Slice of Supermarket Life

I admit that I'm nosy. This tendency rears its ugly nasal passages in a big way as I'm standing in line at the supermarket. I pass time in line contemplating why people buy the things they are buying.

I'm not alone in this hobby. A Sam's Club checker once asked me outright when she was baffled at my order: 4.5 pounds of Kraft grated parmesan cheese and three pounds of prunes. In that case, the two were unconnected; prunes and parmesan are staple foodstuffs here at the rookery, and we happened to run out at the same time.

The order that lady behind me unloaded onto the conveyor belt today required no explanation:

• Children's Tylenol with Fever Reducer
• Pedialyte (2 bottles)
• Fifth of vodka

You Might Be a Copy Editor If...

I spent the weekend at Context 23, a wonderful weekend of speculative fiction writing and fandom, and a must-attend convention for any beginning genre writer. Today, after the convention closed, Emp. Peng. and I went to lunch with Stephen Zimmer. On the walk back to the convention hotel where we were parked, we passed a sign in a parking lot:

No Semi's

What followed will be on the blooper reel when my life flashes before my eyes. I stopped dead and shuddered. Emp. Peng., ever the dutiful husband, asked what was the matter. I couldn't bear to look at the sign. I could only point in the general direction. Words failed, but I managed to get out, "Apostrophe!"

Unfortunately, I lacked convenient white paint, so the abhorrent apostrophe stands.

Penguin Interlude

Baby Corn, Defeated

A couple of years ago, I discussed how baby corn invades all Mongolian barbecue. If you've never been to a Mongolian barbecue (which bears no discernible resemblance to actual mongolian food or barbecue), you owe it to yourself to try. The basic idea is that you fill a bowl with assorted meats and vegetables then the cooks grill it up on a large circular grill. If you get a good restaurant, the cooks make a show of the grilling process.

This show occasionally results in some bonus foods, as a piece or two from the neighboring bowls works its way into your meal. As I detailed two years ago, that bonus piece always seems to be baby corn. I've been with the only party in the restaurant, none of us put baby corn in our bowls, yet I still managed to find a piece of baby corn in my dinner.

All that changed Friday. As a belated birthday dinner, we went to a Mongolian grill that, since the last time we went, has inexplicably added cheese ravioli to the meat bar. I filled my bowl with a little bit of duck meat, snow peas, peppers, mushrooms, onion and pineapple, then topped it off with a tong full of adult kernel corn. For the first time in my life, I made it through a plate of Mongolian barbecue without finding stray baby corn. My hypothesis is that the adult corn scared off the baby corn.

Good for the Citizenship Goose

The latest craze in Political Wedge Issues is amending the 14th amendment's pesky loophole about not having to work any harder for U.S. citizenship than getting expelled from a birth canal in the right place (legally known as jus soli, or right of the soil). We should have seen this coming; when the economy tanks, people look for any reason they can glom on to for the protracted pain of being out of work involuntarily. Plus, more people have a lot more time on their hands to indulge in xenophobia.

This time, the xenophobia lands on the neonatal population. Apparently, in the world where the likes of Senator Lindsey Graham live, heavily pregnant women risk traversing the desert on the U.S.-Mexican border in August for the sole purpose of "dropping a baby" (which has now gone from an indication of bad grip to a euphemism for birth) who can, two decades hence, sponsor the parents for citizenship. I have never been pregnant, so I can't speak to how likely women in the third trimester are to go for a hike in the desert. If one believes Exodus, the Hebrews managed the feat en masse, but I suspect that it's not the sort of thing modern obstetricians recommend, due to the increased risk of stillbirth that would make the whole exercise rather pointless. Part of me wants to think that if there are that many Mexican women with that kind of physical fortitude and foresight, maybe having them here and passing that determination on to offspring wouldn't be all bad.

Perhaps the stupidest argument I've heard in favor of this proposal is that the 14th amendment doesn't actually need amended to suspend automatic birthright citizenship. According to the proponents of this strategy, since the 14th amendment starts off with "All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside," but parents in the U.S. illegally aren't "subject to the jurisdiction," the kids aren't citizens. In a word, hogwash. Whose jurisdiction are these folks under, if not that of where they are located? The fact that the proponents of this refer to the parents as "illegal" ought to nullify that argument right off the bat. They're illegal under the laws and jurisdiction of the U.S.; were they not subject to U.S. laws, they would not be illegal. That exemption for people who aren't under the jurisdiction of the U.S. applies primarily to diplomats, who are, in fact, not subject to U.S. laws while on U.S. soil.

Moreover, I would be interested in finding out how many of the people who advocate the revocation of birthright citizenship would be able to prove their own citizenship to the standards they advocate. Estimates from the State Department in 2007 indicated that only 27% of Americans hold a passport, and the percentage is only that high because of new rules requiring a passport to go to Canada or the Bahamas. I'm among that 27%, and I also have a certified copy of my birth certificate indicating that I was born in the U.S., only a couple hundred miles up the highway from a popular border crossing, which I suppose is suspect. Of course, with a revocation of jus soli, a birth certificate isn't enough to prove citizenship, not that a certain segment of the population accepts birth certificates as definitive proof of citizenship even with jus soli in place.

Sentence Diagramming Also Pays

Lack of punctuation on a sign cost Spokane County $60 in parking fines when two men successfully argued that "No Public Parking Permit Required" could have a meaning entirely different from "No Public Parking; Permit Required." Granted, the men spent far more than $60 worth of time and effort standing up for the principle of eliminating run-on sentences in parking signs, but it's still a victory for Grammarzon Word Warriors everywhere, since the county intends to punctuate the sign in question.

Read the whole story

Why Math is Important

If one is to believe the vinyl banner covering the sign for the defunct burger joint, there's a new pizza place down the street. That makes five pizza places in a one-mile stretch of road, coming perilously close to the density of auto parts stores on that strip. The vinyl sign advertises their special - or it might be their only menu item; it's hard to tell - of an 18-inch pizza, soda and five breadsticks for $18.99.

I predict failure for that restaurant, possibly faster than the previous inhabitant of that restaurant building, the drive-thru brewpub (anyone surprised that idea failed within mere months?). Five breadsticks is only marginally better an idea than serving beer through the car window, and only because being bad at math is a few more steps removed from a misdemeanor violation of Open Container laws.

As you might recall from about fourth grade math, five is a prime number, evenly divisible by only itself and 1. With five breadsticks, you either need to eat alone (which is way too much food for one) or have a party of five, which requires a protractor for even division of the pizza.

Assuming that the pizza is cut into the typical eight slices, it doesn't get better by ordering two of the specials. That leaves ten breadsticks and 16 slices of pizza. You could split that five ways, with two breadsticks and three slices apiece, but that leaves a leftover slice, and more people needing the bicarb than if you split the single order four ways (two slices and one breadstick apiece, with a spare breadstick).

In fact there's no point, mathematically, at which one gets an even division of both breadsticks and slices of pizza, without leftovers, that doesn't basically boil down to everyone eating a whole pizza and five breadsticks themselves.

Another Trend on its Death Bed

The only thing I know about Silly Bands is that they're apparently the latest fad for a certain age group. I shouldn't know more than that, because if history from the mid-1980s to the present is any indication, the moment I have a clue about something is the exact nanosecond it becomes uncool. It's not just trends. Products get discontinued the moment I discover I like them. I bought three pairs of sneakers because, even though they've made All-Stars since 1917, the fact that I find them comfy (and they don't give me duck feet) positively dooms the style.

Parents, I'm doing you a favor by remaining ignorant and letting you amortize the cost of this fad over a couple more months. On the other hand, maybe I should look into this and save you some money by planting the kiss of frumpy death on whatever those things are sooner rather than later.

Of course, it's possible that the end of Silly Bands is coming without me. They're sold at the supermarket now, which is about two steps away from fad death. One step if you count that the supermarket has a sign out front advertising that they carry Silly Bands. Specifically, "Marvil Comics Silly Bands." I'll accept that my supermarket's employees can't reliably tell red leaf lettuce from a red onion, since it's not like nature labels the produce or anything, but presumable Marvel Comics does label its products.

The Less Yummy Side of the Apocalypse

Textured vegetable protein. You've almost certainly eaten it. The fact that you probably don't realize that you have is what makes it the other food of the dystopian future. For that matter, the food of the topian present; it's used as a meat extender in a lot of what is loosely termed "food." That microwave beef and cheese burrito doesn't get to be 89 cents by being filled with 100% cow products. Textured vegetable protein is also the "bit" in "imitation bacon bits." You may be noticing a trend. Textured vegetable protein is good at pretending to be food that it isn't.

Shame, really, because straight up, it's not that bad, especially with a bit of cheese. You can find it in the natural foods section of most grocery stores - dystopia has a sense of irony, since textured vegetable protein isn't natural, and it's claim to being food is really more of a technicality - as baggies of nondescript beige granules. Apparently, all the most sci-fi food is shades of brown. Combined with equal parts water, the granules fluff up to something vaguely akin to crumbled ground beef in texture.

Being dehydrated doesn't make a food sci-fi. Being an industrial byproduct does. Textured vegetable protein starts off as what is left over from sucking the soybean oil out of soybeans. From there, the soy leftovers are run through a processor that poufs it up and dries it out to make the granules.

There you have it. Textured vegetable protein isn't the balanced nutrition that our post-apocalyptic sci-fi bretheren get from peanut butter ball mix, but it does provide a source of cheaply-transported protein, while solving the problem of what to do with the waste from creating biodiesel.

Soylent Brown is Peanut Butter Ball Mix

I mentioned that peanut butter ball mix is one of the most sci-fi foods I know. To elaborate...

My mother used to make peanut butter ball mix for me and PengSis as kids. There's no set recipe. Basically, mix peanut butter (I think creamy works better) with a bit of honey to make it sweet, and enough wheat germ and/or dry milk powder to make it not sticky. What you're left with is a concentrated, moldable brown paste with all the protein, carbohydrate, fat, vitamins and minerals a body needs. It's dense, easy to transport, doesn't spoil (as far as I know, anyway...it never lasted long enough to find out) and made from relatively cheap agricultural products. In short, it's exactly what every bit of post-apocalyptic sci-fi has humanity's survivors eating. Except for when we're eating industrial waste products. That's another post.

OK, so "tastes like the apocalypse" isn't the world's best tag line for a product. Try it anyway. Dystopia was never so yummy. Dystopia can also be dipped in chocolate.

You First, the Global Medicine Version

One of my clients is extremely opposed to vaccinations. I'm not. It's a point on which we agree to disagree, with an arrangement that I don't have to directly put my name directly to anything opposing vaccinations. I think she is mistaken and using faulty logic to reach her conclusions about vaccinations, but I also know that her thought process is not going to be swayed. Plus, she who pays the bills makes the rules.

Personally, though, I put vaccinations right up there with sanitation and contraception as one of the great advances in science and medicine. However, vaccinations, like peanut butter ball mix, are so mundane that we don't appreciate just how sci-fi they are. Our planet is crawling with tiny, deadly things that straddle the border between lifeform and not-life. These things can kill us in dozens of ways that bypass our biological defenses. To protect our young from these maybe-alive things that we don't completely understand, we give our children substances that artificially enhance their immune systems, starting in infancy, and continue taking these substances at regular intervals throughout life to keep up the immune system enhancements and deny these maybe-lifeforms a host population. Does that not sound like the start of a plot to an episode of Stargate, or any of those sci-fi dramas that rely on dropping Earthlings onto other planets inhabited by aliens who are pretty much humans with SFX makeup?

In the unlikely event that I ever have fledglings of my own, you can bet your bippy those kids are going to be vaccinated against everything we have vaccinations for, even chickenpox. I don't, myself, even remember getting the chickenpox, though the blood tests indicate I did at some point before I was 18. I do, however, know or know of two people who nearly died from the same virus I can't remember.

My hypothetical fledglings are also definitely getting the HPV vaccine. Here in the U.S., we've more or less tamed cervical cancer. Women still get it and die from it, but not at nearly the rates they did before Paps became ubiquitous. Without the widespread screening, cervical cancer is right up there with giving birth on the list of Things That Kill Women Young, but the U.S. has been so good with paps for so long (possibly related to my prior post about GPs holding our contraceptives hostage until we pay the annual ransom of cervical cells) that mothers in my generation don't remember what a killer it is. Both HPV and chickenpox vaccinations run into the problem that the parents deciding to vaccinate their kids don't know how dangerous the viruses can be.

The HPV vaccines protect against the viral strains implicated in most, but not all, cases of cervical cancer, so having the HPV vaccine isn't a get-out-of-pap-free card. Here in the developed world, we'll still need to get regular paps to find the sliver of cases of cervical cancer that aren't attributed to the strains of HPV in the vaccine, and I wouldn't expect that the number of deaths from cervical cancer to go down too much once we deploy the vaccine. There will be side effects to the HPV vaccine; there are side effects to anything we do, including eating a bean burrito. The benefits aren't likely to be huge. Why, then, risk getting the HPV vaccine?

Because it's not about us. In the U.S., we have readily available gynecological care and fairly widespread screening for cervical cancer. On a global scale, this is unusual. In many parts of the world, gynecological care is all but nonexistent, and what is available is usually focused on keeping women alive during and after childbirth. Cervical cancer screenings are way down the list of health priorities, below things like malnutrition, malaria and the large collection of fatal diseases caused by contaminated water. However, the fact that cervical cancer isn't on the radar doesn't mean it doesn't kill women in those parts of the world. A lot of those women could be saved, to raise the children they manage to survive the births of, with widespread deployment of HPV vaccines.

However, the developed world has some bad history with the populations that would be most well-served with widespread HPV vaccinations, starting with that whole colonization thing, and going downhill from there. Some of these places have resisted efforts at universal polio vaccination, mistrustful of the motivations of those offering polio immunizations. In some places, folks have raised concerns that the polio vaccinations are a cover for population-control measures. Given some of the attitudes toward the developing world by the places on the planet that generally develop vaccines (including the kind of insulting subtext to the terminology "developed/developing" and "first world/third world"), one could understand where they're coming from.

So, if we show up with an HPV vaccine and want to inject it into all of their virgins, while at the same time saying that we're not giving it to our own little girls...that just isn't going to go over well. We need to adopt the HPV vaccine in the U.S. as a measure of good faith for those who don't have the backup detection methods we have. Getting the vaccine in the U.S. may not reduce death rates from cervical cancer here, but it can go a long way in the places that will benefit directly from the vaccine more than we will.

Bad Penguin News

The pengsperts aren't sure what's going on, but whatever is happening spells Brazilian penguin doom.

MarmotaWatch '10

We have the official First Woodchuck Sighting of the season!

Answers I Really Want on Health Care Costs' Upward Spiral

Health and Human Services secretary Kathleen Sibelius has called for insurance companies to justify, explicitly and publicly, their premium increases. Now President Obama has gotten in on the action, calling for the aforementioned justification to be posted online for all to read.

OK, OK, we get it. Insurance companies make money dealing with people who are sick and vulnerable and facing the potential of giant mountains of dream-crushing medical bills. You know who else makes money there? Doctors. Once we get the explanation of the premium increases, I'd like to see the politicians press the doctors on their fees. My insurance company may raise my premiums, but at least they only do it once a year and give me some advanced warning. My insurance company, unlike my doctor, has never raised my costs mid-procedure while I was in the exam room with my pants dropped.

For the past 12 years, I've taken quarterly injections of prescription Depo-Provera, which I procure at a retail pharmacy for approximately $45. With my most recent dose, the doctor flatly refused to fill the prescription I have been taking since the late 1990's with no ill effects unless I came in for an unnecessary checkup, and also decided not to tell me she wouldn't refill it. That, I found out from my pharmacist when I went to pick up my medication and the pharmacist had no record of a refill. When I called my doctor's office to find out why I had no refill waiting, I was told the doctor would only provide me with my medication if I got it from her stock and agreed to schedule the unnecessary procedure during that call. The office staff had no idea what the medication would cost me. Note to politicians: it's hard to bend the cost curve if the doctors won't tell you the costs.

Fast forward to the appointment to get the injection administered. The nurse took me to the exam room and had me sign the usual raft of paperwork for getting an injection, then left to draw up the dose. I get the shot administered in my butt, and was all prepped with gluteal exposed when the nurse returned with the syringe in hand and told me, "The billing department says you're going to owe $50 for today's visit. Is that OK?" She's standing there with the medication I need all drawn up, I'm one cheek to the wind, and NOW the doctor's office tells me I have to pay $50 on the date of service, even though I carry insurance that has no copays. Say what you will about health insurance companies, and I'll grant that $50 isn't the $1,000-plus annual premium increases some folks are seeing, but at least the insurance companies give notice before they try to get more money out of policyholders.

I wonder what they would have done if I had told them that no, it wasn't OK. That I had assumed that they would use the procedure they'd used since my first appointment, where they run the claim through the insurance company and bill me a few weeks later, after insurance processes it, at which point I pay the entirety of the fee, minus the substantial "negotiated discount" (that, I will address in another post, along with cost-shifting). They had the medication drawn up. It's not like they could just put it back in the vial for the next patient if I walked out. In the end, since we keep a very little extra in the Health Savings Account, I told them I'd be able to pay the $50. On the way out, I asked the lady who took my money what the final bill would be, since $50 was getting pretty close to what I usually paid the pharmacy and the doctor combined when I brought my own meds. The office person looked up in her book, which she told me was way out of date, and said that the drugs would be $80 (mind you, I paid $45 at the pharmacy if they let me buy it there), but she didn't know if that was still the case or what the negotiated rate was.

To recap, after denying me the option to get my medication from my source of choice, the doctor's office can't tell me what they're going to charge me for it, but make me pay $50 toward that cost anyway, right now. And it's the insurance companies who have to answer for their deeds?

When I came home from being shaken down at the doctor's, I called my insurance company, UnitedHealthCare, to possibly try to figure out how much I was going to owe for this visit. The very helpful insurance company representative explained to me that more doctors are moving toward a policy of requiring payments on the date of service at the beginning of the year, when people haven't satisfied their policy deductible, regardless of what that policy deductible is. Because the doctor actually controls the negotiated discount, she couldn't tell me what the final bill would be, but gave me the information for filing an ethics complaint against my doctor if, once things settled down, I felt she had acted unethically.

Already, that was more answers from my insurance company than I got from the doctor. Insurance companies are being made the villains in the health care reform debate. Frankly, the insurance companies, while they definitely do some sleazy things, at least protect patients from some medical bills.

What seems to be lost in all this is that, aside from premiums, patients don't actually get bills from their health insurance companies. They get bills from their doctors. While premiums can be enormously high, the people you hear about who were bankrupted by illness were not bankrupted by their insurance premiums; they were bankrupted by doctor and hospital bills. You know, the things that your insurance company negotiates down on your behalf. If the President and the Health and Human Services Secretary get the answers they want from the insurance companies, I hope they turn their attention next to getting explanations for the actual medical bills from the people sending them: the doctors and hospitals.

Not Dead Yet

No, I did not die of my penguin-inflicted injury (though if I get to choose how I die, that's toward the top of the list), nor did I contract Penguin Flu and spend five months recuperating. My extended absence from the blog has been partly from keeping very busy with my now-year-old freelance copy editing business, and partly from racking up the GDP of several small nations in MyFarm. As if Facebook weren't enough of a time suck without the games.

Back to my penguin-inflicted injury, though. For my birthday last summer, Emp. Peng. surprised me with a trip to Kentucky, specifically the Newport Aquarium. We started the day off with the Penguin Parade, which has three penguins in a modified Radio Flyer forming a processional for the assembled crowds and distracting us from a very informative discussion by the aquarium docents on the volume of guano a penguin produces daily.

As we waited for the penguin parade, Emp. Peng. drew my attention to a sign advertising the Penguin Encounter. In addition to a cross-border penguin excursion, he'd arranged for the add-on tour that included 45 minutes of in-habitat time with the African penguins! Me and the penguins in the same room! He had specifically booked the 4 p.m. Encounter, since the aquarium staff said that was the best time, right after penguin lunch when their bellies are full and they're content.

The schedule gave us some time to see all the aquarium exhibits, and we even took the behind-the-scenes tour of the vet areas, kitchen areas and inner workings of the aquarium. We caught the sea turtle trying to eat scuba equipment as the diver prepared for feeding time, and learned that, in the absence of algae or native kelps, the fish eat broccoli. In the veterinary clinic, the tour guide showed us how you anesthetize a penguin, which requires duct tape and an extra-large drink cup from Arby's.

The day capped off with the Penguin Encounter, which would prove to be a close encounter, indeed. After some basic hygiene to ensure that we didn't track any germs into the habitat and some instructions to keep our camera straps securely around wrist and neck, we were led into the habitat and shown to the benches along the wall. The penguins roam free during the encounter, but the keeper has to give the humans the green light for touching the birds. If the penguin wants to touch you, that's up to the penguin. One, Paula, spent most of the encounter trying to eat Emp. Peng.'s shoelace.

Mostly, the penguins waddled around while the keeper recapped most of the same guano talk from the morning processional. The penguins, fully loaded from lunch, obliged with a demonstration of their guano-producing ability, though they managed to miss us both. One other person in our Penguin Encounter group was not so lucky on that front.

Three times during the 45 minutes of habitat time, the keeper brought the penguins around, luring them with a hamster-shaped cat toy, so we could touch them, shoulder to tail, using the aquarium-approved two-finger touch. On the first round, I was introduced to Blue, a juvenile. The juveniles are known by their flipper band colors, since their final home zoo or aquarium will name them. The keeper positioned Blue facing away from me and occupied his beak with the hamster toy while I got to feel penguin feathers firsthand, thus crossing one more thing off my list of things to do before I die.

A few pets in, Blue apparently decided the hamster toy wasn't interesting anymore, craned his neck around and beaked me in the back of the hand! Actual penguin bite! The keeper caught his beak and turned him back around, and I, undaunted, went right back to petting him. By the way, their beaks are sharper than they look, but the damage was minimal. I made Emp. Peng. take a picture of my penguin-inflicted wound, anyway. If you look really close, you can see a straight red welt where his beak pinched me, right about in the center of the photo:

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.