Debate Livesnarking

Well. Peter isn't sufficiently appreciating my debate-related witticism, but he did bring home delicious beer. And I'm stealing his laptop to cast pearls among Internets, hoorah!

  • 7:30 - Yeah, it ended right on time. I'm hungry. And I bet people in Wisconsin and Ohio and Indiana are hungry too.
  • 7:27 - Wait, is this a closing statement? The food hasn't even arrived yet! And why didn't Kerry refer to any swing states?
  • 7:22 - In all this talk about Russia, Bush never quite gets around to mentioning that he doesn't believe in checks and balances either... take a drink!
  • 7:15 - they're talking about "wilting". Presidential candidates are all lovely and unique flowers!
  • 7:13 - "I don't think [a difference of character] is my job or my business" - aahhh. That's a lovely sentiment.
  • 6:54 - I didn't think anything said in this debate could change my vote... but it's time to order Thai food and we still haven't heard about Kerry's stance on delicious shrimp tom kha. One well-timed stalk of lemongrass could put California in play.
  • 6:41 - OH SHIT! John Kerry is wearing a RED tie, and George Bush is wearing a BLUE tie! The major parties are telling us something here and I think I should vote Green again. Also, the moderator is wearing a red tie. Oh, shit. Liberal media my ass.
  • 6:35 - I'm downgrading "gratuitous mention of a swing state" from two drinks to one.
yami · 18:36 · 30 Sep 2020 · #
Filed under: USian Politics

Moral Leadership A La Dennis Hastert

It seems at this point that voting against the 9/11 Commission Recommendations Reform Act would be political suicide - which is why it's the best bill ever for introducing sneaky measures to legalize the practice of sending random Canadians to Syria for two-week torture vacations! I'm throwing my panties at Dennis Hastert in adulation, that's for sure. Obsidian Wings has more. Halfway Sane Readers, write your representatives, friends, family, and editors.

(via Kevin Drum)

yami · 12:44 · 29 Sep 2020 · #
Filed under: USian Politics

Movies Lately

So here's what I've seen in the past couple weeks, in no particular order:

  • Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow - So I think there was some kind of plot, because why else would they have stuck all those people in front of the CGI robots? Quite a mistake - the robots, and the associated visual pastiche of early-to-Golden Age styles, were much more interesting than the tributes to time-honored wooden archetypes. Brave Manly Pilot, Superficially Feisty Yet Ultimately Helpless Non-Technically-Oriented Heroine, and Genius Engineer Sidekick, blah-de-blah, whatever, costuming. A good date movie for nerds, because you can play Spot the Reference; I was disappointed not to hear the Wilhelm.
    And for those of you who've seen it: what was up with the villainess costume? I found it incongruous and distracting - particularly the cape - perhaps it was some sort of Batman thing but it didn't seem to fit.
  • Outfoxed - a little uneven, but overall, how depressing! The proposed solution was to badger the FCC, which left me feeling bleak and empty - I generally favor the ruthless subjugation of commercial speech to consumer fraud protections, but I don't think "fair and balanced" is in quite the same class of claims as "100% juice" or "not tested on animals".
    New Campaign Friend M. emerged from the theater bent on creating a liberal equivalent, which is also depressing. What I hate about Fox News is that otherwise clever people will grant it a kind of epistimologic privilege it clearly hasn't earned. Whether it's because people think the sum of all lies is truth, or what, I don't know, but I'm interested in eliminating this kind of bullshit credulity, not expanding it. It's fundamentally a cultural problem. Bleah.
  • Hero - Does anyone know the number of basic color words in Chinese? The colored scenes were remarkably coincedent with the approved sequence for adding color words to languages. In the absence of a better reason for not having fight sequences in orange and purple, I'm sticking to my friend Mr. Whorf.
  • Shaun of the Dead - made me puke. Literally. I had to leave the theater at the end of the first act* and hang out in the lobby/bathroom with irritating kids and ushers. The movie could've been very cute, if only it had done more to distinguish itself from a mysterious tummy bug. Such wasted potential!

* Note that this was before the "zombie gore" set in. I may be squeamish, and sitting in the front row certainly didn't help (you can't even see the whole screen at once that far forward, why do they even put seats there?), but I'm not quite that sensitive. Also: Zombie seeking brains.

yami · 13:02 · 28 Sep 2020 · #
Filed under: Movies

Threaten My Enfranchisement Harder!

Jesus fucking christ, they put Donald Rumsfeld in charge of expatriate voter enfranchisement. Shockingly, the amount of actual expatriate voter enfranchisement available is not on the rise.

Gentle Expatriated American Readers (are there any of you still out there?), if your ISP is full of terrorist h4x0rs, try Overseas Vote 2020. Registration in many states must be received by October 3 or 4 (it's the state of last U.S. residence that counts, and it doesn't matter how long you or they have been living abroad). Gentle Foreign Readers, the nagging begins NOW: find an American and chew on their arm or throw fruit at them until they print, sign, fax, and mail their registration and ballot request. Your old tomatoes are a small price to pay to put someone halfway sane at the helm of the world's largest (economy|nuclear arsenal|ball of twine), eller hur?

yami · 21:27 · 22 Sep 2020 · #
Filed under: USian Politics

Non-Marketing Non-Future

Good consumers choose purchases based on the time-honored means of self-expression through brand identification. We need products that change brand automatically based on the buyer's self-image.

I was thinking this might help me sort out my yogurt from everyone else's yogurt in the company fridge, as most of my coworkers' yogurt would be branded part of a healthy, active lifestyle - or possibly a populist appeal to overpowered yogurt automobiles, I'm not sure who eats all the yogurt in this office - while my own would be a sort of crayoned take on Repo Man-style generic branding. Then I thought, aw, geez, it's really arrogant of me to pretend I'm the only person in the whole wide office fridge so unaffected by consumer culture. And anyway, yogurt is a crummy product to play this game with, it'd be better to try it with soda or shampoo or something.

Then I started thinking about work again, tweedledum doodleum.

yami · 9:17 · 21 Sep 2020 · #
Filed under: Uncategorized, Crap

Ahoy Me Hearties!

  1. Arrr, even me landlubbin aunties is talkin like pirates today! But they be not tellin such salty riddles:

    Q: Whom did the pirate vote for in the Haitian election?
    A: ARRRistide.
    Q: Wait. Why did they let a pirate vote in the Haitian election?
    A: Remember, the nation was taking its first halting steps toward democracy, and balloting procedures were rather chaotic. The pirate just slipped in somehow. Arrr.

  2. The scurvy maggots of urban sprawl be opposin' residential construction for me sainted grandmama! The bilge-waters of the Pasadena Star-News online don't have the booty, but from the paper swag, it seems that West Covina, Baldwin Park, and the rest of the shark bait suburbs in the East San Gabriel Valley be tryin' to scupper a bill requirin' cities to allow small second units or "granny flats" to be built with only reasonable zoning restrictions. We'll be keelhauled under our own boat, me hearties, if we don't smartly scrape the barnacles of sprawl. Arr.
  3. ARRRRRRR!
yami · 10:45 · 19 Sep 2020 · #
Filed under: Links, Local Politics

Rhetorical Gatekeeping, Gender, Etc.

Bitch Ph.D. is indulging in a metablogging series; Part 1 includes a satisfying rant against the necessity of continually explaining one's fundamental premises to all the ignorant yahoos on the internet, and the genderedness thereof:

When one is not teaching entry-level courses, when one is trying to think something through at a fairly high level of analysis, having to reiterate basic premises is not only irritating (which is why women so often get "shrill" or "angry" when they're interrupted YET AGAIN, and why it is so fucking wrong for men to say patronizing things like, "don't be insulting, or you'll never get anyone over to your side").
[...]
'm willing--as are we all--to occasionally pause and reexamine the opening chapters, to go back over beginning stuff; this is how we learn, after all, and our understanding of things changes over time (which is another element of blogging, by the way). But when I am in the middle of thinking stuff out, it is really frustrating, and disruptive (and, one suspects, sometimes deliberately so), to be interrupted all the time and asked, "sorry, I came late to class. Did I miss anything important?" And it seems to me that this kind of thing happens a lot more to women bloggers than it does to men. And I think that people should think about this.

Skipping over, for the moment, a handful of men I've met who make me ponder polite ways of saying "Hey, you know how you grinned while interrupting me just now? That was just really fucking patriarchal, blaaaargh chomp chomp!" - as I said, skipping those folks over, ahem... feminists have traditionally coped with such disruptive students by creating explicitly female-only or feminism-friendly "safe spaces", with tightly controlled participation: moderated invite-only mailing lists or even physical rooms with heavy doors to close. Blogs don't have such ready barriers against the trolling masses, but nevertheless some are safer spaces than others. Why?

I'm thinkin' 'bout rhetorical strategies for gatekeeping in the absence of actual gates, which we all indulge in to one or more extents. I think I've used, or at least seen, all of these in effect at one place/time or another:

  • Inside jokes and internal references.
  • Wheedling attention from other people whose readership is uniformly well-reasoned and insightful, while limiting one's interactions with ignorant yahoos even outside your desired safe space, lest they be tempted to follow you home.
  • Interweaving "friendly" topics (food, kittens, gardening, office supplies, how other people are rude drivers) with the heavy stuff - I assume this has a gatekeeping function, if only because niche blogs tend to attract larger audiences. Presumably it's an exercise in healthy community bonding as well.
  • Writing in crazy moon language idiolect, euphemistically described as "quirky" or "jargony" or "Danish" (og selvfølgelig her snakker jeg ikke om virkelige dansker, men om mig og min "dansk")
  • Aiming entries at particular readers, because you like them and you know they'll be interested, or because you hate them and you know they'll be bored to tears.

These are all very generic means of delimiting social groups, and I suppose I've strayed from the gender-issue pasture... but that's okay. I've got a dinner date tonight, and this is a blog fercrippesake so I don't need an excuse to leave my thoughts half-finished anyway, so there.

yami · 12:49 · 17 Sep 2020 · #
Filed under: Feminism, Wanking

Ikebana Fails Me

Sometimes, you get a few flowers from the dumpster. When they're in the dumpster, they look in really good shape. When you bring them back and stick them in a vase on your desk, you're suddenly confronted with their imperfections and every broken petal or droopy blossom takes on magnified importance. And you sort of almost wish you hadn't found the flowers in the dumpster at all.

Seems like this oughta be a good life lesson, but I think it's only applicable to taking flowers from the dumpster.

yami · 18:17 · 16 Sep 2020 · #
Filed under: Uncategorized, Crap

California Performance Review for Geologists

In keeping with my emergent desire for political activity on those narrowly tailored local and technical matters where I feel I can be most effective, I bring you an entry of extremely limited interest - but there might plausibly be one or two California geologists lurking among you Gentle Readers. California non-geologists and googlebots may be interested as well; I'm pulling in a bunch of environmental permitting issues here that are, at best, only tangentially related to the geohydro-EIR parts of my job.
(more...)

yami · 13:04 · 15 Sep 2020 · #
Filed under: California Politics

No Vegetables for the Poor

My high school government teacher was a firm believer in the notion that poor mothers, if left to their own devices, would feed their children nothing but tequila and Cadillacs. So she was a huge fan of the WIC program and its restrictive couponing system, which might finally supply fresh fruits and vegetables maybe. Currently, the WIC food package assumes that one's vitamins should be obtained primarily from fruit and vegetable juices, and cheese. Lots of cheese! In fact, additional cheese may be issued to lactose intolerant persons!*

What's that you say, Mr. Welch's Grape Juice and Mr. Dairy Association?

Children who don't drink juice will drink soda and tequila and Cadillacs instead! And Mongolian herders live quite happily on mare's milk alone, you know, for whole winters, and you don't see them asking the U.S. government for spinach, do you? Besides, nothing in the whole universe is an acceptable source of dietary calcium but milk and milk products.

Well, those are good points. I bet those herders would like some grape juice now and then to relieve the monotony of their grape-juice-less diets.

I haven't found an appropriate email address, but here's some generic WIC program contact information, in case you want to phone, fax, or snail-mail to ask that grape juice for Mongolian herders be included in the USDA's subsidy programs.

* I assume some lactose intolerant persons can tolerate cheese. However, neither of my two lactose intolerant roommates were able to do so, and my anecdotes trump your transparently silly regulatory capture, Mr. Dairy Association.

yami · 13:06 · 13 Sep 2020 · #
Filed under: USian Politics