Dan'l's Multiapostrophic LiveJournal

4:08pm: First of all...
...I want to note with joy that my home state has now struck down its unconstitutional law forbidding same-sex marriage.

Of course, forces of reaction have rolled into overdrive with unsurprising efficiency. They already claim to have 1.1 million signatures on a ballot initiative to amend the state Constitution and define marriage as "one man, one woman."

It therefore behooves those of us who care about the matter to do what we can about it: most of all, getting our butts out the door and voting in November.

11:20am: Thot for the day
Good science fiction should be full of mysterious shit.

11:17am: Core of Awareness
( Neepery in the cut. )

9:02am: Great political mashup
Via matt_ruff.

8:38pm: Cultbookmeme
Glarked from enegim. ( Hidey hidey in the clicky thingy. )

5:08pm: 7 interests
Meme from handworn this time around.

Comment on this post and say YO BABY ! I WANT TO DO THAT INTEREST MEME or something like that. I will choose seven interests from your profile and you will explain what they mean and why you are interested in them. Post this along with your answers in your own journal so that others can play along.

Catholicism: Though a Christian all my life, I am an adult convert to the Roman Catholic church. I'm particularly interested in the odd aspects of "why do Catholics do that," as I really am behind the curve on that.

Discordianism: The worship of the goddess of chaos. Just fun. And a good excuse to eat a hot dog of a Friday.

Evolutionary psychology: The study of how our brainminds are a product of our ancestral environment, and how they function in the artificial environment we've put them in. Explains a great deal.

Intertextuality: More "just fun," at least for me. I don't care to put a lot of work into tracking down references, but I enjoy recognizing them.

Taoism: If I were not a Christian, I would be a Taoist. I regard the tao teh king as the highest work of natural wisdom written by a human being.

Mathematical logic: Again, for fun. I took a couple of courses on this in college and discovered I really enjoyed it, but didn't pursue it professionally.

Tying wide-ranging facts together: Like the "Connections" column that used to run in SciAm. I'm not as good at that, but occasionally I make the leap.

9:49am: Lines written yesterday
Key to the following: My mother is on an around-the-world cruise. Chris is my brother; Victoria my sister.

To my Mother:
On the Occasion of her Seventieth Birthday

I wish you were home today.
I would like to call you and tell you
how much I've been thinking of you lately,
how grateful I am for the support,
of various kinds,
you've given me for nearly fifty years.
Instead, I offer you these lines.

It occurred to me the other day,
that I am significantly older now
than you were when we moved
out West, out here.

Somehow,
that is the age I still think of
when I think of you.

When I think about myself at that age,
I think of myself as intolerably young and naïve;
yet it seems right for you.

What I thought of:
the first time you played me the Pachelbel "Canon"
and we both thought it gave a tremendous sense
of the depth of years.

How little we knew of the depth of years then:
you were in your mid '30s, I in my teens.

We have been here in the West
more than half your life now,
more than two-thirds of mine.
Do you still feel like the East is home?
I still do; when I visit the East coast,
anywhere from Virginia north,
the light feels right, the air feels right,
in a way it never does out here.
The light out here is harsher, the air wilder.

I tried to plot with Chris a birthday surprise:
that we would fly up unnanounced over this past weekend
and wait in a restaurant (PECTOPAH) with Victoria
for Dad, prearranged, to bring you in.
But you floated away, yet again, for these months.

We had dinner with Chris on Sunday.
He made spaghetti. It was very good.
Maureen made oatmeal cookies.

I miss you, Mom, and wish you were here.
Happy birthday.

11:45am: Friday!

9:34am: NomiCards
Here are the rules for a game I've designed. I can't sell it because it is inherently a DIY game, so I'm tossing it out into the world to see if it catches on.

NomiCards
A game of chance and changing rules

Starting rules behind the ( clickythingy. )

1:32pm: Ephishuncee
Let me state at the outset that this is not a complaint about my current employer, at least not in particular. But something happened today that made me shake my head and think about how incredibly badly-run most of the companies in the Silicon Valley really are.

Like f'rexample a few years ago, I hired on at another company, and told them I needed a special keyboard because of my shoulder injury. This isn't a custom item; it's something I bought for my home computer at Fry's for (at the time) about $50.

So okay, they told the IT department, and the IT department brought me a special keyboard. The only problem was that the special keyboard that IT brought me has nothing to do with the one I had requested, nor did it deal in any way with my actual problem. So they took it away and explain, politely, that what I want was not part of their inventory and I'll have to get it approved.

So I submitted a request to my boss, who submitted it to his boss ... by the time this item could be approved, it took the signature of an Executive Vice President. And the ultimate result was that I went out to Fry's and bought the thing for $50 and they reimbursed me.

Now, I don't know exactly what an EVP at that company made. But I figure that, between the time wasted by IT and the time various people up and down the chain spent approving my request, and then approving the expense voucher, it cost that company close to $1000 to buy a $50 keyboard.

What happened today to make me think of this?

Well, I spent two hours on a "special project" today that essentially involved copying material from one document and pasting it into another. This is something a $10/hr clerk could do. I get paid ... well, let's not go into details, but I have 20+ years' experience in a specialized, technical field, and I get paid commensurate with that.

Why am I doing this?

Because modern companies don't have $10/hr clerks. The PC did away with most "typist" work, so it is presumed that anyone short of an uppermost executive will do all their own clerical work. This is supposed to be better for the company. I submit that it would be better for this company if we had one $10/clerk for every fifty or sixty professional employees.

It is things like this that make me despair of American business.

9:08am: The Joys of Censorship
To quote Tom Lehrer, "When correctly viewed/everything is lewd." Some clever-Dick demonstrates this with selective bleeping.

8:30am: 44 questions 44
Glerked from magicwoman. ( Read on if you care )

8:03am: It's the Feast of Fools...
...so happy birthday to amydmartin!

11:12am: Question
SO about these "blog for/against such-and-such days." I've participated in a couple of them, not bothered with others, but ...

... who comes up with them? Is there a central clearinghouse for them? How do people know in advance when they're coming, or do they? Does someone just say, "Hey, today's Blog Against Disco day," and it ripples out? Or, uh, what?

8:46am: Blog Against Torture Day
Do these things really do any good? Do they influence anyone?

Well, be that as it may, here's my contribution:

Torture is a bad idea. It doesn't work, because people will say what they think we want to hear to make it stop.

Torture is immoral.

Torture is bad PR.

Torture makes enemies more likely to fight to the death rather than surrender to us.

OH, and by the way: a US military court settled the question of waterboarding after WWII, hanging Japanese prisoners for having used the technique on American POWs. Case closed.

8:47am: Conservative Ontology 101
This is a response to a non-response to a reply I left in another's LJ. This person may or may not be openly Republican, but is a supporter of the war in Iraq and of John McCain's candidacy, so I feel comfortable in calling him a conservative at this time.

I want to be clear that this is not an attack on that individual, or even on the particular statement I'm responding to. It's just that this statement has crystallized some thoughts that have been brewing in my mind for quite a while.

So what I was responding to, and even my response, are irrelevant. What prompted me to write today is the revelatory nature of the non-response I received, and in particular these two sentences:

Your world is shaped very differently from mine. I hope you enjoy living there: I wouldn't want to.

Now, the fact is, I recognize that each of us perceives the world somewhat differently. But to say that we live in different worlds is contrary to fact. There is a singular reality, and sanity consists of trying to deal with it as it is rather than as we think it is or want it to be. My correspondent's comment, here, confirms something that I have suspected ever since the infamous "you're a member of the fact-based community" remark: that conservatism is inherently not sane.

It involves the belief that reality can be molded to one's desires (at least if one has sufficient power): like the history-editing of Nineteen Eighty-Four, where a historical individual can be declared an "unperson" if they no longer fit the desired reality, conservatism depends on a consciously editing facts until the fact that they have been edited no is no longer conscious.

There is a technical name for the attempt to live in a reality that is not factually accurate. That term is schizophrenia.

I put it to you that the modern conservative movement is a case of schizophrenia on a massive scale.

This explains a great deal. It explains how Bush can say one day that "we're going to smoke Osama out, we're going to get him" and another day say that he's simply not all that relevant. You see, we have always been at war with EastAsia Iraq. They are the enemy. Ignore the man behind the curtain, sending out threatening videotapes. He's not our real enemy. Never was. We're quite certain Saddam was behind 9/11.

I don't necessarily enjoy living with the facts. The facts, for example, are that G.W. Bush is President and that we are involved in a lunatic quagmire in Iraq. I don't enjoy those things. But they are facts, and I have to live with them. It would be much more pleasant to pretend that a votecount was completed in Florida in 2000 (rather than being blockaded by a Republican rent-a-mob) and then cut off by an obscenely partisan Supreme Court. But that would not be factual, for -- whoever would have won -- the count was not permitted, and the man who wants to "spread Democracy" (a phrase that makes me think of rape: spread 'em! -- a fitting metaphor, for the 2000 election was, indeed, a rape in a literal sense) was elected by a majority of five to four.

Another example of reality twisting: BGH. Remember BGH? An artificial hormone injected into cows to make them produce more milk? Monsanto (the producer of BGH) is very upset that some people prefer milk from cows that haven't been injected with the stuff -- and, yes, I'm aware that there is no serious evidence that it gets into the milk -- and so has mounted a lobbying campaign to outlaw packaging that tells you what isn't in a product. By that logic, all diabetic-safe foods with "no added sugars" will be illegal, but what the heck, it's confusing to consumers, let 'em read the ingredients.

Do you see my point? Conservatism, as it is today, has no interest in facts, only in labels and images. Conservatism, as it is today, seeks to redefine reality to its own advantage, because it cannot compete in a genuinely free marketplace of ideas. Conservatism, as it is today, is possible only when people are kept in a state of media-induced schizophrenia.

And this saddens me for a dozen reasons, but not least because I am a basically conservative person. I honor and love the real conservative tradition in America, from John Adams to Arlen Spector. But the current crop of leading conservatives has broken faith with that tradition, has chosen instead to follow the slime-trail of Richard Nixon and Murray Chotiner, and the term "conservative" has come to mean something I despise.

Alas.

7:40am: Baaaaaa!
Please leave a one-word comment that you think best describes me. It can only be one word.

No more.

Then copy & paste this in your journal so that I may leave a word about you.

2:38pm: Kidsongs
For some reason, my head has been full today of the songs we sang on the schoolbus and the street when I was a kid, growing up in Merrick, NY.

Songs like:

I'm looking over my dead dog Rover
lying on the kitchen floor.
Three legs are broken, the other is sprained,
He got run over by the five o'clock train.

and

Comet! It makes your teeth turn green!
Comet! It tastes like Listerine!
Comet! It makes you vomit!
So get some Comet and vomit today!

and

[Johnny] is a friend of mine,
he resembles Frankenstein.
When he does the Irish jig
he resembles Porky Pig.

These things seem to grow up spontaneously wherever there are kids in any number. What were some of yours?

2:31pm: Isn't it odd...
...how we can come to care for people we have never met.

Most of the people on my FL fall into this category. If we have never met, you may take this as a compliment, if you like: it appears that I care about you.

But, in God's name, why? There are people I see every day that might fall off the face of the Earth without my noticing. But when one of you fails to post for an unusually long time, I worry.

I mean: there's a guy who works two cubicles from me. I couldn't even tell you his name, nor, I feel sure, could he tell you mine. He does his job, I do mine, and our paths never cross beyond a polite "hello" in the corridor.

This is not because my employer promotes an alienated workstyle. They don't. And it isn't becausae I'm weirdly alienated. I'm not. There are plenty of people whose jobs have nothing to do with mine, that I have regular conversations with. But there are, equally, plenty whom I don't.

I can't help feeling that there's something vaguely wrong about this, that I can care more for people I've never met than for people with whom I have regular physical contact. But I do. And I suspect it of being true of a number of you Out There.

Any thoughts on this?

10:20am: Oooh, fun
Thanks to louschwing for this:

Maker your own Bush speech.

11:53am: Some Good Last Words
Sir Arthur left us a message on his 90th birthday. Here it is.

3:17pm: RIP Arthur C. Clarke
The last of the Big Three of "golden-age" science fiction has passed on at the age of 90.

His special blend of scientific mysticism, while clearly descended from H.G. Wells and W. Olaf Stapledon, made him a unique voice in the field. He continued writing up to the end, and has just published a new book, cowritten with Stephen Baxter -- another heir to Wells and Stapledon in his own right -- that concludes their trilogy "A Time Odyssey." He was the conceptual inventor of the geosynchronous communications satellite.

Blablablah -- a dry recitation of facts and figures that tells us nothing about what the man meant to some of us. And here at the cusp, I can't tell you what he meant to me: a voice that was strangely attractive, a seer of big visions, a man I never met. I don't feel his loss as personally as I did Heinlein's but there's a heaviness on me as I write that I can't quite explain except to say that, yes, he had his impact on my life, and I'm sorry to see him gone.

I'm really not clear on what, if anything, he believed about survival after death, but I shall pray for him and hope he would not be offended.

8:53am: To state the obvious
Obama is electable; Clinton is not.

Clinton will bring every right-wing whack job who hates the word "clinton" out of the woodwork to vote against her. They'll vote for McCain; against her, they would vote for Ted Kennedy.

Obama will bring out large numbers of young voters. If Clinton is the nominee, some (I do not by any means say "all") of these will stay home, much as young voters did in 1968 when Humphrey was perceived as "more of the same."

If you don't believe that these two groups are enough to swing the election either way, you are either a crazy optimist, or not paying attention to the numbers.

8:39am: Gakked from magicwoman
Everyone has things they blog about. Everyone has things they don't blog about.

Challenge me out of my comfort zone by picking something I don't blog about, but you'd like to hear about, and I'll write a post about it. Ask for anything: latest movie watched, last book read, political leanings, thoughts on lima beans, favorite type of underwear, writing techniques, etc.

Repost in your own journal so that we can all learn more about each other.

12:06pm: And this one...
...is an almost exact description of what patriotism means to me. It would make a great national anthem.