Stay Tuned

I am healing from a penguin-inflicted injury. Yes, I got close enough to a penguin that I could be injured, and in keeping with someone who sprained a foot knitting, I managed to sustain some beaking damage. Full story in a couple of days.

Something Else for the Health Care Debate

I don't see a lot of advertising, so I hope you will overlook that my astonishment is about seven months late. I was 15 seconds into a spot that I assumed was a new snake oil mascara when I heard "Latisse is the first and only FDA-approved treatment for inadequate or not enough lashes."

WTF? "Inadequate or not enough lashes?" Just because you name something "Eyelash hypotrichosis," that doesn't make it a medical condition (with all due respect for the--I'm guessing twelve--people in this country suffering from debilitating eyelash hypotrichosis). Turns out that Latisse was originally a glaucoma drug. Some enterprising person in R&D noticed that people taking the glaucoma eyedrops had lashes to die for. Thus, they figured out a way to deliver the drug directly to the lash folicles and went through the entire FDA approval system (which pharmaceutical companies happily remind us is fraking expensive when we ask why miracle eyelash-growing drugs cost $120 a month) so they could directly market the same drug, in lower concentrations with the promise of looking like Brooke Shields. I kid you not, Brooke Shields is the posterperson for a drug now.

There are a whole lot of things wrong with health care in America, and this may be an odd place for me to draw the outrage line. Seriously though, we rank 30th--dead last among developed nations--in the percentage of infants who make it to their first birthday. People are dying of actual diseases, and companies are putting their resources into curing "inadequate or not enough eyelashes." I really don't care that 90% of the drug's development was for glaucoma, which is, unlike inadequate eyelashes, something that harms people. The company still devoted resources to testing and getting approval of the drug as an eyelash growth serum.

Incidentally, the logo for the company that makes/markets Latisse, Allergan, looks an awful lot like the logo for Veridian Dynamics. That alone ought to tell you something (other than that, if you actually had to click the link for Veridian Dynamics, you really need to start watching Better off Ted).

Wishlist

When I die, please don't make my obituary as sappy as this one for the Taco Bell Chihuahua.

We Chose to Go to the Moon

Forty years ago today, the first human beings set foot on an extraterrestrial body. I, of course, don't remember it. We came, we saw, and we left 6 years before I was born. Think about that for a moment. People are constitutionally eligible to be President of the United States who have never lived in a time when humans have stood on another world.

We've had low-Earth orbit most of my life. NASA was testing Enterprise before I was born, and by the time I was 3, they had regular shuttle launches going. It wasn't watching humans walk on the moon, but I was excited nonetheless. When my grandparents got a VCR, they recorded all the shuttle launches for me to watch. There was something about watching the plume of fire and smoke push people into space that captivated my imagination. People went into space. Challenger put a stop to the televised launches.

People argue that the space program diverts funds that could be used here on Earth. I don't know the exact numbers, but I don't think there was less poverty, hunger and overall human misery to be ameliorated in 1962 than there is now. By 1969, there were wars on both nations (North Vietnam) and common nouns (poverty), domestic unrest and any number of other things that needed American attention and funds like they do now. Still, we chose to go to the Moon.

In an episode of Star Trek: Voyager, Seven of Nine makes a toast to an unborn baby, "May all her dreams come true except for one, so she might always have something to strive for." In 1962, putting a man on the moon must have seemed like a pipe dream. Forty years after the fact, our ambitious national goal might have been our undoing. Michael Griffin has an excellent op-ed explaining how that can be. We put a man on the moon and brought him safely home. Having met the ambitious goal, we had nothing left to strive for. Forty years hence, we've lost the will to reach for the stars.

I Do Not Think that Book Means What You Think It Means

So, the internet is abuzz with outrage over Amazon rectifying a problem with some sales of unauthorized digital editions. To get the obvious out of the way, Amazon handled the situation poorly. First off, a distributor of digital books on the level of Amazon should have some kind of safeguard in place to prevent this sort of thing--and by that I mean someone posting a digital book for sale that they don't have distribution rights to sell in digital format. Second off, removing the book from people's Kindles without warning was probably not a good plan. Third, Amazon should have been way more proactive with the message that, yes, they disabled the content, but they refunded the purchase price and legitimate digital editions of the books in question are available.

Most of the buzz focuses on the (apparent) irony that one of the books in question was 1984 by George Orwell. I say apparent because, as I will get to in a moment, the outrage is an example of the Alanis Morissette definition of ironic. The news headlines are variations on the them of "Amazon puts Orwell down the Memory Hole." Blogosphere comments are typically running with the theme of "Amazon is doubleplusungood and broke into my house to steal my stuff and this is why I'll never buy a Kindle." I'm still trying to figure out how Amazon steals your "stuff" if you don't own the product with which you can read the stuff they "stole" with a complete refund, but this is the internet. Leave your logic at the router.

People--and I include both headline writers and the anonymous internet commenters in that category, although the quality of some of the comments leads me to think that the infinite number of monkeys at an infinite number of keyboards may have learned hit "submit"--seem to think they're clever sprinkling Orwell references in their writing. They're not. This whole situation has reinforced my conviction that roughly 95% of people who use the word "Orwellian" have never actually read any of the works of Orwell. They heard somewhere that 1984 is about the government trying to control what the population thinks, and that, in the book, the government rewrites English so that words mean the opposite. They've heard Doubleplusungood, thoughtcrime, Big Brother and War is Peace, and they run with that. When I become head of the Party, no one gets to reference Orwell without proving they have, in fact, read the book. If you don't get that, go read 1984 and come back when you've finished. It's only 250-odd pages long.

You see, 1984 doesn't mean what people make it out to mean. Yes, the government revises the past and is rewriting English to avoid the possibility of dissent once the words for it no longer exist (gotta love the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis). However, at the core of it, the government control of people's thought works only because people believe what Big Brother tells them, unquestioningly.

This, not the deletion of bootleg copies of 1984, is the real irony of Amazon's situation. The internet is up in arms because they read that Amazon broke into people's Kindles and took away the books they bought legally. They don't need to go look for the facts of what really happened, which, unlike in 1984 have not been systematically deleted. These people have read what they read, and they're ready for the Two-Minute Hate against Amazon for it. Like the denziens of Oceania, blogophiles don't need to think for themselves. Someone has told them what happened, so that must be true.

1984 is hardly alone bearing the burden of popular misunderstanding as to its content. Somewhere in middle school or high school, kids get assigned to read Fahrenheit 451, and teachers drill in an anti-censorship message. I have it on good authority, specifically, straight from the mouth of Ray Bradbury at a Comic Con panel I attended, that Fahrenheit 451 was motivated by his distaste for television. Bradbury pointed out that the one vital thing that people miss when reading that book, and teaching it, is that people didn't start burning books until after they stopped reading them. Voluntarily. Once you're finished with 1984, go back and reread Fahrenheit 451. You'll notice that the author has a point.

As Emp. Peng. is detailing over on Intercontinental Ballistic Discourse, he is in the process of renovating our library. We're segueing from a temple of pop culture to the library of an autodidact. He has systematically made a list of the books that embody the high points of human knowledge, and is in the process of acquiring them. The next part of the plan is to actually read them. He's far ahead of me, having started in on the great ancient and modern philosophers. I'm thinking I'll start with the works that get referenced in pop culture. All too often, the books do not mean what people think they mean.

Do They Have Gardenholics Anonymous?

I think I may have a problem (you can stop laughing now) (no, really). It's probably perfectly normal to go to the garden center for some cilantro seeds, see the clearance rack and impulsively pick up a 4-pack of Super Chili Hot Pepper seedlings just because they're 88 cents for a 4-pack and the name is intriguing. I mean, that's what clearance racks are for, right? Buying stuff you don't really need because you already have 2 dozen hot pepper plants at home. It's a whole other breed of crazy to come home, look around the yard for somewhere to plant the 4 cute little seedlings, then spy the edge of the front walk and think, "Y'know, that would be the perfect place for these if I had eight more to fill out the bed."

I'm at the breed of crazy where I do all that, then turn around and actually drive back out to the nursery to get a dozen Super Chili Hot Peppers to convert a former hosta bed into a hot pepper hedge.

So, let this be a warning to anyone visiting the Rookery. I don't know what will be on the menu, but it will be spicy.

Unintentionally Funny

I present a transcript of an actual conversation that passed in the Rookery. We have preliminary harvest going on and I am blanching veggies for the freezer daily. The container of lettuce outside appreciates the daily dose of blanching water, so I leave the pan on the stove to cool.

Emp. Peng: Why are you boiling urine?
Me: That's not urine, that's pea water. (pause while I listen to what just came out of my mouth). That came out wrong.
Emp. Peng.: I think that came out just right.
Me: It's water from blanching peas.

Penguins From Spaaaaaace

You know you need to put a flightless bird on latrine duty when the guano stain is visible from space.

Thoughts on Tax Day

The sun has set on another April 15, and here in the eastern time zone, folks have 2 hours and 12 minutes to get their returns to the post office.

Hating taxes seems like the American birthright. The colonies severed the bonds of the mother country in part because of unfair taxation policy that treated the colonies like an 18th century ATM. Apparently, in the intervening years, we have lost the distinction between fair and unfair taxes. The Revolutionaries' problem with things like the Stamp Act wasn't that it was a tax. It was that it was a tax levied by by the British Parliament. Colonists questioned Parliament's authority to levy taxes on colonists without consulting with the colonial governments who handled administrative issues in the colonies. It wasn't even a matter of a lack of Parliamentary representation. Parliamentary representatives at the time represented the good of the British Empire as a whole, including the colonies. In a way, everyone was represented, and no one was. Procedures existed for petitioning Parliament for colonists to sit in Parliament, but the logistics of actually having a colonial delegation were nightmarish, and besides, the colonies never asked.

We make the mistake of teaching this level of nuance in high school, at an age where students retain very little information about anything that does not have a cute butt. As a side note, this is why we need to teach American History using less of Gilbert Stuart's portrait and more of Horace Greenough's 1841 statue showing George Washington half naked and ripped. Since taxation policy isn't sexy no matter how you slice it, opposition to unfair taxes became opposition to any taxes. The annual national grumbling on April 15 doesn't help matters. Kids grow up hearing mom and dad moan about taxes in the middle of April, and the dislike of taxation transmits to another generation.

People hate taxes. You know what people don't hate? The stuff taxes gets them. They like Social Security and Pell Grants. They like food and drugs that don't kill them. They like roads (note to the department of transportation: they like roads that don't sprout the same potholes like clockwork every October even better). They like those military snipers who took out the Somali pirates. All of that costs money, and money comes from taxes. You really want to Support Our Troops? Stop bitching at the very mention of a tax increase, since taxes are how we pay our troops, and if we don't have enough tax money, we can't pay the Troops.

I actually don't mind paying my fair share of taxes. I get a lot in return. The police come when I call. The township keeps the road in front of my driveway from flooding. A taxpayer-funded program got me into college, and federal student aid kept me there. Without taxes, I'd probably still be in a job where I showered when I came home to get the nauseating combination of fryer fat and cigarette smoke out of my hair. So I'm OK with taxes. Not OK enough to pay more than I need to, but I don't mind paying for all the stuff government gives us.

Here's the kicker, though: I don't actually pay taxes. At least not this year. We paid the usual FICA stuff for Social Security and Medicare, but our income tax this year was $0, even with a gross income that places us solidly middle class for a family of two. We have an honest-to-goodness accountant (not the people at H&R Block) do our taxes and consult with us throughout the year on the tax consequences of major financial decisions. He advises us of ways we can reduce our taxes, but has never suggested anything more exotic than planning IRA contributions to maximize the available tax credit.

During the campaign, Obama talked about raising taxes on people earning more than $250,000. People oppose this, mostly because we want to believe that one day, we will be that person earning $250,000 a year. It's April 15, the time of year where our financial lives are slapped before us in black and white. It's a great time to assess the reality of your financial situation.

Take a look at Line 22 of your 1040 form. That's your total income. How close is it to $250,000? Be honest. If you need to, take a calculator, divide 250,000/total income and see just how many years it takes you to earn $250,000, gross. If that number is, say, four, can you envision a realistic scenario wherein your income will quadruple before you retire? If this scenario involves winning the lottery, factor in that any jackpot less than $5 million still leaves your 20-year annuity payments below the $250,000 threshold. For you hourly workers, can you envision a scenario where you are making $120.19 per hour, every hour? That's what it would take for 52 forty-hour workweeks to put you over the $250,000 mark. Even if you put in 80-hour workweeks and worked through Christmas, the family vacation and the worst case of stomach flu imaginable, you'd still need a job that paid a dollar a minute.

While you've got the calculator out, divide 3,500,000 by your total income. The result is how many years you would have to save every penny you make, not even buying a stick of gum or a kilowatt of electricity for light and heat, to have your estate subject to the estate tax. Life expectancy is around 78 years. Do you really have that many years and that much financial discipline left?

With bailout numbers in the trillions getting thrown around, it is easy to lose persepective on just how much $250,000 is compared to what we actually make now. With all the bubbles being burst in the economy, I almost hate to be the one to burst this one. Fact of the matter is, though, most of us are never going to make a quarter million a year, nor are we going to have $3.5 million to leave to the kids.

Bunny Thoughts

In another social media venue, my sister posed the question of why Easter, which is the more monumental Christian holiday, isn't as anticipated as Christmas. After much thought, here's what I came up with:

It all comes down to the date. It wasn’t until the fourth century that church leaders even decided that Jesus’ birth was something that ought to be celebrated, and by then, the exact date had been long lost (assuming anyone even took particular note of Jesus’ DOB in the first place). With only one easily overlooked temporal clue in the account of the nativity, basically, the entire calendar was the church’s oyster when it came to deciding a feast day for Christmas.

Pope Julius I (pope from 337-352) settled on December 25 for Christmas. Now, it wasn’t until 394 that non-Christian religions were actually outlawed in the Roman Empire, but the writing was on the wall by Pope Julius I’s time. Although the December 25 date runs contrary to the one textual clue for the time of Jesus’ birth, December 25 did have one thing going for it: Saturnalia, one of the big party days in ancient Rome. People don’t like to give up a good feast day.

Case in point: modern Christmas itself. In this multicultural, multi-religious society compounded by a legal mandate against state-supported religion, having a Christmas celebration in a government facility (e.g. public school) is legally untenable. Did people stop celebrating Christmas? No. They started calling it “Holiday” or “Winter Festival” or some religiously-neutral phrase, threw in a nod to Hanukkah and Kwanzaa, and carried right on as they did before. People grouse about a War on Christmas, of course, but when given a choice between not celebrating or celebrating while calling the celebration by the officially-approved name, even modern Christians choose Option B. Early Romans did the same thing; they kept Saturnalia, tossed in a Nativity scene and called it Christmas.

The other great thing about December 25 is that it is only a few days after the Winter Solstice, which is a big feast day in pretty much all of the cultures that Christianity spread into. As it had with Saturnalia, Christmas could basically absorb the solstice celebrations, even if they had to move a few days, and call it good.

Easter doesn’t have that advantage. The textual clues firmly tie it to Pesach. Of course, Christianity couldn’t really appropriate Passover traditions for the celebration of the event that marks the break between Judaism and Christianity. Once you establish ham as the traditional holiday meal, any ties to Passover are pretty much over, except for the date. Since Passover and Easter are tied to the lunar calendar, they are a moving target and can end up several weeks off from the vernal equinox. Thus, Easter didn’t have the same success co-opting the equinox festivities of pagan cultures they way Christmas overlaid itself on the solstice. They managed to get the Easter Bunny and colored eggs from Germanic tribes, but that was pretty much it. At least Easter picked up the bunny. Without the colored eggs and marshmallow chicks, Easter is a holiday about brutal torture. Not only is that not exactly greeting card material, if Easter were a video game instead of a religious holiday, states would be passing laws against selling it to children.

August Body, But August of What Year?

As with any episode of The Daily Show, the whole seven-odd minutes of this clip is worth watching, but the bit relevant to my commentary starts around 1:54.

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	M - Th 11p / 10c
The Ever Spending Story
comedycentral.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Economic Crisis Political Humor

I'm about to type a sentence I never thought would come out of my fingers.

Can someone please hook these folks up with PowerPoint? Keynote? Open Office Impress? Something?

Now, I have never been a fan of presentation software, primarily because people tend to use it as a giant ass-backward teleprompter. In short, nothing any more useless than a giant blue placard that reads "$15,000,000,000,000" to impress upon us just how big 15 trillion is. The problem isn't that we don't know how many zeros are in a trillion and need it shown to us; the problem is that the human mind is only capable of comprehending numbers up to a certain point. After a while, more zeros are effectively meaningless, no matter what color the placard is.

As much as I loathe PowerPoint, this is the U.S. Senate in 2009. They should be using more advanced presentation technology than a middle school science fair circa 1992. Actually, circa 1992, we were already five years into the age of PowerPoint. My middle school was just a bit behind the curve. Why in the name of modern technology is our Most August Body still using easels and placards as visual aides?

I know we are in a budget crisis, but surely even an LCD projector, 100 thumb drives and the salary of a 14-year-old computer geek to run the projector--no, I don't expect senators to learn 20 year old technology--has to be less than the budgetary line item for printing all those giant placards. Those things don't come out of the inkjet by the receptionist's desk, after all.

Condom Comment

Let me add my voice to the noise in the blogosphere over this news item. To summarize for the non-clickers out there, the US Agency for International Development, the agency in charge of our international AIDS prevention efforts, has changed the suppliers they use for condoms for AIDS prevention programs in the developing world. The old supplier was in Alabama. The new suppliers are not American.

The article begins by asking the question:

At a time when the federal government is spending billions of stimulus dollars to stem the tide of U.S. layoffs, should that same government put even more Americans out of work by buying cheaper foreign products?

The answer implied by the rest of the article is, "No."

Wrong. Not only is the answer wrong. That's not even the right question.

The American jobs in question here are making condoms for AIDS prevention programs in developing nations. Believe it or not, there are places on this planet where AIDS is not something you deal with by taking some wildly expensive drugs; it is something you die from, painfully, alone and ostracized by the community (but possibly not before trying some of the local folk cures which tend to do more to spread the virus than cure it). These are places where it is a non-trivial accomplishment to get to adulthood HIV-negative, places where preventing HIV spread saves lives. Not jobs. Lives. Human lives.

The question we should be asking is how many people have died in years past because we insisted on using a more expensive (and, buried down in paragraph 8 of the article, less reliable) supplier? How many human lives is an American job worth?

Sure, the lives saved are not your own, or your neighbor's, or anyone on this continent. They are the lives of anonymous people in developing nations. Human decency doesn't put food on the table when you've lost your job. Still, there is something about human decency that suggests we ought to value life over a job.

Happy Pi Day

Today is Pi Day (unless you are in one of those countries that puts the dates backwards...you lot don't get a Pi Day until someone redoes the calendar to include a fourteenth month in the year). Celebrate with all things circular, particularly pie. If you were planning ahead, you can even make pie in one of these. Me, I'm planning a blowout bash in 6 years, on 3/14/15. We'll start the festivities at 9:27, because we round fives up here at the Rookery.

And Happy Birthday, Einstein.

Breaking Wind

I took part of the afternoon to work outside on the dry creekbed I am digging and landscaping so that my basement will remain dry. I had intended to take more of the afternoon for that particular task, but gave up when reminded why, when the wind is just right, it really blows to live downwind of the sewage treatment plant. Mercifully, the wind is not just right that often.

I find it exceptionally humorous that we are four houses down from the sewage treatment facility, yet we are not connected to city sewers. Once every 3-4 years, we pay a guy a hundred bucks to pump the human effluvia out of our septic tank and drive it four houses down to dump it at the treatment plant. Kinda seems like there ought to be a more efficient process, there.