A debate for which there cannot be a resolution: whose hair appears to be more fake, Donald Trump (you know what he looks like) or Pervez Musharraf? Keep in mind that Donald's is rumored to actually be real. This may bestow bonus points.
Related: I'd much rather hear DT say "you're fired" than PM, seeing as Pakistan is a nuclear power, and he could conceivably be standing near a silo somewhere, pointing up at the sky while making a lame, albeit apocalyptic, pun a la AS.
When public interest groups compile lists of corporate welfare recipients, a company called Archer Daniels Midland (ADM) is usually at the top of the list. You may never have heard of ADM, because its name rarely appears on consumer products, but it’s huge. Its products are in most processed foods.
ADM collects welfare because of two cleverly designed special deals. The first is the government’s mandated minimum price for sugar. Because of the price supports, if a soft drink maker wants to buy sugar for its soda, it has to pay 22 cents a pound -- more than twice the world price. So Coca-Cola (and almost everyone else) buys corn sweetener instead. Guess who makes corn sweetener? ADM, of course. Now guess who finances the groups that lobby to keep sugar prices high?
Something's always bugged me about decrying welfare and yet pretending that massive farm/insurance subsidies are qualitatively different.
Are the Grey Tuesday protesters protected by fair use?
Fair use generally refers to the federal copyright law exception contained in Section 107 of the Copyright Act. Because the White Album is not protectible under federal copyright law, fair use is not directly applicable.
State courts, however, are likely to look at federal fair use principles, as well as general principles of "equity" (i.e., fairness) in applying state law doctrines. There are a number of characteristics of the Grey Tuesday protest that would likely weigh in favor of those who post the Grey Album:
1. the posting of the Grey Album is for a noncommercial purpose;
2. downloads of the Grey Album do not substitute for purchases of the White Album;
3. the Grey Album is a transformative use of the White Album, not a wholesale copy; and
4. the posting of the Grey Album is intended as part of a commentary on the use of copyright law to stymie new kinds of musical creativity.
Chris Harry is a model employee for the U.S. call-center industry.
The 25 year-old arrives promptly at his cubicle, speaks courteously on the phone and is never late or absent. He plans to stick with his job for three years, a boon in an industry plagued by high turnover. And he gladly works for money many Americans would scoff at -- $130 or so a month.
After all, he could be back swabbing cell-block floors for a third of that.
"I can't complain about fair," said Harry, who was sentenced to 10 years and eight months for robbery. "I did a crime and I'm in prison. At least I'm not wearing a ball and chain."
I really hate to take issue with this because it's such a fluff piece, but what is the primary intent behind giving inmates jobs? If it's to occupy idle hands and provide a sense of purpose, then I'm all for this, but as Lafer notes there's something rather perverse about training a prisoner for a job that won't exist once they're freely allowed to seek employment.
And why did they categorize this as a "business" article? Do they need to get the word out to all the Fortune 500 CEOs who are desperately seeking cheap, incarcerated labor?
:: Have you heard about this item you brought to my attention?
I wrote a little while back about memigo, which tailors news to your tastes based on your browsing habits. One of its great features is that anyone can register their syndication feed (RSS/Atom/WhatHaveYou) to be spidered for links to interesting stories. Memigo is nice enough to include attribution so when viewing a summary, one can see from whence it was suggested. Since average bloggers get their feeds scanned just like heavy-hitters like Metafilter and Popdex, I often see "...this article was linked by Drudge Report, Google News, JoeMama, AngieDaddy" or "Memigo user JoeMama originally submitted this article" at the bottom. When they say a user has "submitted" an article, it can sometimes (well, in my experience, almost always) mean that their feed was scanned and a nice ripe link was harvested. Memigo has a very tacit definition of submitted. It's like the teacher that signed you up for Model U.N. because he/she saw you reading a short pamphlet on Truman (or Model League of Nations because you were staring wistfully at a crochet quilt featuring Woodrow Wilson).
So memigo scans its huge database of feeds and presents me with news items which it thinks I might find interesting. It does an decent job - not good enough to wholly supplant other news sources but spiffy as a supplement. But: since I've included my blog's feed (those cute little syndication links over in the sidebar aren't just there for show) in memigo's resource pool, anything about which I post is fair game, and there tends to be a high degree of crossover between the subjects about which I read (i.e. memigo thinks I like) and the subjects about which I blog. The end result is that, on occasion, I'll be browsing through the list of suggested headlines only to find one that looks strangely familiar. Upon reading a summary, I'll see why: "Memigo user morland originally submitted this article."
All that processing just to prove the near-tautology that I am interested in what I post about. It is nice though to see proof that my browsing tastes (from which memigo gleans what to suggest) and my linking behavior are fairly consonant.
Now back to crochet. Oh Wodrow... If only memigo user cupid would suggest our love.
The slow atrophy of Russian democracy scares me. Vlad's imprisoned a chief critic, a potential opponent simply vanished, at a missle test last week the state-controlled news media reverted to good ol-fashioned Soviet insta-revisionist coverage, and now he's dismissed the entire government to eliminate one holdover official from the Yeltsin years.
And his approval rating, if it can be trusted, is above 70%.
I meant this to be sarcastic (kind of a "you are special!" thing), but it went to unexpected places.
Dear QIS -
It's February, and here in New York that means it's cloudy. Some people get Seasonal Affective Disorder, which can be a real impediment to getting things done. One can start to think that some of the more menial tasks are useless and put forth less effort. But those people don't realize the true significance of what they do.
Think about this: why is homo sapiens sapiens the most dominant species on the planet? We are slow, weak, and fragile, yet now control the fate of all life on Earth. One would be tempted to answer that our undisputed place atop the animal kingdom is a result of myriad factors, from our dexterous manual ability to use tools to our penchant for wakeboarding (which is AWESOME). The common consensus among anthropologists today however, is that, while such diverse aspects of our morphology, physiology, and behavior are important, they pale in comparison to the use of one critical adaptive mechanism, one that, above all others, has lead us to our rightful position of utter dominion over lesser, non-wakeboarding, creatures: culture. Simply put, it is our unparalleled ability to effect coordinated action as a group that has lead to our success.
* Lemma 1: the fate of humanity lies with the proper functioning of society.
Society is a giant tool used by our species to adapt and thrive, an incomprehensibly complex machine, a network of billions of decision-makers struggling to align themselves. The industrial-strength lubricant used to ensure its proper functioning is communication.
* Lemma 2: the proper functioning of society is predicated upon effective communication.
The primary means by which humans communicate is obviously language (there are others, such as facial expressions, or flamboyant wakeboarding technique, but none approach language in terms of impact and importance). Once upon a time, this only meant the existence of an oral tradition through which members of a small group could transmit the ideas necessary for the community. One tribesman might say to the other, "Hey, let's go hunting. By dividing our efforts, the two of us can become better hunters as a group than we would have been as individuals. Afterwards, we can go wakeboarding." But soon this was supplemented by written communication, which had innumerable advantages over its solely oral counterpart.
* Lemma 3: the efficacy and nature of communication depends on the medium.
One such gain introduced with written communication was that, for the first time, messages could be carried over long distances and remain independent of the inaccuracies that accompanied human memorization (the old method). So now, a foreign diplomat could relay back, "My lord, I beseech thee to avoid further provocation of the Gauls. They are quite irate over the wakeboarding incident," without worrying about the linguistic subtleties being lost. Additionally, the knowledge contained within such communiqués could be permanently stored, copied, and/or disseminated. This proved to be a massive shift in the way societies interacted with ideas. Witness, for instance, the success of the Guttenberg Bible and its bearing on Martin Luther's reformation of the Catholic church. New technologies, adopted because they lowered costs, increased reliability, and decreased transmission time, made their impact felt in ways unimagined hitherto.
* Lemma 4: progressive paradigmatic shifts in communications technology (i.e. the medium) lead to greater societal benefit.
Every major communications revolution has, over the long-term, resulted in a profound change for the better. The telegraph eliminated the need for sometimes risky trans-oceanic envoys to carry missives between continents, but it also lead to such innovations as the stock ticker, which stoked the fires of the free markets (providing valuable information transparency) and helped to usher in the industrial age.
* Lemma 5: those who foster such shifts have a direct and non-trivial impact on the speed and extent of their adoption.
Beneficial technologies like, say, wakeboarding, will, ceteris paribus, likely achieve prominence on their own merits in time, but the process can be noticeably accelerated by its developers and benefactors. Business savvy, political sway, assiduous dedication, foresight, and any number of other qualities can shorten the window needed to turn a nascent and untested means of communication into a popular and vital one.
* Conclusion: the individuals responsible for shepherding new communications technologies have a direct effect on the health and operating efficiency of societies, the successes of which translate directly to the success of humankind in its entirety.
We are living on the cusp of a new stage of societal development, one that will be a direct result of wireless technologies currently emerging. Qualcomm, BREW, and you at QIS play no small part in this. Through your efforts, all of humanity benefits. I believe a new era of good fortune and wakeboarding is upon us.
So you see, when the sky is cloudy and you get to a-thinkin' that those little things you do aren't so important, please realize that the entire fate of our species rests on those very tasks you might at first think inconsequential. Not to be grandiose or anything.
Hey, speaking of which, I've enclosed an [phone model] with software build [unimportant]. Could you please re-flash it with the latest software build and return it to us as soon as is convenient?
Tonight I went to see Lil GnR, a Guns n' Roses cover band made up of children. There's something truly disturbing about having a ten-year-old child inform me (through song) that "[I'm] in the jungle baby... [I'm] gonna die!" Despite that, it was still less disturbing than the Bob Saget show I saw back in college.
In future episodes, OLN’s most prominent outdoor experts will share their knowledge with Yoshi as eastern tradition meets western expertise. From sporting clays with Tom Knapp to log rolling with Ironjack World Champions, OLN's master outdoorsmen will teach Yoshi their discipline while learning from his Samurai ways. While discovering each other’s skills these experts manage to share enjoyable, fun and leisure moments together always mindful of the pleasure and joys that life in the outdoors, no matter how approached, should bring to us.
“Yoshi brings his own unique approach to each sport,” said Williams. “Because of his rigorous martial arts training he has intense focus and composure. Given the Samurai’s reverence for nature, Yoshi is at one with the outdoors and quickly builds a rapport and relationship with OLN’s other hosts. He is adept with a range of weaponry: swords of all sizes and shapes, bows and arrows, and even guns.”
I caught Samurai Sportsman, staring Yoshi Amao, last night on OLN, and was instantly hooked. Like Iron Chef, it manages to be simultaneously outrageously campy and earnestly appealing. OLN is airing it fairly frequently over the next couple months, so check it out. Last night's episode featured renowned lumberjack Mike Sullivan:
Samurai Sportsman follows in the footsteps of the great lumberjacks of the American forest as he tackles axe throwing and log chopping with champion Mike Sullivan. The two masters of the blade - Mike with an axe, Samurai Sportsman with a sword - face off in a ninja star throwing competition.
For those of you in the NYC area, Yoshi hosts separate samurai sword fighting workshops for beginning and advanced students every Saturday.
Remember when cable television first became popular, and speculation ran rampant that all this programming would eventually result in unforeseen millions of boorish pulp shows, each catering to the basest common denominator of its target demographic? Well, that's what happened, and it's awesome.
Don't forget: this is the network that brought you Rvtoday.
Last night, having fasted against my will for 40 hours or so, I had some memorable dreams. One involved my father regaling the family with tales of his journeys abroad on various projects for NBC (which has some basis in reality, insofar as he did indeed travel all around the world - he rarely though, if ever, shared stories thereof). He had just begun to tell us about how he'd almost gone to China when the phone rang. I answered it and had a lengthy conversation with my aunt regarding the respective ages of some distant relatives. Then I awoke, never having heard the reason why my father was to have gone to China, nor why his trip had been canceled.
This afternoon, back in reality, I was on the phone with him for unrelated reasons and decided on a whim to ask if he'd ever been to China. He replied that he'd been scheduled to go once, but "some asshole producer from The Dean Martin Show wouldn't grant a temporary leave of absence." And why had he been scheduled to go? He was "supposed to accompany Nixon and Kissinger" on their landmark diplomatic voyage of 1972.
1) I wish my dad would share more stories in real life.
2) It appears that fasting results in ESP.
Kim Jong Il has an exceptionally discriminating palate. There is an episode I remember well that demonstrates this. I was preparing sushi in the Number 8 Banquet Hall. All of a sudden Kim Jong Il said, "Fujimoto, today's sushi tastes a little different."
He had had a lot to drink that evening before the meal, and I suggested that maybe that was the reason.
He replied, "Maybe..." He seemed doubtful, but didn't pursue it any further.
However, when I returned to the kitchen, I checked the seasoning used that day and found that the sugar was ten grams less than usual! Kim Jong Il was the only one who had noticed. Even I was astonished at this.
With respect to rice, before cooking it a waiter and a kitchen staff member would inspect it grain by grain. Chipped and defective grains were extracted; only those with perfect form were presented.
We all know Kim Jong Il is wack, but usually we see it manifested through brash political moves and strange diplomatic tactics. How endearing it is to hear of finer personal details of paranoid insanity first-hand.
"(Theme Song from) Sex and the City" - Um... I dunno, Dvorak.
A little research would clear that last bit up, save for the fact that I have nothing but a wasteland of inclination when it comes to SATC. Well, that's not entirely true.
And for you budding misogynists out there: the owner of that particular ringtone is not female.
I never used to be an insomniac. Not that I'm really one now, because that term seems to carry with it images of helpless tortured night-owls turning and tossing restlessly in their beds, desperate for forty winks but stymied by some congenital, hormonal, or environmental preclusion. No, the truth is anytime past ten o'clock (how strange is it that "o'clock" is still colloquial? It's like the token medieval minority we let into the country club of modern English to prove we're not biased. That and "wil o' the wisp") if I have a soft place to lie down I'm, to appropriate the title of the infamous Hollywood epic oeuvre, gone in sixty seconds. But, biological determinism be damned, I've always preferred to stay up late. I guess that means I'm not a genuine insomniac, just voluntarily sleep-deferred (and all the Langston Hughes girls go: "What happens to a slumber deferred? It puts your ass in a sleeper-hold, word."). In college, especially towards the beginning, I was awful about it; never ready to go to bed, never ready to wake up, living 28-hour days. But I've been pretty good about it since I started working. Except for the past couple months.
I know exactly what happened: the internet and the coldness. They conspired. The coldness made sure I'd be forced to stay inside while the internet suddenly decided to become way more interesting and time consuming than it had in the past. You'd think monopolizing the time of a frostbitten hermit would be the domain of television but honestly I only turn on the TV these days for 1.5 hours a week, coincidentally the sum total of the running times of The O.C. and Curb Your Enthusiasm. The internet had to go and get all RSS (or Atom) on me, so now I can't pretend to ignore the fire-hose of interesting information. When I see all those feeds sitting there with unread items I start to panic. My god, these posts are almost TWO HOURS OLD! I can't link to this, it's stale by now. What happened? I was in a meeting and the whole world updated.
Maybe that's why I've been staying up so late of late. It's the only time I feel like I'm on top of things.
The spring should fix this. My new drinking technique is unstoppable.
Enough. I hope I can rest easily tonight while the couple beneath me either plays a heated round on their XBOX or has competitive coitus (I can't tell which it is they're doing - oddly coherent speech suggests the former, guttural expletive bursts hint at the latter). I wonder if anyone's posted anything about it...
SEVEN people were killed and more than 100 injured in Pakistan during the annual kite flying festival marking the arrival of spring, officials said today.
It's already spring in Pakistan? Damn. We still have to wait an entire month. Just wait 'til I break out my Lamm.
Sometimes I forget how quiet the digital age can be. The industrial revolution gave us rattling engines and humming turbines, giant clanking machines clamoring for lubricant and belching embers. The information revolution reduced the forefront of industry to the quiet whir of cooling fans, tucked neatly away in some insulated co-location facility. The sound of work getting done is the muffled cough of a coworker, or the professionally restrained voices of a conference call, sounds that were always around but used to vie with the nuts-and-bolts machinery for aural supremacy.
A small part of my job involves processing data, not in the same sense normally associated with "data processing", where I'd be entering handwritten data from a survey form or what not and entering it into some field on my computer screen, but grabbing some files from point A and running them through an interface so all that data comes out at point B looking more manageable. It's like supervising an assembly line, but totally silent. The only sign it's finished is a little "Succeeded" indicator on a web page somewhere. Imagine if your washing machine, printing press, or go-cart engine made no sound whatsoever and didn't appear to move in the slightest. I think it's creepy not to have some a/v feedback, even just in an ambient form.
Software designers recognize this. Progress bars and hourglasses let us know that, while nothing looks to have changed, we can rest assured that a little silicon brain somewhere (be it under our desks, on our laps, or thousands of miles away in a server farm) has acknowledged our request and isn't slacking off (silicon generally has a can-do attitude). But there's no need to add such niceties to this internal system at my workplace, built as it was with the twin startup constraints of expeditiousness and frugality.
Today, for reasons far too irrelevant and dorky to discuss here, I got to process some data outside of the automated interface, via a good ol' fashioned command-line interface. Instead of detached silence, I got back raw progress output, one character at a time, five or six characters per second. Voila:
Each marker represents a record being processed (hyphen = no change, u = updated, n = new). There were tens of thousands of these lines scrolling down my terminal window over the course of several hours, with the result being that I felt much more connected to that task.
It's no pistons a-clanging, but it'll do. Now I can retire to my tenement walk-up and engage in wacky antics with my wife and dim-witted but loyal best friend/neighbor feeling like something's actually been done. Perhaps we'll go to the local juke-joint. I hear the Charleston is all the rage these days...
Music stores used to be magical places offering wide variety. Today the three largest music retailers are Best Buy, Wal-Mart and Target. In those stores shelf space is limited, making it harder for new artists to emerge. Even established artists are troubled by stores using music as a loss leader. Smaller, more personalized record stores are closing all over the country -- some because of rampant P2P piracy but many others because of competition from department stores that traditionally have no connection whatsoever with artists.
While brief, this WaPo opinion piece is a relatively even-handed overview of the state of the music industry today. It's written by Don Henley, so it's got a weird urgent-but-chilled-out tone.
The ESPN SportsZone in Times Square is overpriced, overcrowded, ugly, loud, and exemplifies many other failings of the modern theme restaurant. That said, it's worth going to see stodgy corporate types ride mechanical horses in an effort to best their friends on the virtual racetrack.
Musician/actor/spoken word artist Henry Rollins destroys the engine of a muscle car to make a point about methamphetamine. As he guns the engine until it breaks Rollins tells teens, “This is how meth makes your heart feel.” Then he looks to the viewer and says, “The only difference is you can’t rebuild a heart.”
The Partnership for a Drug-Free America is banking on Henry Rollins' massive star power to convince kids to steer clear of meth. Ever since Johnny Mnemonic and Bad Boys II, he's an unstoppable marketing machine. To maximize credibility though, they might want to consider a spokesman whose best-remembered contribution to society wasn't a song about spewing falsehoods.
Have you noticed Henry has this "intense" air about him? Just curious, cause he's pretty subtle about it.
If you live in one of the cities listed on their website, be sure to check out Robot Stories. It receives the coveted "pas mal" stamp of morland approval (given only by those referring to themselves in the third person).
Having read a fair amount of science fiction (and having little to show for it save technolust and nearsightedness), I've learned to distinguish between authors that use it as a means versus an end. I've also noticed that most of the better work comes from the former group. Philip K. Dick, for instance, used his arsenal of sci-fi plot devices which, in the hands of a lesser writer, would have stolen focus to explore fundamentally human traits like paranoia and identity. Similarly, Robot Stories leverages potentially distracting fodder to produce engaging melodrama.
I held hands with a robot once. It was immobile, but had a beating heart. It was cold to the touch. It did not force me to question the nature of sentience. It was truly a disturbing experience.
:: No, honey! That magazine meant nothing to me, I swear!
The Pure Restoration workshop helps men of all ages better understand and recover from pornography addiction (including Internet pornography) and infidelity. If you are ready to take control of this problem instead of continuing to let it control you, then we can help. Thousands of men over the last 3 years have been helped by Pure Restoration's co-creator Joe Dallas and his inspiring, results-oriented, 4-day recovery workshop.
I just got short-changed on my dinner. I went to the same Thai place I've gone to a hundred times before, and I still got shafted.
Senior year of college, I went to a Syrian deli across the street from my apartment all the time. I must have personally dumped $500 that year on their delicious Shish Taouks alone. The owner recognized me. His wife recognized me. His tween daughter recognized me when she worked behind the counter, which was often.
One day, I walked in and ordered something (falafel? shish taouk? kafta? It matters not). When it came time to settle up, the owner and his perpetually smiling face leaned closer to tell me something.
"Last time, when you were here, my daughter - she undercharged you."
"Oh, sorry" I sheepishly replied, thinking this was his way of saying: "You're putting my kids through college, so I'm going to let this one slide - after all, you're a regular customer". I began to thank him.
"No, you owe me $5.35." He reached under the counter for the receipt to prove it. Indeed, it showed a discrepancy between what I'd owed and what I'd been charged (she had punched in the total into the credit card machine improperly). Perhaps if he'd let his daughter study math after school instead of working... but I won't go there.
"Oh," was my only response. I paid for my double-meal and left.
He had every right to do that, but can't a dude get a buyback once in a while?
Moral: never trust immigrants - they'll bilk you any way they know how! Kill whitey!
I pared down the crony links (sites of people I've actually met more than once) on the sidebar. Basically, if you hadn't posted anything since, oh, I don't know, last August, I nixed you.
I added a contact link. Abuse at your peril.
If anyone else joins Flickr, you can find me under the name "morland". Shocker.
Everyone in my office building hates the actors on the second floor. They've been remodeling the lobby, so some walls are covered in appropriately-named construction paper. Some have taken to using it as a bulletin board. A nice string of back-and-forth rhetoric has sprung up which bears a remarkable resemblance to a online discussion forum flamewar.
Every time an American bites into an ice cream cone, candy bar, or cookie, spoons sugar into a bowl of cereal, or tosses a five-pound bag of the stuff into a shopping cart, a very small group of sugar farmers collects propped-up profits, thanks to a U.S. government price-support program.
In fact, over a year's time, U.S. consumers pay $1.4 billion more than they would without the government program -- some $560 million of which goes directly to sugar producers,1 according to the General Accounting Office. (That's a conservative estimate: a 1988 Department of Commerce study put the cost to consumers at an average of $3.7 billion a year.) Thirty-three farms in Florida and Hawaii receive more than a million dollars in benefits apiece yearly, one-third of the benefits of the entire federal sugar program. Four sugar cane companies in Florida receive more than $20 million apiece in benefits from the sugar program every year.
Ever wonder why ADM is such a huge agro-conglomerate, forcing corn-syrup into everything we eat (which is insanely unhealthy)? In brief, because they have the lobbyists to forestall the kind of legislation that made sugar so expensive. Learn all the fascinating details about the twisted history of sugar regulation here.
Sorry for not posting anything so far today. I was exceptionally busy, and didn't really have much to say besides, but I'm not going to let that deter me. They say to write about what you know, so I thought I'd recap my day for everyone. Ok? Ready, go!
Today passed very quickly as there was much to be done. Some people think this is the idle season, but it's not - a lot of sh!t goes down this time of year.
First, Manuel asked if I could help dig that new trench in which the caissons for the new sorting facility will eventually be placed. Technically, it's not my job, but Manny caught me pilfering half a gram of product last month so he's been asking me for little favors here and there to keep him quiet. He knows I know he's railing Peter's wife, so he can't really ask for much more. At least it's winter, so I didn't get heat stroke like last time.
After a couple hours of digging, Xavier stopped by and told me I had a customer. I put my suit back on and headed inside the villa. By this point, I was a little dehydrated, and that pissed me off. I'm head of sales around here - how am I supposed to be at the top of my game closing deals if I have a freaking migraine? Whatever, no biggie. I sold 200 kilos to those Russian boys back in November while I was hungover, wigging out on cheap American crank, in the middle of the bloodiest gang war in recent memory after staying up 72 hours straight hosting one of my trademark coke orgies to "blow" off a little steam. And I got them to pay with no bills larger than a twenty. Nothing but net (income!).
So I walk into the conference room and here are these two dweebs wearing masks like they're R. Kelly or something (did you see the Grammys? It's a special kind of feeling I get knowing half the audience is sky-high partly thanks to me!) and I ask "Dude, what gives?" and they're like "anonymity is sacrosanct in this business", and I'm all "WTF?" and they're all "Yeah, we came here to place an order, hold the super-size Haterade." Then I notice homeslice on the left has this little mole under his chin and I start thinking that it looks familiar. I give them our standard shpeal about bulk discounts and how we've been ranked #1 in customer satisfaction according to J.D. Power and Associates the last four years running while I try to think of where I've seen that mole before. Finally I remember that this guy is the "Jack of Diamonds" in our "52 most dangerous undercover D.E.A. agents" deck of playing cards that Dieter got last summer, which we've been using to play Asshole when we pre-party for Wednesday-night karaoke. I excuse myself and hand things off to Sergio, who told me later that Mr. Jack o'Diamonds begged like a total wuss before Sergio stuck him in the decompression chamber. Something about having two little daughters. Hey, retard, should have thought about that before you messed with the past three Wednesdays' President. Later busters!
So by now I've missed lunch having to deal with this nonsense and I'm starting to get one of those nosebleeds that won't quit, so needless to say any satisfaction I had from nailing those narcs is quickly going out the window. I head over to the commissary, grab some caviar and plantains, and go back to my office to relax a little. While I'm browsing the web scrounging for the latest Fashion Week gossip, I get this IM from Esmeralda (whom you'll remember from the pics I posted from New Year's - she was "Crazy" Ivan's date):
EzzyOzborn: hey you! JoeBlow865: ;) EzzyOzborn: never guess who got pinched! JoeBlow865: that fine backside of yours? rarf! EzzyOzborn: omg, lol!!! EzzyOzborn: :) EzzyOzborn: no, Ivan!
At this point, I'm totally psyched because I've been sweatin' Esmeralda for years but Ivan is one stone-cold killer and I saw what he did to Julio just for asking her out and there's no way I'm running the risk of scarring up this pretty face of mine just for some primo tail. But now Ivan's in cuffs and with the shazbot he's pulled over the years, his ass is as good as extradited.
JoeBlow865: (^o^) JoeBlow865: :( JoeBlow865: sux. EzzyOzborn: whatevs, I told him not to buy that ticket with his real name JoeBlow865: yeah, rookie move EzzyOzborn: so... whatcha doin later?
Damn boyeee!
JoeBlow865: oh, nothing. manny and I were going to head out in the fields and terrorize the peasants with our pistolas. the yoozhe. EzzyOzborn: i was thinking about heading over to the cantina for happy-hour lines. want in?
Game, set, and match: me. So now I'm feeling like I just snorted a whole 8-ball by myself and I run over to my boy Chris' desk, who works in accounting down the hall, and C-money's like NO WAY but I take him back and show him the IM and the high-fives start flying. Then we spent the next hour watching that Quiznos ad (so awesome!) on repeat and taking shots of Jager. Needless to say, I needed a little siesta after that.
The rest of the afternoon was spent mostly in meetings with the Medellin boyz working out contracts for the rainy season. Except for this part where Jim almost got garroted it was hella boring.
Later losers, gotta go meet Ez! I'd ask you to wish me luck, but there's no contest - have you seen these guns (and I don't mean my AK's or my Glocks)? Someone's been making the most out of their cartel-sponsored gym membership!
Holla back if anyone wants to hit Encendido later (they still let you smoke downstairs!!!).
On Salon today, Neal Pollack does his usual satire shtick, this time targeting the pop-culture quasi-hipster blogs (has someone coined a term for these yet, akin to warblogs or photoblogs?). Sometargets are obvious (or, I guess "obvs"), and I kind of wished he'd harvested his style from more than a handful of sites, but then again part of me is very smugly satisfied that NP reads the same blogs as I do. Or at least exploits them when he has to jam together a piecemeal write-up to pay the bills. Whatevs. Same diff.
I had a heart murmur once. It was dismissed as innocent, but it scared the pants off me (and the ladies in the crowd can vouch for me on this: my pants don't come off easily [wait... what?]).
When you give your heart to somebody this Saturday, please realize that it's a ticking time bomb, and there's quite literally a chance you could drop dead any second, even if you're young and healthy.
That's where I come in.
Call me a grief counselor. Your loved one will naturally be quite shocked at this sudden loss, and you need to plan accordingly. For a fee, I will ease that pain the only way I know how: with the healing power of intimate companionship.
"But hey," you're thinking, "everyone has life insurance anyway. Why would I want to pay extra for some schmo to consort with my lover/partner/spouse/concubine?" Well, why do people pay extra for air-conditioning in their automobiles? It's a matter of comfort: it feels really good. Great, actually. Doesn't your loved one deserve the best mourning money can buy? And shouldn't it know how to whip up an omelet afterwards?
You're in good hands with morland. Hands with years of masseur training and maybe even some scented body oils. Hands that will do your memory justice.
If the price is right (I'm thinking high six figures here, but talk to me about it - I want to make this work, so there might be some wiggle room), I'll accept applications for same-sex or over-50 bereaved (but not both - unless we're talking seven figures).
This is a win-win proposition here. Think about it. There's more than one way to be an organ donor.
POSTSCRIPT
Sunday night idle hands + link to SADS + heart candy image generator + impending Valentine's Day = most offensive entry I've ever posted. If you know someone affected by SADS, my heart goes out to... whoops!
No, really, I'm kidding. We all know my heart is spoken for.
I'd just like to insert a permanent caveat here. My last entry was long-winded, heavy on opinion, and light on facts. That's the way many blog entries are. With the exception of some of my rants on the wireless industry, I write most of this having little or no professional experience in the topics at hand. Never put more faith in what I jot down on this little site than you would in what I say in a casual conversation over drinks, which is to say, almost none.
I guess saying this is rather pompous, since it's predicated on presuming that someone would actually take what I say seriously.
Now a new threat looms. The market for legally downloadable music is tiny today, but the success of Apple's iTunes online music store and the rush of rival services to the marketplace is expected to gobble up an ever-larger share of the pop music pie. A recent study by Forrester Research, which examines technology trends, predicts that in five years fully one-third of all music will be delivered through modems, and the CD itself will be passe, if not obsolete, in the years after. This isn't necessarily bad news for the record labels, but it could be lethal for brick-and-mortar stores.
"I tell retailers they need to get out of the plastic business," said Josh Bernoff, the Forrester analyst who wrote the report, titled "From Discs to Downloads." "Two-thirds of the people who currently download say that when it comes to music, it isn't important to them to hold a physical object. They're done with the CD. They just care about the songs."
If that's true, the album is doomed and the industry is headed back to its roots in the '40s and '50s, when the single was the most popular format. It's already moving that way. Last week, the punk trio Green Day released a cover of the rock classic "I Fought the Law" through a promotion advertised on the Super Bowl and available exclusively on iTunes. That's a peek at the future: Hear the song one minute, own it the next.
That's a transaction that doesn't require a record store, of course. As a precedent, consider the airline ticket. Thanks to online travel sites and the advent of ticketless travel, millions of flyers no longer think of tickets as physical objects that must be printed and brought to the airport. And that's been brutal for travel agencies: in the past three years, 30 percent of them have closed, according to Airlines Reporting Corp., which keeps tabs on the industry.
I'm going to ignore the weird use of the word "modem" to represent all data traffic for now.
Here's a, perhaps overly, simplistic take on this: stand-alone record shops, travel agents, and the like are nothing more than the bundling of an information broker with a retail seller. The core value of a travel agent is not the ability to sell the purchaser a ticket, but rather to weed out which travel plan, out of a confusing matrix of options, is the most suited to the tastes of thereof. Likewise, music stores once served as one of the main avenues of exploring and sampling all those potential musical wares.
Brokers are by definition highly specialized, and offer a service which the parties involved find too prohibitive to do themselves. In these examples, the cost involved - for instance taking the time to understand the labyrinthine pricing models of a major airline or subscribe to fifty different music publications at once - used to be sufficient to deter the average consumer, creating a market for these specialized intermediaries. But this is no longer the case.
The internet has brought the cost of almost every type of information transaction down dramatically. Automated web sites now do the work of a small team of travel agents in a thousandth of the time, at a tenth of the cost, and (some argue) even better than their human counterparts. Trusted blogs and niche sites now give tailored reviews and suggestions to music lovers of every conceivable genre. Taking out, or dramatically streamlining, the middleman results in a much better-educated consumer. In fact, I think one of the reasons music sales have purportedly dropped in recent years is that these better-informed buyers are buying a lot less crappy music and focusing on what they like.
So what of the other component, simply being a retail seller? That alone, on that scale, won't cut it. Full information transparency leads to commoditization, and that’s the bread and butter of big box retailers and online superstores - minimal margins, maximal volume.
In high school, I bought on average about a CD per week. I never liked music stores, and found the practice of browsing the aisles at once both mind-numbingly boring and overwhelming. I would therefore only enter them to purchase something with which I already had some familiarity. Despite this, what I bought often wound up being junk (Stabbing Westward?!?! I lack the vocabulary to accurately express my regret and puzzlement. And before anyone points fingers, know that I am aware of quite a few musical skeletons in various closets, and some of those closets are walk-in in size, in the basement of glass houses, so let's not get around to throwing stones, ok?).
That all changed when I went to college - my freshman year coincided with the fringe adoption of the MP3 format. Suddenly, I was browsing FTP sites and local file shares finding all this great music to listen to. My CD consumption dropped virtually to zero not because, and I want to be very clear about this, price was no longer an object when it came time to acquiring songs but because the cost of deciding what to acquire dropped so precipitously. The internet became an omnipresent listening bin costing only whatever value I placed on the time it took to rummage through it (which, being in college, was almost nil). The recommendations I was getting online, in the implicit form of scanning the collections of users with tastes similar to mine (a proto-recommendation-engine I guess) were far better than the preferred placement shelves at a record store or overpriced bloated periodicals. If these links to new tunes could also be considered a commodity, then I was receiving a much higher-quality product at a far lower price.
In fact, the cost of seeking out new music often disappeared entirely. A "friend" of mine (let's call him "Mr. Half-assed Attempt ToIdemnify III") ran a FTP site of his own where he permitted (but did not require - the community at the time was altruistic enough that leeches were rare) uploads*. It was not unusual for him to return from classes (or rather wake up from 10 hours sleep at 4pm... see also: retrospective whitewashing, guilty conscience, youthful indolence, et al.) to find an upload directory full of choice picks from kind users. The online listening station was accumulating recommendations with no effort whatsoever on his behalf.
Now it's true, if this were a perfect analogy and the capacity of all that file-sharing was solely one of suggesting new and desirable choices, that I should have, being a more broadly and deeply-informed and thus better consumer, increased my consumption as these new products were brought to my attention, the efficiency gains having allowed me to increase the accuracy of my purchases as well as stimulate demand (fuel for the fire of my rapacious quest for the soul of the muse!!!). But the service I desired - helping me to choose more wisely and bring new material to my attention - happened to be bundled inextricably with what allegedly constituted copyright theft. My attitude at the time, which is not overly dissimilar to my current stance, was one of "So be it. If certain organizations are unable to devise a plan to address this almost limitless demand, then this constitutes neither a market failure nor a legal quandary, but instead incompetence on their part." Maybe that was a bit of an over-reaction, but I still think that laws regarding this issue should be structured to strike a balance between public and private benefit (perhaps you can infer whether I think one party is getting the worse end of this deal), not tweaked ad nauseum to assure the continued viability of venerable but obsolete business models.
New models need to arise which recognize and exploit the new plentiful, ubiquitous nature of information.
* Later, this "friend" had a meeting with some authority types, discovered that asserting his rebelliousness was suddenly less important than being able to avoid explaining to his parents that he'd been expelled from their $120,000 investment in his future, and made the decision to shut down the site in compliance with a cease-and-desist order from the RIAA, the first in many incidents engendering ill will towards that organization on his part.
As regular readers (and, fully appreciating the addictive powers of this site, I doubt there are any other kind) know, I switched over to Sprint PCS for their seductive new Treo 600 (side note: I do not regret this - despite the painful LNP process, I've come to really enjoy the device) and, since my family was already using Sprint, joined a group plan in order to (as it turns out, significantly) reduce my bill. The one downside is that I now have to transfer money from my bank account into my father's instead of cutting a check to MegaGloboWireless PLC. He scans the statements as they arrive, compresses the images in a password-protected zip file, and then emails the appropriate file to each son. No, really, he does. Every month. It was the same way when I was living at home in high-school, having to verify an itemized list of all my long-distance calls on each bill for the house's land-line, calculate the total and kick back what I owed, but with DES encryption.
Sprint, in an effort to woo new customers, offered me some incentives if I'd switch (which I'd already decided to do, but gift horse, mouth, and such) most of which consisted of waiving almost all the fees and charges for the first two months. Taking those into account, and seeing as I didn't exceed my allotment of minutes, my phone bill this month amounted to a whopping $4.95.
Tonight I received a call from my father, barreling down the freeway en route back home to the empty nest, informing me that I was delinquent with my $4.95. He insisted that I conduct the bank transfer tomorrow.
When I inquired as to the possibility of spreading the payment over three easy installments of $1.65 he was not amused.
[boring instructions on what to do with said handsets]
I think this is the most phones we've ever sent at once, and for that I'm apologetic. I know the pain of Sisyphean toiling. My pappy was a coal-miner who died at the tender age of 17 from black lung. He took my momma with him. It is believed to be the only recorded case of black lung murder-suicide. Orphaned and alone, I took to working as an apprentice for a clog-maker (affectionately called a "clobbler") when only 5 years old. I have the scars and splinters to prove it.
What I'm saying is this: inside of all of us there's a little crying orphan boy franticly running down a back-alley somewhere in an ill-fated attempt to outrun a pack of feral stray dogs while making deliveries. If he drops his clogs, he can run faster - maybe just fast enough to outrun those dogs with their foaming-white diseased mouths - but the master clobbler will beat him. If he keeps the shoes, he'll surely get bitten, and if he gets rabies, he's a gone-er for sure.
This is a choice we all must make in some way or another. I trust you will have the wisdom to choose rightly.
I AM god! Or at least I can assume the virtual role of someone who thinks they are. And it's more of a "compound" than a "complex". Your friends at C-Level present "Endgames: Waco Resurrection":
As predicted by his Branch Davidian followers, Vernon Howell (aka David Koresh) has returned to Mt. Carmel for final battle. Revisiting the 1993 Waco, Texas episode, gamers enter the mind and form of a resurrected David Koresh through custom headgear, a voice-activated, hard-plastic 3D skin. Each player enters the network as a Koresh and must defend the Branch Davidian compound against internal intrigue, skeptical civilians, rival Koresh and the inexorable advance of government agents. Ensnared in the custom "Koresh skin", players are bombarded with a soundstream of government “psy-ops”, FBI negotiators, the voice of God and the persistent clamor of battle. Players voice messianic texts drawn from the book of revelation, wield a variety of weapons from the Mount Carmel cache and influence the behavior of both followers and opponents by radiating a charismatic aura.
The screenshots and video clip of this are hi-larious (note: you might have to download the .mov before it plays properly).
Athletes also care about their video döppelgangers because many of them are avid gamers who grew up playing video games. As several Sonics players sit in the locker room an hour before tip-off, one mention of an old-school video game like "Tecmo Bowl" sets off waves of nostalgia.
"That's the best game ever," says Sonics All-Star Ray Allen of "Tecmo Bowl" as he lies on the floor doing some pre-game stretches.
Umlaut alert! Seriously, is Salon turning into the New Yorker? What other English-speaking publication would add an umlaut to "doppelgangers"?
Incidentally, I felt Tecmo Bowl was overrated, as it did not feature coöperative play.
You know you're getting old when in the midst of a dream in which you stumble upon a hidden cache of drugs your brain, not knowing which drugs are all the rage with the kids these days, resorts to visualizing this illicit hoard as comprised of cucumber slices and jellybeans.
In a show of hostility toward a company promising to bring hundreds of jobs and rock-bottom consumer prices to poor, blighted neighborhoods, the Los Angeles City Council this month may ban Wal-Mart from opening its popular "supercenters," sprawling new stores that sell discount groceries along with many other bargain goods.
Wal-Mart polarizes everything. Either you only shop there or you never shop there. One town aldermen shows up in the local papers shaking the hand of WM's regional manager and praising the unbeatable pairing of new jobs with lower prices while another raises hell and passes preventative ordinances, casting WM as a retailing pariah. Free market fanatics exalt Sam Walton's genius while anti-globalization proponents spit on his grave. One economic study links his stores to unemployment and strained public services, the other purports hundreds of dollars in savings per family per year (though in this example the two findings may not be mutually exclusive people tend to focus only on the study corroborating their viewpoint).
The architect in me abhors the blight of those big blue boxes with hectares of asphalt for doormats. The economist in me thinks there might be something to say for the efficiency gains inherent in economies of scale such as this. The trust-buster in me is angered by the way WM predatorily stiff-arms wholesalers and OEMs. The conscience of the spoiled upper-middle-class preppy kid in me asks if it's not more than a little smug and elitist to only hate them if you have the luxury of not shopping there. The free-speech crusader in me is driven nigh to the point of blind rage by their prudish desire to capitulate to the highest common denominator of squeamishness. The technophile in me is interested in their pioneering use of RFID. The technophobe in me is terrified stiff by that same practice.
There's also an interesting left v. right dynamic: social welfare dukes it out with unabashed capitalism.
In the end I'm leaning more towards the side of razing every Wal-Mart, recycling the scrap metal to construct a giant futuristic panopticon in Bentonville where every former employee from the management level on up will be incarcerated until such time as they complete a logorrheic treatise on the virtues of modesty, and looting their corporate coffers to fund a massive global campaign to strike any mention of their existence from all historical records public and private. But that's just me.
I usually don't grant myself super-powers in my dreams (because, let's face it, reality's already an unfair fight with my honed sense of echolocation and superhuman stoicism) but last night I explored the wonders of telekinesis. I could only manipulate small objects at first, but as I grew more comfortable I started to juggle tables and cars. I seemed to have no problem with the number of objects I was controlling at any one time, only the size.
I dismissed it at first, but today I began to think: if I did indeed have that power, I would never need an umbrella.
Liberal judges -- and we are a small minority these days -- do not manipulate law to reach a predetermined result. We apply a particular philosophy of law -- often infused by concepts like "rights" and "social justice" that may appear foreign to the admirers of the jurisprudential views of those who see the Constitution only as a technical framework for the allocation of powers. The jurisprudential views we espouse are those we believe to be most faithful to the text, structure, and history of the Constitution. Conservatives -- be they "strict constructionists," "texualists," or "originalists," -- apply their own philosophy of law to the very same legal problems we face. It is naive, if not disingenuous, to assume that liberals are simply imposing a "personal preference," while those conservative judges who continually reach the same restrictive result, in case-after-case, are simply "following the law." Different legal philosophies produce divergent legal consequences. We can debate which constitutional philosophy is the more appropriate one, but it is intellectually dishonest, and ultimately a disservice to the law, to accuse those who subscribe to a competing philosophy of being lawless or engaging in misconduct.
This has been a very bad weekend for my personal possessions. First went the precious bag with The Best Umbrella I've Ever Owned, and now I've lost my pen. It was a Pilot Precise V5. Black.
I complained a long time ago about pants pockets. Those of my latest pair du jour are predisposed to developing holes. I sew them closed when I can, but often it's not enough. While I was concentrating on tending to the bottoms, my pen just slipped right out the top.
I don't know why I keep coming back to the Pilot Precise V5. It's one of those little things in my life I don't usually have the inclination to question. Would the marginal utility increase derived from an exhaustive search for a superior pen outweigh the effort and opportunity cost needed to find one? I might likely find no pen within my price range to be as good, and then the only benefit would be the reassurance that my original, ahem, inkling to go with the PPV5 was sound.
Pilot has an awesome site, with hi-res images of every product line.
Okay, I'm going to wax serious here for a sec, confident that I'll catch some flack for it, but what the heck.
Hegel said (see, anytime you start a paragraph with "Hegel said", you're going to catch flack, whether from people justifiably mocking you for pretending to know something you don't, or - far worse - someone knowledgeable enough to legitimately critique your argument), if I'm remembering correctly, that no argument or object truly exists without engaging in a dialectic with its opposite. The closer and more vigorous this exchange, the better-defined something becomes. More simply: we cannot define a thing unless we can state clearly what it is not. Basic, yes, but with an interesting corollary: everything is defined via relationships. Nothing exists independently. There are no closed systems.
I've been thinking recently about this, spurred on by network theory, blogs, and YASNs. I've come to realize that such a distinction isn't unique to quantifiable subjects, that this is very much applicable to how I live and interact with others. Identity is comprised of a massive kaleidoscope of relationships, a giant fractal network with bidirectional feedback mechanisms (sometimes so asymmetrical as to seem unidirectional: consider how the average person interacts with say, NBC - the massive majority of information is sent by the broadcaster to the viewer, but the viewers, in aggregate, sway the programming of the broadcaster). We are constantly ascertaining and reasserting our place with respect to this context. Examining your connections to everything else is, I believe, the only method of self-definition.
As I look back upon places I've lived and things I've done, I engage in a subconscious cataloging of things, people, and events that somehow, through my interaction with them, hold some personal significance (even those things which were long ago far more central and now seem heinous or frivolous still retain some residual value as markers of change). That which is unimportant is discarded or made dormant, waiting for a reconnection at some later time.
Some of the most powerful of these relationships are those we have with people close to us, both socially and geographically (familiar strangers, after all, can be just as important as a distant cousin a continent away). The process of growing from child to adult, mirroring the educational process, is rife with the upheaval of social systems. Every so often, those networks get jumbled and reset themselves. The phenomenon is well-observed elsewhere. Take your pick: schemas being refined a la Piaget, punctuated equilibrium a la Gould, or paradigmatic revolutions a la Kuhn.
But now, I've escaped that cycle. Sure, there are still jolts to the system - a new job, moving, marriage, etc. - but these are organic and unscheduled. The bouts of stagnancy are more prolonged. Since I'm generally averse to systemic shocks, this is fine by me (though I've found in retrospect that many such events, into which I went with dread, turned out remarkably well). But these periods of relative calm aren't totally static.
Barrett is leaving on Friday to return to school. This, I agree with almost everyone else, is the best course of action for a man who, in the true Hegelian sense, is quite my opposite in many ways. He is the second close friend to depart, the first having left only this past August.
This slow social atrophy is unfamiliar. Graduations past have trained me to sever ties and take with me only what I want. They were sudden and decisive, not like this gradual water torture. These friendships are chief tools with which to find my place, and now they are behaving strangely.
But the silver lining is that I may just learn to be more pliant with how I relate to the world, dealing not only with the occasional earthquakes, but the slow plodding pace of plate tectonics underlying it all.
Hmm... Once again it seems I've taken a post ostensibly about someone else and used it for a little navel-gazing. In recompense, I give you this picture of Barrett covered in beer, about to bite someone's ass.
In future episodes, OLN’s most prominent outdoor experts will share their knowledge with Yoshi as eastern tradition meets western expertise. From sporting clays with Tom Knapp to log rolling with Ironjack World Champions, OLN's master outdoorsmen will teach Yoshi their discipline while learning from his Samurai ways. While discovering each other’s skills these experts manage to share enjoyable, fun and leisure moments together always mindful of the pleasure and joys that life in the outdoors, no matter how approached, should bring to us.
