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Is it just me or does anyone else watching these press conferences keep expecting Donald Rumsfeld to peel back the skin off his face, naked skull cackling maniacally as demonic blue flame erupts from behind his head?
Rumsfeld has a pretty commanding presence and seems to keep the press under pretty tight reins, but BOY, he freaks me out.
Well, there does appear to be some justice left in the world. Now how do we get Bechtel off the list ...
At the very least, any money they make should go back into paying the federal government and Commonwealth of MA for cost overruns associated with the Big Dig.
The cold downpour happening outside at this hour reminds me of Louis XIV's final words. It really is a deluge outside, alternating between just pissing down rain and pouring down buckets. The forecasts call for a possible switch over to snow later, but with this much wet down first, and the warm weather we've been having for the past few days, I doubt it'll amount to anything -- especially this late in the season.
Weather like this brings back a sense memory of being a kid and just wanting to stay under the covers forever on days like this. It's not that I hate rain -- you spend a year or two in Seattle and you learn about rain the same way the Inuit have dozens of words for snow -- but the chilly early spring air and the harsh, pelting precipitation combine to make you truly thankful for having something warm and dry to snuggle underneath. Speaking of which, we picked up new sheets at K-Mart the other day, and it made me realize something.
We swapped a cheap bed-in-a-bag my mother-in-law got us recently as a gift for Bonnie's birthday. We got a set that cost us $5 more than the set we swapped, but that we both liked a lot better. Judy got the sheets on the closeout deal, and we'd have kept hers, except that the comforter had a pink roses print that Bonnie and I both thought was nauseous. This one has a rich red flower pattern going on that suits us -- and the room -- a lot better.
It was the first sheet set we'd bought in the better part of a decade, about eight years all told, near as I can remember. The last time we'd bought sheets was about a year before we had Bob, if memory serves, which is about the same time we'd bought our bed, and that is DEFINITELY showing its age. At the time, Bonnie INSISTED that we buy sheets with a high thread count. They'll hold up well, she promised me, and it's better than buying a new set to replace them every few years.
I'd thought that it was very indulgent to do so. Good sheets cost a lot of money -- a lot more than cheap sheets do. And you can't buy them as beds-in-a-bag, either -- you have to piece them together, buying the comforter, pillowcases, shams, bed skirt. By the time you're done, you're out a couple hundred dollars, versus $50 on sale. At K-Mart.
Hindsight -- and being able to see the television picture through the threadbare and scratchy topsheet of our new bed set -- made me realize the truth of what Bonnie was trying to tell me at the time. She's an accomplished seamstress and understands fabrics, so I guess I shouldn't be surprised.
Well, we scored a serviceable bed set for $5, so I'm not entirely disappointed. But if I'd payed even the full sale price, I'd have been upset that we just hadn't spent the extra money on the good stuff.
When I first started working in the Macintosh market, it was arguably one of the most depressing jobs a technical professional can ever do: Front-line telephone support for consumer products. Five years of it, all told, working for computer hardware and software makers. In a job like that, you talk with a lot of people who don't have any technical knowledge at all, people who mightn't be all that smart to begin with. It's common to trade "stupid user stories" with friends and colleagues as a release valve for the pressures of the day. After that, I did network administration and system support for another half-decade. Again, it's a tough gig unless you have excellent interpersonal skills. Mine leave something to be desired most days.
The same dynamic exists in the game market, I've learned. Some of the most vocal members of the game community are young people and others who suffer from problems associated with arrested emotional development or anger management. For reasons that aren't exactly clear to me, those particular folks -- a minority, to be sure -- use public forums, e-mail addresses and chat services as a way to vent their problems. For some, it's therapy. For others, it's just another outlet for aggression. Whatever the case, it's often ugly.
My friends and colleagues in this business and I have long been alternately fascinated, repulsed and nonplussed by this sort of behavior. Occasionally, we've even been dragged down into the muck -- that's one of the reasons I stay away from GameRanger now, and my frustration with this whole culture has been fodder for past Tikkabik rants.
There's something that concerns me a bit, however, and while it may not be a trend, it's happened twice now that I'm aware of in the Mac game market, and I hope that's it: I'm referring to the public chiding of "stupid" users. MacPlay's recent e-newsletter sported a satire column where a fictional angry man at the company took users to task for silly questions. I asked the author of the newsletter who confirmed for me that it was indeed based on real feedback they've gotten. And yesterday, Inside Mac Games posted an article called "dumb letters," which make similar sport of intellectually challenged users who have asked them for help.
Whatever you think or say in your downtime, or in confidence to someone else, or screaming into your pillow at night, is one thing. But to show such open, bald-faced contempt for your customers is a big mistake. At the end of the day, whether you're a journalist, a game developer, a publisher, or a service provider, these people are the ones paying your bills -- they're the ones who click on your banner ads, who buy your advertiser's products, and who pay for the subscriptions to your magazines.
The customer may not always be right, but he always deserves to be treated with respect. By all means, treat them with a sense of humor. But don't forget the respect part.
... as Chairman of the Defense Policy Board amidst a conflict of interest scandal.
And amazingly, there's been very little attention paid to the fact that VP Dick Cheney's old company, Halliburton, just landed a multimillion dollar US government contract to help the Iraqis rebuild oil wells -- all without any public bidding process at all.
So, Al Gore was appointed to Apple's Board of Directors, and MacCentral's readers promptly went completely nuts. The crux of the complaints are that Gore has no private sector experience, and that it seems to be more motivated by Steve Jobs' liberal tendencies (a well known Clinton supporter) than by any business reason.
Well, even though Gore's appointment is largely ceremonial -- do Boards of Directors actually *do* anything -- I certainly can say one thing without any reservation: It certainly was a polarizing decision, at least for the vocal minority who post to MacCentral's story forums. Some people say they'll get rid of their Macs over the decision, and others say that they're going to forgo purchasing decisions that they would have made otherwise. I sincerely doubt it'll have a significant long-term effect on Apple's bottom line one way or another, but one thing's for sure: Apple sure surprised a lot of people with the decision.
I'm somewhere between ambivalent and supportive of the decision, to be honest. Gore is a well-known Mac user who only started using Windows PCs after he had trouble getting the software he needed to run on it, and in a government sector job, that's no big surprise at all. Now he's back on the Mac, according to Steve Jobs, so that's a plus -- I doubt that many of the other board members really use the hardware all that much. As for his politics, I don't see that it has any more bearing than the politics of any of the other board members, and I don't know anything about their beliefs.
Ever since I started working from home several years ago my wife and I have managed to live with only one vehicle, and for a family living in the distant suburbs of Boston, this is a feat. When the closest grocery store is miles away, and the closest convenience store is about the same, you can't do much without a car at all.
My job occasionally requires me to travel. Sometimes it's as close as Boston, which is about an hour and a half's bus ride away. Often it's a trip to New York, which is several hours away by train. Sometimes it's an airplane trip to the other side of the country.
In any one of these cases, it's imperative to be able to have a car to get at least part of the way. The private bus lines that service this region don't stop anywhere less than about a twenty minute drive away, and the closest commuter rail stop is about half an hour away. The closest Amtrak stop is more than an hours' drive away, and three hops by bus. The closest major airport is equally inconvenient to get to.
And this is all within the confines of Massachusetts -- one of the smaller states in the Union, and one of the oldest and more densely populated locations in North America, and location of the nation's oldest subway system. You'd think it'd be easier to find decent public transportation here than elsewhere.
Unless you live in a major urban area in this country, chances are that public transportation, or even affordable private transportation, is going to come up short.
This is partly because we're a culture that for the last half-century has invested heavily in the automobile as a part of our national identity. There's nothing more quintessentially American than a lone driver on the open road. The Eisenhower administration leveraged a huge amount of funding to link interstate highways, and that's a legacy that continues to drain our tax resources and our collective consciousness to this date.
But it's more than that -- America is also huge, and we have a lot of ground to cover. Alas, the car is still the easiest way to do that. I wish things were different. I wish rail service -- both intercity and light rail -- was a lot more ubiquitous than it is. I wish bus service was a lot more consistent too, and a lot more convenient to use than it is. But these things require money, and the only way for it to make sense is to socialize it, or at least partially subsidize it using tax revenue. That's an idea that rankles my libertarian sensibilities, but from a practical standpoint I find it very appealing.
Part of the reason why Amtrak is losing money hand over fist is because it's forced to run unprofitable routes through states where it just doesn't make sense to have rail service -- places where the population density is still ridiculously low. But if you look at the northeast corridor, Amtrak manages a very profitable enterprise. It's because it makes sense here. People need to travel between Boston and Baltimore.
So what's the solution? Maybe a common sense approach is best -- continue to provide public funding for public transportation where it makes sense -- where it is used enough to be profitable. And give people some sort of incentive to use it, even if that incentive is ultimately altruism -- the common good. But cut off such services where it just doesn't make sense -- where the motivation to service the area is political, rather than sensible.
Just for fun, I'm trying to install Yellow Dog Linux 3.01 on a coupla different Macs around the office to see how they do. This is Terrasoft's latest implementation of a PowerPC-optimized Linux environment, and it's based on the enormously popular RedHat distribution.
First off, if you're using a NewWorld Mac -- anything with a color in the case beside beige, basically -- you're gonna be able to do the install quite easily. The software incorporates a very user-friendly installer that walks you through the process and asks you a few questions that -- unless your name is Evan Marriott -- you should be able to field with a minimum of head scratching, even if you're a relative newbie. The only possibly daunting part of it is if you have to reformat your hard drive to give the installer the opportunity to set up partitions correctly.
YDL gets a bit squirrely if you're installing on an OldWorld Mac, like by venerable beige G3/300. These things can't boot straight into the installer, so you have to futz with BootX, a Mac OS 9 control panel and extension apparatus that forces your Mac to boot into a Linux environment.
To this end, Apple has been much more user-friendly with OS X, which supports beige Power Mac G3s and all newer machines too. My Jaguar installation CD recognized the computer right off, and told me that I'd have to reinitialize the hard drive with smaller partition sizes (it's a 20GB model, bigger than all of the stock models that Jaguar would have installed on presumably with no problem.
So -- if you're using a newer Mac, YDL and OS X are in a dead heat on setup. If you have a beige G3 in the house, OS X might have the advantage.
More thoughts to come later.
Okay, I'm certainly no international law expert, but I'm a bit confused by Donald Rumsfeld's allegation that Iraq is in violation of the Geneva Convention for showing video of American soldiers captured as prisoners of war. Unless I'm missing something, Rumsfeld's argument stems from Article 13 of Convention III, which states:
"Prisoners of war must at all times be humanely treated. Any unlawful act or omission by the Detaining Power causing death or seriously endangering the health of a prisoner of war in its custody is prohibited, and will be regarded as a serious breach of the present Convention. In particular, no prisoner of war may be subjected to physical mutilation or to medical or scientific experiments of any kind which are not justified by the medical, dental or hospital treatment of the prisoner concerned and carried out in his interest.
"Likewise, prisoners of war must at all times be protected, particularly against acts of violence or intimidation and against insults and public curiosity.
"Measures of reprisal against prisoners of war are prohibited."
Now, I get how showing them on video might possibly be construed as failing to protect POWs from public curiosity. But that seems pretty flimsy to me. It occurs to me that they're doing more of a service than a disservice by enabling US media and the military to identify who the Iraqis have in custody and who they've killed or who's gone MIA.
So, can someone with a better grip on this stuff explain it to me? Use small words. Otherwise I might startled and frightened.
For whatever reason, I've never trusted Michael Moore -- the documentarian who made his public debut with "Roger and Me," which discussed the deleterious effects of General Motors' decision to close manufacturing facilities in Flint, MI. Moore has been more recently lauded with his work on "Bowling for Columbine," which touches on America's propensity for guns and ties together that with the murderous behavior of two youngsters from Columbine, Colo., who went on a shooting spree at their high school.
My reasons for disliking Moore are largely visceral. While I could probably be convinced of the benefits of the brand of socialistic altruism he'd like to see governments and corporations support, he comes across to me as a bully. His "TV Nation" television show repeatedly would take middle managers or low-level executives from corporations with questionable ethical positions and put them on camera. I think it's a cheap shot, and I don't think simply because you're collecting a paycheck from a company that's doing crappy things that it's worth taking public abuse or ridicule over. It's also patently obvious that Moore and his production team stage some events.
On the other hand, I like to see a real journalist -- like the 60 Minutes crew, for example -- make senior executives and government officials squirm when they catch those guys doing something really loathsome. But those folks are asking for what they get -- they're agreeing to the interview, and all it entails. It implies a certain battlefield chivalry that I think is wholly lacking in Moore's guerilla approach.
Anyway, a recent Opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal penned by John Fund exposes some of inaccuracies, distortions and mistruths in Bowling for Columbine. David T. Hardy has also weighed in on Bowling for Columbine, and he raises some great points too, but his delivery is a bit more vitriolic.
So, if you think that Michael Moore is somehow a paragon of virtue, common sense, or the voice of the everyman, check this stuff out. It'll cast him in a new light.
Okay, I've been watchin Farscape religiously since the show first debuted four seasons ago. I just finished watching the series finale. If you're not familiar with what's happened, let me bring you up to speed:
The show follows the trials and tribulations of John Crichton, an Earthling astronaut cast into universe through a wormhole. He develops a group of close friends who travel with him through many adventures and eventually becomes the focus of intense interest from different galactic powers because of his ability to manipulate wormholes -- a means of traveling anywhere in the universe instantly, and a technology that no one else has mastered.
Anyway, the show is spectacular. From the costume design to the acting, CGI to set design to the creature effects, everything about Farscape is top notch. There's only one problem: It's not terribly episodic. It has a long arcing storyline that's intricate and involved. And it's been consistently losing ratings for the past couple of years. That I would have expected -- people are morons.
Unfortunately, The Sci Fi Channel pulled the plug on it late last year after production of the fourth season wrapped. It's a complete kick in the junk, too, because the fourth season ends with Chricton and his lady love, the dark and sultry Aeryn Sun, being blasted to particles by some heretofore unknown assassin.
It's not gonna come back last year. The sets have been broken down, the costumes and props have been put away, and the actors have gone looking for other work. The show still ended defiantly with "To Be Continued," though, which gives me hope that maybe the story arc will see some sort of completion with a mini-series or a movie, kinda like Babylon 5.
Bah.
There are protesters. And then there are dumbasses. Obviously, the anti-war folks don't have a complete lock on foolish behavior, but there are definitely some whackjobs out there.
The SF Chronicle reports that some protesters called Pukers for Peace ended up regurgitating on the steps of the Federal Building. I have it on good authority that a couple of SF protesters were crapping on the streets and hurling it at passing automobiles, too.
What's more, some asshat in Olympia Washington chained himself to the wrong building to protest the war.
Geesh.
In defense or analysis of the Macintosh, a lot of people draw analogies between computers and cars. Mercedes-Benz and BMWs have a small share of the auto market but huge respect of reviewers and industry insiders plus profitable businesses (for the most part), so it's totally understandable. But I don't think of the business in those terms.
I consider the Mac more like a Bang and Olufsen stereo. It's a lifestyle device.
Bang and Olufsen is this company based out of Denmark that makes home entertainment systems. Ask any audiophile about Bang and Olufsen and chances are you'll elicit the same contemptful sneer that you do from a PC gamer who's asked about the Mac: "Sure, the boxes LOOK pretty, but what's inside isn't that great."
And it's true. You can get better quality audio hardware at considerably lower cost if you don't mind ugly boxes. And you can get stuff that sounds close to as good for a fraction of price, if you're not measuring distortion rates with an oscilloscope.
But what separates Bang and Olufsen from the crowd is their attention to design. Their stuff kicks all sorts of ass. From tapered-candle looking tower speakers to wall-mounted speakers that look like floating flat planes of fabric and components that are all primary shapes, Bang and Olufsen has a totally unique design sensibility that's really untouched in the home entertainment business. Their designs make a bold architectural statement, and create a compelling focal point that really causes you to think hard about how you're going to display the gear.
That sort of statement isn't for everyone -- some people won't be willing to pay the price that premium lifestyle equipment demands, and some people won't be willing to put up with the limitations. For those that "get it," though, life is good.
It's common for me to see feedback from readers -- posted to the MacCentral forums, sometimes even e-mailed to me directly -- lauding the old "Classic" Mac OS. They still use it, they say, and they see no reason to switch. They have a wide range of political, economic, or personal justifications for not using Mac OS X.
I do not identify with these folks in any way, shape or form. I cannot understand why anyone would not make a concerted effort to get Jaguar installed on their Mac; and if they're using a Mac that doesn't work with OS X, I cannot understand any reason why they would not buy a new machine at this point, unless the economics made it truly impossible.
Having been a Mac user off and on (but mostly on) for more than half my life, I have seen the Macintosh operating system evolve from its humble beginnings as a simple, black and white graphical user interface capable of basic tasks that was still way more sophisticated and powerful than anything available for other personal computers; to a slightly more sophisticated (if cumbersome) system capable of running multiple applications at once. Eventually it evolved into something more useful still, with built-in color support, better memory and task management and so on, into the system that ultimately became Mac OS 9.
In many ways, that last iteration of "Classic" reminds me of my car -- it's the sort of thing that's been patched and wired together so many times, you're amazed that it works, and a little fearful of it too.
Not so with Mac OS X.
I'll admit that when I first started using Mac OS X -- as a public beta -- I WAS terrified of it. A Unix-based operating system -- something that can operate equally well as a script or interpreted language-driven command line operating system or as a GUI -- was a terrifying prospect to behold. I knew enough Unix to know that I could easily blow something up and never get it to work again without reformatting and reinstalling the operating system.
Having spent all this time with Mac OS X, however, I have to say that I truly love it. Corey Tamas has asked me to quantify my adoration for Mac OS X in slightly less esoteric ways than I have in the past, and I'm not sure that I can -- it's the mixture of under-the-hood power combined with an elegant user interface. Extending the old computers-as-cars metaphor, I guess I feel with Mac OS X like it's Bentley owners do -- a beautiful, well-crafted engineering marvel truly made for driving.
Microsoft has come a long, long way from Windows 3.1 to XP, there's no question. But I still find it an exceedingly cumbersome and awkward environment -- things like operating system commands and directory listings are hidden from me that shouldn't be hidden from me, while I'm exposed to problems that I shouldn't have to deal with, like device driver issues and constant, constant updates to security and reliability.
The Mac isn't perfect. Operating system drivers still need some refinement and tweaking, and Apple's dependance on OpenGL -- and the ARB's slow pace of ratification -- has put the Mac behind Windows in terms of 3D driver development, to be sure. Apple sure as hell has to do something about the glacial pace of PowerPC processor clock speed increases. That's the bane of Mac gamers, along with the long time for games to port and the slow pace at which A-list titles come to the platform. But it doesn't stop my day to day Mac experience from being supremely good -- and as I've said again and again, I'm a Mac user first and a gamer second.
I'm sure that Windows will evolve further down the road too. But Apple is innovating at an even better pace, so to that end I'm hoping that we'll continue to see the Mac evolve in ways we haven't imagined yet.
It's nice to see that, despite the grave situation in the world today, not everyone has lost their sense of humor.
Procrastination is catching up with me again. The boxes and piles are taking over my office, and I'm becoming very depressed with the weight of it all. The last couple of weeks have been a trial because my boss has been on the road, which means that I'm responsible for updating the site AND writing a large part of the content.
Outside of the long hours (70+ last week and more of the same this week, as it's turning out), I don't really mind the work -- in fact, I like it. There's a sense of accomplishment in seeing the material posted and seeing readers comment on it at the end of the day that's very concrete, even if it seems almost sisyphean the next morning when you have to just start all over again.
But back to the whole procrastination thing. I COULD take a day and clean up my office. I COULD fine spaces for all this stuff so it's not in my way. I COULD get my shit together.
But not today.
Well, maybe not according to the calendar, but taking whiff of the air outside you'd certainly expect it to be. It's in the 50s today -- today and yesterday were the first days in this temperature range since last October -- and it's sunny and beautiful, and I wish desperately that I wasn't trapped in my rabbit warren of an office right now.
Birds are chirping, the snow is almost gone, spring bulbs are pushing fresh shoots up through the loam, and we even have a few windows open to let the fresh air in. Please, nature, give us a break and cut this arctic air/heavy snow thing out for the rest of the winter.
There's technology that improves the quality of my life, and I'm profoundly grateful for all of it. Here's a list of things that come to mind immediately:
Ham and cheese Croissant Pockets and the microwave oven. Hot, tasty, flakey pastry snack with pork products in it, what more could I ask?
Polarized sunglasses. Dolby noise reduction for your eyeballs.
Polar fleece. Soft, comfortable, lightweight and warm. Fashionable, even.
Dye- and perfume-free laundry detergent.
Charmin Ultra. The softest toilet paper ever invented.
Automatic coffee makers. A blessing from heaven.
Gilette's Mach III razor. Truly, you have to be an idiot to cut yourself with one of these things.
We got about an inch or two of snow last night. A mere annoyance, especially in light of the copious snowfall we've seen this winter. But I can tell Spring is going to be here soon, because I'm totally unmotivated to shovel it.
I shoveled the steps, the front path, and a path through the driveway to the street, so the kids can get to the bus and the FedEx guy can get to the front door without getting their collective feet wet. That's it. Fuck it. Mother nature can take care of the rest. I quit.
The weatherman was showing pictures from Newfoundland last night, of people standing on mounds of snow where their houses use to be. That, to me, is hell. Then again, they eat seal flipper pie up there, so it takes hardier stock than me to brave that wilderness. More inbreeding, too, from what my Canuckistanian friends tell me.
"Freedom is not a reaction; freedom is not a choice. It is man's pretense that because he has choice he is free. Freedom is pure observation without direction, without fear of punishment and reward. Freedom is without motive; freedom is not at the end of the evolution of man but lies in the first step of his existence. In observation one begins to discover the lack of freedom. Freedom is found in the choiceless awareness of our daily existence and activity." - Krishnamurti
It amazes what some people think is "news."
"Apple aware of speed gap."
Apple's machines are running less than half the clock speed of generic consumer-grade PCs. And they're "aware of a speed gap," according to this rumor site. Great caesar's ghost! Stop the presses!
Behold, a complete fucking retard in public office. Is it any wonder that he was elected by the fine folks from the midwest?
It seems that Congressman Bob Ney (R - Ohio) -- a self-loathing product of French ancestry -- has jumped on the latest cause celebre by forcing the Congress cafeterias to change their menus from "french fries" to "freedom fries." Ney admitted to the New York Times (registration required, but it's free) that it's a symbolic gesture -- what he seems to fail to understand is that it also makes our elected officials look even more out of touch with reality than they already are.
This little story made me spit out a mouthful of freedom-roast coffee I'd just brewed. Good thing I wasn't eating freedom toast. I might have stained the freedom maid outfit I was wearing.
It's been around for a while, but I saw this in a .sig and it made me laugh. I have no idea who to attribute it to.
"We have enough youth. How about a fountain of smart?"
By the way, I love Mac OS X so much I want to hump it.
Democrats can be every bit as stupid as Republicans.
Wonder if the outcome will be the same?
As much as it pains me, I must respectfully disagree with Burger King's assertion that adding bacon, cheese and barbeque sauce to a piece of flame-broiled ground beef constitutes a "lifestyle."
It is many things. It is a sublime concotion of three cholesterol-rich substances with a tangy condiment that creates a veritable orgasm of flavor in the mouth of any self-respecting carnivore. It is one of nature's most perfect balance of flavors. It is ambrosia, the nectar of the gods.
But it is most certainly NOT a "lifestyle."
Selling your house and buying a boat then following the trade winds back and forth across the Atlantic -- THAT'S a lifestyle choice. Giving up all your wordly possessions and learning Zen Buddhism from a master -- now THAT'S a lifestyle choice. Buying an loft apartment in the city, THAT'S a lifestyle choice.
Eating a Rodeo Burger, though? Naaaah.
Okay, so Alienware's Area 51 Hybrid is not very original, but it's damn cute. And terrifingly powerful, given the minute amount of space it consumes.
I kinda want one, though I think the monitor they have pictured with it is ass-ugly.
Okay, now to enjoy this link you have to find some humor in leetspeek, but if you occasionally get a kick out of the retards who use that in chat conversation, this link is worth its weight in gold.
I was recently called into school to pick up Robert from the principal's office. He'd accidentally missed the bus, and while I was there, the principal asked me to step in to her office for a minute.
My heart sunk, just like any parent. My first thought was, "What's he done?"
The principal explained to me that apparently a girl's parents had tried to implicate Bob and two other boys in what seems like -- without sounding overreactive -- a case of sexual assault against a girl in their class. In my day it would have been an innocent enough thing, but these days, all this stuff is taken very seriously, and occasionally with good reason.
Anyway, what had happened was that Bob had asked a couple of other boys to play with him at recess. They weren't enthusiastic about the idea, so they dared him to kiss another one of their classmates -- a girl.
Now, Bob refused to. At the risk of sounding like a prideful parent, I like to think I've taught my kids right from wrong, and he knows he has no business kissing girls that don't want to be kissed. There are lines you don't cross, and that's one of them. Then again, he could have been scared of catching cooties. Hell, whatever works.
Bob walked off and didn't do what they wanted him to do, entertained himself through recess and got on with his day. The girl caught wind of the exchange, however, and told her parents about it when she got home. Needless to say, they asked the school administration to look into the incident.
Bob was cleared of any wrongdoing. He did the right thing, the principal acknowledged that, and redirected her attention to the boys who deserved it.
We're big in this house on applying practical experience to our knowledge. Bonnie and I often turn shopping trips into math quizzes or yardwork into science experiments -- it comes from a year of homeschooling. So on the way home, I asked Bob if he'd learned anything from the experience.
He thought about it for a moment, and sighed. "Yeah, the lesson is not to ask *stupid* kids to play with me."
As you can see, the apple doesn't fall far from the tree.
...for the recent snow phallus story, if you'll pardon the pun.
Some egghead from the University of British Columbia things that Stonehenge is a giant stone vagina. They were a goddess-worshipping culture, see, so EVERYTHING they made must have had something to do with female genitalia.
I wonder if ancient Celtic men complained of subjugation by symbols of female dominance?
Court Nixes Child Net Porn Law
Yay!
While I'm all for protecting kids, I'm not willing to lose my own constitutional rights in the process. This law was bullshit, and I'm glad to see the courts knock it down.
I find it cosmically ironic that the Macintosh's biggest strength -- graphics -- is also a big weakness. Ever since PCs moved into the realm of hardware accelerated 3D graphics Apple has been lagging. It's partly their fault and it's partly not their fault too. This point was driven home to me this morning when I was writing up a recap of ATI's recently announcements of three new desktop chips, with a Mac version of their last flagship desktop chip still MIA.
I understand the reasons why development itself lags. It's partly economy of scale -- 97 percent of the market demands an equivalent amount of resources. One can't expect ATI or Nvidia to devote themselves part and parcel to the Macintosh market when they have bigger and frankly more important fish to fry. That's a cross I'm perfectly willing to bear.
No, what I get bent about is when Apple does stupid things, like taking its high-end box and putting a mainstream graphics chip in it.
Even if it doesn't make a huge amount of performance difference if the Power Mac G4 uses a Radeon 9000 or a GeForce 4 Ti, I still think Apple should do the right thing and put the high-end graphics system in its high-end boxes.
I can't understand why Apple, which already has the highest margins in the computer business, isn't willing to sacrifice a bit of those profits and provide users with more of what they want. Apple is already at a serious deficit when it comes to CPU performance, at least when it comes to gaming. The PowerPC may be good for some things, and may very well be able to outpace Pentium CPUs running at much higher frequencies for certain tasks. But it's damn rotten when it comes to game performance compared with Pentium 4's running at twice the clock speed or even higher. Having a mainstream graphics card in there is just rubbing salt in the wounds.
I really wish that Apple would make more of a concerted effort to consistently get the faster graphics technology into their boxes, too. There's still no sign of GeForce FX on the Mac platform, despite Apple's seemingly love affair with Nvidia -- a topic I've discussed before.
There's been a debate raging at Harvard University for almost the past month about the erection of a nine-foot tall snow phallus in Harvard Yard. Done as a prank by the Harvard men's crew team, the giant snow penis was knocked down by a feminist and her conservative Christian roommate later that night.
Both the crew team's sophomoric prank and the extreme reaction to it have caused debates on campus running the gamut from free speech rights to violence against women. "No one should be subject to an erect penis without ... consent," the would-be snow-castrator told The Crimson, Harvard's resident newsletter.
That seems like an extreme reaction. God forbid this woman ever travels to spots on the planet where yawning yonis and tumescent lingams are actually celebrated in festivals and religious events -- you know, places where cultural mores haven't been shaped by 400-years-dead puritans.
And as far as I'm concerned, if Ms. Keel had any sense of humor about the situation, she'd have simply knocked the giant phallus over to make it limp rather than blasting it apart in a fit of Cotton Mather-like fervor.
One women's studies expert compared the snow-penis to other symbols of male dominance like the Washington Monument and nuclear missiles. Give me a break. I'm reminded of Cole Sear, Haley Joel Osment's character from The Sixth Sense. "I see penises!"
You can review the whole sordid story itself by visiting The Crimson's Web site and searching for "Snow Phallus" yourself.
The Wall Street Journal's Brian Carney has a good perspective. All the highfalutin academic gibberish, he asserts, has gotten in the way of what's really at issue here.
"But Ms. Keel doesn't need exotic concepts like 'gendered violence' and phallocentricity to justify what she did. Old-fashioned ones like decency will do just fine. The trouble is, by rejecting traditional mores as so much bourgeois conventionalism (to borrow a phrase), Ms. Keel has left herself impotent in the face of real obscenity."
While it's clear that the original sculpture was done in poor taste, it's interesting to note that the crew team itself isn't overly upset with Keel's knocking it down. One team member's reaction to the resulting brouhaha is that "smart kids tend to overanalyze things," which pretty much sums up the situation.
Somehow I got finagled into taking this parenting class every Tuesday night, for the next five weeks. What I've discovered is that the other people in the class, the teacher, and the folks who wrote the books don't have any better insights than I do about how to raise kids.
Well, at least it gets me out of the house once a week.
I subscribe to libertarianism more than anything, though I don't wholly subscribe to that political camp either. So it won't come as any great surprise to find out that I'm not anxious to see the United States get into a war with Iraq.
But my convinction is not born of any lofty philosophical goals -- mainly practical ones. A conflict with Iraq is going to cost us a hell of a lot of money -- north of $50 billion and maybe closer to $100 billion, according to some estimates. The U.S. won't recoup most of that cost like it was able to with Desert Storm, which cost us net about $10 billion after getting $50 billion back from our allies. It'll also take us a while to mend our fences with our foreign allies who don't support us. Both of these issues raise very negative economic ramifications for our already ailing economy, and the last thing we need to do is give the Euro any help.
Still, that's not to say that I agree with the jingoistic rhetoric of the left, either. In fact, most of it makes me want to vomit. Jennifer "Buttafly" Bishop has some great insights about what's wrong with this camp, based on her recent experience at an anti-war rally in that bulwark of liberal wackiness, San Francisco.
The Daily Californian reports that the Berkeley College Republicans have incited a debate by organizing a bake sale cum demonstration to protest affirmative action policies.
Waitaminit. Berkeley? College? Republicans? There's an oxymoron if I ever heard one. More power to 'em.
The bake sale sold cookies to whites for $1.50, while latinos and blacks were charged only $1.00 and $0.25, respectively. A bit heavy-handed, I admit, but the point was demonstrated pretty clearly.
While the group president said the event was staged to show the inherent racism of affirmative action, the head of the California Democratic Party decried it as a "racist attack." I'm not sure if he's missing the point or just pandering to his political constituency. Either way, it's exactly what I'd expect from some Bay Area cabernet commie.
