We Regret To Inform You...


...unless you’re prancing around with feathers or fans or some other hokey gimmick in a 1930s burlesque show, you are a stripper, not an "exotic dancer."

...they will stop supporting your OS looonnnnng before they stop enforcing their copyright. And none of the legacy drivers will work with current machines.

...the funniest young writer of the moment is stuck writing for a horrible little Fargo newspaper, so you won’t get to see Adam Quesnell in person very soon.

...your invisible superfriend does not exist. None of them do. The universe is a big, cold, uncaring place, and you are but a speck of microgel that means nothing in the overall scheme of things.

...Keanu Reeves is still making "movies." This was not our fault. We had nothing to do with it. We didn’t even rent the headphones on the plane.

...quite a bit of your overall success or failure is down to luck. Of course, quite a bit of it is your fault, too.

...if history is any judge, just about everything you believe will be disproven within 300 years.

...none of the things you are afraid of are actually going to kill you: you will most likely die in your car or bathroom.

...as soon as the orgasm is over, the universe goes back to being exactly the way it was before.

...you are not big-boned. Nobody is.

...Vernor Vinge has a novel coming out this year. It’s a sequel to a book he wrote twenty years ago. We may have to wait another two decades to read the next one-- that’s the part we regret to inform you about. By that time, Ray Kurzweil is convinced that The Singularity will occur. Vinge created the concept of The Singularity. So....uhhh...that just confused myself.

...that was not caught from a toilet seat, the locker room, or a bench; they got it from rubbing up against someone else.

...you’re going to master that productivity software just in time for them to upgrade to the next version. All your hotkeys and shortcuts will be useless, and people half your age will be able to perform twice as much work in half the time with none of the experience.

...in those places where they don’t collect income tax, they do collect exorbitant real estate taxes, taxes on “professional services” like haircuts, and a rather bizarre set of value-added taxes, use fees, and sales taxes.

...yeah, a sandwich sure would go great right about now. But you’re out of bread.

You’re reading this, which makes you, by definition, a Reader.
You read. That’s terrific.

It’s also why this is the perfect gift for you.

I can start by saying: “You’re welcome.” I am an awesome gift-giver.

I read this book a couple months ago. “Learning To Swim,” by Sara J. Henry.

Blew. Me. Away.

For those unfamiliar with the noir genre, here’s the skinny: you usually get an idealistic, flawed protag, who is thrown into some ethically-questionable activities, and has some kind of grand Either-Or dilemma to decide. These are usually set in the crime or mystery genre. Masters of the art: Dashiell Hammett (of “Thin Man” fame, but who also did triumphant short fiction that’s even better), Gregory Mcdonald of the Fletch books, John D. MacDonald with Travis McGee...and film noir, with the supremacy going to Bogey (“Casablanca” and “The Maltese Falcon” and “The Big Sleep”), but with huge contributions from Hitchcock (everything he did except “The Trouble With Harry”), and Jack Nicholson (“Chinatown”), and even Fred MacMurray, of all people (“Double Indemnity” is a champion of the breed).

Neo-noir are the modern takes on this styling...and some of them are damned good. Really damned good. “Brick” and the underrated “The Lookout,” with Joseph Gordon-Levitt. Half the Coen Brothers’ work (“Blood Simple” and “Barton Fink” and “The Man Who Wasn’t There” and, yes, “The Big Lebowski,” dude). Tarantino’s better work (“True Romance” and “Pulp Fiction” and “Reservoir Dogs”).

“Learning to Swim” is neo-noir, in the classic vision. I mean this as no insult at all to Henry, even though her protagonist is (from a quick comparison of the content of the book, the author blurb on the dust jacket, and her website) a stylized version of herself. And her protagonist has all the traditional noir traits: the self-reliance, the stubbornness, the paranoia, the anti-authoritarian temerity to believe she knows better than others (and the tragic flaw of being correct on that count, more often than not). There are even nods to the ability to accept grueling physical punishment, while not succumbing, but also not exhibiting superhuman abilities or characteristics.

This is noir, and this is what I dig. So much, in fact, that the book overcame my anachronistic biases against female leads and any child character in any artistic work (who, truth be told, would be more interesting if they did NOT learn to swim, in my opinion; drowning kids are always more fascinating than talking children). But Henry’s protag, Troy Chance, is all woman, without drifting off into sentimental mawkishness, strong without being freakish, smart without being some kind of wunderkind. She is starkly human, a true noir hero. And the kid, dammit, is even realized in believable fashion and still likeable, without being some afternoon-TV moppet from the 1970s.

I am going to give you none of the plot. It’s better that way. Part of the gift. I will give you a couple general comments, though: it’s high Gothic melodrama, but done in such a way as to be compelling and not stilted. Is it a ripped-from-the-headlines, True Life Crime novel? No. Let that go. Suspend your disbelief, and enjoy the story... “The Maltese Falcon” could never happen, either.

But more than any of that, more than anything I’ve said about it thus far, are the mechanics. Seriously. This is a book for Readers, of which You are one. The dialogue has that snap you expect from noir, but it also has a sort of realism, a hyper-realism, where we can get the subtext; we can get what the character means from what they say, even though it’s different from their actual words. There is foreshadowing and red herrings and unreliable narration and the uber-crucial show-don’t-tell, all racked and stacked throughout the book like it was orchestrated, but without seeming contrived. Instead of groaning at hackneyed writing devices, used improperly, you will find yourself pleased with each exhibition of the deft employment of a tool or technique. For me, that lent the book a kind of nostalgia, a feeling of going back years ago, when reading a book (a story!) could give me such pleasure and joy....just in the receipt of the information...just having got the tale was something to relish.

There aren’t many things that can do that for under fifteen bucks.

Oh, did I mention that this was Henry’s first novel? Yeah-- some kids have all the luck. And skill. And talent.

Lucky for us Readers, there’s a sequel coming out next year.
See? You’re welcome-- again.

Sure, we all know Andy Garcia as the undisputed master of film, things having to do with film, and filmic qualities in general, but how did our current reigning Lord of Entertainment ascend to his throne? Was he born and bred to lead the motion picture industry, or did he have to claw his way up from the very bottom of the flick biz?

It’s a tale we all know by heart, but can’t help but enjoy re-hearing.

As we all know, young Andy --then Andres-- fled Castro’s Cuba with his parents, and moved to Miami (a trendsetter, even then!). A poor immigrant child, he was forced to turn to acting, as his parents’ multimillion-dollar perfume company could barely support the family. His first role was humble-- portraying the boyfriend of one of the characters on the groundbreaking Que Pasa, America?, one of the first television programs to address the issues and lifestyles of Cuban-Americans (well, after I Love Lucy, of course). He then had another small role, on the world-renowned Archie Bunker’s Place, the smash hit follow-up to All In The Family, the fantastically-brilliant show which positioned Archie as a big softy with a Jewish niece.

Mr. Garcia’s big breakout role was definitely when he played “Gang Member,” on the premier of Hill Street Blues. This led to his meteoric rise, from the role of “1st White Tough” on Murder, She Wrote to playing “1st White Tough” (unrelated) in the TV film The Murder of Sherlock Holmes. His debut film was the blockbuster Mean Season, with superstars Kurt Russell and Mariel Hemingway.

From there, it was nothing but up, up, UP! In 1986, Andy got to launch the character he would continue to play for 30 years: the smarmy-yet-stylish ne’er-do-well, with a great deal of charm and a hint of danger. The initial portrayal of the Garcia we have come to feel in our bones was featured in 8 Million Ways To Die, up against a Jeff Bridges at the top of his form. Garcia got to return to the screen in the Brian de Palma presentation of David Mamet’s screenplay, The Untouchables. Even these movies were just stepping stones to his wild triumphs: American Roulette, and the TV movie Clinton and Nadine, followed by the phenomenal Black Rain, which paved the way for Hollywood to express racism once again, after having left it behind at the end of WWII.

His next foray including cowriting the screenplay to the spectacular, misogynist Internal Affairs, co-starring Richard Gere. This catapulted him to an astounding role in the now-classic A Show of Force, with megastars Erik Estrada and Lou Diamond Phillips.
 
Garcia then took the role of a lifetime, playing heir to Michael Corleone’s crime empire in The Godfather: Part 3, in which he not only got to pretend to have sex with Bridget Fonda, but he also was allowed to become the surrogate for the director’s incestuous fantasies, as well as helm one of the best-loved capstones to any American film trilogy in history.

After that, Garcia could do no wrong. He made a star turn in Kenneth Branagh’s Dead Again, in which he memorably smoked through a stoma. We all know the industry-changing next film, 1992’s Hero, up against Dustin Hoffman (reprising his role as Ratso Rizzo) and uberstar Gina Davis, who always translates to box office gold and platinum.

Garcia turned to the arthouse scene, capturing the love of critics by doing the quasi-independent Jennifer 8 and When A Man Loves A Woman. His return to studio pictures was the mega-super-ultra hit, Things To Do In Denver When You’re Dead, the film not based on Warren Zevon’s song of the same name (and which is never actually used in the soundtrack) with fellow A-listers Steve Buscemi and Chris Walken.




He has gone on to own not only Hollywood and the movie industry as a whole, but our hearts and undying love. From his powerful appearances on Frasier and Will And Grace, to his tearjerker dramatic turns in Beverly Hills Chihuahua and Pink Panther 2, to his tour de force performance in the Turkish TV series Kurtlar Vadisi, Andy Garcia has proven why he is known throughout the world as the King of Hollywood.

There was movement behind the pile of rubble off to my left. I stayed in a crouch, weapon close, most of my head hidden by the wall, my body still down in the ditch. They couldn’t have seen me. I was ready, silent and unseen.

Yes-- there it was: a person; dammit, two people. At least they weren’t ‘bies. I was going to wait in the culvert until dark or until they moved away...anything to move on, alive, away.

I don’t know how the one detected me. Maybe it was one of those that got the heightened sense mutation from the gene-mod food the terrorists had seeded throughout the Midwest; one of those few beneficial mutations, instead of the Plague which destroyed 40% of everyone else. But that one must have communicated my position quietly to the other one, because they were both spinning and firing in an instant, cop-killer Teflon-coated bullets punching away at the wall in front of me.

I went face-down into the dirt, trying to will myself into the ground, wanting to be absorbed for cover. I had to wait until they finished their ammo, but they were almost certainly packing illegal assault weapons with those high-capacity magazines, the kind favored by all the school shooters, so they’d be able to keep unloading until they were almost standing directly over me. I had to time it right-- if I stood to return fire before they were dry, they’d just cut me in half.

Their weapons stopped chattering at almost the same time, but I could hear them still coming toward me. I rose to a half-crouch, aiming down my weapon’s barrel, steadying it on the lip of the ditch. I pull the trigger, sending a burst into the one on the left. I shifted my aim to the other, and pulled the trigger, just as he slammed home a fresh magazine, and released the bolt.

My gun jammed.

I reached up to yank on the extraction lever, hoping to clear the gun, horrified and scared senseless, even as he raised his weapon to shoot me.

Then he exploded.

A fury of bullets tore through his body, from somewhere behind and to his right. They plucked flecks out of his clothes, and threw him to the ground. He didn’t move again.

A loud voice, strained, called from the direction where the bullets had come. “Human?”

My mouth opened, but didn’t work. I kept pulling on my gun’s lever, not sure how to respond. The voice came again, louder, demanding. “Human?”

“Yeah!” I finally yelled. “Yeah. Human. Human! Over here. In the ditch.” I worked the bum round out of the chamber, and my weapon loaded a good cartridge in its place. I didn’t know who this was, but they’d just saved my life...and I wasn’t sure why.

A person stepped out from behind a mailbox just down the street. There was a longarm in the figure’s grasp, a rifle with a broad stock and an elongated clip. The person was clad in a military-style jumpsuit, dark gray, and had one of those masks the CDC gave out to first-responders during the last wave of the Bird Flu...DDT made birds extinct just a season too late to save all the victims of that horror.

The weapon was not pointed at me, so I didn’t point mine, either. I waited.

The person took off the mask. I was a bit taken aback to see that it was a woman, or one of those really good transgender jobs. She had a fresh, sharp face, with none of the sag that botox treatments ultimately develop. She walked over to the bodies, checked them with a wary eye and the toe of her boot, then stepped toward me. She nodded, said, “Shake hands.”

“Shake hands,” I replied, nodding myself. Nobody’s actually touched a stranger since ’81, when Lyme was determined to travel along with ticks.

“Lydia Parsons,” she said. “Special security out of Brimley, Ohio. Got any UV?”

I reached into the cargo pocket of my pants, just below my left nipple-- everyone over 25 wears pants with a waist far above their hips, so we won’t be mistaken for Kids. I found the SPF 64 sunscreen and handed it to her. She took it carefully, then started slathering it on her face.

“Thanks,” she said, with a sincere, grateful tone. “Haven’t had good block since Missouri; scared to death I was going to get facial tumors. What I wouldn’t give for some ozone, y’know?” That explained the mask.

“No prob.” I replied. “Yeah, damned CFCs. I see a can of hairspray now, I can only think of melanomas.”

She nodded, her face now a pasty white. She handed back the tube.

I waved a hand toward her face. “Aren’t you afraid of being mistaken for a ‘bie? If you rub it in, the color goes away.”

She shook her head. “I walk upright and with a steady gait, anyone who spots me before I see them, they know I’m a living person, not one of the braineaters.” With that, she turned to the corpse she’d shot, and started going over him, taking ammo and anything valuable. I did the same to my kill, harvesting everything worthwhile. We didn’t talk until we were done.

“C’mon,” she said, nodding to the east. “I’ve got a camp over this way. We should get into cover before the teens come out.” She was right-- the sun was falling, and we had to seek shelter soon. I had no better prospects than to follow her.

Along the way, we caught each other up on our dead. We’d each had those overly-large families, growing up in the 1970s; the population explosion was definitely a part of our world. But we had both been lucky: neither of us had any immediate family members die in the famines that followed.

But then it kind of went downhill, as it did for everyone. I, myself, had lost a sister to the Ice Age that had been predicted when we were kids...then lost a brother to global warming a generation later. Her parents had been culled by the government, during the socialization of the medical system, and she’d lost three brothers to roving bands of Soviet invaders who had pillaged our country during the early 1990s. I knew how she felt: I’d lost two brothers in the succession of wars that followed Vietnam, as that domino fell and we were plunged into a host of battles as other countries were cowed by the Russian hegemon.

“And your other brother?” I asked, remembering her original accounting.

“Straight AIDS,” she explained. “Then West Nile took one of my sisters.”

“I lost a sister to West Nile, too,” I told her. “And one to Toxic Shock. Another to Tylenol with cyanide. My last one died of Mad Cow.”

“Yeah, I had a Mad Cow sister, too,” she sighed. “What an ugly way to go. Lung cancer took the other one-- secondhand, from working in bars. She was a singer. Used to have a lovely voice. Your parents?”

“Well,” I sighed myself. “One accidentally mixed Pop Rocks and Tab. The other got gunned down by a Saturday Night Special during a nighttime home invasion. Crackbabies did it-- broke in looking for cash and valuables to get rock and Infamil.”

“Sad.”

“Yeah.” We walked quietly for a while, thinking on our dead. I spoke up after a few minutes of crunching gravel under our Moon Boots. “You wouldn’t think that was possible. How do you accidentally put Pop Rocks in your mouth, then take a swig of Tab?”

“I’m over here,” she said, and pointed to a hole that led to the basement of an office building, clearly marked as a Fallout Shelter. I was hoping nobody else would figure on using the same space, but she led me to an area behind the radiator, a place that was not at all obvious, even to someone standing in the basement, and I felt more secure about this bivouac.

We plopped down, exhausted, the tiredness that comes after the adrenalin leaves filling our muscles. She took off her boots, and threw me a can of spaghetti. I thanked her profusely, and gave her some of my bottled water. I’d have to run my reverse-hydrolysis collector later, to capture more water from the air-- there is no more water anywhere on the planet, in liquid form. It’s all been wasted. Like the topsoil. But I figured I owed her, anyway.

“So, uh, Lydia,” I began, not sure how to go at this, and keeping my sidearm rapidly available, without being too obvious. “What is, um, ‘special security’?”

She looked over at me, a very serious look in her eyes...if she hadn’t been so hardbitten, I would have said it was pure fear-- she must have known what I was thinking. She looked me plain in the face, straight on, so that I’d know she was sincere. “It’s not what you’re thinking. We’re not...”

She couldn’t say it. I had a real hard time. I started to say it, found my throat very dry, grunted twice, then kind of whispered. “Government?”

She was nodding real hard now, even a little smile on her face. “Yeah. We’re not that. No. Never.” Relief washed over both of us, as the terror dissipated. “Although, honestly...I’ve seen some of them, when they come into our village, hunting Islamoterrorists, and they haven’t eaten any babies, as far as I can tell.”

I nodded. I’d always thought those tales were a little overblown. “So, like-- what do you do?”

“Well,” she said, warming to her topic. “We provide contract justice to those folks who need help, if they can find us, and if they can afford it.”

I got the idea. “Good for you. Righteous work.”

“Yep,” she agreed, nodding and taking a swig from her bottle. “Those two were the last of a band that robbed a bank back in Ohio; we were hired to make them pay.” She shrugged. “They did, today. Thanks for your help.”

“Not a problem.” I looked over at her. In the fading that crept into the basement and behind the radiator, the lines of her body seemed lithe, filling the jumpsuit just oh-so-well. “Well...you married, Lydia?”

“I was about to be,” she replied, looking at me. She seemed to cock her head, reminiscing for a moment. “Then he got Raptured, and, well....how ‘bout you?”

“Ah...” I said, not having thought about it before I’d asked her, but realizing now I’d have to respond. “She went...er...” I cleared my throat again. Every time I tell it... “She took the car out to the store, New Year’s Day of Y2K. I told her not to. Chip in the engine made the thing explode, three blocks from the house. As she was returning.” I shook my head, then stared past her, at the wall. At nothing. I whispered. “Three blocks away.”

She had the decency to say nothing for a couple minutes, then started, “Hey, so, I was thinking tha--“ and was interrupted by sounds coming from the basement, just on the far side of our little camp.

We silently hefted our weapons, and low-crawled over to the edge of the radiator, peering around. We knew we were hidden from ‘bies, and teens, and guvvies, and all the other creepy-crawlies.

But she hadn’t noticed the grate in the floor of the place; it must have led down to the drains, to make the gym easier to wash down, or something. Back in the pleasant times.

Because the grate was lifting. And they were coming out.

Pressed against each other now, contact taboos forgotten, I looked into her eyes, and she into mine, and we both saw terror, then turned to the basement again, took our weapons off safety, and chose targets.

The CHUDs were coming.

 
 
- There is no such thing as a “Darwin Award.” No official body presents or grants or recognizes stupid activity as being any stupider than any other activity. In fact, believing that there could be awards for stupidity is, well…umm….
 
- There is no such thing as a “legal document.” All documents are legal. The court does not recognize one piece of paper as having any more validity than any other piece of paper. When evidence is introduced, the court will take into account such things as signature, origin, and so forth…but the conceit that a certain kind of record is a “legal” document, while another is not…is just wrong. Saying “legal document” is redundant. In fact, you’d be hard-pressed to find an illegal document. Even a forgery is evidence of the criminal act used to create it. There are “legal instruments,” which is a term of law for documents that evidences an or agreement-- like laws and contracts. But those don’t need to be on particular forms or official-looking paper; you can make a contract on a diaper, if you want. Although I’m not sure why you would.
 
- The default for ownership is not “free.” If I don’t label something, or fail to tell you NOT to use it or take it, or you simply can’t find me to ask for my permission, you are not then allowed to then take or use my stuff. Just because I leave my car in the street, with the keys in the ignition, doors open, and engine running, this does not mean you are permitted to take my car. Not for five minutes, not for five days.
 
- You cannot "waste" water, energy, food, or anything else. Matter and energy cannot be destroyed (although they can be transformed into each other, at great cost of both). Leaving the tap running while you drive to Akron has zero effect on the world's supply of water. In fact, about 7/10 of our planet is covered in water. Heck, water falls from the SKY. It's not as if the planet is going to run out of water anytime soon. Granted, the vast preponderance of it is full of salt, but that doesn't mean anything in terms of "wasting" water. If you use more water, you pay for more water-- that's why we have water meters. As long as you keep paying for it, who can say you're "wasting" it? If I want to use my water to wash my alpaca every Wednesday, why is that any more or less wasteful than you watering your azaleas or quenching the thirst of your brat or powerscrubbing the brass siding on your garage? (Yes, the brass will tarnish-- hey, it's YOUR water.) If we used enough water to the point where it got really scarce, the price would go up, and we would either use less, or someone would be willing to bring more to us. If we used a lot, LOT more, Exxon would stop hauling crude and would bring us H2O in supertankers, instead (we already pay more per gallon for bottled water than gasoline). If we used enough of it, the practice of desalinating water from the oceans would become cost-effective, and someone would open one of those facilities with the express purpose of bringing me water. The notion of "wasted" water is just plain silly.

- Wonder Bread is not really either of those things.


You’re welcome.

    My nerdly friends will recognize “42” as a number with literary import; it’s the answer attributed to the main question in the “Hitchhiker’s Guide to The Galaxy” books. That series of books was about a book --the Guide-- which makes this entry all that more apropos.

    Of course, those books are a lot better than this blog entry will be. I apologize. Maybe you want to go read them. I won’t be offended.

    Anyway...

    In sixth grade, Mr. Conrad showed us this book:

    Its central conceit is that it is being written by an author and for an audience in a time thousands of years from now. This writer is supposedly an academic interested in history and archaeology, and reviews the evidence left over from 20th century civilization.

    This leads to all sorts of amusing interpretations of what our world was like, and what we used our technology for. Everyday items take on totemistic import and our urban infrastructure is lent religious or superstitious meaning.

    It’s a damn funny premise. The idea is kooky and clever and it’s pretty well-executed, with lots of drawing that get the author’s point across (of course, it’s really more of a picture book, with a bunch of sight gags, than an actual text).

    A couple weeks ago, I got to see a book named “Trajections,” by Timothy Ely.

    Wild, isn’t it? Ely makes art that are books. Or-- books that are art. Either way, they’re really freaking cool. He creates a visual narrative, using drawings, an invented script, and the medium of the book itself.

    It immediately occurred to me: “oh, man-- some historian thousands of years from now is going to be baffled by this thing.” Just like in the Motel book.

    The next thing I though of was the Voynich Manuscript. Wilfrid Voynich was an American book collector who claimed to have acquired the thing in 1912, and gave it an entire backstory, with royal owners and Jesuit scholars and all sorts of stuff. It now resides in the Yale Rare Book and Manuscript Library.

    It has taken on near-mythic status on the cyberinterwebs, where my geeky brethren have attributed to it quasi-magical facets, such as it impenetrability to modern cryptographers and all sorts of other fascinating details. It’s viewed almost like the Necronomicon in some circles.

    And it’s probably just a hoax.

    I emailed Ely after seeing “Trajections,” and asked him both about his own work and the Voynich Manuscript. He got where I was going right away.

    “I have made over 450 books and I suspect they won't mess up too many grad students anytime...” he wrote, “...unlike the Voynich, my books are titled in English, are signed and so should reveal their origins.”
    
    Which is a really, really good point.

    Then he brought a right hook, and just clobbered all the web-based silliness about the Voynich Manuscript:

    “I suspect that the Voynich Manuscript [I examined it carefully about 20 years ago] was made in the early part of the 20th century. I believe it to be of Italian origin as both the raw materials and craftsmen/calligraphers were available to Wilfred Voynich at that time.”

    What makes Ely such an authority on the stuff used to make the Voynich? Oh, yeah-- I forgot to mention: Ely crafts and binds all his own books. He actually builds the things from scratch, one at a time. They are unique works of art, not mass-produced. They are supremely wonderful.

    But what about the fact that the Voynich Manuscript has been proven, by scientific tests, to be much, much older than when Wilfrid “found” the thing?

    “I love it when they date the vellum and hint that it gives a clue to the origin- we could easily obtain parchment or vellum from the 16th century in Italy even today. I think I have some,” Ely writes.    

    Why would anyone do this? Why would someone go through all the trouble of creating such a detailed, difficult piece of work as a fraudulent book made out of materials that were hundreds of years old?

    “I suspect, based only on tales from that edwardian time that Voynich had it made simply to put a burr under the saddle of the intelligence and code breaking community that he was socially engaged with,” Ely suggests.

    Which makes a lot more sense than some mysterious tome drafted in an unknown language, passed from owner to owner over the years, with no real hint as to the meaning of its content.

    And, if you think about it, the idea of the Voynich being fake is supported by the lack of historic mention of the thing: we don’t have any writings or notes from its purported previous owners or investigators, discussing the thing, even in general terms (“My Dear Tolliver-- Todaye I dide reed a most myesterious and dreadeful Tome, whych is both beautiful and terrifying to the utmoste degree. I will sende you a Xerox.”).

    For me, this does not diminish the coolness of the Voynich; if anything, this element of the story makes it all the more interesting. Sure, it wasn’t planted by ancient aliens in a European village during the Dark Ages, but a prank created by a dick who wanted to play a joke on his friends is just as fascinating, and says a lot more about the human experience.

[The new bee-log page allows you to leave comments. Just click on where it lists the number of comments, next to the date.]





    I am, admittedly, a libertarian kook. I want to see vending machines that sell heroin. I think antiaircraft missiles should be available for purchase at the supermarket. I don’t care who dumps toxic sludge onto any property they, themselves, own. I think leaving incompetent yachters to drown and unprepared hikers to freeze is far preferable to offering them tax-funded helicopter taxi service back home.

    Honestly, I would rather see the private sector do just about every job that government currently performs. Not only do I think organizations incentivized by profit would do a much better job in most circumstances, I believe they would do so with less waste and much less disregard for actual American human beings. Competition does wonders: straight-up, do you get better service at McDonald’s or the DMV? Kinko’s or the County Recorder’s office? Barnes and Noble or the police station?

    You’ll note that “just about” qualifier. I’m no anarchist.

    That said, I hear a lot of arguments about how some things just could not be privatized, because no comparable company would step into the niche left by an absent government entity and provide that same service with a similar level of quality and function.

    I was thinking about that position the other day while considering the FDA-- that is, the United States Food and Drug Administration. This entity, supposedly, keeps our national stockpile of canned baked beans relatively free of human thumbs, and assures us that our boner medicine is made from actual chemicals, and not just the powdered bones of rare animals.

    How would privatizing such an organization work? What would it look like? Could it possibly be as effective? Who would perform this service?

    As with most such things, I am a hopeless optimist, all based on my desperate love of science fiction, which drives my boundless faith in technology. For instance, I could picture a world without an FDA, and that vacuum filled by subscription services...you, the consumer, sign up for a private food-inspection service...maybe you buy an app for your smart phone...or pay an annual or monthly fee...and when you’re at the supermarket, you can use your Web-enabled phone to look up the groceries you’re considering before you purchase them. The service would tell you whether the products are safe for consumption by your family, or if they’re chock full of hog anus.

     Maybe looking up each individual product is too onerous...maybe that takes too long, and isn’t worth the hassle...well, maybe the food-inspection service you subscribe to has an agreement with the food vendors, where the sellers put a bar code or digital blot on each label, such that your phone can scan it instantly, and confer with the service, and tell you in less than a second whether the food meets the qualifications of your service.

    Heck, maybe you can even customize your personal service to screen certain aspects of food, to an individually-detailed level. You don’t like food that contains preservatives. You are allergic to peanuts. You only want to consume free-range cookies. Whatever.

    Why would the food companies participate? What’s in it for them to cooperate with the subscription services? If there was no law FORCING food sellers to put labels and nutrition information on their products, why would they do so?

    Well, for one thing, they’d be opening their potential sales demographics to everyone who subscribed to that service. And, conversely (and more importantly), they wouldn’t be limiting their list of potential customers by excluding their products from the list of “approved” items on the subscription list. It might even give them a competitive edge to get as many private subscription approvals as possible...it might be a discriminator consumers would use when deciding which food to buy.

    Yeah, it’s crazy. I know. Wacko libertarians are just full of silly notions. It would never work.

    I mean, it wouldn’t be fair to non-subscribers, right? People who chose not to spend any money on inspecting their food would get inferior food, wouldn’t they? Instead of EVERYONE being forced to subsidize food inspection through taxes and the FDA, only those who wanted to pay to know their food was clean would get clean food. Wouldn’t that mean rich people got better food than poor people?

    Or, really, what would stop the subscription services from getting into bed with the food producers, and approving all sorts of contaminated food in return for a payoff? What would stop agribusiness from just buying the subscription services, and approving their own products?

    Never work. Couldn’t. Wouldn’t be fair. Nobody would pay for it. No private entity would do the job, or, if they did, they wouldn’t have a decent standard of quality and trustworthiness.

    Sure.





    Except we already have this. For almost all the food you buy.
   
    Who guessed it before they got here? It only occurred to me the other day, and I’ve been thinking about stuff like this for years.

    The Jews have been doing it for millenia. More specifically, American Jews have been doing it with the domestic (and sometimes international!) food industry in almost exactly the manner I describe for the past 100 years.

    Check your food labels. If you see a single U or K or P somewhere on the package, whether those letters are circled or not, that food has been inspected by a rabbinic organization, which has determined whether the food meets the strict quality criteria so as to meet the rules of kashrut....kosher.

    The government has nothing to do with this process...other than protecting the copyright/trademark provisions those private entities hold on their specifics letters/codes. (Yep, I’m a believer in private property protected by the state, even intellectual property-- told you I wasn’t an anarchist.) The private entities have their own subscribers, adhere to their own standards, perform their own audits, make their own deals with the food companies, all without ANY legislative enforcement.

    Who pays for these services? People who want them. Mostly Jews, who want to know that their food meets kosher standards (because, honestly, food that is prepared according to kosher standards is really quite a bit better than non-kosher food...especially raw meat). It’s worth it, to the people interested, to pay the services (rabbinates) to perform that work.

    It’s also worth it, to the interested consumers, to pay extra for that food. By and large, kosher food is more expensive than nonkosher food (again, especially the meat, which can be twice the price, or more, of comparable nonkosher cuts of meat). Sometimes the companies selling the food reflect the added expense they had to go through to get the rabbis’ approval.

    Oh, yeah-- I didn’t mention that: it’s expensive to get a kosher seal. Nobody forces a food company to get that approval; they do it because they want the customers to buy their food. So they apply for the inspection (which costs money), and pay for continued use of the seal (which costs money), and avail themselves to audits (which-- you get it).

    How many subscribers can really influence an entire market? Well, Jews are about 2% of the American population, depending on how you figure it.  But, somehow, that tiny, little slice of the market was significant enough so that the Coke in your pantry has been inspected to the point where it’s got a K on every can.

    Yeah, but, wait-- if there’s no government oversight, then you can’t really trust the quality control, right? These are private groups, so they must not be reliable, right?

    I have never heard any complaints about kosher-inspected food products being anything less than what they were purported to be. I would be very surprised to find that a rabbinic entity was slacking off on enforcing their own standards....much as I would be shocked to learn that Consumer Reports was falsifying product-inspection data: the very nature of these groups, their existence, depends on their reliability.

    Not so much the government. If the government has a bad sales year, or loses the trust of the consumer, well, the government is still going to be here next year.

    Admittedly, it’s tough to prove kosher food is more “safe” than food that is not inspected, because the FDA inspects everything, so there’s an existing baseline. (And, technically, it’s the USDA that does the inspection of meat, not the FDA, and kosher laws mainly involve meat...but a lot of food in America has trace amounts of substances derived from animals, so it’s all affected by kashrut, whether the FDA or USDA is involved...convoluted story.)

    Still, I’d feel very comfortable eating food that had been inspected under a kosher-approval entity even if the government hadn’t looked at it.

    But, hey-- won’t one single koshering club take over the whole kosher market (ahem) and create a monopoly, so that you can’t trust that individual seal of approval? Well, if anything, the rabbinic inspectors are getting MORE diversified and competitive, not less. Here’s a website that lists over a dozen in the United States.

    And this was all done with very low-tech solutions: there were no smart phones or apps or digital marks involved. And rich people don’t get more benefit than poor people...in fact, if anything, non-subscribers, that is people who did NOT contribute to the rabbinic councils, and therefore did not pay for the koshering inspection at all, are deriving a free benefit at the expense of those people who are very concerned with the origin and processing of the food that goes into their bodies.

    Maybe free market solutions and privatization won’t work in all cases, and maybe we need government agencies and laws and regulations to keep us all free and happy and safe.

    But that’s sure not the case when it comes to food. Unless you want bacon, I mean.






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Look, some things just don’t have the correct name.

A minivan should just be called, “mommy car.” The Hooters restaurant chain should be called Tease You Mercilessly, And No Hooters. And every military operation should be changed from names like, “Hard Wolf,” to any combination of the words “Fluffy,” “Bunny,” “Chartreuse,” and “Velvet” (this would inevitably lead to less foreign adventurism, as no military leader wants to get on television and announce that brave American forces have now deployed to hostile shores in support of Operation Chartreuse Velvet Bunny).

And the Lord of the Rings trilogy should have been called “The Triumphs of Samwise Gamgee.”

Okay, for the four people on the planet who have not yet seen the films, stop reading now: the entirety of this article will be given over to spoiling every plot twist and development of all three movies.

And for those that have read the books, well, bully for you. I didn’t, and I don’t care that the films did not include the legendary poetry of the false language of the wood nymphs in the summer season. Honestly, I just don’t care that much. In fact, I just made all that stuff up, and it’s actually probably in there, knowing Tolkien.

It’s not germane to the discussion. Unless, of course, the books somehow depict Samwise as being less than totally awesome.

See, in the movies, Sam is supposed to be the sidekick. He has to follow Frodo around, and do Frodo’s bidding, and help Frodo. Why? What is this monumental task that Frodo has to accomplish, the heroic thing he has to do, such that it requires the assistance of a group of truly badass heroes?

He has to carry a ring.

Yeah.

This is sort of like saying, “He has to move something a bit heftier than a feather.”

I mean, come on-- is this the greatness by which we’re going measure a champion? He carries a RING around?

Oh, wait-- he has to carry a magic ring.

Sure, that makes all the difference.

So Frodo is stuck carrying the big, heavy, cumbersome magical ring, and Sam does EVERYTHING ELSE.

He carries the preponderance of the gear. This includes the food (more on that in a bit)...which he also prepares. He provides a moral compass. He fights. He gives hope where there is despondence.

Basically, he’s not the little whiny wuss that Frodo is during the entire journey.

When we first see Samwise, we don’t think much of him. He’s the tubby friend of the protagonist...and both of them are hobbits, which means there isn’t much substance to them at all, in terms of adventuring and bravery and heroism and whatnot. This is sort of what makes the hobbits in these movies (and Sam, in particular) so totally awesome. See, the hobbits are a stand-in for us, the viewers, a bunch of pasty, flabby, unadventurous slobs, who could never stand up to a dragon in a fight, or really, when it comes right down to it, even defeat a soda machine in a contest of wills. While the real heroic deeds and majestic accomplishments are performed by these elves and dwarves and incredibly-tough humans, the hobbits are along for the ride, part of the group but not really in the group, acting as our proxies among the hard-core fighters and killers.

Check it out: hobbits are physically diminutive-- they are variously shown throughout the films as about the size of six year-old children, or half the size of an adult human, or  kneehigh to a wizard (the continuity in the movies tends to slip a bit in this detail, not that I care much, because it really doesn’t matter: point is, they’re small). They are certainly much, much smaller and weaker than the main adversaries of the tale, the orcs.

This does not deter Sam from entering a series of physical combats where he is utterly outclassed. He dukes it out with Gollum, a centuries-old coldblooded killer. He takes on all sorts of orcs. He even goes toe-to-hairy-toe with a giant, poisonous spider.

Hobbits are also renowned for their love of food. There is a distinct sequence where a couple hobbits discuss their amazement that humans don’t seem to eat eight meals a day. Even more than the other hobbits, Samwise is a fat slob.

Does this keep him from engaging in any manner of physical activity, be it trekking or fighting or climbing? Nope. He doesn’t even break the pace of the longer-legged humans, much less his own thinner hobbit companions. Sam even gives up his portion of the meager provisions when it is apparent that Oh-So-Special-Frodo-Ring-Carrying-Guy might have to suffer some hunger pangs that could keep him from toting his RING.

The moment we realize Sam is a driving force in the story, that he’s more than some chunky comic relief sidekick, is after the first skirmish between the group of heroes and a band of orcs. One of the heroes, a human, is killed, and two of the other hobbits are kidnapped. Split from their group, Frodo and Sam stumble to the river, and Frodo (in the first of a series of chickenish moves), leaps in a boat, to take off by himself. Sam follows him, as Sam was ordered to do, to protect and care for Frodo. He wades out into the river, chasing the boat...and Sam can’t swim.

Sam is indefatigable in his steadfast, solemn approach to looking after his friend. He is constantly telling Frodo that they have to keep moving, offering help and comfort and aid.

What does he get in return? Suspicion and mistrust, as Frodo starts acting like a twitchy junkie, taking the word of Gollum, the creature he KNOWS to be a murderer, over that of his lifelong friend.

Sam warns Frodo, several times, about Gollum’s perfidy and psychopathic intent. Never does Frodo believe him. More than once, Sam is proven correct-- and it doesn’t matter. Frodo chooses to side with Gollum rather than his friend.

Samwise even offers to help with massive “burden” of hauling the ring around the countryside...and Frodo sees this as an attempt to undermine his unique relationship with the chunk of metal.

Yeah, even ignoring how completely amazing Sam is, it’s easy to see that Frodo deserves none of the credit, because Frodo is kind of a prick.

No, actually-- he’s a giant prick.

After all these people have gone to great lengths to help him in his mission, some dying, some enduring grievous wounds and horrible torture, all going through privations, Frodo, at the end, can’t complete the mission. Sam has prodded, cajoled, and even carried Frodo to the lip of the volcano where all Frodo has to do is DROP the ring...and Frodo won’t do it. The little weasel. He doesn’t even have to make any effort-- GRAVITY will do the job for him...and he just won’t do it.

Because he’s a prick.

In the end, oddly, it’s Gollum who finishes the job, albeit unintentionally, biting off Frodo’s finger (yes, Frodo has to be subjected to mayhem to give up the ring) and falling away into the molten center of the crater. Yippee, Frodo...you utter dolt.

Yet it’s Frodo who gets all the credit, who is hailed as the triumphant accomplisher-of-deeds, instead of being given the Big Prick’s Award from everyone involved. In fact, Frodo is offered what appears to be eternal life, invited to sail off into the sunset with the perfect elves, while Samwise is forced to return home to a dull life in what appears to be Wisconsin. That he gets the girl and title to Frodo’s familial estate seems small reward compared to his accomplishments and the alternatives offered Frodo.

The movies (at least, the characters in the movies) all celebrate Frodo, and what a tough job he did, and how wonderful he was for doing it. In fact, Frodo acted like a paranoiac addict, interested only in the thing that gave him his fix, and dooming the efforts of all others who attempted to help him or even themselves. We should acknowledge the true hero of the piece, the real champion of the films: Samwise Gamgee. Badass hobbit.





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It is difficult to force people to be safe. You can warn them about going outside without their hat on. You can chastise them for swimming less than a half-hour after eating. You can tell them and tell them not to swallow their gum.
[None of which actually matter, of course.]

Sometimes, just scolding and nagging someone into being safe isn’t enough: sometimes you have to pass a law forcing them to be safe. Which, as we all know, works like a charm.

[Hint: charms don’t work, either. That foot wasn’t so lucky for the rabbit, now was it?]

Such is the situation in California. The Anxious State has rules for everything. Yes, everything.

So it’s not hard to believe that Cali is the state that seems to be involved in the personal ownership of firearms more than anyone this side of Samuel Colt. ‘cept, like, in an opposite way. Meaning they would be against each other. Hey-- it was a stretch for the metaphor, okay?

One of the provisions of owning a handgun in the Land That Sense Forgot is that you must pass three tests.

Sorry-- let me try that again: you have to pass three tests before you can own a handgun in California.

That’s “own.” Not “fire.” Not “carry.” Just owning it, you have to pass three tests. Or you’ve violated state law.

I’ll get back to the tests in a moment.

Let’s make a quick comparison: in 2005, less than 160 people in California were accidentally killed with firearms; that same year, 3,822 were killed by cars. Well, in accidents involving cars-- they weren’t stalked and pounced-on by rogue automobiles. I’m pretty sure.

Just so everything stays fair in our minds, I want to point out a few things:
- 2005 was a peak year for unintentional gun deaths in California. It was way,way outside the norm. I don’t know what happened that year (The 2005 Jack Daniels Indoor Buck Hunting Invitational? A “Shoot-Your-Way-To-Savings” promotion at Raley’s? The Desert Eagle speed-cleaning championships? The year that everyone in the state got a bad batch of eyeglasses then bought a duck permit?), but it was a MUCH higher number of accidental fatalities than any other year during the decade 1999-2009. So I used it on purpose, to show unintentional gun deaths at their WORST.

- This number does not even discern between handguns, which are covered by the safety-testing law, and longarms, which are not. And I haven’t been able to find the exact data, but I have to think that SOME of the unintentional firearm deaths in California in any given year are hunting accidents...which would, primarily, involve shotguns or rifles. So the number doesn’t even accurately reflect deaths that might be affected by the law. As if death is affected by law. But onward...

- Yes, there are more cars in Cali than guns. In 2000, there were about 17 million privately-owned automobiles, and a 2001 survey indicated that 21% of Californians owned firearms...even if we use 2009 population numbers and round up, that puts 8 million guns in California. So even if we wanted to err on the side of fairness, there should be, rates in parity, twice as many car deaths and gun deaths. Instead, of course, we’re looking at TWENTY TIMES as many automobile deaths.

- I know I am slightly mixing apples and oranges, because I am comparing accidental handgun deaths, and not ALL handgun deaths in California, to automobile deaths. I do this for several reasons:

-- The law requires testing not to prevent the other kinds of handgun deaths (homicide and suicide), but to prevent accidental deaths and injuries. It would be a really weird law that tried to convince gun owners not to commit homicide by training them how to safely handle a pistol (“You really shouldn’t off your spouse...but if you’re going to do so, please handle the weapon responsibly”).

-- I am guessing that the vast majority of automobile deaths are accidents. That is, that people killed in car crashes were not the victims of someone intentionally running them over with a car. Or someone who wanted to kill themselves doing so by driving the car into or off of something. I realize this is a major statistical assumption, but I feel pretty confident in making it.

-- We already have laws against homicide; the handgun safety law is superfluous in that regard.

-- Someone using a handgun to commit suicide is purposefully not handling the thing safely. Ahem.

Point being: cars are a lot more deadly than handguns, evidently, but we regulate the ownership of handguns more.

You will also note that there is a provision to own guns in the Constitution, yet no such stipulation for owning a Hyundai. I’m just saying.

Let’s talk about those tests: there are three tests to own a handgun in California. There is a residency test, a written test, and a practical test. These three tests are very similar if you want to drive a car...but not if you want to OWN a car. Voting? One test-- ID. You don’t even have to prove you can read. Or, if you’re a member of the major parties, think. Marriage? I think there’s an ID test, and maybe a blood test. That one’s hard to study for. You are far more likely to be killed by your spouse in California than a handgun, though. Your spouse HAS a handgun? Just pick out your coffin now.

And now, for your enjoyment, check out the state-approved art-and-text guide to passing the handgun safety practical test. You’ll dig it.










Wasn’t that spiffy?

Okay, my military and gun-nerd friends have already picked out the problem with this guide. Can you spot it? Go ahead-- read back over it, and see if you can figure out what’s wrong with this procedure.

Yes, that’s correct: if you follow the procedure as written (and demonstrated with pictures), you leave the handgun cocked. Sure, there might be a gun lock on it, and you might have the safety engaged, but, well...that’s not really a safe gun. But, hey, I’m no firearms expert or gunsmith-- don’t take my word for it....maybe, instead, rely on the statements made earlier in that same document, published by the State of California Department of Justice, Bureau of Firearms [you can get your own copy, too].

“....most semiautomatic pistols have a ‘safety’ that is designed to prevent firing when engaged. However, it is not foolproof so do not rely on the safety to prevent an accidental discharge. A safety should only be used as an additional safety measure.”

That's on Page 20.

Anyway, kids...be sure to operate your handgun in the proper, safe, state-approved manner. This is a sure-fire way of not being killed by a handgun.


Maybe that was a poor choice of phrasing...






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Ever want to see a Beatle daterape a James Bond Girl? No?

Well, you can.

I don't recommend it, though.

They made a movie spoofing all the Hollywood blockbusters involving human beings confronting prehistoric creatures. I don't know why, or who thought it would be a good idea. No-- scratch that: it was a good idea. It was a downright funky idea. The timing was good: Mel Brooks had made a string of great spoofs, starting about a decade earlier. Steve Martin had lampooned the Frank Capra/Horatio Alger Common Hero genre with his genius "The Jerk" just a couple years before.

So it was time for "Caveman."

Seemed like a sure thing. Make fun of a flavor of film that was basically a big joke to begin with; the campy, ludcirous, effects-laden People Fighting Dinosaurs movies. Do the same things --have people fight dinosaurs, and each other, while the voluptuous women wear scanty, fur-based clothing-- but put gags in each scene.

And this was a decade before "Jurassic Park."

Then... they messed it up. Royally.

No kidding: there's a scene where Ringo Starr slips a soporific to Barbara Bach and her hulking beau, waits until they're knocked out, then goes to force himself on her, only to have the two sleepers roll groggily, switching places while Ringo's eyes are shut, so that Ringo opens his eyes to learn he's molesting Barb's fella.

It's funny! Because it's homophobic!

And a whole generation should hang its head in shame...

Here's the wacky part: director Carl Gottlieb cowrote it with Rudy De Luca. Between the two of them, their credits include those Mel Brooks movies. And "The Jerk." And "Jaws."

Yes, "Jaws."

So they had no real excuse for what "Caveman" turned out to be. They, of all people, knew better.

And you can't blame the cast. There's a 27 year-old Dennis Quaid. Shelley Long playing the unrequited love interest-hopeful who pines for Starr (who is smitten by Bach-- see the whole "drug her then use her unconscious body" subplot). And the sad figure of Evan C. Kim, who is the very best actor in this turkey, with the best comic facial expressions, stealing every scene he's in, just as he did in "Kentucky Fried Movie"...but never able to launch a career beyond character roles.

The material is putrid. There are a host of bodily function and excrement and sex jokes. There's a scene where the "good" cavepeople sit around a bonfire...and the filmmakers use the opportunity to have a Beatle literally invent music by banging sticks together. It's kind of clever, in a slightly meta way, but it's also more than a bit pathetic.

But what's worse, the true crime of "Caveman," is the horribly repetitious delivery mechanism for each joke: setup, development, punchline. One after the other. In such a basic manner than a six year-old can predict each one long before its arrival. At barely over an hour and a half, it feels like watching the movie takes a week.

There's a whole subplot tacked on toward the end, about a fight with Neandrathals...and using armor and weapons to win a war...and...well, it's all the worst parts of "2001" and the Terence Hill/Bud Spencer movies all wrapped up in a nasty little package.

Perhaps the weirdest thing is that it obviously wasn't a low-budget production: a lot of money went into the sets and the special effects (just goofy by current standards, but pretty impressive for the day) and whatnot. There was no reason the thing couldn't have turned out good.

Not brilliant, mind you, but certainly less than awful.

If you get a chance to check this one out...don't put yourself through that.


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I am a cheap bastard. So I buy aftermarket laptop batteries from third-party vendors off eBay.

Because, DAMN-- those manufacturers' batteries are EXPENSIVE. Seriously: it's like shelling out 25% of the entire purchase price of the computer itself just to get another battery.

Of course, there are certain goodies you have to do without, if you're shopping the bargain basement for deals. Like fancy packaging.

Or coherent instructions.

Which is how I ended up with this beauty...




Let's review it together, shall we?

I'll ignore the title. Because, heck-- I've made plenty of typos in my time.

Step 1) This is more than I can say for myself. So, hey-- good for you, Battery. You rock.

Step 2) ...put your left hand in. Next, pull your left hand out. I think the circle is genius. GENIUS! I like this circle. It is a good circle. It is better than the rest of those crummy geometric figures.

Step 3) Actually, I think we could all reach our best status and prolong our useful life if we discharged ourselves completely more than once a month, too.

Step 4) HEEEEY! Wait a second, here! My battery is forcing my laptop to hand over currency?? I don't CARE how "small" this amount is-- my technology should not be extorting funds from each other. Bad battery! BAD!

Step 5) Oh, dammit. That ruins my plans for next weekend.

CAUTION: Okay thanks I was going to not do that but I will not do that now because you told me to thank you oh thank you very much.

Attention 1) Okay. Ummm...didn't we cover all this monthly circle stuff earlier?

Attention 2) Oh, now it's LOSING the money it took from the laptop?? Oh, this battery is really starting to show its flaws. It's like some drunk friend, who keeps borrowing from you, promising to get better, but then blowing it all at the track. Well, no more, Battery-- I'm cutting you off. It's for your own good. I know you don't believe me now, but you will thank this for me later. I saved you from a damaged cell, you ungrateful piece of lithium.

Attention 3) Okay, they had me right up until that last sentence. I mean, I was right there, understanding stuff, smiling, bopping along with the Instructioins....then I had to fit on the battery to rouse the computer. I....I am not sure what they are asking me to do. But I am pretty confident that it is not legal in California. For SHAME, Instructioins!


I will just have to figure out how to use the battery on my own. So far, I have had some minor success by popping out the old battery from my laptop, and putting the new one in. I am not sure how long I can keep this up, because the operation of this equipment is obviously much more complex than that, requiring multistage Instructioins. So I might have to slog through those things again, and try to comprehend what they're telling me.

Still...it's better than reading Dickens.

Oh, this one isn't going to make me any friends, either...

I have noticed that when I am among my liberal/journalist/acting/teaching colleagues, I am the right-wing, meat-eating, gun-toting, redneck combative Neanderthal, and that while I am among my military/contracting/security associates, I am the left-wing, pinko atheist intellectual.

Oddly, no matter what the situation, I never seem to actually change, from my perspective.

Anyway, I do appreciate the concept of conservative political thought: I just have a very difficult time with the way it is seemingly practiced by what is passed off as the "conservative" party in America today. As with many groups and organizations, the GOP and its stalwarts are evidently blind to their own inherent contradictions and hypocrisies.

We can begin with that most giant of fallacies: security. Now, I dig me the "for the common defense" clause of the Constitution as much as the next red-blooded American. It's one of the few benefits of joining together as a society that I truly understand and support: in order to have a free nation, we must band against those that would destroy our nation. Cool-- I'm all for a military, and a strong one, at that.

Which does NOT mean we need to be able to blow up the planet 1800 times over. Nine or so should suffice.

A world without nukes would be just fine. As weaponry, they don't really serve our purpose. Maybe they worked as a deterrent during the Cold War (although I'd make the argument that their existence exacerbated fears and got us closer to world war than the Mutually-Assured Destruction doctrine kept us out of wars), but they really don't do anything less than obliterate cities...so it's difficult to see their strategic (forget tactical) purpose in a world where we want to do anything less than wipe out entire populations.

This is especially true of targets other than nation-states, and even more so for those adversaries who have already proven so batshit insane that they are willing to die for their cause (when it comes to military philosophies, I'm of the Coppola-Patton mindset: if we're in combat, instead of dying for our way of life, we should make the other guy die for his way of life). If we are fighting an asymmetric war, one where we're the established entity and our enemy is a guerrilla group ready and willing to sacrifice themselves, we don't really accomplish much by nuking something. Terrorists rarely have the massed forces and assets whereby blowing them up with some radioactive megatonnage will help us beat them.

And even if we do decide to keep a couple nuclear warheads close at hand, we don't need to have them aimed, prepped, and ready to go: nuking something should not be a hasty decision. If we really, really need to make a plutonium-laced crater, we can just as easily do it a week from today as this afternoon. What's the hurry?

But our current conservative faction seems to view any reduction of atomic weapons as slitting our own throats...even though they are expensive, dangerous, and cumbersome to maintain, and have no proven efficacy in terms of increasing our "security."

Then there are the conventional forces. Do we really need to spend twice as much as the next five highest-expending nations COMBINED?  Again, I do believe we should have a standing military capability, and it should be well-trained, well-armed, and well-supplied...but there is such a thing as just too much. Having that size of force leads to all sorts of trouble, including a culture that is far too willing to engage in foreign adventurism that includes violence for no good end, and an economy far too dependent on the defense sector.

That word is important, while we're mentioning it: defense. For the common DEFENSE. Running around blowing people up is NOT defense, nor does it ultimately make us safer. Here is another major shortcoming in the vision of modern "conservatives": they seem to think it's possible to pacify a group or a populace by killing a number of its members.

This is not the case. This has never been the case...else the Romans would have stamped out Christianity a while back, the Jews would have been gone any number of times during human history, and nobody would ever know what a Cambodian or Armenian looked like.

You can't change someone's mind with a bullet to the head, and you can't stop someone from wanting to kill you by blowing up their family. In fact, if you harmed or killed someone I loved, I'd pretty much make it my life's mission to destroy anyone who allied themselves with you, supported you, and armed you: I wouldn't care if you had harmed or killed my loved-ones "accidentally" or with the best intent in mind-- I would seek justice in the form of vengeance, and do it in a nasty, clever, irrevocable way.

So I understand there are people in this world who hate Americans; in many cases, I think they have every right to do so.

It's a simple formula: we send troops to go fight somewhere, we blow up lots of stuff and people, then we have to do it all again about a generation later. This does not make us safer. It's pretty much guaranteed to do the opposite.

But the conservative lust for security does not end with the loss of life and property on foreign soil: much worse, "conservatives" chuck their purported "limited-government" philosophy when it comes to trampling on individual liberties here at home.

The rampant, disgusting, inexcusable, unproductive civil rights abuses of the recent past boggle the mind in their staggering breadth and completeness. There does not seem to be any limit to what conservatives will justify in the name of "security."

There is no justification. None. The scales don't balance. Trading freedoms for security is so abysmally ridiculous that you can just drop your favorite aphorism into this sentence right here, and it will be completed perfectly.

Liberals-- don't get cocky: Democrats have supported (if not initiated!) some of the most intrusive harms to individual liberty of the past decade.

But why stop with mentioning the combat-hungry facets of modern conservatism? The fact that this tribe is so willing to compromise its main selling point should be enough for any sane person to doubt its veracity.

 I like the notion of limited government, both in scope and size, and I really dig the concept of personal responsibility. These are the repeated mantras of the right-wing set: yet they mean absolutely nothing in real life.

Republican Congresses and administrations have overseen the greatest increases of government spending, size, power, and authority in the past 50 years. The very things they have purported to stand against --growth of federalism, entitlements-- have spread faster and farther under GOP supervision than when shepherded by the admitted statists in the other party.

I understand politics. I understand that politicians who don't use their position and influence to yank taxpayer dollars out of the federal trough and bring it back to their constituents will soon have no constituency. Got it. But I would really appreciate if the people who took these actions did not then claim to represent the opposite of everything they have demonstrated themselves to be.

At least the socialists are up front about their desire to take my money and freedoms with the intent of bestowing it all on someone else. While I despise their philosophy, I appreciate their occasional honesty.

Even purported conservatives seem to be glad to endorse socialism...as long as the socialist programs are ones they approve. Yes, public schooling is a big part of that. State control of wildlife for game purposes is another. Add governmental oversight of finance, alcohol, pharmaceuticals, travel, and industry, and you're right back in the statist camp. Having some government-run social programs and markets is like being a little sexually active...either you are or you aren't: there's no gray area when it comes to that dichotomy.

Then there's the final straw: the current motif of positioning conservative thought as the bastion of superstition.

I will never be able to agree with any political philosophy or movement that holds as its key facets a denial of all human accomplishment, thought, and progress over the past two hundred years. Here's the thing: religion is not reason, and will never be as good as reason, because reason uses demonstrated results, not fairies and make-believe.

Which, liberals, is why your entire philosophy is disgusting: so stay off any high horses.

Current conservatives are held hostage by the component of their populace that wants desperately for everyone to cleave to their shared fantasy, and wants even more that government enforce it. These are the American counterpart to the crazed thugs in the Middle East who go around brutalizing citizens in public, under government mandate or tolerance, because some pretend creature told them they could.

Yes, it's time to grow up and admit that there are no supernatural beings influencing our lives. Time to stop expecting that all Americans should be forced to comply with the whims of your own personal imaginary friends, or that public policy should be based on edicts assigned by your own interpretation of a book full of fairy tales.

That goes for anyone who wants to impose anything they call "morality" or "values": in a free nation, we will all choose those as individuals, and the only moment when government should get involved is when one of us commits fraud or initiates force against another.

Those are the things keeping the supposed "conservative" wing of our society from being actually conservative: military mania including foreign adventurism and excessive scope; chucking liberties in false pursuit of security; approval of specific socialist programs and entitlements; and downright ludicrous belief in superstition.

I might be a part of that group...except these things keep me away. As they should for every true conservative.