In Johnny Gilbert’s voice: "This… is…. Gérard Depardieu!"
What The Voices In My Head Are Saying Right Now
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The Constitution Is Unenforceable
Read this piece at Ace of Spades HQ about how nobody can make Obama prove he’s an American citizen and thus eligible for the presidency and about how no one seems to care that Hillary Clinton is textually barred from serving as Secretary of State (because she, as a legislator, voted to increase pay for that position).
Once the incoming administration has finished rendering those obscure bits of the Constitution obsolete, wait until they get into the choice bits. If we’re going to start the pool, I think they’ll nullify portions of the first amendment first, because if they reinstate the Fairness Doctrine or otherwise impede freedom of the press, religion, and assembly, they won’t trigger an uprising.
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The Undead Rise Again II
Consider it a sequel of sorts to this post, but KSDK reports, with a basic understanding of the possessive form of it:
Metro could eliminate 28 of it’s 60 existing MetroBus routes. The transit company has listed 22 routes on it’s website that may be eliminated next spring.
The second phase of likely cuts, including all service outside Interstate 270, will take place in the summer of 2010.
What does that really mean?
We’ll have to vote down the tax increase that we already voted down in November on the Spring ballot and maybe one more time before Metro does whatever it deems necessary, noting that cutting highly paid consultants or senior admin staff won’t be necessary.
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Jingle of the Day
Everyone sing:
“Midwest Hemorrhoid Treatment Center. Don’t suffer in silence.”
Put it into your head-based jingle rotation along with Frederic Roofing for more fun.
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The Collision of English Students and The Workplace
Instapundit links to a piece from a book about higher education or something, and the author relates a story about a faculty member teaching a graduate level course on technical writing wherein the faculty member gets in trouble for having a potty mouth:
“I will no longer tolerate,” the chair writes in his letter to my friend, “what can only be described as your insensitive, vulgar, and obscene language in the classroom.”
The colleague’s intent in a graduate-level, academic tech writing class (i.e., not a vocational training workshop) is not just to teach students how to type memos, but rather to challenge students to consider how they know what they know as tech writers. This can be achieved while they expand their knowledge of their field, which exists right in the oily hinge, right in the fishy craw of the intersection of higher education and the corporation. Given the mess such a collision must be, he and I agree, some form of institutional critique is vital, and this sort of three-dimensional, reflexive analysis can, over time, only make students better tech writers. To know your context is to know your work.
Like many of his grad students, the complainant is his age, and already works as a tech writer. For much more than his salary.
Oh, give me a break. The “ends” of which academic types, particularly in soft sciences, of technical writing is to deliver correct and useful information to people who need it. Take it from a technical writer. Any time spent on institutional critique and three-dimensional, reflexive analysis is a waste of time unless you want to become a professor of technical writing somewhere since the whole expertise on Dickens’ view of male/female relationships isn’t working out.
You want to teach a technical writer something, teach him or her how to suss out information from the misanthropes on the development team, how to actually freaking open the software or somewhat understand the thing they’re writing about, and how to make a good business case that documentation isn’t a waste of time and saves money on help desk calls and whatnot. But teaching them how to approach their jobs as though they’re academics ain’t it.
Nor is teaching them that swearing is professional in any way shape or form. The tech industry already skews to younger people who have already developed the habit of f-bombing everything in sight to show their intensity and passion instead of, I don’t know, showing quiet competence. I hate to see that taught in the universities as good institutional technique.
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The Undead Rise Again
A good tax proposal doesn’t stay defeated for long:
The tax would finance an $80 million system which would allow members of police, fire and other emergency service agencies to talk to each other. The tax would raise about $15 million a year, Tim Fischesser, executive director of the St. Louis County Municipal League, estimated today. Currently, the county has a patchwork of radio systems using different frequencies. Often personnel from different agencies at an emergency site cannot talk to each other by radio.
On Nov. 4, voters defeated a 1.85-cent county use tax that included money for the radio system. The communications commission made its request for the 0.1-cent sales tax on Nov. 21. The county’s Blue Ribbon Commission on facilities needs discussed it this morning.
The shamble of bureaucracies is only slowed by the will of the people.
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Things That Make Me Wish I Were Half As Crackpot As I Sound
Commentary in the Washington Times entitled “Nostradamus Redux“:
Mr. Celente’s accurate forecasts include the 1987 stock market crash, the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the 1997 Asian currency crash, the 2007 subprime mortgage scandal that he said would soon engulf the world at a time when Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke, a macroeconomist and expert on the Great Depression, told us, “the worst is behind us.” In November 2007, Mr. Celente also told UPI a massive devaluation of the dollar was coming and that some Wall Street giants were headed for total collapse. He called it “The Panic of 2008.”
“Worse than the Great Depression,” Mr. Celente opined. Beginning with a sharp drop in standards of living, and continuing with an angry urban underclass that threatens a social order that allowed the mega-rich to continue living behind gated communities with summer escapades to luxurious homes on the French and Italian Rivieras or to bigger and better and more expensive boats from year to year.
This time, Mr. Celente’s Trends Research Institute, which the Los Angeles Times described as the Standard & Poor’s of pop culture, can see a tax rebellion in America by 2012, food riots, squatter rebellions, job marches and a culture that puts a higher premium on food on the table than gifts under the Christmas tree.
I really ought to stop talking about loading up on guns and liquor and start doing it.
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Book Report: Lara Croft Tomb Raider: The Cradle of Life by Dave Stern (2003)
This is a novelization of a sequel to a movie based on a video game. The only way it could be more geeky were if there was a comic book in its lineage somewhere (yes, I know the game series has a comic book based on it, but that’s not directly in this book’s pedigree, so it doesn’t count).
The book follows the movie, wherein Lara Croft seeks vengeance on the murderers of a couple of childhood friends and to prevent a scientist who’s into selling bio-weapons from acquiring Pandora’s Box and all that it holds. It’s a pretty quick bit of reading and really did make me want to watch the film, its predecessor, and a raft of other titles from King Solomon’s Mines/Allan Quatermain and the Lost City of Gold, Romancing the Stone/Jewel of the Nile, Firewalker, and the host of other Indiana Jones knockoffs.
Unfortunately, though, the book does do some in-filling of character development, and it might overdevelop a character and make him to sympathetic for his ultimate fate. Much of that doesn’t serve the actual story well as it makes the end a bit shocking.
But a nice bit of filler between the heady novels in my queue.
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The President of the Government of Grown-Ups in Exile
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Another Country and Western No-No
Attention country and western singers:
I understand the lure of the Christmas album, and that backlist sales for such can go on for years and years, providing you with a steady, albeit low, income even once your waning popularity relegates you to performing at state fairs and store openings.
However, in your zeal to cash in on the reason for the season, note that steel guitars do not belong in Christmas songs.
I am talking to you, Alan Jackson and Trace Adkins.
Thank you, that is all.
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Morning Read
Read this first: Of Bibliophilia and Biblioclasm:
In 1936, George Orwell published a little essay entitled Bookshop Memories. In it, he recalled his time as an assistant in a second-hand bookshop, a time that was happy only when viewed through the soft-focus lens of nostalgia. Irony might be defined as disgust recalled in tranquillity, and Orwell’s essay is nothing if not full of irony. He was glad to have had the experience, no doubt, but more glad that it was over.
Not much has changed in the three quarters of a century that have elapsed since Orwell’s experience as a bookseller. Second-hand bookshops the world over still tend to be inadequately heated places, Orwell says because the owners fear condensation in the windows, but also because profits are small and heating bills would be large. There is a peculiar chill, quite unlike any other, to be experienced between the stacks of second-hand bookshops.
I love to browse because navigating Web sites and menus does lose the tactile pleasure of the experience, which also explains why iTunes has not replaced a collection of records, CDs, and audiocassettes. When everything you own is just another node in your content tree, is it really the same as really having it?
(Link seen on Neo-Neocon.)
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Book Report: The Lonely Silver Rain by John D. MacDonald (1985)
This book, the last in the Travis McGee series, represents the most existentially maudlin entry in the series. Not that there’s anything wrong with that; I rather like the wistful tone taken in some of the books, but this one hammers it pretty hard.
It’s a pretty pedestrian plot as far as McGee novels go. Hired by a rich man to find his stolen yacht, McGee finds it with the bodies of two American teenagers and a daughter of a Peruvian diplomat/drug trafficker aboard. Suddenly, people connected with the case begin dying, and McGee has to survive long enough to figure out if it’s to cover up for the crime or as revenge for the crime that he’s being targeted.
I’ve read this book before, and as I purchased this latest copy of it, I misremembered which one this was. I thought it was the one where his wife died, but that’s earlier in the set and probably not as melancholy.
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Race to the Bottom
You put money on the Iran/Israeli conflict as the next nuclear wars? Pakistan/India’s odds are increasing even as we speak.
MUMBAI DAY 3
Mumbai Attacks Highlight the Cancer That Is Pakistan
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Selexyz Means Sexy Library in Dutch
Roberta drew my attention to the Selexyz Dominicanen, a book store built into an old Dominican church.
It’s giving me ideas for the library in my castle, when I build it.
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I Must Have Heard It Wrong
Happy Thanksgiving, you say?
Well, it’s just as well since the T-72s I ordered from Omen Wannabi, a Somalian e-mail contact, haven’t come yet.
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Book Report: The Wall by Jean-Paul Sartre (1974)
This book collects a handful of Sartre’s stories, including “The Wall”, “The Room”, “Erostratus”, “Intimacy”, and “The Childhood of the Leader”. If you have read a Sartre short story, you have read “The Wall”. It’s the best of this anthology, and in an odd turn of events, the whole thing starts well and progressively gets worse. “The Wall” is a good story, but “The Childhood of the Leader” is a sixty page exercise in Sartrean pontification and excess.
Let’s face it; Sartre is not a writer whose philosophy dribbles out of his writing. His writing exists to prop up his philosophy, kind of like Ayn Rand’s fiction really lays out Objectivism. Ayn Rand had better plots, though. Sartre’s plots are very literary, and the tone of each story is self-consciously literary. Maybe that’s a factor of the translation undertaken by a student or something.
As such, Sartre deals with revolutionaries sentenced to death; a man gone mad and his wife; a man who just decides to kill someone; a wife who married an impotent man but cheats on him; and a guy who grows into an anti-Semitic leader. So these aren’t people I can necessarily relate to, which makes reading a chore. However, in some literary and high-brow fiction threads, that lack of identification and even repugnance throws me out of my bourgeous sentimentality or something. It also make reading Sartre for pure enjoyment impossible.
As I said, the books first two stories are the best. “The Wall”, about condemned insurgents spending their last night together in their cell and facing the Wall tomorrow, is oddly enough the most approachable. The narrator is forced to dwell on dying and dying well in a limited amount of time. It’s almost Hemingwayesque, but with a distinctly Existential twist at the end. “The Room”, on the other hand, is sort of two parts: It starts with the mother of the wife, confined to her room, as she gets a visit from her husband, a very practical man who’s off to go to tell his daughter what he thinks of her tending to her psychotic husband. He then goes and tells her. In the second part, the woman deals with the aftermath of her father’s visit and how she feels about the husband whom she loved. She wonders what his insanity is really like, experientially, and wonders if she’s going a bit mad herself. It’s a very complex tale, where one wonders about whether the father telling her to send her husband off to an institution is completely consistent, since he himself tends to the woman’s mother.
After that, it’s rather basic Existentialist hokum wrapped in stories about unsympathetic people. Worst of the lot, “The Childhood of the Leader” relies on the main character becoming the narrator of Nausea at three years of age, questioning his existence and the existence of things outside himself, before growing up, having an abortive homosexual relationship, and then turning anti-semitic for really no reason other than to wrap up the story.
Interesting if you’re a student of philosophy, but you can get more enjoyable life lessons out of classic English literature or hard-boiled detective novels.
I think I need to read some Camus to rinse this out of my head.
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That’s a Neat Trick
I just got a credit card statement in the mail today for my Commerce Bank Small Business Visa. I’m turning around and paying it right away because I missed the last deadline by a day because I’d been in the practice of letting a couple of bills collect before I sat down and wrote a bunch of checks.
So I sit down and look it over. The statement date is November 18. Today is November 26. It took Commerce Bank eight days to get this to me, which gives me a little more than, what, two weeks to turn it around without exorbitant penalties.
I called and told them it was poor form, and the customer service representative sat in silence while I said, procedurally, this was a dirty trick, and I was displeased with the way they conducted themselves. I’m not the best guy at venting my spleen on the phone, and certainly I had no end game (I want a free night at the hotel, I want a charge removed, et cetera), but even calling them to complain ultimately made me feel smaller than if I hadn’t called because I don’t expect the policy to ever change because we are a nation of small fries (and now, Goverment Sponsored Entities formerly known as Big Businesses).
But I am empowered, through this blog, to tell you, gentle reader who is searching for photos of Natalie J. Rabb or Commerce employee tracking the business’s online response. So there you go.
At this point, I sometimes want to throw up my hands and say, Big Government, Big Business, what’s the difference? It’s all about ossified bureaucracies and procedures designed to glean every possible drop from you for their own purposes. I guess the difference is choice, which means Big Business needs to trick you, whereas government just has to tell you, so it’s quite a big difference indeed.
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MfBJN: Your Source For Masculinity
Gender Analyzer is 100% sure this site is written by a man.
That’s higher than the industry average.
Meanwhile, my other blog with the word Hate right in its title, only scores 89%.
Because of its inherent sensitivity.
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Ill Harbinger
Has anyone else noticed that the sun has begun setting earlier since the country elected Obama as President?
What does it mean?
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America, F—- Yeah!
Things your little army cannot afford to equip its soldiers with? We give them to our children:
On the other hand, watch for bands of swarthy looking men in cars with Michigan plates driving from Target to Target, buying each out of this item using cash.
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