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A stray dog has been killed by a car in front of your house.
a. You call the police and the ASPCA, and tell them to track down the criminals who did this.b. You call the streets department and ask them to pick up the carcass.c. You grab your shovel and bury the poor creature in the garden.d. You snap on your latex gloves, grab a butcher knife and pair of pliers, and take it down the basement, where your family knows not to disturb you.
(Via Making Light )
=v= Yesterday I was at my bank's ATM when I smelled smoke and noticed that the fire engines I'd been hearing were converging on that very block. Apparently my bank was on fire.
Naturally, I withdrew the maximal amount of cash.
Edward Tufte of The Visual Display of Quantitative Information fame demonstrates how to remove anthropocentrism from the Pioneer Probe plaque .
(Via Word Blog )
A veteran of 150 jobs concludes :
Charities are the least charitable places to work, places dedicated to culture are full of people with no breeding, accountancy firms are the most fun, colleagues can make or break your working week, suing sex-pest bosses pays and, finally, keep looking until you find satisfaction. My 150 jobs may be astonishing to some. What I find astonishing is someone who works eight hours a day, five days a week, year in year out, in a job they hate but are too scared to try something else. You may have to wander in the wilderness for a while, but for some of us, it’s the only way to the Promised Land.
(Via Circadian Shift )
=v= John Lydon (née Johnny Rotten) has walked out on the filming of I'm a Celebrity ... Get Me Out of Here!
He told programme-makers he was "bored" and "wanted some chocolate".
He is now holed up in a luxury hotel on the Gold Coast and will be barred from returning to the set.
In a sense, I have to side with chocolate over the phony reality of reality programming. But how will the punker-than-thou set feel?
=v= A Chinese entrepreneur is trademarking the name "George W. Bush" to sell diapers (a.k.a. "nappies"). The article has a great photo of a Japanese "George W. Bush" toilet paper display, complete with Dr. Bronner's-style Engrish text:
Mr. president BUSH, you are boss of a nasty Viking. We might say, YOU ARE A TERRORIST. I am never never forgive terrorism which is shooting an innocent tourist.
(This last part appears to refer to Yoshihiro Hattori, who was shot to death for ringing an American doorbell, though that happened in 1992, when George The Elected was boss of a nasty Viking.)
Three Cuban families sail for Florida in a propellor-powered 1959 Buick .
Three Cuban families’ hopes of puttering to South Florida in a green, 1959 propeller-powered Buick were dashed Wednesday when the tail-finned, floating car was sunk, just like their first ingeniously engineered amphibious vessel, a 1951 Chevy truck rigged to a pontoon of 55-gallon drums, an exile source said. The U.S. Coast Guard declined to comment on the fates of the 11 migrants who were intercepted aboard the sealed Buick 10 miles off Marathon on Tuesday. But Cuban exile sources speculated they will likely be repatriated, just as some had been during the Chevy crossing last July.
Q: Perhaps you feel a bit out of step with your contemporaries?UKL: Why should a woman of 74 want to be “in step with” anybody? Am I in an army, or something?
Nominally Norman Spinrad interviewing Woody Allen, this reads much more like Woody Allen interviewing Norman Spinrad :
N.S.: When you’re in the States and you’re a writer and you’ve
got money and you walk into a bank and you’ve got money, you’re a
bum with money. If you’re broke, you’re just a bum.
(Via Neil Gaiman’s Journal , Word Blog )
The Squalor Survivors website offers this disturbing definition of levels :
- First degree squalor
You are getting behind in tasks that you would normally manage, like laundry and dishes. You are not the tidy person you once were. Little piles are starting to emerge and your disorganization is starting to affect your life and inconvenience you. Things are just starting to get out of hand and become unmanageable. A sign of first degree squalor might be that you are embarrassed for other people to see your mess…but you would still let them in the house.
- Second degree squalor
Now things are really starting to get out of hand. Signs that you have reached second degree would include losing the use of normal household items like your bed, table, television or telephone, because the piles have expanded to cover the items up. You start to develop new methods of moving around your house, as normal movement is impeded by your piles of stuff. You might start making excuses to discourage people from entering your house.
- Third degree squalor
At this stage, you have all the above, plus you have rotting food and animal faeces and/or urine in the house, and this is the rule not the exception. You cannot cope with the growing mess. Essential household repairs may not be done, because you are too afraid to let a tradesperson see your house. Just the thought of someone seeing your mess causes you great stress.
- Fourth degree squalor
At fourth degree squalor, you have all of the above, plus you have human faeces and/or urine in your house that is not in the toilet.
The son of an Ebay addict has posted detailed pictures of a house at second degree squalor .
A professional organizer’s article on obsessive compulsize hoarding :
Although hoarding behavior may manifest in people suffering from psychosis, brain damage, or dementia, most severe hoarding appears to be a subtype of OCD and is usually coupled with other OCD behavior such as compulsive counting, hand washing, checking (making sure the stove is off), and organizing (never mind!)Studies carried out by an expert in the field, Randy Frost, Ph.D., and a National Institute of Mental Health survey, both estimate that between 2 and 3 percent of the population suffers from OCD—creating around $8 billion annually in social and economic losses, with about 15 percent to 30 percent of those OCD sufferers experiencing hoarding as their primary symptom.
“OCD hoarding is an extremely confounding disorder, difficult to treat, and in severe cases life threatening,” explains Dr. Gillette, who has worked with the elderly for more than 25 years. “Outdated food spoils, accumulated food and feces breed health problems, little critters move in, and stacked newspapers and magazines become fire hazards.”
Indeed, a friend’s mother’s house which was crammed from basement to attic with garbage, burned to the ground last year.
In one study of children who suffered from OCD, 20 to 70 percent of first-degree relatives also exhibited significant signs of OCD. It is now widely believed that hoarding, like other OCDs, has a strong genetic component and often runs in families.
[…] “Whereas most people with OCD are aware that their behavior is out of control, OCD hoarders usually lack that insight or don’t think that it’s that unusual,” says Dr. Saxena.
“Inevitably it’s a family member or friend who brings them in for therapy, and they’re unusually difficult to treat.”
As hoarders age, they face an escalating series of stress factors—loss of control over children, retirement, death of a spouse, impending illnesses, diminished ability to care for themselves, etc., and hoarding is the imaginary line of defense in the face of inevitable loss of control.
[…]
The first line of medications to combat OCDs and OCD hoarding is serotonin reuptake inhibitors, or SRIs, such as Paxil and Zoloft, commonly used as antidepressants. “For some unknown reason, hoarders often don’t respond to SRIs, which tells us this may be a unique neurological subtype,” explains Dr. Saxena, heading a three-year UCLA study. “There’s a likelihood that OCD hoarders exhibit unique patterns of brain abnormalities, different from those of other OCDs, which will enable us to direct our research into other drugs.”
And syllogomania is a fancy word for “hoarding rubbish.”
I feel greatly inspired to finish unpacking, and to get rid of some old stuff.
I’m always amazed and entertained by how extremists can be 360 degrees opposed to each other. Here’s the feminist take on why the baring of Janet Jackson’s breast was horrible and wrong and innocents should have been protected from it .
I still think the bulk of the outrage should be aimed at Timberlake. He ripped off a woman’s clothes, and the question we ask is whether she planned it because she was wearing a nipple ornament. How is that different from the jury that refuses to convict a rapist because a girl was wearing a too-short skirt?
(Via Follow Me Here )
James D. MacDonald has been posting a detailed writing tutorial. Here’s one bit I liked :
I also give you permission to write badly. So long as your fingers are moving on the keys, you can write utter tripe. It’s okay. You’re going to revise it anyway, right?What I don’t give you permission to do is not write. When the Muse comes to your house, she expects to find you sitting in your chair in front of your typewriter. If you aren’t there, she’ll just go on to the next author on her list, rather than go looking for you.
Make time, every day, and during that time be at your keyboard. There is no substitute for the BIC (Butt In Chair) method.
and another :
In writing, you can do absolutely anything if it works.The “if it works” part is the tough bit. Try, read it carefully, be honest with yourself. Get the reactions from your first readers.
Think of your novel as a video game. Every time you try something, if it works, you get some number of points. If it doesn’t work, you lose that same number of points. The fancier and more difficult the thing you try, the more points associated with it.
You’ll start the game with a certain number of points. How many depends on the reader — if he’s read and enjoyed a previous work by you, you’ll get more points than if he’s never heard of you before. If you’re writing in a genre he likes, you’ll get more points than if you aren’t exactly what he was looking for, but he was bored and there you were.
You’ve got some points, though, or the cover never gets opened.
Now you start adding and subtracting points for “things that work.”
If your score ever goes down to zero, it’s Bzzzzt! Game over! and the reader throws the book across the room (or, more demurely, puts it down and doesn’t pick it back up).
You can read it yourself for much more good stuff.
Sunday, I spent some time in San Francisco watching the sea lions at Pier 39 — look for yourself . A small number started hanging out on a dock there in ‘89, and as their numbers increased, a dozen small floating docks were dedicated to them. The Marine Mammal Center has a detailed history , FAQ , and sea lion facts .
There were hundreds of them there. At any moment, most are sloppily puppy-piled atop each other, asleep or resting (on account of their being positive thigmotactic and all), sunning themselves. Every so often, one will slip off and take a dip. Though they weigh hundreds of pounds (males can reach a half ton), they emerge from the water as smoothly as a cat jumps on a chair.
Some of the adult males take it on themselves to lecture, and sit up barking for a minute or two — several are doing this at any given time. Then they settle back down. It seems to make no difference that everyone is ignoring them. They remind me of preachers on college campuses.
A mother was rubbing her neck against a pup. Two adolescent males were wrestling, rubbing their necks and chests against each other. One scamp jumped into the water, then emerged onto the end of a dock, climbed on the pile of sea lions, and slid across them just for sport, splashing in the water at the end. He prepared to do it again at another dock, but a pup a tenth his size at the end of the dock barked at him until he backed off. He found another dock and did it again.
I have no point here other than: marine mammals are cool. And: I like to watch the sea lions.
Edward Ocean explains what happens when a five-year old boy whose grandmother’s euphemism for penis is “teapot” learns the “I’m a little teapot” song during his first day of kindergarden .
This account of a white supremacy festival near Arizona must be read.
Have you heard the one about the brown-skinned kid who showed up at the Nazi rally wearing a “WHITE POWER” tee shirt?This was no joke at Aryanfest 2004, an “international” gathering of Nazi skinheads, Ku Klux Klan members and other white supremacists that took place inside McDowell Regional Mountain Park just north of Fountain Hills a couple of weekends ago.
Aryanfest’s gates opened at noon, and about an hour later, the gathering assemblage gradually hushed as all eyes turned upon the young man who had just paid his entrance fee and was casually perusing the hate-rock compact discs, swastika flags and white power watch caps at Panzerfaust Records’ merchandise booth.
He was in his late teens or early 20s, had a shaved head and sported Nazi and white power tattoos on both arms, in addition to wearing the white tee shirt with bold, black script.
He would have fit in just fine, except for one thing: He wasn’t white. Not even close. There was at least half a cup of Kahlúa in his cream.
Seemingly oblivious to the increasingly hostile stares and menacing murmurs generated by his mere presence, this poor fellow, who seemed on the verge of getting lynched from the nearest sturdy saguaro cactus, was accompanied by three white kids who looked as if their primary aspiration in life was to load amplifiers for Marilyn Manson. They were outfitted in gothic black. Two had long, dirty blond hair, the other an unruly dark brown mop that danced wildly in the cold wind.
About five minutes after arriving, the group of four was approached by a cadre of skinhead security guards. These storm troopers were painfully polite as they informed the brown kid he wasn’t welcome. “We’re sorry, but we’ve been asked by the managers of this event to tell you that you have to leave. We’re going to escort you out,” said one.
“Why?” asked the kid.
The skinheads looked at him incredulously, and not without a degree of sympathy. It was obvious that he actually thought he belonged there, amongst white power kinfolk. “Well, you haven’t broken any of the festival’s rules,” began another skinhead, employing the sort of “I hate to break it to you” tone of voice of a father explaining to his 5-year-old son why a bed sheet tied around his neck doesn’t mean he can fly. “The thing is, you’re not white.”
Crestfallen, the kid stood silent for a few beats, then responded, “Okay, okay. I understand. I respect that. I just hope you know I didn’t mean any disrespect by being here. I just wanted to come out and show my respect for the white race and support the cause.”
“We respect that, and we appreciate your attitude, you not giving us any trouble,” said a skinhead, gently guiding him toward the exit. “It’s just we don’t allow any non-whites here, and, you know, a judgment call was made and that call was that you’re not white. We’ll be happy to refund your money. Your friends can stay if they like, and if not, we’ll give them their money back as well. “
The four interlopers each retrieved their $30 cover charge, then made hastily for their car. Watching them go, celebrity racist Tom Metzger cackled and said, loudly but to no one in particular, “Well, what in the hell do you suppose that spic was thinking?”
Either that kid was playing a dangerous prank, or he must be about the saddest guy in the world right now. And I cannot resist also excerpting:
Notable in her absence was […] Wendy Iwanow, who spent last fall promoting Aryanfest and promising half-price tattoos at the event for all her racial brothers and sisters. Iwanow was arrested on forgery charges at an Idaho airport in November when she and Butler were attempting to board a plane for Phoenix, and was subsequently outed on the Internet.Seems Iwanow enjoyed a lengthy film career as porn star Bianca Trump, billing herself not as the white power Russian American she does today but as the “Latin Princess.” She had co-starred with women, black men, and even Ron Jeremy, a Jew. But rules are rules, even for the close personal friend of a near deity; sucking black dick gets a girl banned from Nazi parties.
Mel Gibson’s father, Hutton Gibson:
They [Jews] are the people with an eye for eye and tooth for a tooth. They must have revenge. You know they (the Jews) caused the Roman persecutions too. They called attention to the fact that the Christians were refusing to offer incense to the emperors when the emperors became gods. The Jews were notable for getting the wood to burn the Christians…a labor of love you could say.To a Jew a Christian commits idolatry every time he looks at a crucifix and says a prayer. You know there in control and they’re going to get in control the way things are going. Because they get all of our people…They killed several generations of us Americans (referring to WWWI, WWII)…The Jews weren’t in the army much in WWI that because they were fomenting a revolt in Russia.
My dad taught me my faith, and I believe what he taught me. The man never lied to me in his life.
Mel Gibson hasn’t directly said anything nearly so inflammatory is his father habitually says. But from what he has and hasn’t said, I get a distinct impression that he buys into the same whacked out viewpoint. Enough so that I’ll pass on The Passion of the Christ just to avoid giving him any financial succor.
=v= The ad campaign for Apple’s iLife ‘04 product suite exclaims, “It’s like ‘Microsoft Office’ for the rest of your life.”
Why is Apple trying to terrorize its customers?
Why do they even go so far as to use a Microsoftesque Y2.1K-noncompliant date in the product name?
Jim Henley writes about a heck of a lot of things, including responding to a dismissal of superheroes as “inherently uninteresting”, in which he makes a great point :
Fantasy, at least, works (usually) by externalizing what are in our world internal conflicts, or by personifying abstract principles: making characters of ideas. Science fiction can do this too, but needn’t. While science fiction and fantasy are shelved together in bookstores, the imperatives, opportunities and pleasures of the two genres overlap only - they are not everywhere the same. […] By the logic of science fiction, you must deal with the question of how the existence of superpowered people would affect the world. “Realistically,” you can’t escape dealing with these topics. Science fiction demands that the world of the story be “plausible,” or at least as recognizably implausible as our own. But that’s not what interests me about superheroes right now.
I figure that there are two realistic outcomes to significant superpowers. Either those with them take over, e.g. Squadron Supreme, or those with them are crushed or co-opted by the powers that be, e.g. Watchmen, Marvel’s “New Universe.”
Governments letting superheroes do their thing without interference is right out. (let alone giving them privileges without subordinating them, a status the JLA and Avengers have enjoyed.) As is the world being substantially unchanged by decades of time travel, teleportation, artifical intelligence, alien invasion, undeniable evidence of magic and demons, etc., a conceit implicitly upheld by any of the long-running superhero milieus.
There’s been a strong recent trend toward a pseudo-realism. The DC Universe has a shadowy U.S. government Department of Extranormal Operations that makes dossiers on superheroes and devises countermeasures against them. The Marvel Ultimate Universe has been striving for a more science fictional tone. Radiation is being deleted from origin stories. SHIELD oversees a lot of superhero activity. In the Wildstorm Universe, espionage is tightly linked to superpowers, and the U.N. had a black ops superteam (I think they don’t anymore; my reading of the literature is far from thorough.)
Some good stories have stemmed from these. But what I find problematic is that half-measures toward realism only emphasize all the inherently ridiculous conventions of the genre. Villains still don’t kill heroes when they have the chance. Heroes with nothing going for them but archery skills survive hundreds of battles against villains with serious power. Villains wear outrageous costumes and announce themselves and engage in penny-ante schemes when their powers could easily net them fortunes legitimately or through simpler illegitimate strategies. Even pathetically maintained secret identities are rarely outed. Not to mention that physical laws as fundamental as conservation of energy and Newton’s laws of motion are routinely violated.
Recent events in the DC Universe include a couple of cities being nuked, the entire human race gaining superpowers temporarily, and an interplanetary war. In the Wildstorm Universe, substantial portions of the population and infrastructure of major cities (including London and LA, if I recall correctly) were eliminated, and the entire human race evacuated the planet into alternate dimensions. In the Marvel Universe, super-Vikings took Manhattan, slaughtering at least tens of thousands, leaving hills of severed heads and city blocks of heads on pikes.
And life goes on. The structure of society and how non-superpowered folk live their lives is unchanged. People aren’t actively worried about being killed by superheroes’ and villains’ activities (save maybe for the occasional supporting character who’s played Hostage Boy or Hostage Girl once too often.) There is no consistent concerted effort to control superheroes (but lame, inconsistent attempts are a recurring plot coming up every few years, and in the Marvel Universe anti-mutant sentiment is perennial.) Geopolitics, religion, the technology of the non-superpowered, they’re all more or less what they are in our world.
The more realism they strive for, the more they approach one of the two outcomes of superhero realism I cited above. The Marvel Ultimate Universe is approaching the co-opted superheroes attractor. In a current story in the Wildstorm universe, a superteam, the Authority, is taking over the world.
It gets repetitive.
The thesis that “there’s nothing more to be said about superheroes” has been bandied about a lot. And I wonder whether it might be true that deconstructing superheroes, or making them realistic has been mined out for now, and that that field needs to lie fallow (to mix my metaphor.)
Goedel’s Theorem says that no non-trivial formal system can be both complete and consistent (paraphrasing, but without too much violence.) Completeness or consistency: pick one.
The recent triend I’ve been commenting on has stressed consistency. But for decades, superhero comics displayed much more interest in completeness.
Alan Moore’s American’s Best Comics line embraces the wonderful tropes of superhero comics. A talking gorilla, a duplicate Earth, magical realms, a precocious boy mad scientist who routinely violates any number of laws of nature, a city where everyone has superpowers… all of them nominally coexisting in the same world. The world of each comic seems to function by different rules. It’s inconsistent as hell. And it’s been some of my favorite work of recent years — some of the few superhero titles that I still buy by the issue instead of waiting for the collection (and then not getting around to getting it.)
Obviously I’m not advocating abandoning all realism. For the stories to engage me, I still need to be able to sympathize with the characters and their motivations, to suspend disbelief.
But what I’d really like to see is more playfulness.
The ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right solely on its quality. His procedure was simple: on the final day of class he would bring in his bathroom scales and weigh the work of the quantity group: fifty pound of pots rated an A, forty pounds a B, and so on. Those being graded on quality, however, needed to produce only one pot — albeit a perfect one — to get an A. Well, came grading time and a curious fact emerged: the works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity. It seems that while the quantity group was busily churning out piles of work — and learning from their mistakes — the quality group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay.