American Dream was to open a franchise like a McDonald's, a Subway, what have you.  The idea was you put your meager savings on the line to risk opening a business that might not make it, but had been proved to work elsewhere.  At least that was the way I understood it.
   Years ago a friend of mine and I looked into franchising.  HA!  Not even a remote possibility, unless we had $750,000 liquid, meaning cash on hand in the bank.  I never did get that; if I had that much money laying around in cash, I certainly wouldn't be exploring the chance to open my own grease palace.  We did some checking and found that almost none of the franchises in existence were owned by a person, they were owned by a company, or a corporation.  And that company didn't own just two or three or four places, they owned twenty or thirty or forty.  Big business built out of small businesses.
   What I didn't get then that I do get now is that the money isn't in being the franchisee, it's in being the franchisor.
   Why expend your own blood, sweat and tears building a business from the ground up when you can get other people to do it, and then pay you a franchise fee for the privilege?  It's genius, really, and totally the American way.  Work smarter, make the other guy work harder.  So here are a few of my ideas.  Nobody steal them, okay?

For old people:
  The Paper 'Net.  A newsstand, just like in the old days.  We take articles and blogs and items of interest from the Web, paste them up into an actual print edition every day, and sell them for 50 cents each.  Large print too.   Kind of like the Huffington Post, but on real paper.  I know, I know, there are tons of copyright problems with stealing content like this, but if Ariana Huffington can get away with it, why can't I?
   Rent a Pet.  Pets make people live longer, it's true.  Or it should be.  Older people's lives are enriched by having a pet, but taking care of a dog or cat really is like taking care of a toddler who's never going to grow up and always gets into the garbage.  We would rent friendly, docile animals to old people for a few hours a day.  That way they get the benefits of having a pet with none of the headache and cleanup associated with owning one.  Like having a pet grandchild.

For college students:
   Party Buddy.  There are tons of people who will take a test for you for a fee, but who's got your back when you're invited to a party you really don't want to go to?  We've all been there, there's a raging kegger or a frat party and you really don't feel like dealing with the douchebags tonight, but if you don't go you'll probably not get invited again.  We'd get your photo and vital stats and send a lookalike surrogate in your place, the people at the party will probably be too drunk to tell the difference.  It'll be just like you did go, without all the beer spillage and vomit.
   Vice Scrubbers.  You know the people who clean up after a crime scene?  They get rid of the blood and spare body parts, that kind of stuff?  We'd do the same kind of thing, but for porn and booze and cigarettes.  Call us before your boyfriend or girlfriend from back home comes for a visit, or before the 'rents come by 'just to see how you're doing.'  We promise to expunge every trace of dirty mags or tobacco or beer bongs to make you seem like the sweet darling you never really were.  Cash only.  Electronic devices incur an extra charge.

For middle school students:
   Cool Parents.  Your parents are not cool.  You know it, but they really, really, really don't.  As a matter of fact, they're so uncool they think they're cool.  You absolutely cannot bring them to any event where other parents will be, otherwise your world will devolve into a year-long exercise in embarrassment.  So call us up, we'll send cool parents in their place.  No mom jeans, no black socks with sandals, just slender, hip, gleaming-smile models, who have absolutely no real interest in you or your day.  The way God intended.
   Touch It.  You know you want to.  Touch it.  It's right there.  I know it's gross, but that's why you need to touch it.  You must touch it.  But you just can't.  So we'll send a kid over to touch it for you.  Yes, it's probably going to be the weird kid, the one who smells like sausage and BO, but at least he's not too chicken to touch it.  Pansy.


See?  Each one a million-dollar idea.  So that's... six million dollars.  Where do I pick up my check?

Wednesday, October 17, 2012

Shop Hungry

They say you shouldn't go to the grocery store when you're hungry.  Whoever 'they' are... I think they're the same people who determine what colors are 'in' each year.  Yes, 'they' are Pantone.  Possibly.
   Back on track... I say that you should go grocery shopping when you're hungry.  When you're starving, in fact.  When you're so famished that you could eat the ass end out of a rhino.  That's when you need to go shopping.
   Because then you'll see what your bad habits really are.
   When you go grocery shopping on a full stomach, it's easy for your rational mind to overcome your reptile brain.  'Eskimo Pie?  I couldn't possibly.  Besides, you're not supposed to call them Eskimos.'  You actually consider buying tofu and making something of it on your own.  You buy tiny carrots.  You check labels and consider nutritional content seriously.  You skirt the edges of the store just like they tell you to, avoiding the center aisles and their sinful, shameful products.
   But when you're hungry?  Straight to the Circus Peanuts and Yoo Hoo.
   Grocery shopping while you're hungry you can't avoid the siren call of the Stouffer's Macaroni and Cheese, you seek out the Manwich and the Pringles.  You stalk the ice cream aisle just in case Ben and Jerry come to visit in person.  You forget that they actually stock produce, that they have raw meat just steps away waiting for you to buy and prepare.  Your world becomes a Hungry Man entree.
   Once you've shopped hungry - and I mean REALLY hungry - you'll know your triggers.  If you make a list of everything you wanted to devour right there in the store, you'll find most of it contains enormous amounts of preservatives, which are, I'm convinced with no scientific evidence, the reason we crave bad stuff. 
    When you've let your reptile brain satisfy its need to consume mass quantities, take a break, sit back, and don't buy all that garbage.  You really are better than that.  When you recognize what junk you crave you're halfway towards eliminating the craving.

Can you tell that I just got back from the grocery store myself?  An exercise in self control if there ever was one...

Tuesday, October 16, 2012

Miserable Bastards

I've been around a while - not as long as some people, longer than others - and my faith in human beings has gone through phases.  In college I was a cynic, which is cover for a disappointed idealist.  Just out of college I determined that people are basically good, mostly because I hung out with essentially good people.*
  Then I got a job in corporate America.  My views changed and I determined that most people are sheep, still essentially good but lacking in that essential spark that makes them stand up and say 'No.'  Then I got another corporate job, then another after that, and I began to realize that maybe, just perhaps, some people are naturally miserable bastards.  At least in the finance industry, which may attract more than its share, I admit.
  Now I own my own business, and currently I'm working at a local school district, where the people are genuinely nice and really committed to doing right by the students, even in a time of shrinking budgets.  I can honestly say I have not met one miserable bastard during my year-plus working there.  So I'm kind of back on the side of the angels here.  Most people are good.
   Except...
   I've been paying attention to politics more and more as I get older.  Not that I like what I see, it's really more of the same fascination you have with a wreck on the highway.  You wonder if there's going to be blood, and you hope there's not, but you really kind of hope there is so you keep glancing over as you creep by.  That's me and politics.  I have to say that I've never seen a greater collection of miserable bastards in my entire life than I see in politics right now, today.
   Let me correct that.  I've never seen a greater collection of lying, cheating, greedy, gleefully strutting miserable bastards.  I remember a time when miserable bastards kept it on the down-low, when they knew they were awful people and tried to keep others in the dark about their miserable bastardy.  Not no more they don't.
   And let me point an accusing finger.  It's the GOP I'm talking about.  Sure, there are liars and cheats and probably a few miserable bastards on the Democratic side, but Republicans have taken the lying, cheating and greed to a high art.  They're so confident as miserable bastards they don't even try to hide it any more, they put it right in our faces and dare us to do something about it.
   So here's what we do.  We vote them out of office.  As many as we can, so we send a clear message.  It's time to get rid of the miserable bastards and replace them with genuine, caring people.



* with a few glaring exceptions, Tiller I'm looking your way here.

Sunday, October 14, 2012

Good-bye CIO

You ever watch a boxing match - or MMA bout if you're into that - and you see a guy who's clearly had it, he's done, not gonna win, but he's sticking it out?  Too tough to put down, too stupid to quit?  Everybody in the arena knows he's going to lose, it's just a question of whether he goes the distance or gets KTFO?*
  That's today's CIO.
   The Chief Information Officer - or Head MonkeySpanker -  didn't exist thirty years ago, and I predict that job title will be encased in amber five years from now along with other Jurassic job titles like Copy Boy and Buggy Whip Maker.  Lemme 'splain...
   Anyone who works in corporate IT knows that every IT organization is exactly the same.  Dysfunctional.  The difference between companies is just varying degrees of broken.  The problem is that companies try to run something that's pure overhead - Information Technology - like it's a revenue center.  And running IT as if it were making money for the company leads to all sorts of idiocy, like IT and the CIO having their own internal goals and metrics that have nothing at all to do with the goals of the company.
   When you have a sales staff they know their job.  They have goals.  Sell stuff the company makes.  When you have a legal staff they have goals.  Protect the company from lawsuits because of bad decisions the executives make.  When you have an R&D staff they have goals.  Make the next generation of bad products the sales staff can sell and the legal staff can litigate. 
   In contrast, the IT staff's goals are usually far less concrete.  One might even say jell-o like.  Or completely made-up and divorced from reality.  Maintain uptime.  Reduce TCO.  Improve TTD.  Make up more monkey-spank justifications to employ people like project managers who would otherwise starve in the street.**  Almost never do you see an IT staff's goals read 'provide measurable support to the lines of business.'  Because that's a goal most IT groups don't know how to measure and couldn't meet even if they could measure it.
  So the CIO's day consists essentially of:
   1)  protecting his phony-baloney job
   and
   2)  keeping the servers running
   I know they spend most of their time on 1), but it's really 2) that is the main justification for their position.  Companies spend a very large portion of their income in IT support, wires and servers and software and people, and that's what a CIO tells his kids he does when they ask him about his job.  Which he hopes they never do.
   Here's the problem:  many American companies now can outsource everything the CIO claims responsibility for.  Rackspace does this, IBM does this, Microsoft does this, they're all hosting providers.  A hosting provider will do EVERYTHING computer-related.  They will buy the servers, they will install the software, they will maintain security, they will keep up with updates, they will provide backups, and they will provide solid metrics about their performance.  Even better, they will do all this for less than it costs any company right now to do the same thing in-house.
   In a grand irony, the CIO's job is being outsourced.  And, unlike most outsourcing, this time the company you hire to do the job really will do it better than the guy doing it right now.  Better, faster, cheaper.  The CIO is being crushed under the great Karmic wheel, and I think it's poetic justice.
   If I worked for a company and my title included the letters CIO, I'd be desperately maneuvering my way up or out.  Finding a different position in the company or getting a phony PhD from an online diploma mill and doing my best to do anything else to make a living, because I know my time in the corner office is coming to an end.
   CIOs you have been warned.  Ignore me at your peril.


* Knocked The Fuck Out - from 'Friday,' Ice Cube's earliest and best film role
** and who, in a just universe, would become food for coyotes.  I'm not fond of IT project managers.

Thursday, October 11, 2012

E-Ettiquette

Maybe Miss Manners has addressed this already, I don't know and I'm not inclined to find out.  But I've noticed a definite lack of civility around our little computers these days, and it's pissing me off.  Time was using a computer meant going into an office and turning on a beige monstrosity that had Bill Gates stink all over it.  Now our computers fit in our pockets.*  Whence come the distractions and my own little Hell.
   There needs to be a New Consideration, along with an enforcement arm to beat compliance into ne'er-do-wells.
   What am I talking about?  I'll tell you, sit back and get comfy.  Everybody but Great Uncle Joe already knows that ALL CAPS READS AS YELLING in electronic communication.  So most non-octogenarians have abandoned the Caps Lock key, as well they should.  But there doesn't seem to be a consensus as to when to call, when to text, or when to e-mail.  No rules.  And no common sense, it seems.  We're given an embarrassment of riches when we want to communicate but the end result is we're communicating worse than ever.  I've developed Seven Rules to a More Polite Society.  Follow them or I'll mop the floor with you.

1.  If you're not a very close friend or related to me, you don't get to text me.  If you have to ask if you're a close friend the answer is 'No.'  Texts from people I know and love are annoying enough - the electronic equivalent of tugging on my sleeve - I don't need some random schmoe interrupting me with his idiocy too.

2.  Business communication means you use my last name.  That's 'Mr. Hartshorn,' especially if I have never met you.  When you assume familiarity you haven't earned I instantly hate your guts and fantasize about punching you in the back of your head over and over again.

3.  Unless we've agreed on other arrangements, the method you used when you began your communication stays your method.  If you called me, keep calling me.  If you e-mailed me, keep e-mailing me.  Nothing creams my corn more than having someone switch to e-mail when we've been talking.  A simple 'hey, I'll e-mail you' is enough, but don't surprise me by switching e-horses mid-stream.
   Also, if we've talked about going to a movie don't switch to text or e-mail at the last minute to bow out, you chicken shit bastard.

4.  No response does not mean 'no.'  No response means no response. Or you're ignoring me.  Or you can't be bothered to reply.  Or you're a simpering little milquetoast who avoids confrontation.  When I ask you a question - e-mail, phone, or text - you're obligated to reply, just as if we were in the same room.  I reply all the time to people I don't want to deal with, you don't get a free pass because your computer fits in your pocket.

5.  PUT THE FUCKING PHONE DOWN.  Seriously.  Put it down.  I'm right here in the room with you, why are you texting someone else?  That's the exact same thing as interrupting a conversation to hold a conversation with another person, the fact that you're typing doesn't alleviate the jaw-dropping rudeness.
   True story - I've been in a room with three other people, all of whom were texting others, completely ignoring everybody else there with them in person.  Astonishingly inconsiderate.

6.  Put it on vibrate.  All devices do this now, figure out how yours works.  Why?  Because you have crap taste in ring tones, sorry if this is the first time someone's let you know.

7.  No, you cannot use my wall socket to charge your phone.  Unless you're my mother, then it's perfectly fine.  If you're not my mother you should have thought of charging your phone before you came to my house.

There.  Read them, know them, live them.



*  and Bill Gates hasn't been a household name for ten years

Friday, September 7, 2012

I've Had About Enough Of That...

Back in the good old days, when I rode my dinosaur to school and my father wore sabre-toothed tiger skins to work, we had one telephone in the house.  All four of us shared the one line, assuming you could pry it from my sister's hands long enough to use it.  One phone line.  Four people.  One house.  All was right with the world.
   Then came beepers.  Terrible little things, they quickly became the go-to device for medical professionals.  And drug dealers.  Who are, if you think about it, a kind of medical professional.
   After beepers came cell phones.  Laughably huge, they looked like field radios you'd see in old black-and-white WWII movies.  But they got smaller.  Much smaller.  And they got texting capabilities.  Now there was no need to actually use your phone as a phone, you could type what you wanted to say instead of talking to the other person.
   And the world got a little worse.
   Soon texting became The Thing.  Talking was so inconvenient, holding a conversation so last-Century.  Besides, talking means interacting, and who wants to do that?  It's much easier to type what you want to say, that way you don't have to deal with any feedback or engage anyone other than yourself and your personal solar system can continue to revolve around you and only you.  I'm surprised Baby Boomers didn't think of this thirty years ago.
   And I despaired.
   But just when I thought it couldn't get any worse, technology and self-centeredness prove me wrong yet again.  Yesterday I watched my brother-in-law use an app that let him - in essence - speak a text message.  It was still his voice, delivered as if it were a mini voice mail.  The person he was 'talking' to used the same app to send mini voice mails back.  He'd talk into his phone, like he was dictating, and then he'd send.  In a few seconds his phone would buzz and he'd get a 'voice text' - or whatever the hell it's called - from the person who had just heard his message, which came through on the speaker.  Back and forth, back and forth, when it would have been much simpler to just dial the Goddamned number and talk.
   Holy crap on a cracker, how horrible is that?  It was like using the phone if only one person could talk at a time while the other waited.*  What is the fucking point?  How is this an improvement on the awful practice of texting?  At least when you're getting a string of letters you can tell yourself the person sending it is in a meeting or otherwise occupied.  Getting this kind of almost-instant voice mail lets you know the other person is perfectly available to talk, they'd just rather not talk to you.
   I've said it before: just because you can doesn't mean you should.  Of course, since I find this new tech so awful it's going to be Number One with a bullet very soon.  It's like 'Seinfeld' all over again...


* in technical terms this is 'half-duplex.'  Like the two-way radios invented 100 years ago.

Tuesday, August 28, 2012

Still Mystified

I'm still mystified.  I've given it some thought - not like I'm burning up brain cells or losing sleep or anything, but I'm mulling it over - and I still don't get people who vote against their own interests.
   Trailer Park Republicans, I'm looking your direction here.
   Just in case you call yourself a Republican and think I'm NOT looking your direction, there's one simple test to determine if you're a Trailer Park Republican: do you have One Million Dollars in liquid assets?  To be clear, I'm asking if you could go out tomorrow morning, to the bank or the brokerage house or the bunker under your private tennis court and have a lackey cut a check for $1 million, no questions asked.  If you answered 'No' then you, my deluded friend, are a Trailer Park Republican.  Sure, you may not live in a trailer park but the respect the GOP has for you is exactly the same as if you did.  Which is to say, none at all.
   Why do so many people persist in identifying themselves with a movement that holds them and their middle-class situation in contempt?  Like I said, I've been giving it some thought, so here goes: once someone has identified themselves with a group, it's very hard to separate from that group, even when the group's interests clearly run counter to the person's own.  Like when gang members realize what they're doing is going to get them killed but they still hang out with their hoodlum friends.  If you change your mind you run the risk of looking stupid, and no one wants to look stupid.  But there’s more to it than that.
   No one wants to feel stupid.
   Children are used to making mistakes, it’s how they learn, and nobody begrudges them a mispronunciation or a factual error.  When a child makes a mistake we correct them and both of us move on, no harm no foul.  But somewhere along the line, usually when we’re teenagers, things change.  Making mistakes becomes a matter of public embarrassment.  We’re ‘supposed to know better’ even though that’s patently untrue.  When we’re wrong we’re mocked, and no one likes that.  Being ‘right’ becomes a matter of personal pride, we become emotionally invested in it because the alternative to being right is not being wrong, it’s public humiliation.
   When we become parents our beliefs take firmer root, even the wrong ones.  As authority figures now the risk to being wrong is not just public humiliation, it’s the risk of the loss of trust and respect from our children.  Think about the first time you realized that one of your parents was dead wrong about something.  Remember the shock like ice water to your face?  Remember the dawning notion that if your parent was wrong about this one thing, there was every possibility they were wrong about something else?  Maybe everything else?  Parents dread that same moment coming upon their children so they do everything  they can to make sure they’re never discovered to be wrong.  As adults and authority figures it’s our natural tendency to circle the wagons, to put limits on what options we consider, on what information we take in.  We like to think things over once and then be done with it.  As adults we imagine that, once decided, our opinions are set in stone never to be re-examined.
   But the world changes underneath us.  What was true one day can suddenly become an uncertainty the next and an outright falsehood the day after that.  This is the agony and ecstasy of science and social progress.  Discovery is what makes us human beings, and as Ovid told us, there is nothing in the whole world that is permanent.  I think about the world my grandparents knew during the Depression: no transistors, no penicillin, rampant Jim Crow legislation, no computers, no TV, no interstate highway system, and the Soviet Union going full steam ahead.  The world seemed so certain, there were Communists to fight, FDR would always be President, and minorities certainly knew their place, as did women and the queers.  It’s a good thing my grandfather died twenty-seven years ago, because his head would explode if he were around today.  Almost nothing he believed to be true is still true.  His casual racism and matter-of-fact sexism seem almost quaint now, a by-product of more innocent, more ignorant time.  Quaint, but no less dangerous or oppressive.
   We’d be right there still, all of us as prejudiced as my grandfather in 1939, if none of us ever were willing to be wrong, if none of us took a minute to think about what we believed and the way we implemented that in our daily lives.  Sticking with a political affiliation that clearly holds entire sections of the electorate in contempt is not only shameful, and silly, and contrary to their own best interests, it's holding the Trailer Park Republicans back.  They're fighting battles decided decades ago, they're asking questions answered by our grandparents, and they're demanding a return to discredited, racist, sexist, just-plain-wrong policies that never worked in the first place.  And they're doing it all loudly, proclaiming the justness of their unjust cause at the top of their lungs, gleeful lemmings leading each other over the cliff of ignorance, secure in the belief that even if doom awaits them, in this crowd of like-minded companions at least they won't feel stupid.
   Okay, so maybe I do have some insight, but I still just don't get it.

Sunday, August 26, 2012

Ant Politics

Do you suppose ants bicker?
  I have a fire ant mound in my front yard* and every so often I'll watch the ants going about their ant business.  They're oblivious to me, I think I'm on a scale that's almost incomprehensible to them, but then they're almost incomprehensible to me.  As I watched the other day I saw two ants bump into each other - more or less - back up, go forward again and bump again.  They did this a couple of times before they figured out to go around each other.  After that incident what did those two ants think of each other?
   'I saw Eduardo today,' one would complain to his ant friends at the ant country club.  'Bastard wouldn't get out of my way.  Who does he think he is?'
   'Stupid Dave was in the middle of the ant highway again,' Eduardo might say to his ant buddies, over a round of cheap ant beer.  'I swear, it's like he thinks he owns it or something. That ant highway is for all of us, not just him.'
   Such teeny tiny problems from such teeny tiny creatures.
   Which got me to thinking, of course.  Given the incredible vastness of the cosmos - truly unimaginable objects on colossal scales so large that they have no meaning to us - aren't all our problems really just a variation on the theme of ants bickering?
   I mean, think about it.  We're several billion people on a pretty small planet orbiting a fairly average star in a galaxy that contains over 200 billion stars.  That billion with a captial 'B.'  And that galaxy is one of about 170 billion that we know about so far.  Again, billion with a capital 'B.'
  Those kind of numbers drive you insane when you think about them even for a little while.  They let you know just how truly, incredibly vast the universe is, and how small we are.  Ants.  Bickering ants slowly murdering the planet that's their only home.
  Now, I know it's not in their nature, and I know this is just hyperbole, but what would happen if the ants in my front yard got together with the ants in my neighbor's yard?  What kind of ant community would they have then?  There are a whole lot more of them than there are of us.  And if the ants in my cul-de-sac got together with the ants in the next cul-de-sac over... well, that's actually kind of frightening.  But it would be kind of cool to see what they come up with.
   Same thing with us.  We're in control of the planet, undeniably, but in the grand scheme of things we're just larger ants, all our striving and scheming and plotting as inconsequential to the universe as the ants' bickering in my front yard is to me.  But... what if we started working together?  There are seven billion of us on Earth.  If we could get one billion of us - that's about 14% - all pointing in the same direction, trying to accomplish the same thing... we could, literally, move mountains.  We could change the course of human history forever.
   That would be kind of cool, don't you think?



*  which I am in the process of exterminating.  With all apologies to Nature and PETA, I can't have fire ants around the house.

Sunday, August 5, 2012

The Beer-Tax Allegory

There's a fable making the rounds through some inboxes that purports to equate ten men going out for a beer to the current tax rates.  It's pure trailer-park Republican stuff, poorly understood and poorly presented and full of manufactured outrage.  But it's been around for a while, and it bothers me when liars try to explain things in ways that are clearly false and intended to obfuscate rather than lay plain.  So I'm gonna make up my own fable.
  First, let's ignore the fact that trying to equate buying goods - in this case beers - with paying taxes is a completely false correlation.  For the sake of comparison I'll preserve the beer-tax allegory.
   The e-mail tale assumes all ten men are already in the same bar.  But let's back up.  Let's assume all ten people - not necessarily men - work at the same company.  The CEO decides to go for a beer and invites nine of his closest friends.  None of them could make it so he slums it with his workers.
   The CEO gets chauffeured to the bar.  His driver does not figure into this as he's an illegal alien.
   The next two richest employees drive their import cars and valet park them.
   The next three drive their own cars and feed the meter and hope the CEO doesn't keep them so long that they get a parking ticket.
   The last four poorest can't afford cars or the insurance on them so they take the bus.  Which makes them 20 minutes late.  The CEO and the two valet parkers rail at the insensitivity of the bus riders, wondering why they couldn't get to the bar with everyone else.

Once all ten are at the door the bouncer decides where they can go based on their incomes.
   The four who took the bus get to sit in the unfinished basement.  The bouncer doesn't go down there so it's a very sketchy rat-infested space, not safe at all, and no one pays attention to what goes on.  Three of the four employees are single mothers.
    The three who parked on the street get to sit next to the bathrooms on the first floor.  At least it's lit, and relatively safe, but there are better places in the bar, they're just not entitled to go there.
  The two who valet parked get to sit right up front, at the bar, where they get very good service and everyone pays attention to them no matter how stupid what they say sounds.  Thing is, they can also see the stairs to the second floor.  They're not allowed up there, but they can see and smell everything, and it's delicious.
  The CEO goes straight to the second floor via an exclusive entrance he doesn't have to share with the other nine.  He's the only one up there, but Goddamn it's a fantastic place.

The bar is the US Biergarten.  Everyone is entitled to have a beer at the US Biergarten.  And because Sam, the owner, is actually related to all ten of the people - he's their uncle - he really does care that they have a good time and take advantage of everything the US Biergarten has to offer.  Since they're all family he lets the ten pay according to their ability, because he's really the one who foots the tab for the entire US Biergarten.  Beer for all ten of them costs $100, and each of them has to pay up front before they can drink a single drop.

   The four in the basement pay less than a dollar each, because they make about 1/174th what the CEO makes.
  The three who parked their own cars pay about $4 each, or $12 out of the $100, but then they make on average about 1/66th of what the CEO makes.
  The two who valet parked pay a little more than $5 each - $11 between the two of them - because even though they're doing really well, they still only make about 1/15th of what the CEO does.
  The CEO pays $75.  But he's the one with the chauffeur, with the private entrance, and the entire posh second floor to himself.  He makes the most money, he uses more resources of the US Biergarten than anyone else, and he enjoys special considerations the other nine don't, and so Sam decides he has to pay the most for a beer.

The end of the night comes, and it's time to settle the tab.
   Sam has seen the four in the basement and he knows times are tough for them, so he gives them back the tiny amount they paid.  It's not like they didn't pay, he's just refunding them their money because they've been handed such a raw deal compared to everyone else.
  For the three who street parked Sam returns a little of the money they paid, a few cents on the dollar.
  The two who valet parked show Sam that, in actuality, they didn't make nearly as much as their pay stubs said they did, with allowed exemptions their taxable income was much, much lower.  So Sam shrugs and refunds them about $2 each.
  The CEO shows Sam that everything he's enjoyed, from the chauffeur to the private entrance to the posh second floor, is really a business expense.  Sam scratches his head, wonders how this could be, but it's all proper according to the law, so he returns the CEO $35.

Sam now has $58.  For beer that cost $100.
  The four poorest employees did enjoy a beer, they paid for it but got that money back.  Yet they still had to sit in the unfinished basement with the rats.
  The three who parked on the street paid $11 out of the $58, or 19% of the tab, even though all three together make 4.5% of what the CEO makes.
  The two who valet parked paid $7 out of the $58, or 12% of the tab, even though they make 13% of what the CEO makes.
  The CEO had his tab reduced by 46%.  He didn't spend that extra $35 creating jobs or helping his employees drinking beer in the basement, he sent that money overseas and parked it in offshore accounts so he could retrieve it later, tax-free.

The tab for all ten still cost $100, so where does Sam get the $42 he's down?  Next time the three street-parkers come in he charges them more.  He wants to charge the richest three more, but they have well-paid attorneys who come in every day to argue against it, so Sam has given up that angle.  He also borrows money from other bars to cover the tab, and then has to pay interest on that money, which just raises the tab for everyone the next time.

And that, trailer park Republicans everywhere, is how the tax system really works, at least in the tortured metaphor of equating beer purchases to income tax.
   Just to be clear, all of you would be the four in the basement or the three parked on the street.  The valet parkers and the CEO don't give a rat's ass about you, they only care about fooling you with false analogies so you'll vote contrary to your own interests.

Friday, August 3, 2012

Where My Bigfoot At?

I want Bigfoot to exist.  Seriously.  I want there to be a Loch Ness Monster too.  And a chupacabra, and ghosts and gray aliens and a hollow Earth and... all of it.  I want every crackpot thing anyone's ever come up with to scare kids around a campfire to really exist.
   But I want a picture of it.  With it holding a newspaper. Or with it using an iPad.  Or with it strapped to a fender like a deer with a tag in its ear before it goes for processing and becomes Sasquatch sausage.  Which would be Sasquatchage.
  Have you noticed how there are far fewer claims of the paranormal in the last five years or so?  No UFO abductions, no Bigfoot sightings, no ghosts.  Nothing.
   It's because everyone has a camera.
   If you have a cell phone you have a camera.  Cops know this now, they assume they're always being filmed, at least the smart ones do.  In the good old days, with film cameras, you'd have all sorts of backwoods folks claiming to have been abducted, or to have shared a pot of beans with the Jersey Devil.  Nowadays, though, if someone makes an extraordinary claim, the first question everyone asks is 'where are the pictures?'  There are no more excuses, if you claim to have seen something out of the ordinary - say, a gray alien eating a Hungr-buster at the DQ - you'd better have a picture.
   As Carl Sagan said, extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof.  And while I would dearly love to saddle up and ride the Loch Ness Monster, I'm pretty sure that's not going to happen.  Grainy, faked 8mm film isn't going to cut it any more, only HD pictures will do.
   You know what?  I think we're a little poorer for it.  I'm not sure anyone ever really believed in Bigfoot,* but absence of proof was not proof of absence, at least back before every American carried a camera in his pocket or her purse.  There used to be room for doubt, for the possibility however slight that you might one day come across a chupacabra caught in the act of chupa-ing some cabras.  I don't think that chance exists any more.  Too bad.  A little of the light of magic has gone out for us.
   I'm still holding out hope, though.  Maybe Bigfoot is just really, really, really camera shy.


*except for card-carrying weirdos, and even then I think they were doing it for the attention

Tuesday, July 31, 2012

Way Too Soon

I learned something shocking today.  A guy I went to high school with just retired.
   I am not 65.  Nor is he.  Far, far, far from it, in fact.  Evidently he worked for a very long time for the phone company and got enough tenure to retire.  'Good for him,' I thought.  And then I thought some more, and that turned into 'I'm not so certain that's a good thing,' and then I thought some more and realized it's actually not only not a good thing, it's a bad thing.  A very bad thing.
   This guy has easily another 20 years on this Earth - assuming he doesn't take up snake handling or Russian roulette - and more probably has another 30 or 40 years ahead of him.  Essentially half his life is left.  And he's already retired.  Livin' the American dream.  Or more accurately the Greek dream, pulling a pension for the rest of his life without having to lift a finger.
   What's the problem? You might ask.  Well, I'll tell ya.
  Let's assume he doesn't get another job, which seems to be his plan.  Doing nothing but keeping Drew Carey company weekdays from 10-11 AM.*  Let's also assume his pension isn't a flat rate, but includes COLA increases.  That means he'll probably have exhausted everything he contributed within ten years, and for the remaining 10 or 20 or 30 he'll be living off the pension contributions of those people who are still employed.  He'll be the tip of the pyramid of an institutional Ponzi scheme.
  Sound familiar?  Like Social Security familiar?
  He'll be doing fine, presumably, but the people who come after him won't.  Eventually that pension fund will have to face the reality that it cannot meet its payout obligations because it never calculated that the participants would live for decades after retirement, or, indeed, that any of them would retire at 45.  There just isn't enough money.
  And when that pension fund goes insolvent and he can't collect SSI because that's also insolvent or he didn't contribute, who gets to foot the bill?  You and me.  We're funding his indolence.
   A first-time reader might assume from this post that I'm some kind of right-wing nut job, when nothing could be further from the truth.**  I'm so far left I even fence left-handed.  But I don't think anyone - ANYONE - should be collecting retirement income until they're of retirement age.  Which is 70.  Allowing people to suck from the pension teat any sooner destroys the basis for the whole system, which is the idea that most people will die before they retire.  Sounds harsh but it's true.  Neither pensions nor SSI were designed to pay people for decades.
   My grandfather retired at 40 from the US Air Force.  He joined when he was barely 18, at the height of the depression.  He went from that job right into a job with the Civil Service, which he kept for another 10 years, whereupon he retired a second time.  When he turned 62 he started to collect Social Security.  He was a triple-dipper, two retirement incomes and SSI.  'Good for him,' I thought...  After he retired - the second time - he lived another 20 years, and then after he died my grandmother collected a sizable fraction of his triple dips for another 14 years.  That's 35 years of having other people pay you not to work.
  The American dream?  Sure.  But it ain't right.

* when The Price Is Right airs

** seriously, go read some of my other stuff, the only reason I watch Fox is for COPS.  Oh, wait... that sounds kind of redneck too.  Uh... I listen to NPR regularly, how about that?

Friday, July 27, 2012

Wendy Late

Hi, ya'll!  My name is Wendy Tate, but people call me Wendy Late because, well, I have trouble showing up places on time.  Matter of fact it's kind of my defining characteristic, which I suppose explains the nickname.  In a world of uncertainty, the one constant my friends and family can be assured of is that I will not, ever, be on time for anything involving them.
   Let me tell you why.
  It's not because I don't have a clock, because I do.  I have a cell phone that's practically glued to my hand and my head whenever I'm awake.  There's a clock on that thing, and it's synchronized to the national atomic clock in Colorado.  Like all cell phones are. 
  It's not because I forget I have places to be.  If that were the case then you'd never see me, I wouldn't walk through the door.  I actually do show up, but I take my own sweet time about it.
  It's not because something came up at the very last minute.  If that were the case then I wouldn't be late ALL the time, I'd only be late every once in a while.  Like normal people.
   I'm not just late to your things.  I'm late to things I organize too.  Which is really kind of an amazing feat if you sit and think about it.  I'm habitually late even to things I set the schedule for.  Wow.
   So why am I late ALL the time?  It's really a very simple explanation, not complicated in the least.
   I don't respect other people.
  You're just not important enough for me to take a moment and consider that maybe you have things to do in a day that don't involve waiting half an hour or more for me to make an appearance.  I don't care about you or your time.  The least important thing I have to do today - say, trim my toenails - is ten times more important to me than the most important thing you have to do.  My world revolves around me, and I don't see any reason yours shouldn't revolve around me as well.
   For example:  we're going to meet for lunch.  We talk beforehand on my ever-present cell phone, and we agree we'll meet at 11:30.  You know I'm not going to be there at 11:30, I know I'm not going to be there at 11:30, but for the sake of appearances we both maintain the illusion that we'll be sitting for a meal together at 11:30.  I don't start getting ready until 11 AM.  It takes me at least half an hour to get ready, and another half an hour to drive to the restaurant, which puts us at 12 PM at the earliest.  This is if I don't get distracted with a phone call - because nothing is more important than answering my phone - or exfoliating, or taking out the garbage, or any of a thousand other tiny little things that I could easily do some other time but that I feel the need to accomplish before I decide to be in your company.
   The inevitable has happened and I'm late.  Big surprise.  I won't be at the restaurant at 11:30, even though you've done the considerate thing and gotten there by 11:25.  But do I feel the need to call you?  Absolutely not, even though, as I've said, my cell phone has been surgically attached to my hand.  Why do I refuse to call?  Because if I call and tell you I'll be late I've admitted that I'm wrong, and that just can't happen.  Nothing I do is wrong.
  When I'm late, I've automatically put myself in a position of power over you.  You're on MY schedule, bitch, like it or not.  I also don't call to tell you I'll be late, letting you know you're not important enough for even that minor courtesy, and then I don't apologize when I do saunter in.  You get to wait on me because, let's face it, you're just not as important as I am.
   You suck, I don't.  That's it.  That's the totality of my explanation.  I pretend I respect others, and I certainly claim to respect others, but my behavior tells a completely different tale.  Too bad for you, loser.

See you later  (HA!, get it, later...),
-- Wendy Late

Monday, July 23, 2012

Can Someone 'Splain?

I've been pondering imponderables yet again - I just can't seem to stop - and I keep coming back to a list of a few things that I just don't get.  If you have a clue, please help me out.

1.  Smoke alarm batteries only die in the middle of the night.  And almost always after you've had a hard time getting to sleep.

2.  People who insist on voting against their own interests.  Okay, Democrat billionaires I do understand, guilt is a powerful motivator, but trailer park Republicans still mystify me.

3.  City-dwellers who own Ford F-350s.  That truck's designed to haul a horse trailer or a hay wagon, but Cowboy Ned has his chromed like a UFO and has never had it off the pavement, let alone near livestock.

4.  Fedora-wearing douchebag hipster fathers. I saw a guy in the grocery store, older than me, dressed like he was trying to be either 20 years younger or 20 years older.  He had kids with him, so presumably he understands setting a good example, he just chose to ignore it that day.

5.  What is fire?  I mean, seriously.  I understand combustion, so don't use the 'it's oxidation' excuse.  What is the flame?  And don't try telling me 'it's glowing pieces of soot' because that's a load of crap too.

6.  People who claim - usually very loudly - to be religious yet demonstrate their unspeakable cruelty and intolerance daily.  There seems to be an inverse relationship between religiosity and sincerity.  Also kindness.  How can you claim to love your neighbor when you so obviously loathe anyone not exactly like yourself?

7.  Why can't I get a good haircut?  I've paid from $50 to $6 and every amount in between and they're all pretty much the same with different degrees of suck.  I used to despair, now I'm just resigned.

8.  How could the majority justices on the Supreme Court keep a straight face when they ruled that corporations have the same First Amendment rights as US citizens?  It seems like the setup for a really bad punch line, except they never finished the joke.

9.  Wal-Mart.  The whole thing, from the parking to the loading dock and all around the inside.  I don't understand.  Plus, their 'suburst' logo looks like a cat's anus.


Saturday, July 21, 2012

Awful People

Stephen Covey died this past week.  If you haven't heard of him you've surely heard of his '7 Habits' book.  I own a copy of this book, many people do because it's sold millions, but I'd never read it, not really.  Scanned it, never absorbed it.  But after he died I pulled it from my shelf and... well... scanned it again.  I'm just not a self-help kind of guy, it all seems too facile to really be applicable.  I did, however, realize that most of the terrible people in the world violate one or more of his 7 Habits.
   So I decided to write my own version.
  These are Stephen Covey's 7 Habits of Highly Effective People re-written with the douchebag in mind.  With the career politician in mind.  With the overprivileged American aristocrat in mind.  With the aspirational CEO in mind.  You get the idea.  Assholes.

7 Habits of Terribly Awful People
1.  Be reactive
    Don't think anything through, just say the first thing that comes to mind.  Especially if it's demonstrably wrong, or prejudiced, or misogynist, or evil.  And whatever you do, don't ever, ever admit you were wrong.  You could never be wrong.  You're perfect.

2.  Have no goal other than to preserve your own position.
   Why work towards a greater goal than your own bank account?  Thinking in a larger context is just stupid.  Besides, thinking is hard, and cuts down on the time you could spend being reactionary.

3.  Avoid the difficult stuff.
   Do all the easy work first.  Even better, make other people do the easy work, and then hold them at fault when the hard stuff never happens.

4.  Think win/ lose.
   Every situation is zero-sum.  That's a fancy college term for 'for me to win you must lose.'  Compromise is for suckers.  It's also hard to spell, and you never want to do anything that's hard to spell.

5.  You don't need to understand anyone else.
  Compassion is for suckers.  It's hard to spell too, I mean, are there three s's or only two?  When you try to understand someone else's view then you're on the short track to violating Habit 2 and possibly Habit 1.  You don't ever want to re-evaluate your position, because to do so would be to admit that you were wrong.  And you're never wrong.  You're perfect.

6. Divide.
   Don't bring people together to accomplish a common goal, because if you do you'll never get the credit for anything that comes out of it.  You're the one in charge, so you have to keep Habit 4 in mind always.  When people work together they get a sense that they might not need you around.  That, in fact, your presence might be a hindrance to progress.  However true that might be, you can't ever allow others to realize it.

7.  Dull your tools.
  Don't take care of your body, your mind, your soul, or your relationships.  It's all about you, after all.  You can do everything alone.  You have to, otherwise someone else is going to get credit, and you can't have that.

Sunday, July 15, 2012

The Most Dangerous Game

I had a conversation with a friend recently about the information various companies and government entities have about our activities, and whether that's a good or bad thing.  We weren't even talking about sales data or behavioral data or medical data, which are all tracked closely and often, we were talking about our cell phones.
   If you don't already know about your phone's GPS capabilities you should, but even if you have one of those bare-bones pay-by-minute phones, the phone companies - and by extension law enforcement agencies - can track your position simply by triangulating your phone's ID by cell towers.  It's not even particularly complicated math, it's how TV traffic reporters know how fast traffic is moving in the morning.  If your phone is on, it's a beacon.
  My friend was not bothered by this invasion of privacy.  As we discussed it, his position boiled down to three points:
   1. Scientists track animals all the time and that's okay, why not track people for the same reasons?
   2.  Nothing is secret or private anyway, so what's the big deal?
   3.  He doesn't do anything wrong, so if I object to being tracked I must be the bad guy.

I must admit I was astonished.  There's just so much wrong with taking these kinds of positions. Let's examine them one by one.

1.  People are not animals, and vice versa, no matter what PETA says.  Tracking animals is useful precisely because people are screwing up their nesting habits and migrations and their feeding grounds; tracking animals helps people fix what they've screwed up for the animals.  When animals are tracked it's science, when people are tracked it's surveillance.  You wouldn't want some middle-aged, wheezing IT guy following you on the street in a panel van, why would you think it's okay when that same middle-aged, wheezing IT guy works for the FBI and sits in an office all day following you by your cell phone records?

2.  This question gets to the heart of the data ownership debate.  Who owns the record of your coming and going?  You do.  And that information is yours to do with as you please, not someone else's to take without asking.  Saying that no one has an expectation of privacy is not only dead fucking wrong, it automatically gives ownership of your personal data to someone or something else.  It's no one's business what time I walk down the street to check my mail.  But if I carry my cell phone along the way my location is logged.  The only reason the phone company needs to know the location of my phone is so they can provide me a service I've paid for, they're not entitled to use that data for any other reason, because it's MY DATA.  The record is not about the phone company equipment, it's about where I am at a certain point in time.  It's about me.
   This is so important I'm going to repeat it:  you own your data.  You own your name, your SSN, your address, your age, your bank account information, your marital status, even your hair color or the fact that you've got a scar over your left eye.  You also own any positional data collected by the phone company, because it's information about you, not information about the phone company.

3.  This is the age-old argument along the lines of: if you don't have anything to hide from the cops, then why won't you let them search your car?  To which I answer: because the cops don't get to do whatever they want just because they're cops.  Same with the FBI or CIA or anyone else who wants to look at your phone records, including GPS data.  Law enforcement agencies can request access to your personal information - everything I listed above - but they have to have a very good reason to do so.  That's why courts issue warrants, as a check on the authority of law enforcement.  Claiming to be okay with violations of civil rights simply because you yourself 'don't do anything wrong' is abdicating your responsibilities as a citizen.  You're part of the same system I am, like it or not, and if you don't exercise your rights to hold the system accountable you're dismantling the check-and-balance structure brick by metaphorical brick.
  Also, nut up and be a man, you great-big pansy.  Tell the cops no.  Tell The Man no.  Stand up and be counted for once, stick to your principles, don't fold like a cheap hotel sheet when someone flashes a badge.

People will tell you that technology is moving too fast, that there are all sorts of questions about what is allowable and what is not, because we now carry computers in our pockets instead of resting them on office desks.  But those people are full of crap.
   There are guiding principles to all behavior, and those principles don't change just because you've got a new gadget.  Just remember what those simple principles are - e.g. you own any data about you - and you can answer any questions very easily.

Thursday, July 12, 2012

Connected

Did you know that my first semester in college, my roommate and I did not have a telephone?
   Unless you were me or Bob, or our parents, you probably did not know that.  But it’s true.  For 16 weeks we lived in a… rustic* apartment at 30th and Guadalupe in Austin, TX, blocks from the University, and our telephone was the pay phone across the street by the front door of the co-op.  Seriously.  We were not connected in any way, and the Internet as we know it now was then a decade from springing full-formed from Al Gore’s skull.  Bob and I were both eighteen, college freshmen, with less money than the Dragworms**  we chatted with on the way home from school, and we managed to make it more or less successfully for four months without a telephone.
   Imagine that now.
   You can’t, can you?  I almost can’t, and I lived it.  Right now I’m sitting at my desk, my computer connected to the Internet, with my smart phone about a foot from my hand.  I am ready, at a moment’s notice, to be interrupted by anyone else’s whim.  You want to text me?  Do it.  You want to send me an e-mail on any one of the seven or so accounts that I monitor regularly?  Make my day.  IM?  I’m waiting for the flashing light to distract me from what I could be accomplishing.  There’s even a desk phone a foot in the other direction, so people from work can call me looking for the person who had that number last.
   Connected?  I’m the spider at the center of the web, baby.  Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Dropbox, Blogspot, Hotmail… I got it all.  Except Pinterest, because I’m not a chick.  If news breaks, I’m on it.  If there’s a celebrity nip-slip, I’m right there.  Up-to-the-second political theater?  I got a front-row seat.
   But what does all that effort get me?
   Sure, I’m connected, but to what?  I read two news sites several times a day, and I notice that more often than not the top stories are exactly the same.  They’re wire feeds, from real journalists at the AP and Reuters.  Two large web sites, providing this service to me for free, don’t even create the content they pipe to my brain.  Yes, my family can text me and I can text right back, but is that any better than a phone call?  Or a visit in-person?  I read what my former colleagues in LA have said they like to have for dinner, but I don’t know my neighbor’s name.  And while I appreciate being able to stay connected with friends all across the globe, when have Facebook and Twitter been anything but an excuse to avoid doing something you’d rather not do?
   I think back to that time when I was a brand-new freshman at a great-big University.  I was a blank slate.  I didn’t know what to expect, I didn’t know what was expected of me.  I talked to my family infrequently, on a pay phone 75 yards from my front door and across a major thoroughfare.  I was forced to rely on myself, to decide what was important to me and to make it happen because there was no one else around to look after me but me.  I made new friends, I figured out how to succeed at school, and I encountered Austin’s seamy underbelly and emerged unscathed.  I did a lot of living those 16 weeks and lot of growing up.  All without obsessively consulting other people about it, without a device tethering me to the firehose of largely-pointless information that makes up the Net today.  I had to internalize the experience, I had to mull it over, make my own sense of it and incorporate it in my life.  I had to think about stuff instead of blindly reacting to it.
   I should start doing that again.  You probably should too.

*  the polite term for ‘roach infested moldy cracker box with a backed-up toilet that used to be the HQ for the local pot dealer.’  But all that’s another story.
** homeless mental patients released from the State Hospital about 12 blocks North of the University and pushed out the gates with a change of clothes, a pair of shoes, fifteen dollars and a hearty handshake.  Really.

Sunday, July 8, 2012

In Or Out

I grew up in Texas, and summers are hot here.  Hotter recently than I remember they used to be, but that's for Al Gore and climate change deniers to argue out.  When I was young I would stand in the doorway, cool air from the inside hitting my back and hot air from the outside washing over my front.  And my mother would say 'in or out, make up your mind.'
  I'm sure my experience is practically universal.  In or out, but not stuck in between.  You can say that about a lot of things, crossing the threshold is more than a motor skill it's a metaphor.  Going from being a child to being an adult,* or from being single to being married, or from a non-parent to a parent.  Thing is, this metaphor doesn't just apply to people, it applies to societies too.
  I was doing some research for a new novel, one where the idea of boundary space and thresholds plays a very large role, and I came across some research by anthropologists regarding exactly that topic as it relates to cultures.  It's called liminality, from the Latin word for boundary or threshold or space in between spaces.  It's fascinating, if decades old research, about how societies shocked by crisis - usually wars - are forced to move beyond what they were before and become something new.  They cross the threshold and give up what they had been in favor of what they could be.**  These researchers were writing in the 60's and were fervently anti-Communist, and their argument was that for the Soviet Union the Second World War never ended, their society was stuck in permanent liminality.  After 1945 the Communist leadership kept their people in a state of perpetual crisis and held their entire society in the doorway - neither in nor out, not the old Tsarist regime or a new non-Communist state - to the detriment of every citizen.
  Now, a moment of reflection will let anyone realize that the exact same thing can be said of the United States, that the Second World War never really ended, the battlefield just changed.  The Cold War was just a decades-long perpetuation of the circumstances of the Second World War.  We were neither in nor out ourselves, we'd never really fixed the economic or social problems brought about by the Depression, we just spent our way into consumerism designed to distract us from the underlying decay.
  And when the Cold War ended in 1989, what happened?  Almost immediately a new war, Desert Storm, 1991. And new fake prosperity with the Dot Com bubble.  And when that bubble burst, as they all eventually must, what happened?  Yup... another war.  Another two wars, actually.  And another bubble, this time with real estate, all three at the same time.
  American society in the 20th Century has been in a constant state of crisis, the societal equivalent of the teen acne years, neither the old, pre-technical boom-and-bust society of the late 19th Century nor a society or economy much farther along than we were in 1938. Neither in nor out, but standing paralyzed in between.
  This, I think, is the new challenge.  We need to step through the doorway, we need to cross the threshold.  We absolutely cannot step backwards, that's what Russia and the old Soviet states are doing right now and it's not working at all.  If we don't move forward we'll keep fighting the same old fights and running the same old repetitive treadmill as we have the past 60 years.  I don't know about you, but I'm tired of things the way they are, it's not really working for anybody, even for those who seemingly benefit the most.  We need to get to the next thing.  Soon.


* or being tried as one, anyway
** kind of the the Hegelian dialectic model, but 150 years more modern

Thursday, June 28, 2012

Legacy

I actually feel sorry for George Bush.  I know, he stole the election in 2000, got away with it again in 2004, started two wars based on lies, allowed the financial inmates to run the asylum and generally neglected everything a real President should pay attention to.  Make no mistake, we can’t forgive him for that, and we can’t ever forget or it’ll happen again.
   But, seriously, didn’t you feel just the slightest bit sorry for him during the last three months of 2008?
   I did.  As the economy grew worse, and as the truth about just how bad off we had it became clear, you could see his transformation.  He went from a smirking, proud, vain peacock to a troubled man carrying the weight of the world on his shoulders.  No more smiles, no more aggressively ignorant ramblings.  And this was in the prime of his lame duck period, when he should have been strutting like Tony Manero at the beginning of Saturday Night Fever.
   But he wasn’t strutting.  Because he knew that the debacle the American economy had become would be his legacy, he knew he’d be remembered for the impotence and mismanagement of the last six months of his office, not for the self-aggrandizement and hubris of the prior seven years.  He’d tried so hard to make a name for himself, to cement his place in history as a do-er – as a decider – but it just wasn’t meant to be.  George Bush’s legacy is to be remembered as the most corrupt, most incompetent President ever, a man who squandered the economic and military might of the United States.  He stood revealed as what he was, the frat-boy President, unequal to the task of governing and unable to do anything but watch as his crony appointees rode the economy down the toilet like the stinking turd it was.  You could see it in his face that October, November, and December, the realization that he’d been revealed as the fraud everyone suspected he was, an emperor with no clothes, a credulous marionette to corrupt puppet masters.
   As much as I despised his policies and everything his administration stood for, no man should have to endure that kind of soul-wrenching realization in full view of the entire world.  Of course, no man had failed so spectacularly or in such a public fashion either.  But still…
   It makes me wonder what my legacy will be.  Right now I’m pretty sure there isn’t one, except for all these ramblings on this blog, which, I’ll admit, does not have a wide readership.*  What is any man’s legacy, really?  How long past his death will the average person be remembered?  Ten years?  Thirty?  Who do we remember from the past?  Why do we remember them?
   Or are those perhaps the wrong questions?  Being remembered by your descendants is kind of the first form of reality TV, after all.  We only remember the bad ones.  Wouldn’t it be better to create something good, something that makes the lives of others just the smallest measure more bearable?  Shouldn’t your legacy be a contribution to society, whether your name is ever attached to it or not?
  I don't know... maybe I'll build Stonehenge in the backyard, or maybe I'll write an epic poem that will be passed down for thousands of years.  Maybe I'll try to make my corner of the world a little bit better, and not worry about anything else.  We'll see.


*  Except in Russia, oddly enough.  Привет, друзья!

Saturday, June 23, 2012

So Long, Puddin'

It's been eight years.  I couldn't throw you out, but I also couldn't keep you in my house where I would see you and remember.  So I put you into a box and took that box to my storage unit.  Out of sight means out of mind, I hope.  Sorry, but it's long past time to move on.

Good-bye.


Sunday, June 10, 2012

Come On, Weirdos...

While cleaning my house and trying to stem the tide of a spider invasion, I had the TV on.  NASCAR at first, but that doesn't last forever, so I tuned to the History channel.  Which is, increasingly, less about history and more about the same dreck that drags down all the other crap cable channels.
  Today the topic was 'ancient astronauts.'  Not much history there, but tons and tons of uninformed speculation.  It's one of those shows that assumes its own premise - that aliens did visit ancient cultures - and then spins every sentence to try to support that.  For the pure science parts they have real scientists,* and these guys do not speculate.  They just say, for instance, that the Maya lived in what is now Mexico.  Fact.  Provable.  For the other stuff, the wacky 'ancient astronauts' stuff, the producers get other guys, you know the kind, crazy eyebrows, insanely-coiffed hair, oddly-accented English that you just can't pin to a real country, enthusiastic assertions of pure hokum.
  Weirdos.
  The kind of people who, if they weren't on TV, would be ranting on a street corner or begging for today's dose of lithium at the psychiatric hospital.  They look tetched, like they might start babbling incoherently at any moment.  The mad-scientist hair and wriggling eyebrows and wide-eyed, fanatical earnestness do nothing to help their cause.  At least not with me.
  You ever hold a conversation with a crazy person?  I have.  Many times.  I may have told you of my experience with homeless people of all stripes, most of whom were a few nuts short of a fruitcake.  There's a distance between you and crazy people, an emotional distance, even if you're standing side-by-side.  You get the feeling they're not really seeing you, maybe they're seeing a talking dog or a shopping bag caught in an updraft, or a burning bush.  You get the idea.
  These UFO weirdos are the same way.  They can't not be, because what they're asserting is crazy.  They're starting out at a deficit.  So why, why why why why why why why do they all insist on presenting an appearance that is so off-putting?  I know if I were trying to convince someone that, say, an alien from another galaxy hid ghosts of dead aliens in Earth's volcanoes, I'd want to present as friendly and well-groomed a front as possible.  Maybe I'd recruit A-list actors to my scam.  But for sure  I'd cut any wiry eyebrows I might have.  I'd shampoo my hair.  Repeatedly.  I'd wash my face.  I'd practice not squinting, or not screaming, or not giggling like a serial killer, or whatever tic I had that made regular people call the cops.  And I'd learn how to present my batshit crazy ideas as if they were as well-reasoned and widely-accepted as trickle-down economics.
  Come on, weirdos, if you're going to be on TV you might as well learn how to play the game properly.

 * The scientists have initials behind their names like PhD or MD.  The Weirdos just have labels like 'UFO Researcher' or 'Speculative Anthropologist.'

Wednesday, June 6, 2012

How 'Bout A Job That Doesn't Suck?

I was in the corporate world for almost exactly ten years.  Ten very long years.  Very, very, very long years.  And one thing struck me almost immediately when I took that first gig with a large insurance company.
  Most of the jobs were pointless.
  There were a few people who did real work: programmers, underwriters, phone service people, janitors, cooks (they had five cafeterias in the building), actuaries and... that's about it.  Then there were an army of other people, project managers, supervisors, quality assurance people, and other mid-management types whose function I never really knew and whose performance I couldn't begin to measure because I don't know what they did during a day, let alone what they were supposed to do.  I'd say it was an easy 1:1 ratio of people who actually did something during a day to people whose job it was to watch other people do something during a day.  I suspect the ratio was really more like 1:2 real workers to parasites once you count in the execs and serious fuck-ups who inexplicably never lost their jobs.  And this was in a business that didn't really produce any tangible product; insurance companies reside firmly in the 'financial services' sector, and we all know what a crock of crap that is.
  No wonder that was such a miserable place, people were doing jobs with no purpose.  I know it's a little much to ask that all people follow their passion - we can't have everyone on the planet trying to be a reality TV star - but I don't think it's too much to ask that when a company hires someone to do a job they make sure that job doesn't suck.
  You can only do a job 'for the money' for so long, and admittedly for some people that's a very long time, but working for a paycheck is stultifying.  Soul-crushing.  And when you're working for a supervisor who's been there longer and has had all vitality drained from him by the mind-numbing tedium of his own job you're forced to carry some of his baggage on your journey.  No wonder workplace satisfaction is way down.
  So how do you do it?  How do you create a job that doesn't suck?  In my own experience a not-suck job comes down to three simple things:
1.  Set expectations.  People do good work when they know what they're supposed to do.  Setting solid expectations lets your employees know their limits, and lets them realize their potential.  It also makes it very easy to tell when someone isn't doing their jobs and needs a little 'coaching.'
2.  Let your employees do their jobs.  No micro-managing.  You hired them to do a job, let them do it.  Chances are good they're going to do it better than you could.  People tend to rise or fall according to an employer's expectations.  If you think you have a bunch of monkeys in the office, your employees will absolutely prove you right.  If you think you have a bunch of professionals, guess what? you will.
3.  Don't sweat the small stuff.  And it's mostly small stuff.  All those pointless jobs I was talking about?  Those are positions designed to monitor the small stuff.  Was your employee supposed to take a sick day instead of a vacation day?  Who gives a flying fuck?  It's their time off, let them use it as they want to.
   Most of all, people want to do a job that they know matters.  One that makes a difference.  Why do you think nurses and doctors work in inner city hospitals for a fraction of the pay they could get somewhere nicer?  Because they know what they do makes an immediate difference.  Same with teachers anywhere, they could get a better-paying job, but for them it's really not about the money.

The dear, departed Ray Bradbury has a great quote: 'If you don't like what you're doing, then don't do it.'  Sounds simple, yes?  But almost nobody follows that advice.  If more people did, then employers might stop creating jobs that suck.