West Point, circa 1969
Fascinating reading on the Point, from a former cadet.
DeLay’s personal right-to-die history
Were you really surprised to hear this?
After a two-day outage, from what I’m told was a bad cable, I’m back. Email will reach me again, so fire away.
Hint #471 that Politics Suck (and yet another reason I don’t like Robert Erlich). From the Baltimore Sun: Ehrlich associate targeted O’Malley.
“The governor had no idea,” Steffen said. “I don’t even think he knows where the Web site is. If anyone is guilty, it is me. There was no outside influence. It was all me.”
Yeah, right.
Gerry Brewster, a Towson Democrat who ran against Ehrlich in the governor’s first congressional election in 1994, said Steffen was well known as “the dirty tricks operative” of Ehrlich’s campaign.
It kinda makes me think of another dirty-tricks operative in the news today.
Romesick. You’ll need QuicktimeVR to view this shot of the Spanish Steps in Rome. (If that link doesn’t work, go here, look for the PANORAMS 2004 pulldown on the upper right side of the page, and open the Spanish Steps link under 2005.) We ate dinner to the immediate left of the Samsung advertisement/monument on the right side of the steps. Our hotel was a mere three blocks up the steps and almost directly as the crow flies behind Ghandi’s head.
In the sad news department, I read this afternoon that Incredible Jimmy Smith passed away today. If you’re not aquainted with Jimmy Smith, he was the absolute tip-top MACK on the Hammond B-3 organ, recording such excellent tracks as “Organ Grinder’s Swing” and “Root Down” (Sampled by the Beastie Boys, who always knew quality when they heard it). Recommended listening from the Dugan archive: Organ Grinder’s Swing, The Blue Note Years, and Back at the Chicken Shack. RIP, Jimmy.
Yeah, not a good day for the home team. I want a beer.
Cranky McBitchyPants. Lemme get on a soapbox here and just rant about how fucking pathetic Windows XP is. I have a “new” machine at work which runs moderately well at best to begin with: XP is a resource pig. When I open Internet Explorer, the system grinds to a halt and I’m immediately beset with popup adware and my browser settings are hijacked. Scanning the drive for Malware reveals, on average, about 350 bad files, from actual running processes to cookies I don’t want. I quarantine everything, remove it, and my browser gets hijacked again. All ActiveX permissions are turned off; MS’s “security” settings are all on High, for whatever good it does me. I’ve spent about two hours playing the ‘remove the spyware’ game today, and it’s getting to the point where I want to stab myself in the eye with a pencil. I want to go back to 2000 Server. I never had problems like this on Server.
Before anybody helpfully suggests to “use Mozilla” or “use a Mac,” BEWARE: I already do. Running IE is not something I choose to do; it’s required in my alternate life as a web designer.
Goddamn waste-of-time POS.
NPR this morning was reporting on the recent problems the District of Columbia has been having in regards to bringing a major league baseball team to the city. Now, if you do a search on this log for sports content, you’ll come up pretty dry—and there will be almost no mention of baseball (except, maybe, the mention of free Orioles tickets.) I like the football, although I don’t arrange my Sundays around it; I like the baseball as long as the tickets are cheap, my beer is full, and I’m actually sitting in the stadium. Hockey is fun, but there’s none of that this year. I don’t write much about sports, but this story gets at the heart of something I’ve thought about for years.
Apparently, the mayor of D.C. promised MLB all kinds of concessions in the standard “We [the city] will roll over and pay both MLB and the team owners for the privilege of hosting this team in our city, as well as hiking taxes on our citizens to generate the money to build them a stadium” plan. Usually this deal forfeits parking concessions and other revenue-generating enterprises, involves knocking down a large amount of existing buildings, and leasing the city-owned land back to the team for $1. (See: Ravens Stadium.) The common wisdom is that the team’s games will bring revenue into the city via tourism, merchandise sales, and taxes. What it usually boils down to, in my opinion, is trickle-down economics—the team, owners, and MLB pocket the lion’s share, while the city is forced to sell bonds and further tax its citizens to pay for the whole thing, just so that it can claim a team (for a limited time. Just wait ’till those attendance records start dropping.) The city gets a pittance of revenue through stuff like payroll taxes on minimum-wage earning concessioneers.
In a rare, well-intentioned move, the D.C. City Council decided that it would sign a contract with an added provision that half the money to build a stadium would have to come from private financing, not the taxpayers. And, predictably, MLB lost it’s frickin’ mind. “WHAT?!?! We deign to offer you a baseball team (after having taken two away from you already) and you expect us to pay for some of it?!? HOW DARE YOU!”
I say: Fuck Major League Baseball. Go watch a triple-A team and save yourself some money. (Chances are, they’re not taking steroids yet.)
To a certain someone: You got so very, very lucky yesterday. You’d better show some contrition and respect for that, or I’m going to go absolutely mental on you.
I used to work here. Still do, kinda.
Our troubled orange tabby, Penn, has been dealing with anxiety issues ever since we joined the two kingdoms. He manifests his insecurities by attacking pretty much every other cat in the house, saving his special love for Geneva, the female. So we’ve had him on medication since before the wedding, and trapped in the rear atrium room away from the other cats. The first medication he was put on was Diazo-trypto something, and it made him very stoney for the first two days, then reduced his white-hot anger to a dull crank. He was mellower but still itching to bite Geneva whenever he could. With a change in doctors, a checkup, and a new prescription, we thought things might turn around for the guy. He was lonely and sad in his little castle, scratching at the window and making pitiful requests for love. The second meds (Ela-something) did nothing but dull his senses for three seconds—he burned through that stuff like a Twinkie on a hot day, and seemed more eager than ever to get into some ass-whuppin’. Today I picked up the third prescription for the little terror (he reached out and clawed the face of our new cat doctor on his first visit, the only time I’ve ever seen him attack a human)—the big gun, Prozac. Thankfully it’s generic, it’s a smaller dose, and it’s not harmful to the liver like kitty Valium, which is our last and final resort. So say a prayer tonight for Mr. Penn, and let’s all hope he calms the hell down.
Nice. This is a beautiful series of maps drawn to illustrate how misleading some of those election result maps were when they flashed them onscreen last week. I’m sure Tufte could get a whole new lecture series out of this subject, like PowerPoint.
Happiness Is. My wife calling me out of the blue to tell me she loves me.
Sadness Is. The “Check Engine” light on the Jeep lighting up this morning.
To Do list:
- Donate money to the ACLU. They’re gonna need it.
- Contact the local Democratic party headquarters and volunteer.
- Get involved more in local organizations and effect change from the inside.
- Raise a family of pinko liberal hippie educated activist Democrats.
- Make, pack, and send some care packages to soldiers serving in Iraq.
Any other suggestions? I’m all ears.
Props. Special shout-outs to the following people, whom I haven’t mentioned but in passing the last few days:
- Renie, my sister, for driving six and a half hours to stand on a ladder and scrape the Oldest Wallpaper Known To Man from the plaster in our hallway. Hopefully, the lobster feast, trip to Peter’s, homemade quiche and booze made it worthwhile.
- Dave, our good friend, who dropped by to haul away a pile of dry brush from our driveway on Tuesday, and who sat through an hour of our deepening depression as the election results came in. He could not be tempted with either pizza or Hefeweizen, so we owe him something special. Chewbacca thanks you, Dave.
- Molly, for the excellent T-shirt she sent over just in time for an anniversary present. Jen looked at it and laughed, and I suggested she wear it at Christmas. We’ll see how that goes.
Updates. I went through the Lockardugan Photo Archive this morning to dig out a bunch of beginning photos of the house for comparison’s sake. I’m going to be posting them over the next day or so as I get the time- there’s a bunch of them. This should be interesting.
E-L-E-C-T-I-O-N R-E-F-O-R-M. Four more years of shite. Thanks a bunch, middle America. I’m glad, at least, that I live in a state that didn’t carry him. And, what’s all this bullshit about “moral issues”? Who gives a crap about banning gay marriage when the economy is in the toilet and we’re occupying a foreign country? Come on, people!
Ch-ch-ch-Changes. I moved the home page of the namesake site over to a CSS-based design, meaning there’s not a table to be found in it. Now, that’s not that big a deal considering it’s two images and an image map, but for some reason I can’t get the CSS equivalent of the ol’ <body align=center> tag to work correctly in Mozilla. (Nor, for that matter, do the popups in the design section work in Mozilla. Dammit.) The eventual goal is to have the whole damned thing in CSS, but that’s a ways off. Baby steps here, baby steps.
This article, on surviving IKEA, is written just like a walkthrough to DOOM, circa 1998. It will make non-gamers laugh and gamers howl. I wish I had thought of it.
Progress. This morning Jen got up at 7 to shower, and I roused myself to find the TV remote for the bad news. It wasn’t as bad as I’d hoped, but not the surprise I was praying for. Jen tried some new paint on the wall in the guest bedroom, and I made coffee, anxious to get outside and take advantage of the warm sunshine. I should back up and give props to Dave, who brought Clifford by and hauled off the pile of brush in the driveway I’ve been collecting since June. He helped clear the way for the car cover I bought from Sam’s Club a few weeks ago, which I put up in about an hour. Unfortunately, the cover isn’t rated for snow (a fact I couldn’t find on the less-than-helpful website) but with some carefully made modifications, I think I can get around that. Also missing on the website: the fact that the tent does not come with tiedowns—although the instructions helpfully note, “Caution: Once you erect your tent, it WILL become a giant kite!” Lacking any tiedowns, I decided the next best thing would be attaching the cover to the closest 3200lb. weight I could find, so I jump-started the Scout off the Jeep, backed it under the cover, and tied off the center poles to the roof rack. The overall effect is very ghetto, but considering it’s the first time Chewbacca has been under cover since 1998, I’m certainly happy.
10:45pm. Discouraged. I’m drinking every time Dan Rather busts out a Texas aphorism. Which means I’m ripped.
9:11pm. Nice to see a few things: Maryland went Democratic (no surprise there.) Barbara Mikulski looks like she’s going to win. Barack Obama crushed Alan Keyes.
Black Helicopters Dept. I went and voted this morning after waiting a while for Jen come back from giving blood; she has some kind of mystery sickness thing and they sort of threw their hands up in the air and said, “We’ll draw some blood”, which means, we’re stumped. We had romantic dreams of walking across the street hand-in-hand to vote the fascists out of office (actually, she had that dream, while mine was more like the Matrix, where I used the Crane Style Technique to clear a bloody path through the throngs of Bush supporters barring our way to the polls. It turned out that there were just four teenagers asking quietly, “Kerry for President?”) I walked over by myself and after signing the card found myself in front of one of the Deibold machines. My misgivings have been documented before, and I can see where there could be a problem; the fact that my little voter credit card thing was about as insecure a device as a blank piece of paper did not lend a sense of trust. (You sign a paper, they give you a credit card. You walk to the machine, insert the card, cast your ‘ballot’, and the card pops out. You then hand the card to the dork with the “I Voted” stickers, and who the hell knows where your vote went.)
So, for better or worse, I cast my vote for the guy I believe in. Lord help us all.
Professional. I got an email from the VP of marketing at a T-shirt company this afternoon, with the subject “Looking for creative artist”. Here is the body of the message, verbatim:
If you are interested in doing art please let me know
Now, I don’t have any idea who this guy is, or what it’s like “doing art” for him. Based on my previous experiences with T-shirt companies, there’s no way in hell I’d ever send one a sketch, let alone attempt to do business with one. But this email makes me laugh. My website is reasonably professional; my work is generally good. How does this guy expect I’m going to react to an email this impersonal? I mean, his signature took up more space than the message. Get bent, buddy.
Humor. The quiet lakeside town my parents live in is going through some growing pains lately. Some folks bought a big house across the street from them, decided they didn’t like the layout, and so picked it up and moved it off the property to an open lot, where it’s sat up on blocks for a year. Some snarky individual decided to play a Halloween prank with it this year.
Belgian Dark Chocolate. Type junkies, peep this site: Mark Simonson and his font studio MS Studio. Lots of good information on typography, examples, and fonts for buying.
This morning I got an email from a student at SCAD about using some of the photos I posted of the signs in Perry, OK for a class project, which means I’ve got to go into the archives and find the negatives so that I can re-scan them at a higher resolution. (what this really means is that sometime tonight I have to dig through six or seven Tupperware containers, my “file cabinet”, and several boxes of unlabeled stuff, then go through about eighty sleeves of unmarked negatives to find them.) It’ll be worth the effort—hopefully he’ll be able to use what I have, and I’m curious to see the results.
Vanilla. Jen and I watched the debate last night, curious to see the outcome. In my opinion, Kerry clearly came out on top. Every time he hit Bush with a good point (Healthcare, the deficit, religion, the draft, Homeland security), Bush went back to “education.” At one point, when asked about creating new jobs, Bush went off about community college and No Child Left Behind, dodging the question entirely. While I wanted Kerry to simply ask him how going to college and incurring even more personal debt is going to help people get jobs today, it clearly showed how out of his depth the President is, and how he has absolutely no plan for the U.S. economy besides going to war. It also was good to hear Kerry appeal to women voters directly and state his opinion on Roe V. Wade clearly. I also felt that Bush did a hamhanded job of attempting to tag Kerry as a Liberal, and I hope that some of the swing voters saw through that. While the claims thrown around by both men were misleading, I got a much better read off Kerry than Bush.
Rocky Road. After taking the cover off the Base Station, I have an hour of connectivity before it goes feet-up. The capacitors are hot to the touch and the WaveLAN card is cooking hot. I’d have to hack some kind of heatsink or fan onto the thing to get it to stay cool—something I might do later on but don’t have the time for right now.