MemeMachineGo!

If the Democrats nominate Hillary Clinton for president, the Republicans will nominate Condoleezza Rice for veep. They get to play the more-progressive-than-thou card while resting safely assured that any votes they lost to the wing-nut bigot crowd wouldn’t end up going to Clinton.

An unpopular suggestion: driving is too cheap.

If you underprice something relative to its true cost, people will use too much of it. […] It’s not just that we choose to drive a lot. We make residential and other lifestyle decisions based on an artificially low cost of driving. When someone buys a big-ass house 62 miles from work and nowhere near public transit, they just assume that they can commute every day on a free or cheap road at 8:30 a.m. The reality is that for society at large, that 124-mile round trip commute is anything but free or cheap. […]

Is raising the cost of driving popular? Not so much. I’ve been called a communist for suggesting that Americans should have to pay more to get in their cars. This is a curious epithet given that the communists had exactly the opposite problem: They never let the price system work. When prices were not allowed to rise, the result was long queues for items that had been underpriced. Sounds a lot like I-90 going into Chicago on a Tuesday morning, doesn’t it?

(Thanks, Jimcat!)

The National Cemetery Administration of the Veterans Affairs Department allows military graves in its cemeteries to be marked with a cross, a star of David, the angel Moroni blowing a horn, a crescent and star, a tepee, and many other emblems.

But though the military officially recognizes Wicca as a religion, if you’re a Wiccan who wants one, you’re shit out of luck getting a pentagram on your tombstone.

Even loathsome atheists qualify for an emblem — one suspiciously familiar to browsers of library science fiction collections.

=v= I figured it was safe to move to NYC because Donald Trump had been out of the news for a while. Then that stupid teevee show started up and ruined everything. Well, not quite everything, because as long as he's on teevee (and in the tabloids), he seems not to be sullying the City's skyline with his grotesque erections anymore. I guess that's A Good Thing.

Speaking of which, this particular black hole of tastelessness has sucked in none other than Martha Stewart. Once an exponent of good taste, she's got a show of her own in the same franchise! (Yes, I'm out of the loop when it comes to teevee, but I'm now aware that the season and this show started weeks ago and this is old news.)

It's all too much for my aesthetic compass. I dunno if I can take the hairpiece and others' ugly erections anymore. Maybe it's time to move back to San Francisco.

Or maybe not.

The Eye of Argon is a famously bad fantasy story.

The story subsequently came into use as part of a common SF convention party game, as described by SF critic Dave Langford: “The challenge of death, at sf conventions, is to read The Eye of Argon aloud, straight-faced, without choking and falling over.” […] Langford described [the author] as “a malaprop genius, a McGonagall of prose with an eerie gift for choosing the wrong word and then misapplying it.”

It had to happen. (It was so inevitable, in fact, that it happened almost a decade ago.) MST3King The Eye of Argon:

“Prepare to embrace your creators in the stygian haunts of hell, barbarian”, gasped the first soldier.

Tom: Awfully long gasp… he must have the lung capacity of a whale!

“Only after you have kissed the fleeting stead of death, wretch!” returned Grignr.

Mike: You know, his serve could use some work, and his backhand’s downright lousy, but no one returns like Grignr.

Tom: “Grignr”?

There was some fuss earlier in the month about how Dell was offering an open source PC. Woo hoo! Great for Linux users! Go team!

Well, except it doesn’t come with Linux. It ships with no OS installed, but a Free-DOS (an MS-DOS clone) installation CD, doomed to be ignored. (Free-DOS is cool for what it is, but no one wants to dedicate a modern machine to running DOS.) And they offer absolutely no support for any user-installed OS, so they’ve just saved themselves all kind of support costs vs. shipping with Windows.

So, what with no license fees for an OS, and no support for one, they must be much cheaper than Dell’s Windows-laden alternatives, right?

Wrong. I tried it myself. A Dell 5150n with a 3 Ghz Pentium 4, 512M of memory, an 80G hard drive, and no OS costs $689. A Dell E510, which looks to use the same case, modified for the same specs (more memory, no monitor) but shipping with Windows XP Media Center Edition costs $569.

Dell wants to charge Linux users a $120 premium to install Linux on a blank drive over installing it on one that Bill had gotten to first.

But, c’mon — wouldn’t it be worth it? (search on the page for “Solidarity”) (Answer to my rhetorical question: no, but I love that joke and felt like an excuse to link to it.)

And Dell’s been selling OS-less computers suitable for a Linux installation for years — I’m writing this entry on a 2-year-old Dell Poweredge 400SC that shipped without an OS and is now running Ubuntu Linux.But it was labelled a “server” instead of a “desktop”. They were so keen to establish its not-a-desktop props as not to mention its AGP slot in its specs (a high-speed slot for video cards for non-techies out there — desirable for many desktop applications, superfluous for servers,) and to put it in a case that blocks the front (perfectly functional) USB ports.

So this is wholly an exercise in branding and marketing. And damned if I know what it’s supposed to accomplish.

Yes, I’ve been neglecting my blog. But I cleaned out the sump well, the sump pump filter, and the gutters — we’re well on the way to having the house ready for winter.

I turned 38 on Friday..

In order to save marriage, we had to destroy it.

“I do” could become “by golly, we didn’t” for more than 4 million married couples in Texas if voters approve a clumsily worded proposed constitutional amendment, opponents said Monday. […]

The first sentence of an intended ban on same-sex marriage, drafted by state lawmakers last spring, defines marriage as between a man and a woman. The second sentence states: “This state or a political subdivision of this state may not create or recognize any legal status identical or similar to marriage.”

No milestones to be seen here, please move along.

The chief spokesman for the American-led multinational force has called on the media not to consider the 2,000 number as some kind of milestone. U.S. Army Lt. Col. Steve Boylan, director of the force’s combined press center, wrote in an e-mail to reporters, “I ask that when you report on the events, take a moment to think about the effects on the families and those serving in Iraq. The 2,000 service members killed in Iraq supporting Operation Iraqi Freedom is not a milestone. It is an artificial mark on the wall set by individuals or groups with specific agendas and ulterior motives.”

And you know you can trust him, of course, because he is without specific agendas or ulterior motives.

I’d seen and ignored hundreds of times the Electronic References link on the Berkeley Public Library website. Somewhere along the way, I got the impression that it meant the Berkeley Information Network, a listing of local organizations.

My mistake. Turns out just my name and library card gets me on-line access to the Encyclopedia Britannica, the ability to search hundreds of newspapers (and read the archives of pay-only sites like the LA Times and NY Times), O’Reilly’s Safari on-line library of technical books, Books in Print, and more data than I can shake a stick at. (And so can any resident of California.) If you weren’t clued into all of this, it might be worth checking out what your library can do for you.

Meanwhile, as staff at a large educational institution, I can get to just about everything else there is, from Lexis-Nexis to OED, even outside of work (and, no, I won’t share.)

I’m a happy geek.

I am a sometimes participant on a Perl website, PerlMonks. Its infrastructure includes a wonderfully geeky experience point (XP) system (familiar to any role-playing geek), in which other people’s voting on your posts gain (or lose) you XP (there are a couple of other ways to gain XP, as well, but the big points are from well-received postings.) There are titles associated with different levels of XP, and privileges to be gained along with them, like having more votes.

I’d been slowly crawling my way up to sainthood… I was a bishop, within a couple-hundred XP of being a pontiff. But they changed the rules! Suddenly, I find myself a mere chaplain, and fifteen levels removed from sainthood.

Oh, well. Back to the old monastery.

In the first WildCards story, “30 Minutes Over Broadway”, by Howard Waldrop, the world changed forever on September 15, 1946. In its introduction in Waldrop’s collection Night of the Cooters, he relates:

About a month later, the phone rings.

“Yo!”

“Roger Zelazny.” [Another WildCards writer.]

“En que puedo servile?”

“What day was September 15, 1946?”

“Tuesday.”

“Sure?”

“Certainement!”

“Okay.” Click bzzzzzz.

I was certain September 15, 1946 was Tuesday, because that was my birthdate. I like the idea that the world changed forever the day I was born.I was always told I’d been born on a Tuesday. Roger needed to know this because his story takes place just as mine is ending, and he wanted to make sure it was a weekday, because his kid-character Croyd is walking home from school, and Tuesday is perfect for that. (After the book came out, someone came up to Roger at a convention and told him for real and true September 15, 1946 was a Sunday and showed him a calendar. Roger said a naughty word, took his ever-present pipe from his mouth, and threw it down, breaking it. I owe Roger a pipe.)

All of this could have been avoided had one of them known the ominously named Doomsday Algorithm for calculating days of the week in your head.

Stanley Milgram meets The Jerky Boys. The results aren’t pretty.

She was a high school senior who had just turned 18 — a churchgoing former Girl Scout who hadn’t received a single admonition in her four months working at the McDonald’s in Mount Washington. But when a man who called himself “Officer Scott” called the store on April 9, 2004, and said an employee had been accused of stealing a purse, Louise Ogborn became the suspect. […]

[Assistant Manager] Summers, 51, conceded later that she had never known Ogborn to do a thing dishonest. But she nonetheless led Ogborn to the restaurant’s small office, locked the door, and — following the caller’s instructions — ordered her to remove one item of clothing at a time, until she was naked. […] For Ogborn, hours of degradation and abuse were just beginning.

(Via Cogito Ergo Sumana)

Garry Trudeau addresses the American Association of Sunday and Features Editors and explains how the Army has been actively aiding his research into soldiers’ lives.

But then, as I prepared to travel to Riyahd, I hit another snag – one of my own making. I had just finished writing a week of strips about how rich young Saudi men were sitting out the war that American troops were preparing to fight on their behalf. So naturally when my application for a visa arrived at the Saudi consulate, it was immediately flagged for special treatment. Hundreds of reporters had been routinely granted permission to enter the country, but with my visa, it was explained, there were problems.

Two months of non-processing went by, and then out of the blue, I received a call from Col. Bill Nash, the commander of a tank brigade billeted just outside Kuwait City. He told me that he’d read I was having problems getting in-country, but if I’d just jump on a plane to Riyahd, he’d take it from there.

Two days later, I arrived at Riyahd at one in the morning with no visa. This was something of a calculated risk – the lack of a visa was almost sure to get me stuck in a holding tank and then put on the next flight home. I waited in the customs line and just as I was about to face the inspector, two young American officers suddenly appeared at either elbow, lifted me up, whisked me through a side door into the waiting hands of an Army escort. Before long I found myself in a Blackhawk, on my way to a forward operating base in Kuwait. I had just entered and left a sovereign nation without any trace of evidence I had ever been there.

See also the strips that weren’t: Harriet Miers prepping for her confirmation hearing.

And it gave me a thrill to see that Alex is going for a campus tour of dear ol’ RPI (where Trudeau was granted an honorary Doctorate in Arts and Humane Letters.)

(First link via Amygdala, where Gary’s back to his typically prolific pace)