In case you haven’t noticed, I haven’t written here since early November. Mostly, that’s just because I didn’t really have anything significant to say. I typically try to wait until I have something substantive to write before I put it here in order to avoid falling into the “what I had for lunch” blogging trap.
Besides, I do more writing over at the User Friendly message board. I’ll try to put more emphasis on my writings here.
It’s official: people who binge-drink as teenagers tend to earn higher wages ten years later.
According to research done by Jeffery DeSimone of the University of South Florida along with Pinka Chatterji of the Center for Multicultural Mental Health Research, there is a positive correlation between binge drinking as a teenager and higher earnings as an adult. The Oracle, USF’s daily student newspaper, reports that the study “took other factors into account, such as achievement, prior income and adult drinking, which could possibly explain the correlation”, but doesn’t attempt to show that there is a causative relationship between the two phenomena.
“We just started guessing that this had to do with some socialness of these people,” said DeSimone, in a summary of potential reasons for the correlation. “They’re the ones who are social; they’re the ones going to parties - drinking parties - in 10th grade, so maybe they’re entrepreneurial in the sense that they’re less risk averse.”
I ran across this today, and while I guess it’s too late to repair the damage already done, this is my philosophy from now on:
“If You Forget Me”
I want you to know
one thing.You know how this is:
if I look
at the crystal moon, at the red branch
of the slow autumn at my window,
if I touch
near the fire
the impalpable ash
or the wrinkled body of the log,
everything carries me to you,
as if everything that exists,
aromas, light, metals,
were little boats
that sail
toward those isles of yours that wait for me.Well, now,
if little by little you stop loving me
I shall stop loving you little by little.If suddenly
you forget me
do not look for me,
for I shall already have forgotten you.If you think it long and mad,
the wind of banners
that passes through my life,
and you decide
to leave me at the shore
of the heart where I have roots,
remember
that on that day,
at that hour,
I shall lift my arms
and my roots will set off
to seek another land.But
if each day,
each hour,
you feel that you are destined for me
with implacable sweetness,
if each day a flower
climbs up to your lips to seek me,
ah my love, ah my own,
in me all that fire is repeated,
in me nothing is extinguished or forgotten,
my love feeds on your love, beloved,
and as long as you live it will be in your arms
without leaving mine.— Pablo Neruda
I came across this passage while reading Homegrown Democrat, by Garrison Keillor. I think it sums up everything that’s wrong with the South:
Redneck used to refer to farmers like my uncle Jim who did indeed have a red neck and forearms and face right up to the cap line on his forehead, but he was a generous sweet-tempered Christian man who lived out his faith. Now redneck just means someone who’d happily spend $40,000 on a new pickup for himself and rise up in rage if someone asked him to pay $200 more for his kids’ education. They’re not farmers, they’re selfish bastards with shit for brains who only pay attention to education when they get pissed off. The school board, a dedicated bunch of hard-working underappreciated individuals, decides to change the school nickname from the Redskins to the Hornets, and word goes out to the tavern dwellers and for the next school board meeting, the gymnasium is packed with furious large men venting their lifelong frustrations and in the fall the school board is thrown out of office and replaced with angry large people. That’s redneck politics. The new school board sets about restoring Redskins honor, and trimming the budget, cutting out French and Spanish, establishing creationism as the prevailing science, cleansing the library of impurities, teaching faith-based social studies and history. High school becomes a forced hike down a long corridor of locked doors. You earmark your children for a career as drones—no need for them to learn a second language or write poetry or study physics: in a good redneck school, they only need to learn to sit quietly and recite the official patriotic liturgy and become angry rednecks like their daddies.
The few children who won’t become drones become exiles. I grew up in a redneck community (in the modern sense—almost no farmers, just ignorant bigots) and had to flee to civilization.
I just started getting a large number of messages from various email servers, telling me that messages I never sent had been rejected. Upon closer inspection, it’s clear that some spammer has decided to steal my good name (my good domain name, anyway) to try to sneak by spam filters.
I didn’t send the spam. I don’t like spam. And I certainly can’t do anything about the shitheads sending the spam. So hold the hate mail, please.
I bought Straight Outta Lynwood today. Like a number of other recent releases, it’s only available as a DualDisc within the US. Of course, the first thing I did was try to load it into my Powerbook so I could view the bonus DVD content; when I tried, I got a nasty surprise: the disc will not fit into the drive.
The packaging says absolutely nothing about this being an issue. Some other manufacturers have included warnings regarding slot-loading CD drives, but Sony did not. All they included was a vacuous warning about the disc not conforming to the Red Book standard, which would have nothing to do with this problem as it claims to be perfectly compatible with the DVD standard and the drive is a DVD drive.
While this by itself would be annoying, the problems don’t stop there. When I tried the disc in my Wintendo (which has a tray-loading DVD drive), the audio suffered from skips and noise, but this could be explained by scratches on the disc. However, the scratches weren’t that bad; I’ve had DVDs that had taken much more abuse and still played flawlessly. The subtitles don’t work, either: it’s supposed to have a “karaoke” mode, where the lyrics are displayed on screen, but the subtitle track is completely blank. Flipping the disc to the CD side doesn’t work either; the drive refuses to acknowledge that a disc is loaded. (To be honest, this is something included as a warning on the package.)
First thing I’m going to do is try to return the disc to Wal-Mart; hopefully the DVD issues are limited to this particular disc. If Wal-Mart refuses to take it back, or if the replacement disc fails, I’m going to contact Sony/BMG directly and attempt to get a refund. (Wal-Mart will not give refunds for opened CDs or DVDs.)
Click to rate me.
Update (2006-09-19 19:30): Apparently I’m an ugly sonofabitch. My rating is a 3.2, broken down as follows: four 1s, three 2s, one 3, two 4s, three 5s, one 6, and one 7. Not exactly the kind of rating I had hoped for.
As you may have noticed, I’ve made some changes to this site; specifically, I’ve switched to a new theme. This theme is an almost-unmodified K2, with a new header image.
There are quite a few things I have left to fix, but they’ll come in time. For instance, I’m still working on getting the Firefox referral button back in place, along with the recent comments plugin I was using.
If you notice anything weird or broken, or you have a suggestion, feel free to let me know.
We here in America, and particularly here in Florida, have a history of politicians saying very stupid things to very stupid audiences. However, the recent comments made by representative Katherine Harris (R-FL) truly take the cake:
“If you’re not electing Christians, then in essence you are going to legislate sin,” Harris told interviewers from the Florida Baptist Witness, the weekly journal of the Florida Baptist State Convention.
…
Harris told the journalists “we have to have the faithful in government” because that is God’s will. Separating religion and politics is “so wrong because God is the one who chooses our rulers,” she said.
“And if we are the ones not actively involved in electing those godly men and women,” then “we’re going to have a nation of secular laws. That’s not what our Founding Fathers intended, and that certainly isn’t what God intended.”
There is a specific term for a system of government in which religion determines which laws are passed: “theocracy”. Harris is overtly promoting the overthrow of the system set up by the Founding Fathers that she pretends to revere and its replacement by a purely theological system, akin to that which the Taliban founded in Afghanistan. And for the record, it is clear that the Founding Fathers never intended for the government to be controlled by religion, let alone the sort of fundamentalist zealots that we find in the church today. (There were very few Christians among them; the majority were Deist. Even the Christians among them realized that allowing the church to control the government would only lead to suffering; why else would they take such great pains to make the right to free exercise of religion—any religion, or even no religion—explicit?) Or maybe she never paid attention in her history classes, when they taught that even heavily religious areas have rejected the idea of ruling by divine right? “God has chosen me to rule” has not been a valid rationale in the United States since its inception, and in most of the world since time immemorial; “this practice is wrong because God says so” has joined that sentiment in the trashpile of rejected excuses for a power grab in sane people the world over.
I have no issue with religious people holding office. It’s only when their religious beliefs begin to control my life that I am offended. Harris is encouraging voters to elect people who will ignore the grand history of religious tolerance we have enjoyed here in the United States and replace it with control by the church elite.
To those of you who are cheering Harris on, answer me this: What would be your reaction if an Islamic candidate proposed that only those faithful to Allah should hold public office? What would you do if they publicly announced support for a law requiring that all women wear burqas when outside their home? It’s easy to overlook the onset of theocracy when it’s your religion that’s creating it. Take a step back and realize just how evil this is.
Dad actually had a good idea today (OMGWTF?).
One of the biggest reasons I don’t get out and socialize is because most socializing requires alcohol, and I have to drive. While I could simply go and not drink, I’m far too inhibited to actually start conversations in that case, so I don’t see the point of even going.
However, Dad had an idea: Perhaps I could learn to be a bartender.
Perhaps I’m not thinking clearly, but it seems like a genuine good idea. As a bartender, I would be around people, without having to drink (in fact, I would be required to not drink, as I understand it), and people would actually start conversations with me instead of forcing me to approach them. What’s better, I’d get paid for it.
I’m not sure what the requirements are in Florida. For starters, I’d need to actually learn how to mix various drinks; knowing how to do a job tends to help when you apply for it. Also, I might need a license; I need to verify this. There are various bartending schools that claim to prepare anyone to be a bartender, but the tuition is steep: $400 or more for a typical week-long course. I have it on good (independent) authority that I’d earn it back in a week… but I don’t know yet if I even want to be a bartender.
Until I’ve seen a typical bartender’s typical day, I’ll have a hard time determining whether bartending is right for me. I’d hate to pay that kind of money to get a job I hate…