Happy Bunny Day

On Tuesday, the Easter Bunny in Council Bluffs, Iowa was arrested for harrassment.

The Easter Bunny in Bay City, Michigan got beaten up by a 12 year old and sustained a bloody nose. Staying in character, the bunny refused to fight back; however, he is pressing charges.

Who knew that Mall Easter Bunny was such a hazardous occupation.

That Makes Me Feel Better

New actuarial figures show Social Security going insolvent in 2041, a year earlier than previously planned. Strangely, this makes me feel better. Between that and the increased retirement age going into effect, the system is now insolvent 3 years before I can retire. Used to be that with the retirement age at 65 and the insolvency date at 2042, I would be paying into the system right up until I am eligble to retire, then whoops! There goes the fund.

And they wonder why people my age don't care about the Social Security debate. True, a lot of people in their 20's are still busy getting wasted every chance they get and don't have time to worry about their retirement. Those of us who are planning for the future aren't counting on seeing any of the money that gets shunted out of our paychecks every week and are planning accordingly, so whatever anyone wants to do with the program is your business.

Inconvenient Facts

Last night, I was at the local mall--which is apparently not the only mall in America without an Orange Julius stand, man do I miss those--where the local Waldenbooks is clearancing out the merchandise. They're closing the store since there is a Borders coming in and the same parent company owns both Borders and Waldenbooks. Seems someone out at the parent company thought they only needed one bookstore in that mall. 900 jewelry stores, sure, but only one bookstore.

Getting back to the point. Earlier this week, Waldenbooks had a slew of "Store Closing" signs out advertising their clearances. Yesterday, those signs were all gone, replaced with some cheesy laserprinted sheets taped to the fixtures. Apparently, mall management thought that the "store closing" signs reflected poorly on the mall, even though the store is, in fact, closing. Can't wait to see how they spin the store being, well, gone.

More 888-872-2629

Glad to hear I could help so many of you out there get rid of the Chase telemarketers (if you missed the first couple of posts, click here for the instructions on how to stop 888-872-2629 to stop calling you). Maybe some of you can give me a hand, now. I'm working on a related project that expands on the topic, and I could use some more in-depth input from people who have been telemarketed by their credit card company. I would rather not give out too much about the project yet since I'm not certain anything will come of it, but it has a much better chance of success if I can get one or two of you on record with just a little bit about your experiences getting telemarketing calls after signing up for services or buying something.

If you wouldn't mind sharing some details about your experiences being telemarketed and getting them to stop, please drop an email at perspectives@savepenguins.com. Also, on the off chance anyone out there has ever worked as a telemarketer, I'd like to get some input from you.

None of your information you provide will be posted at Penguin Perspectives, and I won't let your email address out. However, if something does come of this project, there is a chance your name (I will need a real name) and a quotation or two might one day wind up in print.

Again, the email address is perspectives@savepenguins.com, and I'll let you know from there exactly what sort of information I'm looking for.

Gizmo Time

For your online-window-shopping pleasure, here's a few of the fun doohickies and thingamabobs you can find at www.thinkgeek.com.

An optical mouse with a floaty duck

A wristwatch and slide rule in one

A USB humidifier just plug it into your computer's USB port, and you've got instant humidification

The next generation in Ant Farm technology (ants not included)

A series of motivational posters that just may make you laugh

Thinkgeek.com also has a full line of Tux products. One day, I'm going to switch to Linux for no other reason than their mascot is a penguin.

Japan Pushes for DST

Is it already time to rant against Daylight Saving Time again? News from Reuters is that the Japanese legislature is making a push for Spring Forward, Fall Back. One of the main arguments for advancing the time change:

"The resulting extra daylight and cooler mornings--

Whoa-ho. Let's just stop right there and clear something up. Setting the clocks back does not magically give you "extra daylight." DST or no, Japan will still get about 15 1/2 hours of daylight on the summer solstice. Whether that starts at 4:30 a.m. or 5:30 a.m. does not change the total quantity of daylight. The mornings may be cooler, but only because there is an hour less sun in it. By extension, this means that the evenings are hotter as there is an hour more sunlight.

Given the 24-hour nature of life in this day and age, why are we fussing over where the big hand and the little hand are when the sun comes up?

Corporal Klinger Lives

New York Times headline: Un-Volunteering: Troops Improvise to Find Way Out

Seems there is a small segment of our military forces--according to the Army, no more than usual--who are doing whatever they can to get out of their contract with the military. Tactics include trying to fail drug tests, defecting to Canada, getting pregnant, getting shot, and being gay. Apparently, M*A*S*H was more realistic than I thought.

About Damn Time!

Reuters headline: US May Restrict Sale of Social Security Numbers

Good idea, don't you think? I should probably not be as surprised as I am that there aren't already restrictions on the sale of my social security number.

Here's the link to what the Social Security Administration has to say on the subject of when you are required to give your number out. The upshot is that disclosing your SSN is voluntary. This does not mean that the entity asking for your number still must do business with you if you refuse, but if you are prepared to do without, the choice to give out your number is yours. Along those lines, apparently there are ways for your utility company to run a credit check on you without you providing your SSN.

By the way, the official policy of the Social Security Administration is that your card is not a form of ID, given that it only proves that the number on the card was assigned to the person named on the card and does not guarantee that the person presenting the Social Security card is in fact the person to whom the card was issued.

Media Circus

The 24-hour news channels must be wetting themselves. The Robert Blake and Scott Peterson verdicts came in on the same day! How, oh, how will they give both of the Trials of the Century verdicts the constant coverage they deserve while still keeping up the play-by-play on Michael Jackson's jammies? At least they have the crawl for those trivial news-fluff items like the two wars that I think we may still be fighting.

Mundane Stuff of Life

The people who live in the apartment next door are fighting again. I don't listen, but the yelling carries through the walls, so sometimes one can't help but hear. I'm counting the days until we will live somewhere not attached to someone else's home. 33, if everything goes according to the current schedule.

More New Studies

Now, my mother is a wonderful woman who has, to my recollection, never held the circumstances of her children's gestation and births against us. However, I hear tell that there are some women who pull a guilt trip on their offspring about the 36 hours of labor or what have you. For those women, check out this news story. Seems now, in addition to blaming their progeny for their inability to wear a wristwatch, mothers can now pin their bad teeth on the children. A new study shows that women with more children have more dental problems, even when income, age, and socioeconomic status is factored out.

Happy Pi Day!

It's no National Gorilla Suit Day, but today is Pi Day, 3/14. Click here to see a replay of Pi Drop that happened at 1:59. Those mathematicians sure know how to party with flash animation.

By coincidence, today is also Albert Einstein's birthday. Let's see here. The radius of a circle is a ratio of pi, which is 3.14..., and Albert Einstein was born on 3/14. In Young Einstein, Albert Einstein was played by Yahoo Serious, who was in Reckless Kelly with Martin Ferrero, who was in Planes, Trains, and Automobiles with Kevin Bacon. I guess you can connect anything to Kevin Bacon in six steps or fewer.

Credit to Bonus.com for the last two steps.

Speaking of Vomiting in Public...

The New York Times published an article on the whole Power Hour idiocy I wrote about earlier. To save you the clicking, freshly minted 21-year-olds try to down 21 shots in the hour between midnight on their 21st birthday and 1 a.m. when the bars close. The solution that the North Dakota legislature has dreamed up is to raise the drinking age to 21 +8 hours. Given my doubts about the efficacy of that, I proposed a counter-solution to have the bars limit the number of shots they would serve anyone, regardless of age, in an hour.

Apparently, we can kiss that idea goodbye. I'm pretty sure that when the bars are providing barf buckets to the 21-year-olds, we can pretty much forget about enlisting their aid in curbing the practice. When they're supplying the drinks and the vomitorium and not stepping in when a patron tells his friends "no more," I'd say we can count the bars firmly as part of the problem, not part of the solution. Of course, as the drinkers in the New York Times article see it, the problem is that there is nothing to do in North Dakota except get blind drunk and puke in the middle of a bar. That, I must say, is the absolute WEAKEST excuse I have ever heard for anything. If there is nothing to do, have they considered learning a foreign language or taking up knitting? If there is so little to do in Fargo (and they do have a movie theater with live pipe organ music), here's an idea: when the hangover wears off, pack up whatever brain cells aren't pickled, call some movers, and leave North Dakota. But then they'd have to grow up and become responsible adults, so that won't work, either.

Tossing My Cookies

I have an intense distaste for air travel. I may have mentioned before that there is no good way to vomit on an airplane, particularly when the "fasten seat belt" sign is lit. I have tried, and it cannot be done. However, if there is one good thing to be said about flying, it is that the snacks are great. Stop laughing. I like airline snacks. I am particularly fond of the cookies on Delta, sort of a light, flaky gingersnap.

My local Kroger also carries these particular cookies. Lo and behold, today Kroger had sample platter of my favorite airplane cookies out for my nibbling pleasure, and I pounced. Pounced a little too hard, it turns out. In the process of setting the plastic cover aside, I managed to nearly send the whole platter tumbling off the display. I saved the plate of cookies, but the cover clattered halfway to the deli meat counter. One way or another, I seem to always hurl these cookies.

I'm Not Making This Up

A Michigan cat shot its owner with a 9mm handgun. There are two lessons in this story.
Lesson #1: never leave a loaded handgun unattended on the kitchen counter
Lesson #2: don't piss off the cat

Recommended Reading

You absolutely must read the saga of ME and his garage door replacement.

Question of the Day

Does anyone know whatever came of the duck from You Bet Your Life?

For the last time...

In today's Funky Winkerbean, the comic book store owner got arrested, presumably because some of the items in the comics are not so much for the kiddies. The story arc starts on March 4 with a woman taking her first ever trip to a comic book store and finding the Adult Comics section.

Is there any way that we, the comic book reading public, can convince the rest of you that comics are not just for kids? We've already tried talking until we're blue in the face and pricing comic books way out of the range of most kids' allowances. None of that seems to have taken hold. There are many great titles for the small tykes--check out RQW--but not every comic is meant for minors. A lot of comics are meant for grownups, in exactly the same way that the majority of what is in a Barnes and Noble is meant for grownups.

Sure, some shops do a less-than-stellar job of segregating out the most adult offerings. One of my local comics shops keeps a longbox of Playboys on the floor underneath a table displaying action figures. Were I running a comic book store, that would not be where I would keep the nudie magazines. To be fair, the bad segregation of grownup materials is not unique to comic book shops. I was in a major media outlet a while back and accidentally knocked a box off the bookshelf. In full view of the Tiger Beat magazine display, a vibrator (ahem, Personal Massager) rolled right out of the box and into the aisle.

So please, leave the comic books alone. Whatever you may remember of Superman being chased by a giant telephone in the 60's, comics are not kiddie fare. Let the grownups have their picture books. While we're at it, can we just agree to stop trotting the small fries out whenever we want to get rid of something we disagree with? People don't do things "for the kids." The kids have no clue. They do it because they don't like something, so they don't think I should have access to it.

Slow News Day

It must be a slow news day. The Associated Press ran an article on people getting in trouble at work for blogs they write off hours. At first, you might think that's a little harsh. Then you read what they were posting. One Delta employee posted pinup photos of herself in (well, partly in) uniform in one of the aircraft, with her undies showing. A Google employee mused about the company's financial situation. A Microsoft employee posted pictures of Apple computers at a Microsoft loading dock and described the building. Another woman posted the office gossip from the Christmas party. That last one could be fairly inocuous, depending on what the gossip is, but by and large those show not a violation of policy, but incredibly poor judgement.

You may have noticed I don't talk much about work. First and foremost, I don't want to bore you and my job isn't all that interesting. Second of all, it is a general rule of Penguin Perspectives that I do not write badly of people I personally know. Makes life easier that way. My boss knows I blog. I don't know if she reads what I write or not. Since I want to continue to be paid, I find it to my advantage to not impugn the nature of the company that pays me. Such is life and commerce.

Questions

Having gone through 12 years of compulsory lower education and six years of college to get a four year degree, I've now decided to learn all the things that people should know just because it is good to know. Classrooms can't teach these things, or won't. For instance, I'm working on learning how a computer works. With everything the computers run in my life, I figure the least I should know is what goes on inside that box. Learning how a microprocessor works, or what a chip really does, is a long term project. In the shorter term, I'm working on questions like why is the North Pole frozen, anyway?

Bling-A-Ling

Logically, one would think that if one of something looks dumb, than four of that something would look even dumber, and the opposite is also true: that if four of something looks dumb, one would still look dumb, but less so. However, there are exceptions to every rule. On the way home from the grocery store, I found one of them.

I may have mentioned before that spinning hubcaps give me a mild case of motion sickness. That, and I think they look incredibly stupid. No reason. Some things are just inherently dumb. Turns out there is something more stupid looking than a set of spinning hubcaps on a primer-gray mid-90's Corsica that appears to have had the dents pounded out with a meat mallet. Specifically, a primer-gray mid-90's Corsica that appears to have had the dents pounded out with a meat mallet and sporting, not a set of spinners, but a single spinner on the right front wheel. Yep, one solitary hubcap spinning away on a car being driven by a guy who looked like a 35-year-old Jeff Foxworthy wannabe who hadn't bathed in a month. I'm guessing he missed the memo where they explained that pimping your ride means pimping your entire ride.

Shmoozers Block

I'm writing cover letters to resumes I will be dropping off tomorrow when I'm down in the new place, and I seem to have drawn a complete blank on how to hype my organization skills (Becca, stop spitting milk out your nose). The first thing I've done at most of my office jobs has been to revamp their filing system. Partly, this is to improve efficiency, but mostly it is job security. I've discovered people are less likely to fire you if you're the only one who know where things are filed.

888-872-2629

I seem to have touched a nerve when I mentioned my travails with Chase's telemarketers from 888-872-2629. Five comments! I didn't know I had five readers.

They called again today while I was at work. Just for kicks, I thought I would see what happened if, instead of waiting for them to call me, I called them. Good news: if you call 888-872-2629, there is the option to add your number to their internal Do Not Call List. It takes about 2 minutes all told to submit the request. Of course, this wouldn't be Penguin Perspectives without the Irony of the Week. I added my home phone to the do not call list, and the automated message told me to allow 30 days for the change to take effect. We move--and get a new phone number--in 47 days.

BYOB-Build Your Own Batcave

There are so many fun things about buying a house. My latest discovery is that, without landlords and security deposits, now there is nothing stopping me from turning my home into my own personal Fortress of Solitude. I'm saving the title of Batcave for the barn.

Of course there are several things any good superhero hideout needs, all of which are, thanks to the Internet, readily available to all of us wannabe superheroes:
- A World Crisis Monitor, courtesy of Reuters
- Sliding panels to hide your World Crisis Monitor. Instructions for making one can be found here.
- Doors hidden behind bookcases.
- A 31-pocket jacket to pull things out of, Secret Squirrel style. Also 11-pocket pants, and yes, even the tie has a pocket
- And no Batcave would be complete without a Wurlitzer. For the whimsey.

Novel Writing Redux

Last November's NaNoWriMo was so much fun, I'm doing it again, and who has time to wait for November to come around again? A few of us are planning to do our own Novel Writing Month in March. Tuesday, we start binge-drafting novels, and everyone is welcomed to join us in an effort to prod each other into finally getting that novel out of our heads and onto a drive. NaNoWriMo sets a universal goal of 50,000 words in 30 days. 50,000 words seems like a lot, but my 50,003 worked out to only 83 pages, which is slim pickings for a novel. Honestly, once you really get into creating characters and a compelling conflict, 50K is not that much. For March, I'm shooting for between 50,000 and 60,000 words, giving me a nice round goal of 2,000 words per day. Goals will probably vary.

If there is interest, I'll set up a team blog where everyone can post their goals and progress. Email perspectives@savepenguins.com if you want in on the team blogging for Novel Progress.

Gateway Saga, Part II

Dante wrote that the gateway of hell read, "Abandon hope, ye who enter here." I think he was on musical hold with customer service at the time with someone who did not understand that if his pens were out being repaired, he could not make his living. Hence why he put it on the Gateway.

To recap, Elie sent the laptop, a vital tool in his business, in to the service department for a simple warranty repair a month ago. Gateway sent it back to where we lived two forwarding addresses before where we lived when we bought the laptop. The people who received the package in error returned it to Gateway, who has no idea where the laptop currently is located. Customer Service gave us every impression that a missing laptop report would be filed, they would make one last-ditch attempt at finding the computer, and if that failed, they would be shipping out a replacement ASAP to make it good. Yes, I hear you laughing from here. We all know where this is going. Turns out no one filed the paperwork to report the laptop missing. Now the soonest a replacement might possibly be sent out would be Thursday. Not that it matters. We have no intention of keeping whatever they send us back. We're passing this trouble off to a guy who is willing to buy the new laptop, even knowing how we came by it.

There is a light at the end of the tunnel. His name is Eric and he works for the CompUSA in Ann Arbor, Michigan. This guy is what customer service should be. Elie had reached the limits of how long he could effectively do his job without a laptop, so we crossed state lines to find an open store where we could get a Mac G4. Eric responded admirably to my strategy of looking like a little confused puppy in the general vicinity of the merchandise I want to buy, and he set us up with the new laptop and all the necessary software, plus throwing in a home networking router (free with rebates). He probably would have ordered us a pizza if he thought it would make us buy more. We're reserving ultimate judgment to see if Elie's business program will run on Virtual PC, but if it doesn't Eric has made sure we can return the whole bundle even though the return policy clearly states we cannot return opened software. We watched him put that paperwork in.

Live humans, 1. Phones, 0.

Watch Them Move Now...

I try to save being cynical for after I finished my morning coffee. Reuters is making that a little difficult today with this article.

Seems Bank of America lost computer tapes with credit card account records--including social security numbers--of 1.2 million government employees. Actually, BofA and the Senate Rules Committee suspect that a baggage handler stole the data tapes as they were being shipped by plane to a storage facility. Among the account holders whose information is potentially compromised are about 900,000 Department of Defense workers and dozens of senators, as well as other government employees. Reading just that part of the article, my inner cynic said, "Yeah. Let's see them move real quickly now on identity theft and airport baggage security now that their personal info has gone missing," while other inner parts of me were saying, "C'mon. At least finish your Cheerios before you start thinking that poorly of people." For the record, I tried to listen to the non-cynical parts. Then I came to the following two excerpts:

Quoted from Senator Charles Schumer, D-NY: "Whether it is identity theft, terrorism or other theft, in this new and complicated world baggage handlers should have background checks and more care should be taken for who is hired for these increasingly sensitive positions."

and

"Sen. Patrick Leahy, a Vermont Democrat, said he hoped the fact that Senate information was among the lost data would spur Congress to pay attention to a 'rapid erosion of privacy rights' due to faulty data security."

Apparently, my inner cynic called this one. Sorry, Senator Leahy, but I hoped that the fact that faulty data security and sticky-fingered baggage handlers are affecting a lot of people BESIDES Senators would spur congress to pay attention to a rapid erosion of privacy rights. We should not have to wait until something happens directly to our congresspeople for them to see that there is a problem.

Here's to hoping that the day gets better, faith-in-humanity-wise.

Ahh, the Sweet Smell of Irony...

First, some background: about a month ago, Elie's laptop stopped emitting sound. Given that Elie uses his laptop for presenting DVDs to clients in their homes, sound is a rather important function. We shipped it off to Gateway for the warranty repair. Then we waited. And waited. When he called to check this week on where in the world his laptop was, Gateway cheerily notified us that they shipped it out to us on February 7. Odd, we thought, that he has not received it yet, particularly since, according to the DHL tracking, it was delivered on February 8.

Apparently, yes, it was delivered--to the leasing office of apartment we lived at three years ago. Wait, it gets better. The leasing office returned the package to the sender the day before we figured out what had happened. Now, Gateway can't figure out where the laptop is. They are making it good, in their own way, but the best is yet to come.

Today, I got a call from a perky Gateway customer satisfaction pollster, asking us how we're liking our Gateway laptop. "Well," I told him, "except that your service department seems to have misplaced it..."

From Figure of Speech to Reality

Man Bites Dog. Literally. A man in Scotland bit his guide dog.

WeddingPalooza Hooey

Salon has an article up about this contest in which 10 lucky couples with children will be chosen to get a free wedding in New York. It is supposedly a move to encourage two-parent households among otherwise-committed African-American couples Race, socioeconomics, and the contest mastermind's ulterior motives aside (she happens to be releasing a book on marriage), this is just another example of something I've believed since before I got married: a lot of people of all social and racial groups who get married don't care about being married. Rather, they want a wedding. The marriage is incidental.

"We can't afford to get married" is a cop out of the highest degree. I got married in Omaha, Nebraska, where a couple can be legally wed for $40 ($15 for the license and $25 for the judge to perform the ceremony). Certainly, there are outside economic factors that sometimes make being married a liability--we waited nearly 3 years to get married in part because we would lose our health insurance--but that is another issue entirely. If having a free wedding is all it takes to get a couple married, they have personal or couple issues that a wedding will not fix, and it does them no service to feed their illusion that all they need for a happy life is a wad of taffeta and a rented tuxedo.

As for the supposed "Stigma of a city hall wedding," again a Steaming Crock of Crap. Hate to break it to people, but no one gives a rat's butt where you got married. Few people will know or remember where the wedding was, and people won't stigmatize based on something they can't readily figure out. Legally speaking (leaving aside certain religion's requirements for a recognized marriage), civil ceremonies leave you no less married. Like so many prejudices, the bias against civil ceremonies is largely propagated by people who have never seen one. We had a lovely ceremony in Courtroom 27, and it was an actual ceremony, not a legal proceeding. The judge gave a talk on the importance of marriage and told a touching story about the Aztecs before we took the standard vows that you would take for any marriage. The court staff assured me we were allowed to bring whomever we wanted to attend the ceremony, and we had our immediate family there. We could have had more than the 12 people there, but we wanted to keep it small. The ceremony was, of course, stripped of a lot of the frou-frou of weddingpaloozas. The choreographed musical procession was pretty much out of the question, and we didn't have time--or inclination--to put out pew bows or huge floral arrangements or candelabras. The proceedings were focused not on how pretty the room was, but on our marriage.

I've said before and I will say it again: we could go a long way in improving marriage if we downplayed the wedding. Ban the butt-bows and dyed-to-match shoes, and you'll find people treating the act of getting married for what it is: a lifelong commitment, not an excuse for a party.

About Freakin' Time

Finally, a news story about how bad some other country's students are in a subject. A survey of Japanese high schoolers found that 24% could not find North Korea and more than 40% could not find Iraq. That doesn't excuse the sad state of American secondary education, since the Japanses students probably still did better than American kids would do on a test of Geography of Countries Whose Invasions or Diplomacy We Are Not Leading (I think we're down to Lichtenstein), but still. When most of the news out of the field of education is about how our high schools are turning out mobs of illiterate, drooling morons, isn't it nice to hear that the other countries aren't perfect?

Not enlightening or uplifting, just good for a laugh

Cartoon Network's Adult Swim has the funniest new show on Sundays at 11:30 p.m. Robot Chicken is hilarious stop-motion animation with off the shelf action figures and toys. Click here for a video clip of a beanie baby panda biting the head off a Geraldo Rivera-esque action figure. Did I mention that this is not for the small fry? Cartoon Network doesn't call it "Adult Swim" for nothing. Robot Chicken is a bit of twisted humor, much like a 16-car pileup on the freeway leaves a little dent in car #7. Let's just say the opening credits for Robot Chicken have a roadkill chicken being revived by a mad scientist who turns it into a cyborg hen and forcing it to watch TV.

Too bad they didn't post the clip of Captain Kirk getting an appendage slammed in the turbolift door. I laugh just thinking about that. Seriously. Watch the show. Without the kids.

Can Someone Say "Lawsuit"?

At Media Play tonight, we bore witness to a harried mother trying to drag her son--I'll guess he was about 6 or 7 years old--away from the playing with the PlayStation 2. After the mom peeled her kid away from the game demo, I happened to glance down at the game that was in the console. They were demoing NanoBreaker by Konami. I cannot speak to the content of NanoBreaker, as I have not personally played it; however, the story is apparently that you are a cyborg fighter trying to slay the nanomachines that harvest human blood. The game is rated M (Mature), a rating roughly analogous to an R rating for a movie. In the words of the ESRB, "content may be suitable for persons ages 17 and older." Content descriptors for NanoBreaker indicate that the M rating is for blood and gore and violence. If the screenshots with that link are any indication, they're not just blowing smoke.

Now, I am all for letting video game developers (and movie producers, etc.) create products with as much blood, gore and violence as they deem necessary. Game developers will put out games they think they can sell, and there are people who enjoy a good polygon hack-and-slash. People are free to not purchase those games that they find objectionable. However, on purely a practical level, stores are getting sued for selling M-rated games to 16-year-olds. Wouldn't someone think that having an M-rated game playing in the demo consoles where any unsupervised 5-year-old can pony up to the controller might just be a bad idea?

Loonatics

Jerry Beck says the best thing I've heard yet about Loonatics, the forthcoming project out of Warner Brothers cartoon studios with characters that appear to be some sort of manga spawn of Bugs, Taz, Daffy, Wile E. Coyote, Roadrunner, and Lola. Warning: he says it with some grown-up language, but we are all grown ups here. He has a point: the more we object to Loonatics--one blog even implied the new show would be a war crime under the Geneva Conventions--the more we encourage WB to keep milking the creative genius of dead animators instead of creating a set of characters for our generation.

On a personal level, I find it at least irritating when studios take established properties and "remake" them by creating what is essentially an entirely new property that is at best loosely related to the original, with the name of the old one. Oftentimes, they don't even give us that. For all they know, the new property would succeed on its own merit and find an audience, but that is risky. Slapping the name of an established property on the project guarantees press and an audience, at least until we realize one has been put over on us, but by then we realize the new property is pretty good and we keep watching or reading. Being tricked into watching makes me resent a perfectly good story.

Related: when the studios "re-imagine" a property and try to convince us they didn't. Harris did it with Vampirella, my bar-none favorite horror magazine from the '60s and '70s, where she was an alien vampire/magician's assistant. They created Vampi, which they try to bill as a "completely separate character" from Vampirella, even though they admit Vampi and Vampirella have "the same general abilities and motives." They forgot logo in that list, but apparently giving one character a more futuristic costume and gadgets and shaving 10 years off the age makes it a "completely separate character."

Reader Poll

We're gearing up for the move, and I'm making an inventory of things we will be moving ourselves and not letting the movers anywhere near. On the list are things we will need immediately upon arrival, like a roll of TP and the cats' litter boxes. Also on the list are our absolutely irreplaceable items. Felix* tops that list, of course. Here is where the reader poll comes in. How bad is it, really, that I just noticed that I seem to have put the sketchbook on the list of irreplaceables and left off the wedding album? Current contents of the sketchbook include original art from Sergio Aragones, Monty Moore, Joe Corroney, Frank Cho, Jeff Smith (no relation, Becca), Mike Deodato, Jr. (whose official site is in Portuguese, so good luck with that link), and a lot of people you've probably never heard of, assuming you have heard of any of those. The wedding album, on the other hand, contains the snapshots of us getting married at the Douglas County Courthouse, and somewhere, we have the negatives.

*- for those of you who may have just joined Penguin Perspectives, Felix is our dearly departed cat.

Something to Chew On

So the National Hockey League has cancelled the 2005 hockey season. This did not keep Electronic Arts from releasing NHL 2005, which in all fairness was released well in advance of the season cancellation. However, a video game capitalizing on a nonexistant sports season is not the most irony-laden part of this whole situation. The NHL is so good at licensing ancillary products that the actual playing of a season of professional hockey has become unnecessary. G4, the tech/video game cable channel, is playing through the now-defunct 2005 hockey season on the EA game. Fans can follow their team through the virtual season. The only difference is instead of actual hockey players and ice, we have gamers on Playstation 2s.

I don't know squat about hockey, but it appears that the hypothetical Pittsburgh Penguins are not doing well at all. At least that's how I am interpreting a 17-31 record with 5 ties.

Slow News Day?

Actual headline: New York's Celebrity Bird Couple is Seen Mating
The news: Birds of prey have sex

Who would have thought hawks would do something so outrageous as mating, and during mating season, no less.

Art, Schmart

A guy actually put orange drapes up in Central Park. There is even a live Central Park Curtain Cam, I guess for those of us who can't get there to see them in person. I'm not sure anything more needs to be said here.

Phishing Trip

I just got my first phishing email. You would think with three email addresses, I would have been pegged before now, but I've gotten lucky. This particular phish was requesting that I confirm my account details for my Washington Mutual account, or else they would have no choice but to suspend my account. In addition to the helpful hints Washington Mutual provides on its website to help its customers avoid being taken by the phishers, there were several tipoffs that this email was a blatant scam.

1. "Washington Mutual" was contacting me by email about my account.
2. They threatened to close my account if I failed ot respond to one email.
3. No legitimate bank makes you confirm your personal account details on a non-secure website. I'm not sure any make you confirm your account details online at all. What is with this "confirming" thing, anyway?
4. The web address text they used for the link, which appeared to be a legitimate Washington Mutual website, was not the address you would get to if you clicked on the link, which was on some random alphanumeric domain.

and most telling of all:
5. I do not have an account at Washington Mutual.

Stupid Telemarketer Tricks

We're on the Do Not Call list, but that doesn't apply when I have a "business relationship" with the telemarketer, which means I get periodic rashes of phone calls from my credit card companies wanting to sign me up for this that and the other. They are very persistent and even when I don't answer the phone, the ringing breaks my train of thought. I finally decided today that the only way to get 888-872-2629 to quit calling me four times a day was to answer the phone and blow them off. The person on the other end--who could not have been calling from a center in Bangladesh because her English grammar wasn't that good--wanted to let me know of "a few benefits that the company is offering cardholders now that were not available when you got the card, and we just need to confirm your address and the spelling of your name." How stupid do they think I am? They know my name and address. The credit card company sends me a bill every month and reports my every sneeze to the credit bureaus. You don't just loan people money without some idea of where to look for them to get it back

Survey Sez...

Here's the results of a survey that might interest those of you who doubt people's sincerity when they say they prize a sense of humor in a mate. You know who you are.

A Lot of Generalizations

Elie and I don't celebrate Valentine's Day, which may surprise some people who know us. As one of my coworkers said today, "You don't celebrate Valentine's Day? Well you've only been married a few years [4 1/2 for the record--JH]. Check back with me in another 15." Elie and I are not that type of morally superior couples you find who have the attitude "well, maybe you need Valentine's Day to show your love, but we don't need a special day," or more nicely "every day is Valentine's Day for us." Those people annoy me. Elie and I are generally considered to be the most romantic couple that our friends know, and even we have our off days--sometimes up to off weeks. No one is as happy and blissfully in love every minute of every day as those couples try to make it seem.

I really am not one of those "Bah Humbug" anti-Valentine's Day people. I don't think Valentine's Day should be banned; I don't think it is any more of a Hallmark Holiday than birthdays, Mother's Day, Father's Day, Thanksgiving, or Christmas; I don't think it is a great conspiracy of the florists and candymakers (particularly since the festival predates both); I especially don't think that non-coupled people should feel like they're missing something on Valentine's Day, any more than Gentiles should feel like they're missing something on Sukkot. I actually think it is great that couples celebrate Valentine's Day, not just because it is a day to remind people to appreciate their loved ones. Well, actually I find it more amusing. We tart the day up with cupids and cards and notions of romance and love, but at the core, it is the one day a year where the whoring is right out there in the open. The whole concept of the day is really a tit-for-tat (pardon the unintentional crass pun). Guy gives girl chocolates, flowers, nice dinner out, and/or sparkly things, and if girl decides the presents are good enough, she gives him what he wants. On any other day of the year between strangers, that would be a misdemeanor.

I'm not meaning that as a negative thing. The fact is, Valentine's Day just compresses the fundamental dynamic of human relationships until you can actually see it happening in a 24-hour period with a tangible exchange. One of the fundamental principles that keeps society going is that we give others what they want in order to get what we want. I think society would be better off if we had more holidays that, even tacitly, acknowledged that that is what people do. We would be even better off if we did not have to hide it behind all the cutsey hearts, but that's not likely.

Study Findings

Finally, a scientific study that explains why I can't swing, musically speaking. Unfortunately, it does not explain my complete and utter lack of rhythmic ability. That's another study.

FAQs

Over at the Selective Service's website, Elie found perhaps one of the most bizarre Frequently Asked Questions ever. Second from the bottom of the list: "How does the Military Selective Service Act apply to individuals who have had a sex change?" I have to wonder just how frequently that question is asked. In case you were wondering, whatever one's current gender, if one was born male, one must register with Selective Service. Apparently there is an exemption one can file in the event one is called up while female.

Did we learn nothing from Prohibition?

North Dakota is trying to legislate out something called Power Hour drinking, in which incredibly stupid people turning 21 hit the bars at midnight and try to down 21 shots before the bars close at 1 a.m. North Dakota's strategy: make it illegal for bars to serve alcohol to anyone until 8 a.m. on their 21st birthday. Now, as stupid as trying to down 21 shots in an hour is, the legislature's proposed solution is only slightly less moronic, and then only because passing the law, in and of itself, will probably not kill any of the legislators.

Why this will not work:
As it is now, the stupid 21-year-olds try to down 21 shots in the first hour that it is legal for them to drink. At the moment in North Dakota, the soonest they can do that is midnight on their birthdays. If the proposed solution goes through, the soonest 21-year-olds can drink would be 8 a.m. on their birthdays. Is anyone in the North Dakota legislature really naive enough to think that their solution will do anything besides move the practice to 8 o'clock in the morning? Face it. There is a certain segment of the population that finds the concept of getting falling-down drunk appealing, and will attempt to do this in public as soon as legally possible. Changing the time that it is legally possible will not alter this. For the record, in the interest of full, I spent my 21st birthday perfectly sober and moving between apartments, and I do not understand the appeal of being drunk. I have been drunk once, when I was 18, fully supervised by my then-brother-in-law, just to see what it was like. To save any of you the trouble, it feels like having the flu and salmonella poisoning at the same time.

A much better solution to the 21-year-old Power Hour Drinking Problem:
Instead of basing the ability to get falling-down drunk on the time of day of date of birth, try curbing the amount of alcohol any person can legally consume in a bar in a given hour. Sure the 21-year-olds are the vanguard of the stupid drinkers, but excessive drinkers come in all ages. Downing 21 shots in an hour requires, by my count, roughly one shot every three minutes. Bartenders have GOT to notice someone drinking that fast. Now, to limit the amount of alcohol a person can consume in a bar in an hour, one must balance the rights of the bar owner to do business against the public safety concerns involved in the sort of binge drinking we're trying to eliminate. 21 shots in an hour is obviously excessive and in most realistic scenarios at least unhealthy if not outright fatal. Where to draw the line, then? Ten shots in an hour is enough to get the average person more than drunk, and limiting a person to 10 in an hour would require 21-year-olds to stagger to at least 3 bars in an hour while still averaging a shot every 3 minutes. This level of bar-hopping is probably not outside the realm of the possible, but it would make 21 shots in an hour a whole lot more difficult, and give a chance for the intoxication from the first 4 or 5 shots to show up by the time the idiots find a bar to get the 21st one at. Limiting to 9 in an hour would even make that 21st shot less of a holy grail, since they would have to find a bar to serve the last 4 shots, rather than the last 1.

See? Much more elegant solution that does not rely in infantilizing a very narrow swatch of the people who probably could use some infantilization. If the problem group is the intersection of 21-year-olds and binge drinkers, doesn't it make more sense to target binge drinkers than 21-year-olds? After all, being 21 years of age in and of itself is not a public health hazard; binge drinking is.

More on the Last Link

In his entry on the Name Voyager site, ME says he didn't particularly notice trends linked to the infamy of celebs, though he did not discount the possibility. I, too, did not find any trends related to celebrities--the precipitous decline of Bruno actually slowed somewhat in the 30s, in spite of Bruno Hauptmann. However, there was an interesting correlation with non-human pop culture icons. Kermit drops completely off the map in the 70s, when The Muppet Show debuted. Bambi actually started to register on the top 1000 baby names in the 40s, after Disney released Bambi in 1942.

Name Game

This link (thanks, ME), goes a long way in explaining why I've never met anyone else my age with my name--unlike my high school biology classmates, a full 20% of whom were named Russell. On the rare occasion where I have met another Janet, she has tended to be around 15-30 years older. That link is a fun little java application that lets you peek into the history of a name's popularity. According to their charts, my parents gave me my name right about the time its popularity was not just waning, but plummetting, down about 90% from its peak in the 40s.

Spam

Somehow, I doubt that "hotcaramelchoco" really has [IMPORTANT] News About My Mortgage Application. Call it a hunch, particularly since I have no recollection of the email this is ostensibly a reply to. Even if he/she did have important news about my mortgage application, which is being taken care of totally offline, I question why Hotcaramelchoco is sending this important information in bulk. Just how stupid do the spammers think I am?

Acronym Acrimony

The government has an aversion to spelling things out--not just in the sense of being transparent about operations, but typographically. The feds love their acronyms. They used to stick to whatever letters happened to go with the words, so we got things like the WPA and some slight confusion over whether DoE is the Department of Energy or the Department of Education (the latter is ED in official contexts). Sometimes the name of the program created some unintentional humor when it spelled out something that could be pronounced, like WAC or COD (Common Origination and Disbursement, an administrative feature of the federal student aid programs). I imagine this is why the Department of Homeland Security is not abbreviated with the lowercase o like many of the other cabinet-level departments--otherwise the DHS would be the DoHS, and Simpson jokes would abound.

We've been at this government thing for 216 years now, and all I can figure is the government is running out of permutations of the 26-letter alphabet in the 2-4 letter range, as there are only just under a half million of those and they would have had to hold it down to about 6 acronyms a day. The acronyms seem to be going longer now, so the acronym-makers have to make them pronounceable or the long string of letters starts to get unwieldy. I submit as evidence the non-government NCBTMB. Lately, though, the government seems to be going further and, rather than making pronounceable but nonsensical acronyms, they're making them standard English words. Sometimes long words. As much as I dislike the USA PATRIOT Act and the syntax that brought us that particular acronym, my hat is off to whoever came up with the phrase Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism. I'm pretty sure the legislators had some help coming up with that one.

This brings me to my point--you didn't think this was just a random rambling on government's propensity to abbreviate, did you? I am plotting out my next novel, to be drafted in March. L. Sprague de Camp's great advice in writing speculative fiction was to only change one major thing (makes it easier on the reader), so I am writing what I hope will become a series of novels that spring from making one basic change to society and following the logical consequences into the future. The change I am focusing on for this book, which was actually alluded to in the last one, is that the government eliminates unemployment and welfare programs and uses those funds to encourage job creation in the private sector by subsidizing part of a worker's salary in positions that the private sector creates, making it cheaper to create jobs. So my quandary is that I am trying to come up with a snappy government-type acronym for the program. So far, the best I can come up with is the National Employment Expansion Drive Jointly Operated to Benefit Society (NEED JOBS). I'm not particularly fond of that, even though it was three days' work coming up with it. Anyone have any thoughts on improving the acronym?

What a Difference a Dyson Makes

It's not every day that a vacuum cleaner completely changes the way I look at my home. Then again, yesterday was not every day.

After 8 apartments, the old Hoover Dimension finally died. Perhaps we should have waited a decent interval for mourning a vacuum that had crossed the country twice, but we went right out and replaced it with the Dyson DC-07 Animal, billed as "The most powerful upright for pet hair." That's a big selling point for someone with 2 longhaired cats and nigh on 2 1/2 feet of her own hair (also a shorthaired cat and shorthaired husband, who do not contribute much to the overall interior furriness). I forgot how beige my carpet is until I set the Dyson on it. I vacuumed regularly with the Hoover, but one pass with the Dyson and the carpet actually changed color with the layer of grey and black cat fur gone. This vacuum sucked up six, count 'em SIX vacuumfuls of hair, fur, and carpet dust off just the living room and bedroom floors. Not only that, but by the time we were done, the brush was absolutely packed with my hair--which you may recall was the Roomba's undoing earlier--and this thing never stopped sucking up the dirt and fur.

My carpet looks new. I had to clean the rest of the apartment because all the clutter that was OK with grungy carpets now makes the place look messy and is just wrong with nice clean carpets. I can't be certain, but I think the Dyson may be turning me into a clean freak. Check back on that one.

Another Headline I Couldn't Make Up

From Reuters: Pope Suspected of Lip Syncing. Actually, that isn't the headline they use, but they do insinuate that John Paul II pulled an Ashlee Simpson.

American Pie

Come to think about it, Don McLean seems strangely prophetic. If you haven't listened to the full 8-minute cut of "American Pie" lately, somewhere around verse 3, the song muses "When the players tried to take the field, the marching band refused to yield. Do you recall what was revealed the day the music died?" I think we all now recall that what was revealed was a mammary gland, though halftime music arguably died long before that.

This op-ed from the CSM has an elegant solution for Superbowl-wardrobe-malfunction-phobia: give halftime back to the marching band. It could work. The few marching bands I've seen are all more musically adept and have better choreography than anyone in the last few Halftime Extravaganzas.

Halftime Show

Reuters reports Paul McCartney has promised not to expose his breasts at the Superbowl halftime show tomorrow. Really.

In other news, turns out Bat Spit may have more uses than being my generic name for any backwater town. A trial of a drug derived from vampire bat spit shows promise for restoring blood flow to the brain after a stroke. So you have a better chance of surviving, but you'll never be able to eat garlic bread again.

More Stupid Food Labels

Since the tale of the worst box of doughnuts in recorded history interests no one, here is another installment in the Stupid Food Labels. From Ann O., off the back of the Cheez-it box.

"Anatomy of a Cheez-it: texture edge) No slip grip: helps you grab more in every handful. (hole) Air Intake: Improves aerodynamics during periods of rapid cheez-it consumption. Surface dynamics: Bumpy, crispy, crunchy, utterly satisfying." and down in small print, "These qualities make cheez-its fun but do not suggest any serious product performance claims."

Performance claims? This is a cheese cracker, not a turbocharged V-8. Who has performance expectations from a lump of refined carbohydrates and dehydrated cheese? I expect that it taste vaguely of artifical cheese and absorb soup broth.

It's a banner day for cheese-related stupidity. I also noticed this boldface warning on my 8-ounce brick of marble cheddar cheese: "Contains milk." Now, I've taken the Tillamook Cheese Factory tour and have a nodding acquaintance with how cheese is made. Cheese pretty much is milk. If cheese does not contain milk, it is not cheese. That is why the cheese is in the dairy case. Anyone who does not realize that cheese contains milk deserves whatever bloated, lactose intolerant reaction they get. I must admit, though, this is a step up for stupid food labels. At least now they are certain my cheese contains milk. My wheat germ still only may contain wheat.

Everyone on the Road Is an Idiot...

...and we have the research to prove it. A study from the University of Utah shows that 18-25 year olds on cell phones and 65-74 year olds not on the phone are 18% slower in braking (slower than what is not mentioned in the article). Norwegian researchers have found that dyslexics had 30% slower reaction times when driving than non-dyslexics in a small study. And the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration reports that 1.5 million people were arrested for drunk or drugged driving in 2002, which works out to 1 in every 130 licensed drivers.

So it's official. You aren't imagining things. No one on the road knows how to drive.

Two Notes on the State of the Union

1. To whoever was sitting behind and to the First Lady's left: Fishnet pantyhose are acceptable attire if you are going to a costume party or are renting out your body. For a Presidential address before a joint session of Congress, particularly if the seating arrangement assures maximum TV exposure of you from the knee down, go for solid hose in a nice neutral tone.

2. To the President: when you begin by addressing "fellow citizens," please remember that includes people in their 20s, even if none of us are in the room at the time. Those big cameras pointed at you are piping the address straight into our TiVos, and no matter what you may hear, some of us do pay attention. More of us would probably pay attention if you at least pretended to talk to us. Try addressing me directly, not talking to my parents about the need to fix Social Security so it will be around for my generation. My parents are not paying into my IRA; I am. I thought I was at least a decade beyond having to feel like someone is saying "Shush! The grownups are talking." What he actually said was

I recognize that 2018 and 2042 may seem like a long way off. But those dates are not so distant, as any parent will tell you. If you have a 5-year-old, you're already concerned about how you'll pay for college tuition 13 years down the road. If you've got children in their 20s, as some of us do, the idea of Social Security collapsing before they retire does not seem like a small matter. And it should not be a small matter to the United States Congress

Let me say that those dates aren't so distant, as anyone in their 20s planning a stable retirement will tell you. In 2018, I'll be 40, and in 2042, I'll be 64. I'm old enough to be concerned about my own retirement, thank you, and would like to at least nominally be included in the discussion. I find it very patronizing to listen to the President talking about the obligation to the children and grandchildren when I'm probably younger than a lot of their children. I graduated from the kiddie table a long time ago. I'd like to be able to sit with the grownups and talk about things that impact me personally.

Survey Sez...

Word from the Groundhog is six more weeks of this winter stuff. I'm holding him to that. I want all this snow and ice and associated ick gone by March 17. Here's the official proclamation out of Punxsutawney from the Father of all Marmota (man, he is one busy groundhog!).

I'm not sure I want to know what the deal is with the young women in bikinis, or the half naked guy standing on Gobbler's Knob (site of the groundhog reading) behind the guy in formalwear with the really big pocketwatch. When did Pennsylvania in early February become the pregame show for Spring Break in Ft. Lauderdale? Also, when did real news start bumping Punxsutawney Phil off the news pages? I actually had to go to groundhog.org today to find this. You'd think the President was making a speech, or the Pope was in the hospital, or some would-be democracy just held its first elections or something.

Gorilla Suitor

Happy National Gorilla Suit Day. Things are pretty quiet around here. I'll try to find something interesting to talk about tomorrow.

Recommended Reading

I just picked up Uncle John's Presents... Book of the Dumb 2, one of this year's releases from the Bathroom Readers Institute. This is a book chock full of Grooisms, guaranteed to make anything you've done seem positively brilliant by comparison. Hey, I may have superglued my pantyhose to my leg, but at least I've never stuck a lit cigarette lighter under my bed with all the flammable box springs and dust bunnies, inadvertently lighting the house I am renting on fire. Suddenly the lobster fork incident doesn't seem so bad.

By the way, I heartily recommend the entire Uncle John series. They're books of 1-5 page articles on pretty much any subject you can imagine. Book of the Dumb 2 is devoted entirely to stupid things people have done, but there are 17 Bathroom Readers (put out each November) that cover a wide variety of general knowledge. There are also volumes devoted entirely to history, famous people living and dead, Texas, science, and the Presidency. And for those of you who, like me, can't wait a year between installments, there is Mental-Floss, a bi-monthly magazine. This month, they discuss the history of the paper clip.

From the Recipe Box

From the Hostess website, here's a recipe for anyone who has ever thought that the one thing that would make a Twinkie better is a bit of booze. The site also has a recipe for making Black Forest cake from Suzy-Qs and a snail and pond scene out of HoHos and caramels. There is such a thing as too much free time.

Must-See Movie

Of course I intend to go see Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith this May. If it turns out to be practical, I intend to go to the midnight showing. However, Star Wars is not the only must-see movie of the year. There's also one coming out this summer with penguins leading a zoo jailbreak and hijacking a ship, and as we all know, any movie that prominently features penguins is a must-see. I even sat through that Batman movie they let Tim Burton direct because it had actual live penguins in it, though they turned out to be the only redeeming feature of the film (and I was not fooled for a minute by the little people in penguin suits!). Here's a link to the trailer for my #2 movie pick of the year, Madagascar, the movie that promises to have the best animated penguins since Mary Poppins.

Complaints, Complaints

Salon has a summary of the 36 complaints from the Parents Television Council that the FCC rejected. Several are tasteless, but I wouldn't call them obscene.

10 were solely over the use of the word "dick," and all as insults, not anatomical references. OK, nine "dick" and one "dickhead." In eight of the ten incidents, it was a generic mild insult directed at a particular character, along the lines of "scruffy looking nerf herder." One instance was a play on the fact that "dick" is also slang for "detective." Only one involved a double entendre.

My personal favorite: the complaint about the phrase "invasive vaginal exam," in reference to an actual medical invasive vaginal exam.

Appliance Postscript

Who on Earth decided white was a good color for kitchen appliances? Of all the rooms in a house that should not be white.

Now I've Seen Everything

It's amazing what they're doing with household appliances these days. For instance, an oven/cooktop/fridge in one. I'll let you read that again so it sinks in. Whirlpool makes an oven that doubles as a refrigerator. Tell me there isn't a wasted step in there somewhere. And are you supposed to keep a box of baking soda in your oven now? The principle is that you put your casserole in the fridge/oven in the morning to keep the food all nice and safely chilled until the timer on the oven kicks in and cooks it so it's hot and ready when you get home. So much for hoping for the best, food-poisoning wise, with the time bake setting. Then again, I have a $30 crock pot that also lets me have a hot, home-cooked supper waiting when I get home from a long day. By my count, that saves me $1650.00. On the other hand, there's something to be said for a self-cleaning refrigerator, and that definitely solves the problem of cleaning out a sufficient hole in the fridge to thaw your turkey for Thanksgiving.

Whoops! There Goes Another $80 Billion

Why are we still funding our two wars with emergency appropriations? This is no longer an emergency. This emerged three years ago. We were there at the beginning of this fiscal year; odds are we'll still be there come the end of this fiscal year. The fact that we might need to fork over some cash to pay for it should not be a surprise.

I'm Sorry Dave. I'm Afraid I Can't Do That

Today we spent $50 to learn two very important related lessons about our computer.

Lesson 1
Windows automatically makes three users on the computer during setup: the user you set up with the computer and probably use daily, a guest user, and an administrator. The computer will automatically boot up with the user you created, but there are two others.

Lesson 2
The spyware/adware/virus checker will only check and destroy spyware/adware/viruses on the user you are currently logged in on when you sweep. If you only run them on what boots up when you hit the power button, the guck will either reinstall itself or just hide out.

So even though we diligently sweep our computer weekly, 63 pieces of adware/spyware/etc. were gumming up the works from the Administrator setting, a setting I did not realize we even had. In spite of what they think at work, I'm not really all that great with computers.

The final lesson for everyone, and use it freely since we paid for it: when you clean out your computer (as I'm sure we all do regularly), make sure you scrub all your computer's users.

If you already knew this, please don't make me feel any more stupid than I already do.

This Just In: FCC Grows Spine

So it comes out that there are broadcast decency standards, after all. After the nipple dust-up last year, I wasn't sure, but now I am. The FCC has denied 36 complaints from the Parents Television Council, concerning Friends, The Simpsons, and Gilmore Girls (3 shows I've not watched, so I can't speak to whether they might be objectionable or not), proving that the FCC has broadcast decency standards and some things really do fall within those standards. Turns out that the criteria for being obscene is more stringent than "someone who does nothing but watch TV all day waiting to get offended writes a letter to complain about it and has different people send it to the FCC 25 times." For a while there, I was starting to wonder.

Double Standard

Do you think that, when Merck pharmeceuticals was applying for over-the-counter approval for Mevacor, anyone wanted proof that having a cholesterol-lowering drug available without a prescription would not affect the way people ate? Did they even consider that easily-available cholesterol-lowering regimens might have people eating cheeseburgers dripping with mayonaise with a side of deep-fried pie on a daily basis and saying "Screw a healthy diet! Who needs to watch cholesterol intake? I can just pick up a pack of Mevacor and I'll be fine."

Mevacor had other, bigger, problems that will probably preclude OTC approval. Still, why are some now-prescription drugs subject to the "won't lead to people being more careless about their health" test during their OTC application and others get a pass?

And while we're on the subject of federally-required labelling and double standards, one of the standards for getting a prescription drug approved for OTC sales is that people can understand and follow the instructions on the label. On the other hand, they also require food labels to carry allergen warnings, even on the most obvious allergen-containing products or products where the allergen is clearly listed among the ingredients. Basically, the FDA assumes I am intelligent enough to understand "take one caplet every 8-12 hours...do not take more than 2 caplets in any 8-12 hours or 3 caplets in 24 hours" (actual dosing instructions on Naproxen), but not so intelligent that I understand that my peanut butter may contain peanuts, or my wheat germ may contain wheat, without a bold-type warning. Tell me that makes sense.

Survey sez...

All I intend to say about this article is that I am in no way surprised, just taking a little comfort that it is not unanimous yet.

The Otters Are Coming

This was news to me. Ohio is being overrun by river otters. To be fair, at the moment, Ohio is being overrun by rivers, with or without otters. In spring, the wildlife council will be taking up a proposal to allow trapping of the once-endangered animals that are now toeing the line between "critter" and "vermin." Until then, though, otter-trapping is still illegal, and to that end, the wildlife council has put out this brochure for beaver trappers. Along with the instructions on how to set beaver traps to avoid snaring otters, it includes a quick lesson in how to recognize otter puke. Never know when that's going to be a question on Final Jeopardy.

Phone Home

The penguins are not having a good day. First it was the icebergs blocking the way to the feeding grounds, now they've lost phone service. A communications satellite went missing and cut the link to Scott Base and presumably the nearby Adelie penguin rookery. No word on whether it also affected McMurdo, the American research base also on Ross Island.

The Math Doesn't Lie

If you're one of the many people around me who seem to be having a rough couple weeks, you can take comfort in knowing that math is with you. Someone at Cardiff University has developed a mathematical formula that pinpoints the worst day of the year. Turns out it's next Monday (appropriately, I have a staff meeting that day). So take comfort: we're almost through the worst part of the year, so after next week, it has to get better. Nice to know that the year hits bottom right away so we don't have to waste too much time on the craptacular.

On a related note, we never got the Killer Pointsettia this year. However, the spirit of the Killer Pointsettia has possessed the appliances at the office. Saturday, the fridge went. Since then, the fridge has taken the furnace and the clothes dryer down with it.

A Day For Everything

Happy Penguin Awareness Day. Don't forget there's only 11 days until National Gorilla Suit Day.

The Craw

This may open a big can of worms, but it's been stuck in my craw lately. In connection with a suit that was just heard in front of the Supreme Court, there has been more talk than usual about the role of mitigating circumstances in criminal prosecutions, particularly how evidence of mitigating circumstances might affect the sentence someone gets for committing a crime. I have a real problem stomaching the whole concept of mitigating circumstances (and, in a related note, "hate crimes" but we'll get into that).

The basic concept of the judicial system is that it should be fair. If justice isn't fair, we've got nothing (and yes I know there are problems). The fundamental principle of fairness is that everyone is treated the same, so two people who do the same thing should get the same sanction or reward. The reasons that a person does what he does has no bearing on the effect the action has on society, so the motives should not affect the consequences to that person. As an example, let's just say that two people each kill someone. One of the murderers has a low IQ, and one is of average intelligence (assuming both have been found competent). If mental ability is considered as a mitigating circumstance, the fact of the one person's low IQ may lead to a shorter sentence. Now, both committed the same crime; what is the logic of one being denied more freedom because he is smarter than the other guy? If the low-IQ person did not know that killing someone was wrong, that's all the more reason to impress upon him the lesson that it is. After the fact isn't the optimal time to start inculcating this, but if we haven't started before, we have to start sometime.

My biggest problem with mitigating circumstances is that they are rarely unique. More people than we want to think are abused as children. There are a lot of people who have mental illnesses or mental retardation (or whatever we're calling that today). Most of these people manage to lead, if not productive lives, at least non-destructive lives. In the case before the Supreme Court, one of the issues was that counsel failed to present evidence of a neglectful childhood in a bad neighborhood, or the man's diagnosis of schizophrenia. Utter hooey. How many schizophrenics are there who don't stab a person then light them on fire? My guess would be lots. Same with people who have tough childhoods. Jiminy crackers, most people have tough childhoods--some more so than others, but childhood is a tough time (for that matter, adulthood is no walk in the park either). Yet somehow most people manage to follow the rules.

From the "How Stupid Do You Have to Be" File

Pop quiz: you're on a top-rated nationally-televised TV show and win $1.1 million dollars, and are further paid $300,000 to co-host a radio program. Do you:
A. bask in the media attention that your winning makes and report the prize money on line 21 of your federal income tax return for that year as "other income."
B. Bask in the media attention and assume that no one at the IRS watches CBS or reads the news since they all live under rocks and can't get over-the-airwaves broadcasts of Survivor.

If you answered A, you agree with the Internal Revenue Service. If you answered B, you would have done what Richard Hatch, the winner of the first Survivor, did. As if it were not frightening enough that you would do something that a man who ate rats on national television did, you would also be facing 10 years in jail and a half million dollars in fines. For those of you keeping score at home, yes, this is how they got Al Capone. The principle is the same: if you can't nail him for sparking this whole Reality TV thing, nail him on tax evasion.

Good News

They've agreed to sell us the house. Barring a bad home inspection (and for everyone who's asked, yes, we've had every intention from the start of getting a thorough home inspection) or something unforeseen going awry with converting our mortgage preapproval into actual funds, the house is ours. Bad news: can't move in until mid-April, which may create a small employment gap.

Sure Beats Green Cheese

Seems Saturn's moon Titan has the consistency of creme brulee: soft and spongy topped with a thin, crispy crust. This, of course, leads me to contemplate other planet/dessert analogies.

Mercury: Swizzle sticks or rock candy
Earth: Caramel-filled cream puff
Io (one of Jupiter's moons): Cherries jubilee
Europa: Creamsicle
Pluto: Snow cone

Thanks

Thanks to everyone who expressed concern about my recent stretch of being smited. Things are looking much better now. Apparently whoever is in charge of the smiting has moved on.

Toil and Trouble

The last about week and a half has been a real doozie for me. Since my office's annual Christmas-to-New Year's hiatus ended, it seems like it has been one thing after another. No one big thing happened, but the accumulation of small and medium-sized circumstances has been wearying. By Monday night, I figured my run of crap had to be ending soon since these things can't go on forever. The cosmos had to be running out of things to throw at me--after all, it was starting to dip into the plot of a Seinfeld episode (they're funnier when they aren't happening to you).

Then I got the boil. At that point, I had to step away from the cranky, bummed out mood I'd been wallowing in for a week and laugh. Boils are just so cliche. Everything else I've been dealing with, then to develop the sixth plague? That's just phoning it in.

Speaking of plagues, I had to give you this link because I wouldn't have believed myself if I hadn't seen them: 10 Plague Plushies. I stumbled across it when I was looking for the plague number for boils.

More Statuary

So George W. Bush may be taking the Oath of Office behind Freedom's back, but he'll be facing down Peace when he does it. Peace, located in the traffic circle of Pennsylvania Avenue and First Street NW, across the lawn from the West Front of the Capitol, isn't as obvious as the 7 1/2-ton Freedom atop the Capitol dome. The Naval Monument, also known as the Peace Monument, depicts "Grief weeping on the shoulder of History, for her sailors lost at sea." Grief and History face away from the Capitol building, but on the base of the 44-foot monument, on the side of the base that faces the West Front of the Capitol is Peace.

Freedom may be looking away, but Peace is watching.

Behind Her Back

Every US President since Ronald Reagan has chosen to take the Oath of Office on the West Front of the US Capitol. According to the Capitol tour, this is more or less a pragmatic decision, as the West Front has more room for spectators than the East Portico, which is the formal ceremonial entrance to the building. However, the decision has a probably-unintended consequence that seems particularly salient these days. If you're going to put a statue on the dome of a building like the Capitol, you have to choose a direction for it to face, and the obvious choice is for the statue to face the formal front. Thus, the Statue of Freedom faces the East Portico, away from the West Front.

Next week, George W. Bush will take the Presidential Oath of Office behind Freedom's back.

I Couldn't Make This Up

Researchers have now trained rats to tell the difference between Dutch and Japanese. No, I'm not making that up. Well, actually it's not the same rat who can tell whether someone is speaking Dutch or Japanese. Different groups of rats were taught to respond to either Dutch or Japanese, and the Dutch-trained rats did not respond to Japanese and vice versa. To answer the obvious question of why anyone would train rats to recognize the difference between Dutch and Japanese, this is trying to track down what parts of language processing are uniquely human; I'm reasonably certain these researchers are not working on breeding a rodent translator.

Parents: This one seems ready-made for science projects. Pick up a bunch of rats and a tape deck and you're all set.

All Better

Fixed the typos in the last couple entries. Damn spell check. It's been a really off week, and it shows in the blogging. The details of the crapfest that is my week don't make very interesting reading, but I will say that the capper was having to fork over $90 today to have the Toyota service department tell me my car was almost out of gas. I love my Prius except for the digital gas gauge that is unreliable at best. Sometimes 5 bars out of 10 is a half tank left, sometimes it is a quarter. Apparently, this time 2 bars out of 10 was "empty." In my defense, my gas gauge had 2 bars left, which is often nearly a quarter tank, and if the WARNING! light hadn't come on when I tried to leave work, I was going to go straight to the gas station a half mile down the road.

Googlebomb

I've not been keeping a very close watch on the confirmation of cabinet appointees, so other than checking the progress on the headlines, I'm not as well acquainted with the Gonzales-for-Attorney-General story as I probably should be. As near as I can tell, we're looking to replace Scary-After-He-Got-The-Job-But-Pretty-Much-Just-Kooky-Before John Ashcroft with Scary-Even-Before-He-Has-The-Job-Which-Might-Be-A-Stepping-Stone-To-The-Supreme-Court Alberto Gonzales. Even with my limited following of the case, I'm seeing this as an overall bad idea that somehow is going to come to pass anyway. Some days, the whole political process seems to just go through the looking glass.

That said, I'm as eager to exploit the quirks of technology as the next person, and Google's technology is ripe for the pickings. The entire concept of Google searches is that it is completely automated, based on the number of links to a page from a given phrase. The more people link to a certain page using certain words, the more relevant the Googlebots think that site is to that phrase. For instance, I would make a link with the phrase "Monterey Bay Penguin Cam," like so, that leads you to the webcam in the Monterey Bay Zoo penguinarium. The Googlebots chalk that link up as one more vote for that site being relevant to the phrase "Monterey Bay Penguin Cam." Now, if you were to go to Google's homepage and do a search for "Monterey Bay Penguin Cam," you're more likely to come up with that site (don't bother, it's already the top site). Now, the Achilles heel of this plan is that the Googlebots assume I will direct you to the webcam in the Monterey Bay Zoo penguinarium with that link and not, for instance, a site on how to grow mulch at home or even the penguin cam at another zoo. Googlebombs exploit that Achilles heel to make a statement by having a whole bunch of people, usually bloggers, use the same phrase to link to the same site. The latest Googlebomb is the attempt to highlight Alberto Gonzales' history with regards to the legality of torturing detainees by making this White House site appear when someone searches for "Tortured logic." That's my contribution right there.

Here's the irony of the whole concept of Googlebombing: It distorts the results of a Google search, and you can't effectively googlebomb without blogs, yet Google owns one of the more popular blogging services. Another thing goes through the looking glass.

Objection Overruled, but Heard

Well, the challenge to Ohio's Presidential vote managed to go forward. Nothing changed, and the vote was certified, but at least the Congress was forced to go through the motions of pretending to acknowledge that a few things might have gone awry with our wonderful democracy. Senator Barbara Boxer of California ended up being the one who allowed the objection to be heard. The Reuters story is here.

I never really expected either of the Ohio senators, the ones I wrote to last night, to be the ones who stood up to support the objections. Most of the time I write to my legislators, I do it knowing full well they're not going to do what I want. In this political climate, getting a legislator to change an established position on an issue falls on the difficulty meter somewhere near splitting the atom with a ginsu knife. Since these legislators will not likely change their minds, it sometimes feels good to remind them their constituents have a variety of positions. At the very least, it makes me feel better.

So It's Going to Be One of Those

We'll skip the part where I had to chip a quarter-inch layer of ice off my car to come to work this morning and what happened once I got there, and go straight to the part where I was trying to order more 1098T forms fromt the IRS and after being on musical hold for 10 minutes, the IRS hung up on me. That's just the latest in what promises to be a craptastic day.

Set your TiVo and Call Your Senator

Set your TiVo to C-Span. Tomorrow at 1:00 p.m. Eastern time, a joint session of the US House of Representatives and the US Senate will convene to receive and consider the Electoral College votes in the recent Presidential election. At that meeting, Representative John Conyers (D-Michigan) intends to stand and object to the vote count in Ohio, based on several irregularities he outlines in this Status Report of the House Judiciary Committee (sure, it's 102 pages long, but the investigation found a lot of problems). However, due to the vagaries of the rules for Congressmen addressing the Senate, one senator out of a hundred must agree to give him the floor. Now, last election, no Senator agreed to do this for any of the many Representatives who wished to object to the Florida vote.

We have less than 14 hours to press one senator--again, it only takes one--into agreeing to let Representative Conyers be heard. Fortunately, we live in the electronic age, and every Senator has a convenient web form for fielding comments from constituents. Contact your senator is as easy as 1-2-3-4-5-6:
1. Go to www. senate.gov
2. Select your state from the drop-down menu
3. Click on a Senator's name
4. Find the "Contact" link on his/her website
5. Fill out the web form with your name, address, phone number, email, and comment
6. Click "Submit Form"
7 (Bonus Step). Repeat Steps 3-6 for your other Senator

Here's the text of the letter I sent to my two Senators. Please feel free to use it as inspiration, but Senate Staffers can sniff out a form letter, so when you write, please use your own words.

Dear Senators Voinovich and DeWine,
It has come to my attention that Thursday at 1:00 p.m., Representative John Conyers of Michigan will stand before you in the Senate and object to the vote count in Ohio, requesting that each and every ballot cast in Ohio in the last Presidential election be counted. According to the rules of your body, he requires the support of only one Senator for this objection to be heard.
I urge you to agree to allow him to have the floor. The idea of having every vote in an election is the foundation of American democracy, and Representative Conyers will come before you to advance that ideal. He must be allowed to speak. Is the idea of having every vote count so dangerous that the very discussion of it must be squelched?
For the sake of the credibility of the entire American government both at home and abroad, please be the one to stand up and permit Representative Conyers to speak Thursday.
Thank you.

You can read Michael Moore's open letter on the subject here. If we all get together and inundate our Senators with requests for this to be heard, maybe we can yet salvage the spirit of democracy in our republic. If we can get it straight here, then maybe there's a chance in certain other parts of the world where we are trying to instill democracy with a fair election. I seem to recall somewhere is doing that at the end of this month.

Irrelevant Gloating

Looks like I was right. We're watching the director's commentaries on the original Star Wars trilogies, and I was right. In this entry, I postulated that Darth Vader does not kill Obi-Wan Kenobi at the end of Star Wars: A New Hope, and that the reason Obi-Wan, Yoda, and Anaken disappear while other Jedi do not is that Obi-Wan and company don't actually die. Rather, they choose that moment to become one with the Force. In the audio commentaries to A New Hope and Empire Strikes Back, George Lucas makes a point of saying that Obi-Wan does not die--going so far as to backpedal and correct himself when he talks about "Obi-Wan's death"--and he mentions that a theme in the prequel trilogy deals with ascending to the Force. I'll add to my theory that Qui-Gon can be heard but not seen after his death because, though he was killed in battle, much is made that Qui-Gon is more in tune with the Living Force than most other Jedi, so my guess is he is sort of partially ascendant even before he dies.

So there. I was right. So the Jedi disappearing thing is not one of the vital questions of human existence, but nonetheless, I got it right. In four and a half more months when Revenge of the Sith comes out, everyone is going to know, so I don't have much more time to revel in having figured it out myself before everyone else knows what I know now.

Bad Start

Kelly Freas and Will Eisner in the space of three days. This is not starting out to be a good year for comic book artists, particularly in the area of remaining alive.

Crochet Chaos

My grandmother taught me to crochet starting, at my recollection, when I was about 5 or 6. She can do wonders with a skein of yarn. I still have an afghan, a pillow doll, and (I'm not making this up) a purse that folds out into a bassinet for a kewpie doll, complete with matching doll afghan, all of which she lovingly crocheted by hand. This is even more impressive when you consider that my grandmother has 10 grandchildren and what she made for me, she made nine more times over for my cousins.

I never picked up nearly that much skill with a crochet hook. I recall attempting a potholder that turned out to be less square-shaped and more resembling an irregular trapezoid with a lopsided rectangle attached. I can make hollow balls suitable for cat toys, but that's about as far as it goes. While many things I try to crochet tend to double as visual aids for discussions of entropy, they're nothing compared to Dr. Hinke Osinga's crochet pattern modeling actual chaos, created by a computer as an inadvertent byproduct of her studies of a set of math equations describing natural chaotic systems.

A Bear's Natural Habitat: A Studebaker

A Bear's Natural Habitat
Originally uploaded by Penguin Perspectives.

If you've seen The Muppet Movie, this should look familiar. That is Fozzie Bear's actual natural habitat, now ensconced in the Studebaker National Museum in South Bend, Indiana.

They had to use a Studebaker for that movie. "A Bear's Natural Habitat..." is just not funny with other car makes. Try it: Ford, Oldsmobile, Chrysler, Toyota, Honda, Kia, Huyndai--Studebaker is the only one that works. OK, Huyndai is kind of funny, but still not as funny as Studebaker.

Happy New Year

Happy New Year's and best wishes for 2005. I've already learned my first lesson: never buy nonalcoholic Spumante. Near-champagne may be near many things, but champagne is not one of them. I don't like the taste of alcohol, so I thought I would try Sutter Home Fre Spumante. Bad idea. It does not have "luscious fruity flavors balanced by zesty acidity" as the website advertises. The closest thing to flavor it has is a vague hint of watered down something, but after half a bottle, I still couldn't get enough flavor molecules to figure out just what was watered down. Next time I try to go for fizzy and festive, I'll go back to the sparkling apple cider.