| Friday, August 26, 2005 |
13:28 - Shut up, brain, or I'll stab you with a Q-Tip
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So I paid for my burrito today with a $20, and got back a $10 and some ones. I tossed what I thought was a $1 into the tip jar, but then the cashier sort of grinned sheepishly and asked me whether the $10 bill I'd actually thrown in there was a mistake or what. With much apology, I fished it out and replaced it with the $1 I'd meant to put in. "It's okay," he said, trying to ease my flusterment. "I know what you meant to do."
And that should be the end of it, right? You'd think so. All is well. Except for one thing: I know that this is going to show up in my dreams sooner or later. I'm going to be haunted by visions of me going to the ATM and finding huge holes in my bank account, and then turning around and having waiters and cashiers wearing top hats and monocles drive by me in Ferraris, waving happily. This is going to screw me up for weeks.
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| Thursday, August 25, 2005 |
10:44 - How does this thing work again?
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Geez, it's hard getting back into the groove of this blogging thing... especially when I'm still so burdened with the digital bauble-hoard from the trip that I haven't even unpacked yet.
But I was just wondering something, and yes I know it's petty and peevish, but hey, that's what this place is nominally for, so here goes: Why is it that almost without exception, people pronounce the first syllable of asphalt as ash?
Not a single dictionary definition I've found lists that as a valid pronunciation, but almost everybody I've heard say the word says it ashphalt. Even comedians from the 30s.
C'mon, people. English is having a hard enough time getting along with its words that are legitimately not pronounced as spelled. Or are we all just gluttons for punishment, craving irregularity and counterintuitiveness?
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| Wednesday, August 24, 2005 |
09:41 - Moving Very Slowly
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All the photos are recovered from the laptop now... yes, it took a long time, mostly because of other geekish emergencies I've been wrestling with ever since getting back, and also that whole "work" thing.
I've got 6,897 pictures in iPhoto now; 3,485 of them are from the Alaska trip.
I won't be posting all of them. I promise.
Teslin bridge at twilight
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| Saturday, August 20, 2005 |
10:32 - It's ending well, so it must be well
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I'm home now. Finished the last leg yesterday with a quicker-than-expected drive down from Yreka to my parents' place in Redwood Valley for the debriefing, and then a longer-than-expected drive down through the Bay Area (running into Friday night rush-hour traffic, a stern welcome back from the wilds of the North) to arrive in town two minutes after the car wash place closed.
I'll download the last GPS track log and set of photos now, and then begins the pleasantly absorbing task of stitching them together and touching up the photos for presentation. More—much more—later. Right now it's time for relaxation.
...And e-mail. 7,500 messages. And that's after SpamAssassin got through with it. (Mostly errors and bounces.)
Heh. Mighty Mouse, huh?
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| Thursday, August 18, 2005 |
06:00 - AUTO-POST: Here Comes Nothing
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Day 20, Thursday, 8/18: The rest of the trip is pretty much at our discretion. We could spend two leisurely days coming down 101, or we could barrel down I-5 and make it home around midnight. It all depends on how exhausted we feel.
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| Wednesday, August 17, 2005 |
06:00 - AUTO-POST: Stumbling Out of the Wilderness
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Day 19, Wednesday, 8/17: Back on good ol' BC 97, southbound this time, and riding it all the way to the junction with BC 99, the road that leads straight to Vancouver and the real world once again (though not before taking in Whistler, which as I understand it is to BC what Aspen is to Colorado). The night's destination can be anywhere in the Vancouver area, perhaps even as far south as Seattle.
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| Tuesday, August 16, 2005 |
19:19 - Reports of my becoming lost in the Yukon and being taken off to be raised by wolves are greatly exaggerated
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Hey, guess where I am? Hint: it's not actually any different from my plans. I'm in Williams Lake, BC, a few hours north of Vancouver.
We drove here straight from Prince Rupert, where the ferry dropped us off this morning at 6:15. Which means we caught the ferry from Juneau just fine, which means we caught the ferry from Skagway just fine, which in turn means we successfully made it from Valdez over the Top of the World Highway, spent a night in a tent on a bed of rocks in the middle of downtown Dawson City, and drove down to Whitehorse and through to Skagway through a pall of impenetrable forest fire smoke. All reservations at hotels and ferries were magically there waiting for us, and there were no problems of any note. Well, except that the "EPC" light came on on my dashboard just after we came across the border northeast of Chicken—the most remote possible location in the entire vacation, the place where I knew deep in my bones that if anything was ever to go wrong, that's where it would be. Fortunately, as we were frantically looking up the meaning of the EPC light in the manual (apparently it means the engine computer has malfunctioned and reset itself to a backup set of dilithium crystals with less power), it went off, a minute after it turned on and just as mysteriously. I'm thinking maybe it was a combination of the altitude, the smoke, and the dust from the road somehow choking the air mixture, but I can't confirm it. No recurrences since then, though, so that's cool at least.
The ferry ride was nice and relaxing, and sleeping on deck chairs in the solarium was actually really fun and quite comfortable—heat lamps hanging from the partial overhang roof, and lots of people to get to know and talk with for two days, really reinforcing the feeling of being a couple of bums slumming it across the planet on a budget. Given the cost of the tickets it's hardly accurate, but it's as close to the penniless-bearded-backpacker thing that I'm ever likely to get. Plus we got to commune with a grizzled old Alaskan native the whole time, which is something I was specifically hoping to get to do sometime this trip.
It's raining now (southern BC—surprise, surprise), and the grime of two and a half days of ferry rides is now washed off, so now it's time for some food.
Just a few more days and I'll be back in the land of the living—but ever since Prince Rupert it's felt like the real world again...
   
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06:00 - AUTO-POST: Land Ho
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Day 18, Tuesday, 8/16: The Yellowhead Highway (BC 16) inland through woods and coastal mountains to Prince George, a metropolis we missed on the way up. That's probably enough driving for one day.
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| Monday, August 15, 2005 |
06:00 - AUTO-POST: Arr, gettin' me sea legs, mateys
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Day 17, Monday, 8/15: The ferry makes quick one-hour stops at Petersburg and Wrangell and Ketchikan, finally arriving at Prince Rupert, BC, at 6:15 in the morning on the 16th. We wake up, fresh and bright and ready for another hard day of driving.
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| Sunday, August 14, 2005 |
06:00 - AUTO-POST: Skagway: Gateway to Juneau
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Day 16, Sunday, 8/14: The ferry leaves at 10:00 AM, so we have a little time to wander around Skagway and see the sights (or maybe sleep in). After that, the super-fast brand-new ferry heads down the Inside Passage to Juneau, which it reaches in 2.5 hours. We get off, eat lunch, and... meander around Juneau for the rest of the day, being one of the lucky few who has a car there. The next leg of the ferry sets sail at 1:15 AM, so we have to just wait for that rather than finding a place to sleep.
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| Friday, August 12, 2005 |
06:00 - AUTO-POST: Meet Me in Dawson City
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Day 14, Friday, 8/12: Not a lazy day! This may not even be physically possible, but the plan for this day is to drive up the Richardson Highway (Alaska 4) to where it joins the Tok Cutoff, then up to Tok and across it up into the interior on the Taylor Highway. The destination, after visiting Chicken and Eagle, is Dawson City, deep in the heart of the Yukon. It's not exactly in easy striking distance, but it's possible—the main worry is not getting over the border before the trailer hosting Customs closes up shop at 9:00 PM. If they do, though, we just head back to Tok and skip Dawson City.
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| Thursday, August 11, 2005 |
20:36 - Anchorage Aweigh
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Now we're in Valdez. Hooray!
Yesterday we did the Kenai Peninsula—a nice scenic drive down to Seward on the southern coast, and lunch at a place where the waitress seemed genuinely interested in making sure we got a good impression of the place (the chili burgers did a good enough job of that on their own).
Today we drove down Turnagain Arm again, went through the one-lane railroad/car tunnel at Portage Lake, and arrived at Whittier in time to check in at the ferry terminal, park our car in line in the boarding staging area, and get lunch at one of the cute little windswept food shops that make up the entirety of Whittier. Then it was the Alaska Marine Highway—the M/V Aurora—across Prince William Sound to Valdez. We saw quite a bit of wildlife, including sea otters and Dall porpoises, and lots of outstanding views of glaciers and steep wooded islands. It was pretty hazy, from a combination of the forest fires that have dogged us since Fairbanis, and general sea haze, so the air wasn't as clear as it could have been; but that was only a small drawback to what was otherwise a fantastic day. I don't think I sat down at all for the entire six-hour trip, I was taking so many pictures.
We're in the Best Western Harbor Inn, which had a one-star super-negative review on the hotel reservation site I used to book it a month ago; I have no idea what the reviewer was thinking, because this place is awesome. Wireless network, great harbor view, DVD player, soap dispensers in the shower, lavish decor, and a rate lower than we paid for our mediocre place in Fairbanks. I'm going to go issue my own review and see if it can override the older one.
Tomorrow is a long day of driving—the last big road adventure, a trip up to Tok (which we last saw a week ago) and beyond to Dawson City. We'll have to get up early for it. I'd also better call ahead and make motel reservations; Dawson City isn't a place I want to get marooned without a room.
Oh yes—quote of the day, from a couple of guys who seemed to be traveling together, in the Aurora's observation lounge:
"So the ferry system is owned by the state, then?"
"Yeah. But it's not the ferry system, it's the Alaska Marine Highway."
"It's a ferry system."
"It's the Alaska Marine Highway."
"It's a bunch of ferries."
"You're a ferry."
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06:00 - AUTO-POST: To ride the ferry cost a nickel; and in those days...
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Day 13, Thursday, 8/11: Alaska State Ferry across the Prince William Sound starting at Whittier (there's now a road sharing the railroad tunnel through the mountain—a one-lane affair that travels on the same surface as the train tracks, and they have to meter cars and trains through it in turns). It's a slow boat, and it lands at Valdez at 8:00 PM. Nice lazy day.
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| Tuesday, August 9, 2005 |
01:41 - "Clearer than I've seen it in weeks"
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I tell you, there's nothing quite like driving due north... into the setting sun.
Especially after spending the day seeing this:
The tour guide said Mt. McKinley yesterday was clearer than it's been in literally weeks—it's the first day that it's been unobscured by clouds. This is the view from Stony Hill, where our bus turned around (at mile 62 into the park).
Our tour bus—a vintage Blue Bird, perhaps from the original stable of buses my dad drove 33 years ago.
A caribou cooling his heels in Savage River.
Dall sheep on Sable Mountain.
Caribou wading across East Fork Toklat River.
Polychrome Pass. Don't let the foreground fool you—those flats behind me are about 1000 feet below the viewpoint. Maybe more.
Caribou on the Sable Pass hill, on the way back.
More caribou, part of a gathering of about nine that we found in the Teklanika River valley.
Ptarmigan near the group of caribou.
The real highlight of the tour: a lynx that was waiting right on the road near Primrose.
Denali from the south, on today's route from Fairbanks to Anchorage. Today was even more cloudless than yesterday.
Long shot of the McKinkey peak.
Wide shot from the Denali Viewpoint South.
Moose right at the side of the road in the Susitna Valley. She had a baby with her; we didn't hang around long.
Oh yes: before we leave Fairbanks behind for good... here's us driving due north, into the setting sun.
And now we're in Anchorage; who knows what tomorrow will bring...
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06:00 - AUTO-POST: Alaska's Heart and Soul
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Day 11, Tuesday, 8/9—Day 12, Wednesday, 8/10: Two days to take in the road down to Anchorage and the surrounding points of interest. Perhaps a side trip down the Kenai Peninsula, or just some resting and recuperation.
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| Monday, August 8, 2005 |
06:00 - AUTO-POST: Denali ain't just a river in Egypt
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Day 10, Monday, 8/8: Bus tour of Denali National Park, on what's as close as I can find to be the same tour that my dad used to drive back when he worked here.
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| Sunday, August 7, 2005 |
01:03 - Never thought a paved road could look so pretty
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Well, that's two mornings up at 5:00 for the Barrow day trip; this time, though, we successfully got on the plane and completed the flight and the tour and the flight back. And now, after a few photos from the Top of the World, to sleep.
Meltwater lakes on the approach to Barrow.
The Alaska Airlines terminal, Barrow. It's a whole airport all in one building.
Mmm. Snacks.
Our tour bus, parked outside the Arctic Pizza (recommended by our driver over the other two pizza places in town).
Inupiat native dance demonstration.
The traditional blanket toss. I'm over on the left.
Dipping into the Arctic Ocean. I took a rock home from the beach.
Beautiful downtown Barrow. That's the police station on the right (a.k.a "the Blue Hotel"), and there's a Wells Fargo with modern ATM and everything in the building off-screen to the left. Behind me is Pepe's, the northernmost Mexican restaurant ever.
Tomorrow: Denali (Mt. McKinley.
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06:00 - AUTO-POST: Whaddya do for fun in this town?
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Day 9, Sunday, 8/7: Puttering around Fairbanks. No distinct plans for this day. There's plenty to do in the area, though, so no getting bored allowed.
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| Saturday, August 6, 2005 |
20:41 - Plan B 1/2
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Okay, well, today was going to be Barrow.
We got up at 5:00 to be out and ready for the River's Edge Resort shuttle bus to the airport; we stood in line, got our tickets, went through the stringent security for this flight to the heavily guarded terrorism-prone metropolis of Barrow, got on the plane, and sat down... but unfortunately it turned out that the flight (it's on a 737-200 Combi, a half-passenger half-cargo plane with room for about fifty) had been badly oversold, and our seats were being occupied by some people who had been booked straight through from Anchorage to Barrow and been told that their seats would not change for this leg. We clearly had the more morally-superior seating arrangement, but when after a lot of fluttering and barking between flight attendants and booking agents it became clear that they could just put us on tomorrow's flight and get us in with the River's Edge tour that would occur tomorrow, we volunteered to give up our seats in the interest of getting the flight off the ground. They gave us vouchers for a free flight anywhere Alaska Airlines flies during the coming year, as well as getting us booked on tomorrow's equivalent trip; pretty sweet, since it meant we could just use today as the do-random-stuff-in-Fairbanks day and have tomorrow for Barrow after being nice and rested. Plus it was raining in Barrow today, and not being able to see the sun there seems like a disappointment. (Further inspection reveals that tomorrow will be even more rainy up there, so I guess that's not really an improvement. But oh well.)
So Fairbanks it was, today. The forest fires continue to blanket the valley with all-concealing haze, but it didn't interfere with such things as a trip through the University of Alaska Museum, with a lot of great human and natural history exhibits. We also ate at a Pho place near the hotel; you can find good Pho just about anywhere, it seems. We also did laundry and put the car through three successive washes, both pressure-hose and hand-administered, to try to get the bugs and dust off. They've both proved quite resilient. The car's in for a serious hand-wash once we get home. Other than that, though, it's behaved very well, the only exception being that the cruise control stopped working as we came across the Yukon/Alaska border two days ago; it came back to life after the car was shut off and restarted, though, so whatever that was about, it seems to be over now.
It'll be an early night tonight, as we're repeating this morning's exercise tomorrow. I'm sure it'll be worth it, though.
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06:00 - AUTO-POST: Hi! I'm knee-deep in the Arctic Ocean!
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Day 8, Saturday, 8/6: Early-morning shuttle to the Fairbanks airport to catch a 737 for a day-flight up to Barrow. It's all guided, and there's no relying on my own driving or anything. Top of the world, baby!
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| Friday, August 5, 2005 |
21:21 - A brief respite
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So here we are in Fairbanks. Right along with the schedule, too... even though the first couple of days of the Highway itself fell short of the pre-planned destination milestones, things worked out such that this last day of driving was nuthin'—just 200 miles of pleasant 65-mph forest speedway. Certainly a far cry from yesterday's trek from Teslin to Tok, much of which (from Haines Junction all the way to within miles of Tok itself) was under construction and seemed to have more stretches of gravel than of paved road. (Of course it wasn't, but time-wise it felt that way.)
By the way, behold the wildlife of the Yukon and northern BC! Setting out from Fort Nelson two days ago, we stopped at the sign for the Liard Highway turnoff to get a better photo with us in the picture; I set up the shot on a tripod so that I could use a fairly long lens, putting the car in the background about fifty yards away, and getting both Paul and myself into shot in the foreground along with both the signs. Just as we were ready to take the shot, I noticed a black bear walking across the road, between us and the car, which suddenly looked a lot farther away than before:
He disappeared into the brush, though, and we made it to safety without mishap.
Fairbanks is a pleasant large town or small city, depending on how you define it; nice long expressways, all the modern amenities including malls and multiplex theaters: a far cry from Whitehorse, whose Quanlin Mall—serving a town roughly the same size as Fairbanks—consisted of a drug store, a food store, a miniature Staples, three little mall-style shops, about six forlorn vacant storefronts, a single-stall open-door bathroom opening onto the general entryway, and several huge signs warning people against things like public drunkenness and spitting. Whitehorse didn't strike me as a very wholesome sort of town, and neither did Watson Lake; but other towns, like Fort Nelson and the little pit-stop villages like Teslin, seemed like little oases of down-home hospitality. Tomorrow we get to find out what it's like in Barrow, at the very top of the world, or as close to it as one can reach with any practicality.
The marathon of driving is over. We've got four nights here in Fairbanks, with Net access and everything, so more installments (and photos) will surely follow.
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06:00 - AUTO-POST: On Into Fairbanks
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Day 7, Friday, 8/5: The final stretch of the Alaska Highway, and the gradual return to civilization and settled land, finally ending in Fairbanks. Then an evening of well-deserved resting up.
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| Thursday, August 4, 2005 |
06:00 - AUTO-POST: Whitehorse, Kluane Lake, and Alaska at Last
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Day 6, Thursday, 8/4: The main attractions of this stretch include Kluane Lake, bordered by the Kluane Mountains, eastern outliers of the huge bunched mountains in Southeast Alaska, and where Mt. Logan (Canada's highest peak) is. Also lots of glaciers. I hope to make it across the border and into Tok on this day.
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| Wednesday, August 3, 2005 |
06:00 - AUTO-POST: Yukon Do It
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Day 5, Wednesday, 8/3: Several border crossings into the Yukon Territory; the Signpost Forest at Watson Lake; and woods and canyonland until we get to Whitehorse. Here I hope to find such niceties as an Internet cafe, there to update the blog and post a few photos and generally let everyone know I'm still alive.
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| Tuesday, August 2, 2005 |
23:54 - I'm in Fort Nelson! (Haw haw!)
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Dang, we're far up north!
This motel in Fort Nelson was such a great deal and so laden with amenities (including a comic-minded receptionist inclined to give us sidelong tips about connecting to the not-really-free Wi-Fi connection) that we couldn't pass it up; we'd hoped to get further tonight, but Fort Nelson is plenty of progress for one day since starting out from Grande Cache on Alberta 40, and we can fit the remainder of the Alaska Highway to Fairbanks easily into three days.
After setting out from Kelowna, we wound our way into Banff and Jasper; nothing could really prepare me for what we saw there, and words really can't do it justice. Not that I didn't try, in the written journal we're keeping. After that, we hit Hinton in remote prairie Alberta, then took AB 40 north to Grande Cache, through what turned out to be a stupendously pleasant scenic byway (I'd been leery of that road and pondering taking the long way around, via Edson and AB 43). Very glad to have stuck to the original plan!
Today we left Grande Cache, did the remainder of 40 (skirting the Rockies), passed through the farmlands of Grande Prairie and surrounding canola fields and elk ranches, and reached Dawson Creek by 11:00. Rain followed us throughout the journey from there to Fort Nelson. After checking in at this great motel, we did about five miles of the Liard Highway, enough to get photos and a feel for what it would be like to travel the remaining 70 miles over gravel and through rain to reach the Northwest Territories border. I'm afraid my brother will have to do with these photos:
  
I'd write more about this awesome little town and this phenomenal motel, but I think I'd rather enjoy the amentities than write about them. Catch you at the next wi-fi spot...
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06:00 - AUTO-POST: The Alaska Highway
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Day 4, Tuesday, 8/2: the Alaska Highway segment itself begins. After taking the obligatory photos at the Highway's starting cairn, off we go on BC 97 again (we could have followed it all the way up the center of BC, but then we'd have missed Banff and Jasper). It's anybody's guess how far we'll make it, but I like to think Fort Nelson is a good landmark for midafternoon. If there's time I want to take the gravel-surfaced BC 77 north for about sixty miles, there to take a picture at the "Welcome to the Northwest Territories" sign, and then head back. But if time is tight, that part can be skipped, I suppose. Back down to the Highway; I suspect the best place to spend the night will be a campground in the vicinity of Muncho Lake.
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| Monday, August 1, 2005 |
06:00 - AUTO-POST: Banff, Jasper, and Points North
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Day 3, Monday, 8/1: after stopping off at my company's building, there to wave at people who don't recognize me, we strike off north along one of the three branches of BC 97, taking the easternmost arm which joins Canada Highway 1 at Sicamous. This heads east into the Rockies: Glacier National Park, then Banff and Jasper (be sure to check out the satellite views of these). After spending the early afternoon driving north through the formidable valleys that make up these two parks, we cut east and then north on Alberta 40, before reaching Hinton. This road leads through some wild logging wilderness before finally dropping back down to the Alberta plains at Grande Prairie, where we turn west again and try to make it to Dawson Creek—the official start of the Alaska Highway—by nightfall. (If we don't, no big deal.)
(Addendum: just got word that the Kelowna office is closed today. Oh well. Maybe that means we'll have pressed on further than Kelowna for Sunday night.)
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| Sunday, July 31, 2005 |
23:41 - Greetings from Kelowna
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Well, here we are in Kelowna; we made it this far.
It's not without some adventures (naturally) and some misadventures (but of course). So far we've done 648 miles the first day and 690 the second; some of these distances right off the bat look like I bit off more than I could chew. And there have been a few logistical curveballs to fend off, too.
Day 1 began with Paul's lost suitcase, which we managed to pick up at the last minute with a swing past the airport; then "braunch" (brunch + launch) at my ancestral home in Redwood Valley (quite a spread put out by my folks). We made it to Klamath Falls without incident (except for an unaccountably hazy sky all the way north, tinging the sky a rusty brown), but the Crater Lake there-and-back run turned out to be a little on the tedious and long side (my dad had warned me, but did I listen? Nooooo). Crater Lake itself was marvelous, though—I hadn't seen it since I was a kid, and we got lots of photos just as the sun was setting, and the deep blues were all in evidence. We got back home late enough to scoop up great clouds of bugs in our radiator and across the windshield, and we got lost in the rather dreary downtown of Klamath Falls looking for our motel that we'd checked into earlier.
Today, we got off to a good start, enjoying the sequence of climate regions central Oregon has to offer: first high wooded desert, then rolling farmland, then high dry plateau country, all featuring panoramic view of the eerily regularly spaced Cascades volcanoes. I remember an old Indian story in a book on the Cascades I read as a kid in which two giants—Pahto and Wasco—fought over the hand of the young and beautiful giant Loo-Wit. The two burly giants threw smoke and fire at each other in a fierce battle until all three were turned into mountains: Mt. Jefferson (Pahto) to the south, Mt. Adams (Wasco) to the north, and Mt. Hood (Loo-Wit) in the middle, slender and graceful and equidistant between them. Looking at the three mountains stretched out over the horizon from the viewpoint on the high empty plains, it was wasy to see how the story came about, and easy to see the whole scene as a gigantic piece of geological theater for the benefit of any humans living in that particular area.
Anyway: we reached the Columbia River gorge and had Subway at the Biggs junction for lunch, then enjoyed a further variety of climatic regions throughout Washington: high woodlands, then bare canyons heading downhill to Toppenish and the fascinating Yakima valley; then up and over a hair-raisingly awesome view-laden freeway and into Ellensburg, then more wooded mountains (where we arrived on the scene of an accident moments after it happened—we joined a throng of about twenty people in a dozen parked cars helping a guy out of his car that he'd just driven off into a meadow and flipped over). The highway from the pass there went down in altitude so far we couldn't believe it—finally we reached Wenatchee and turned north into the stunning Columbia River gorge, which we followed north until it split into the Okanagan River branch, crossed the border, and led up into the Canadian resort towns of Penticton and Kelowna.
That's where things got interesting. We ate in Penticton at about 8:30, but slow roads and deepening darkness took us until after 10:00 to get into Kelowna—and there we discovered that this is a three-day summertime weekend in Canada, and the entire West Coast is in Kelowna for vacation, and the only place in town that had a vacancy—which we didn't find until 11:30—was the Enigma, a residential apartment/suite hotel. The price ($180 Canadian) seemed fair under the circumstances; the alternative, after all, being the $500 "Caveman Room" or something at the local Madonna-esque fantasy-suites resort, or sleeping in the car. And for what it's worth, it's a very nice suite. Wireless network and everything.
Tomorrow, we try for Dawson Creek. Sleep first, though. No pictures today, sorry—that may have to wait for Fairbanks.
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06:00 - AUTO-POST: Oregon and Washington, the Back Way
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Day 2, Sunday, 7/31: US 97 north through Bend and past Mt. Hood. I figure we'll get sandwiches in Wasco and eat them in Maryhill State Park, just over the Columbia River. Then continue on through the cities of central Washington: Toppenish, Yakima, Ellensburg. The road takes several weird turns near Wenatchee, before turning north into the long lake-strewn valleys leading into Canada at Osoyoos. Finally we pull into Kelowna, where my company has a northern development office, and where Sunday ends.
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| Saturday, July 30, 2005 |
06:00 - AUTO-POST: Alaska or Bust
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Note: This post was submitted by an automated script.
Day 1, Saturday, 7/30. Wake up early (6-ish). Give Capri his farewell walk. Leave San Jose by 7:30. Stop by work in Cupertino, then drive north on 280 or 101 (depending on the smogginess of the morning—if it's clear, 101, otherwise, 280). Head through San Francisco on 19th Avenue. Cross the Golden Gate Bridge and strike northward on 101 through Marin, Sonoma, and Mendocino Counties until we reach my parents' place in Redwood Valley, at the confluence of 101 and 20. Spend late morning there rehearsing putting up the tent they have. Eat some brunch, or perhaps lunch, depending on how hungry we feel. (The contents of meals from now on will have little to do with the meals' traditional names or times, so we may as well get used to it.) Then take 20 east, past Clear Lake to meet I-5 at Williams. Then turn north and traverse the Sacramento River Valley until it rises into the Yolla Bolly Wilderness, where the Coast Ranges merge with the Sierras and Cascades, and where Mt. Shasta marks the beginning of the snowcapped portion of the journey, and the beginning of US 97, the highway that peels off from I-5 and strikes through the barren centers of Oregon and Washington until it crosses the border and becomes BC 97, the road that eventually becomes the Alaska Highway. Klamath Falls is the destination for Day 1, with the option for a post-motel-checkin side trip to Crater Lake and back.
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| Friday, July 29, 2005 |
14:50 - Somewhere Blue
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13:23 - I'm a geek
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So here's what I'm going to do.
Throughout the coming 20-ish days of Alaska vacation, I have an automated script that will post each day's agenda from my itinerary in the morning. That way, the blog will always indicate where I'm supposed to be on any given day. Then, on those days when I have Internet access (perhaps in Whitehorse, certainly in Fairbanks and Anchorage), I'll be able to post additional entries, including photos and such, describing where I really am. With any luck whatsoever, they might even match up.
(Luck so far has not been in great abundance today, incidentally. Today, my traveling companion is flying in, and I'd been hoping to start off the trip with an evening bird's-eye tour of Silicon Valley from the peak of Bald Mountain south of my house... but as lack of luck would have it, today is the smoggiest day I can remember in San Jose in years. Perhaps ever. It's absolutely insane: I can barely see the mountains two miles away in Cupertino, let alone the ones twenty miles away behind Milpitas. And all this month it's been admirably clear, too. But today? The one day I need it to be clear? Nooooo...)
Anyway, I will also most likely temporarily change the blog to show all the entries from the past three weeks at once, rather than just the past week. That'll ensure that the entirety of the trip will always be visible on a single page.
Northward ho!
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| Thursday, July 28, 2005 |
14:46 - I guess they don't have "summer" there
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Dishearteningly, I've been finding that the weather forecasts for places like Whitehorse and Fairbanks call for rain pretty much continuously for the next ten days.
Well, that's weather.com; Dashboard reports "partly cloudy" for all the days that weather.com says "rain" for. Ugh. Oh well, I guess as long as that's the only mystery...
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11:38 - BREAKING: Purpose of military is to kill people
http://ravishinglight.blogspot.com/2005/07/you-got-your-tricks-good-for-you-but.html
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Please tell me Western society is not this far gone—where politicians can profess horror at the very thought that the job of a nation's military might include "killing people".
The "End of History", as I understand it, was about the idea that all those icky, ugly "wars" we used to fight back in the benighted ages (heretofore defined as "before 1992") were something we would never again have to revisit as a species—interstate warfare was this thing that some shambling precursor race did, but not us. We've become beings of pure energy now, you see. We've shed our meat bodies and the brutish baggage they bore. No more wars ever. No more killing. Militaries might exist, but only for "peacekeeping", which—you see—doesn't involve killing, because they're, y'know, keeping peace. Not because they have to eliminate threats to peace or anything; no, it's more like how the UN can scowl and write letters and draft resolutions and reality will rearrange itself accordingly. Peacekeepers, in the same vein, can merely strut around in helmets and camouflage, and everyone around them will magically become peaceful. That's just the way it's gone down in Bosnia and Rwanda and such places, you know.
The tests being applied to the military these days—whether it's about the treatment of illegal enemy combatants in Guantánamo, or the occupation of unsecure cities, or the treatment of mosques being used as arms caches, or the role of coalition forces in Afghanistan, seems increasingly to be every bit as stringent as the ones the same people are trying to apply to domestic civilians. The military must be civil, non-aggressive, non-intrusive, culturally sensitive, infinitely patient, willing to absorb infinite insult without retaliation, and—of course—unarmed. Because weapons kill people... and we wouldn't want anyone thinking our military kills people.
Yeah, there is a gulf between us and our forebears, so wide it often does seem like we're a different species. I don't, however, think this is an upward movement on the evolutionary ladder.
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09:49 - I'm gonna burn for even linking this
http://www.pwned.nl/ayb/
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Don't hit me. But it has to be shared. You'll understand once you've seen it.
Poor Queen. Poor, poor Queen.
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| Tuesday, July 26, 2005 |
14:50 - I've heard all this before
http://www.weathergraphics.com/tim/arctic/index.htm
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My brother Mike sends this illustrated travelogue of a couple doing the Alaska Highway in 1999, following a route almost eerily similar to the one I've got planned. True, they didn't do Denali or Anchorage or the Gold Rush interior, and they came at it from Texas rather than California—but everything else is in there, including the Alaska Ferry leg on the way back, prior preventive car maintenance, and even the day trip to Barrow from Fairbanks.
What's more, they did the entire Alaska Highway in three days. Here I've been fretting about being able to make it in four... and these guys averaged 700-800 miles per day, even taking into account construction and sightseeing. I suppose it helps to be able to roll into a town at 11:00 PM and get a motel room. They didn't even get on the road typically until 9 or 10...
I'm gonna print out these pages and take them with me.
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11:49 - Fun with Signs
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There's this pothole in the middle of an intersection of two residential roads near where I live; I see it every day when I walk Capri in the mornings. It's round and deep, and you could really do some damage to your suspension if you drove over it. Lately, someone in one of the adjacent houses has taken to trying to call the city's attention to it so as to get it fixed.
A couple of days ago, the hole had four cones around it, a big bouquet stuck in one, and signs in the others reading CITY OF SAN JOSE - FIX THIS PLEASE!! and WHO VOTES FOR YOU?!
Now, though, the enterprising resident seems to be upping the ante:
I'll start carrying my camera with me on the daily walks, I think. I don't wanna miss a chapter in this little saga.
Next we turn our attention to this sign I saw on a construction site on Santa Teresa, riding my bike past it the other day:
That has got to be the funniest industrial slogan I've ever seen, just because of the way it initially strikes the eye. The marketing manager must have burst out laughing when he first saw the proposal... but my hat's off to him for saying, "What the hell, go with it."
I like this town.
UPDATE: Looks like it worked.
They added the "Subterranean Estates" sign the day after I took the first picture; and today the city has a crew there fixing the hole. Way to rattle the cage!
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| Monday, July 25, 2005 |
19:57 - paTTon: weeeee i got a jeep
http://www.livejournal.com/users/snobahr/148082.html?#cutid1
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I'm busy packing and stuff. So—quick! Look over here!
It's funny.
(Reminds me of this—but probably a lot more realistic in syntax...)
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| Saturday, July 23, 2005 |
13:40 - We must stick them with quills! It's the only way!
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Oh, the things that I miss by not drinking coffee. Here's a Starbucks cup that someone left at my house last night.
Uhhh... huh.
On top of which, I thought that said "This insulting sleeve..." —And I thought, Y'know, that's about right.
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| Friday, July 22, 2005 |
14:20 - My insidious agenda
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They don't have suicide bombers in the Yukon, right? Good.
So here's my plan, day by day, for the Alaska trip now that it's only a week away. These dates are getting less and less subject to change, less so with every non-revokable, non-refundable ticket I buy on some tour or flight. It's getting to the point where if it's unrealistic for me to make a certain destination in a single day, well, I'll just have to drive faster rather than dip into any spare days—or, more likely, keep on driving into the night until I smash into a tree.
(Feel free to follow along on Google Maps if you want. It's been my obsession for the past few weeks; it may as well be shared.)
So: Day 1, Saturday, 7/30. Wake up early (6-ish). Give Capri his farewell walk. Leave San Jose by 7:30. Stop by work in Cupertino, then drive north on 280 or 101 (depending on the smogginess of the morning—if it's clear, 101, otherwise, 280). Head through San Francisco on 19th Avenue. Cross the Golden Gate Bridge and strike northward on 101 through Marin, Sonoma, and Mendocino Counties until we reach my parents' place in Redwood Valley, at the confluence of 101 and 20. Spend late morning there rehearsing putting up the tent they have. Eat some brunch, or perhaps lunch, depending on how hungry we feel. (The contents of meals from now on will have little to do with the meals' traditional names or times, so we may as well get used to it.) Then take 20 east, past Clear Lake to meet I-5 at Williams. Then turn north and traverse the Sacramento River Valley until it rises into the Yolla Bolly Wilderness, where the Coast Ranges merge with the Sierras and Cascades, and where Mt. Shasta marks the beginning of the snowcapped portion of the journey, and the beginning of US 97, the highway that peels off from I-5 and strikes through the barren centers of Oregon and Washington until it crosses the border and becomes BC 97, the road that eventually becomes the Alaska Highway. Klamath Falls is the destination for Day 1, with the option for a post-motel-checkin side trip to Crater Lake and back.
Day 2, Sunday, 7/31: US 97 north through Bend and past Mt. Hood. I figure we'll get sandwiches in Wasco and eat them in Maryhill State Park, just over the Columbia River. Then continue on through the cities of central Washington: Toppenish, Yakima, Ellensburg. The road takes several weird turns near Wenatchee, before turning north into the long lake-strewn valleys leading into Canada at Osoyoos. Finally we pull into Kelowna, where my company has a northern development office, and where Sunday ends.
Day 3, Monday, 8/1: after stopping off at my company's building, there to wave at people who don't recognize me, we strike off north along one of the three branches of BC 97, taking the easternmost arm which joins Canada Highway 1 at Sicamous. This heads east into the Rockies: Glacier National Park, then Banff and Jasper (be sure to check out the satellite views of these). After spending the early afternoon driving north through the formidable valleys that make up these two parks, we cut east and then north on Alberta 40, before reaching Hinton. This road leads through some wild logging wilderness before finally dropping back down to the Alberta plains at Grande Prairie, where we turn west again and try to make it to Dawson Creek—the official start of the Alaska Highway—by nightfall. (If we don't, no big deal.)
Day 4, Tuesday, 8/2: the Alaska Highway segment itself begins. After taking the obligatory photos at the Highway's starting cairn, off we go on BC 97 again (we could have followed it all the way up the center of BC, but then we'd have missed Banff and Jasper). It's anybody's guess how far we'll make it, but I like to think Fort Nelson is a good landmark for midafternoon. If there's time I want to take the gravel-surfaced BC 77 north for about sixty miles, there to take a picture at the "Welcome to the Northwest Territories" sign, and then head back. But if time is tight, that part can be skipped, I suppose. Back down to the Highway; I suspect the best place to spend the night will be a campground in the vicinity of Muncho Lake.
Day 5, Wednesday, 8/3: Several border crossings into the Yukon Territory; the Signpost Forest at Watson Lake; and woods and canyonland until we get to Whitehorse. Here I hope to find such niceties as an Internet cafe, there to update the blog and post a few photos and generally let everyone know I'm still alive.
Day 6, Thursday, 8/4: The main attractions of this stretch include Kluane Lake, bordered by the Kluane Mountains, eastern outliers of the huge bunched mountains in Southeast Alaska, and where Mt. Logan (Canada's highest peak) is. Also lots of glaciers. I hope to make it across the border and into Tok on this day.
Day 7, Friday, 8/5: The final stretch of the Alaska Highway, and the gradual return to civilization and settled land, finally ending in Fairbanks. Then an evening of well-deserved resting up.
Day 8, Saturday, 8/6: Early-morning shuttle to the Fairbanks airport to catch a 737 for a day-flight up to Barrow. It's all guided, and there's no relying on my own driving or anything. Top of the world, baby!
Day 9, Sunday, 8/7: Puttering around Fairbanks. No distinct plans for this day. There's plenty to do in the area, though, so no getting bored allowed.
Day 10, Monday, 8/8: Bus tour of Denali National Park, on what's as close as I can find to be the same tour that my dad used to drive back when he worked here.
Day 11, Tuesday, 8/9—Day 12, Wednesday, 8/10: Two days to take in the road down to Anchorage and the surrounding points of interest. Perhaps a side trip down the Kenai Peninsula, or just some resting and recuperation.
Day 13, Thursday, 8/11: Alaska State Ferry across the Prince William Sound starting at Whittier (there's now a road sharing the railroad tunnel through the mountain—a one-lane affair that travels on the same surface as the train tracks, and they have to meter cars and trains through it in turns). It's a slow boat, and it lands at Valdez at 8:00 PM. Nice lazy day.
Day 14, Friday, 8/12: Not a lazy day! This may not even be physically possible, but the plan for this day is to drive up the Richardson Highway (Alaska 4) to where it joins the Tok Cutoff, then up to Tok and across it up into the interior on the Taylor Highway. The destination, after visiting Chicken and Eagle, is Dawson City, deep in the heart of the Yukon. It's not exactly in easy striking distance, but it's possible—the main worry is not getting over the border before the trailer hosting Customs closes up shop at 9:00 PM. If they do, though, we just head back to Tok and skip Dawson City.
Day 15, Saturday, 8/13: Klondike Highway south through the center of the Yukon back to Whitehorse. No stopping there, though: Highway 2 heads south from there, back over the border into Alaska, and over the Chilkoot Pass into Skagway, the historic little fjord hamlet where we have reservations for the night.
Day 16, Sunday, 8/14: The ferry leaves at 10:00 AM, so we have a little time to wander around Skagway and see the sights (or maybe sleep in). After that, the super-fast brand-new ferry heads down the Inside Passage to Juneau, which it reaches in 2.5 hours. We get off, eat lunch, and... meander around Juneau for the rest of the day, being one of the lucky few who has a car there. The next leg of the ferry sets sail at 1:15 AM, so we have to just wait for that rather than finding a place to sleep.
Day 17, Monday, 8/15: The ferry makes quick one-hour stops at Petersburg and Wrangell and Ketchikan, finally arriving at Prince Rupert, BC, at 6:15 in the morning on the 16th. We wake up, fresh and bright and ready for another hard day of driving.
Day 18, Tuesday, 8/16: The Yellowhead Highway (BC 16) inland through woods and coastal mountains to Prince George, a metropolis we missed on the way up. That's probably enough driving for one day.
Day 19, Wednesday, 8/17: Back on good ol' BC 97, southbound this time, and riding it all the way to the junction with BC 99, the road that leads straight to Vancouver and the real world once again (though not before taking in Whistler, which as I understand it is to BC what Aspen is to Colorado). The night's destination can be anywhere in the Vancouver area, perhaps even as far south as Seattle.
Day 20, Thursday, 8/18: The rest of the trip is pretty much at our discretion. We could spend two leisurely days coming down 101, or we could barrel down I-5 and make it home around midnight. It all depends on how exhausted we feel.
And that will be that.
Holy cow, Google Maps now has a "Hybrid" mode. They seem to have installed it just as I was composing this post. How 'bout that?
This on top of Google Moon—damn, those guys are having fun. (Don't forget to zoom in all the way...)
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11:08 - Shut up. Just shut up.
http://littlegreenfootballs.com/weblog/?entry=16765_Muslim_Leaders_Demand_Surrender&
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What can one say?
“Tony Blair has to come out of his state of denial and listen to what the experts have been saying, that our involvement in Iraq is stupid.” His comments were echoed by the marketing manager for The Muslim Weekly newspaper.
Shahid Butt said he believed the threat to Britain would reduce if it pulled its troops out of Iraq. He said: “At the end of the day, these things [violent incidents] are going to happen if current British foreign policy continues. There’s a lot of rage, there’s a lot of anger in the Muslim community.
”We have got to get out of Iraq, it is the crux of the matter. I believe if Tony Blair and George Bush left Iraq and stopped propping up dictatorial regimes in the Muslim world, the threat rate to Britain would come down to nearly zero."
What in the flaming hell do you think we're doing in Iraq?!
God, I need a vacation.
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| Wednesday, July 20, 2005 |
14:34 - Ar-Rahman Noodles
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Right on cue: someone named "Alan Border" forwarded a text copy of this site (with lots of additional bolding and giant fonts) to the Ar-Rahman list that I've been watching with some bemusement ever since I was added to it by some unknown third party about three years ago.
How the Government Staged the London Bombings in Ten Easy Steps
Paul Joseph Watson/Prison Planet | July 13 2005
Ten Step Method To Staging a Terrorist Attack
1) Hire a Crisis Management firm to set up an exercise that parallels the terrorist attack you are going to carry out. Have them run the exercise at the precise locations and at the very same time as the attack. If at any stage of the attack your Arabs get caught, tell the police it was part of an exercise. . . .
...And on and on.
"Prison Planet". Of course. All about the rise of the post-9/11 police state. The kind of police state where sites like this are allowed to roam freely through the sewers without government officials even breathing a word against them.
The site's owner has written like four books on the subject, too. What can they conceivably consist of? Documented evidence of martial law? No wonder they only show the cover art, then, because a side view would be pretty thin.
Let's see how long before the Ar-Rahman list moderators condemn the article. Bets?
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| Tuesday, July 19, 2005 |
14:28 - When you hear the secret word, scream real loud
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Documentarian/author Morgan Spurlock would appear to envision himself as a modern Upton Sinclair. Too bad for him, though, that the modern-day "Jungle" is way less scandalous a place than he appears to want us to believe.
Spurlock writes the following of a McDonalds hamburger:
"It tastes kinda like meat, but more like an industrialized meat-flavored substitute."
He then spends a paragraph detailing what he feels are the more unappetizing features of a McDonalds hamburger patty.
In truth, McDonalds' hamburgers are made with 100% beef (scroll down to the "beef patty" ingredients). It is USDA inspected. The restaurant adds salt and pepper after cooking. That's it. No additives or preservatives. No filler. No beef flavor enhancers.
However in this writer's opinion, it's true, McDonalds hamburgers don't taste nearly as good as they once did. But that isn't because the company uses anything other than beef. It's because the beef they are using is leaner than it once was. Several years ago, the chain capitulated to nutrition activists, and began to use leaner ground beef in its hamburgers. The result? A less juicy, less savory, slightly more rubbery beef patty. That's why your local, independent burger joint probably tastes better (that, and the fact that McDonalds has no choice but to freeze its beef -- many smaller operators use never-frozen beef).
Morgan Spurlock Watch is certainly full of good reading material, and it's balanced—pointing out where Spurlock is right as well as where he's wrong. It's hard to avoid the conclusion, though, that some people just aren't happy even in what by any historical standard is a paradise beyond measure: such people are only fulfilled by ruining it for everyone else.
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14:21 - No unified theory as yet
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So I'm having trouble figuring this out. Is the main problem with the mainstream media that they're too timid to say anything that they can't attribute to some preexisting source? Or is it that they're too eager to report any zany story even if the only "sources" are imaginary?
Both seem simultaneously true. I get the feeling that the evening news wouldn't report on its own building burning down if they couldn't get independent corroboration and AFP photos first, but they'd report hearsay as fact if it means "proving" that Iraq reconstruction is a failure or Karl Rove is a hooded and cloaked Nazgûl.
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11:25 - Iraqi Bill of Rights
http://www.publiuspundit.com/?p=1379
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InstaPundit points to this post by Robert Mayer, who has found what is apparently a leaked copy of a draft of the Iraqi equivalent of the Bill of Rights.
He has an analysis of the whole thing that brings up all the right crucial points (the right to bear arms, the role of Shari'a, the clauses prohibiting Israelis from becoming Iraqi citizens, the role of oil wealth being constitutionally redistributed into education); but he comes to an altogether too rosy conclusion on just about all of it, I'd say. Most of the commenters seem similarly skeptical, such as Ryan Waxx, whose sentiments seem representative:
That ‘in accordance with law’ crap makes the whole constitution meaningless. The entire POINT of a bill of rights is to put certain matters above the normal reach of government. Without striking that language, that will shorten the useful life of the government being formed by a large factor. But it isn’t as bad as the EU ‘constitution’, whose bill of rights are a laundry list of social services.
What with all these constitutions being written lately, there's a great opportunity for students of law and history to see concrete examples of how different political traditions develop different forms of government, and how certain weaknesses appear in them. Here we have as strong a demonstration as any of the fundamental difference between the U.S. Bill of Rights—with its absolute and injunctive language—and what other constitutional authors always seem to go for, which amounts to "grants" from the government for people to have certain privileges "in accordance with law". One can draw a pretty interesting spectral graph and place different constitutions along it with regard to their stance on inalienable human rights; whether it's Canada's assertion that every citizen "has" the right to free speech and the like (whatever that means when such rights are threatened), or the Iraqis' deferring the definition of "rights" to whatever the legislature should decide, it ought to be fairly clear that there's a significant difference in philosophy between these traditions and a supreme authority that says Congress shall make no law....
It's instructive, at the very least, to note how few democracies there are in the world that have adopted language like ours. Do most societies not have the stomach for such extremity? Or are we just that far out on a limb, even still, historically speaking?
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| Friday, July 15, 2005 |
18:10 - I know politics bore you, but I feel like a hypocrite talking to you
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Dean Barnett and Lileks both call attention, each with an essay well worth reading, to a fact that we in blogland tend to forget: most people don't care.
About the big issues, yes, they do. But not about the details.
Now that the Rove/Plame thing seems to be over, and good riddance to it, I have to wonder how many people in America even know who Karl Rove is—let alone Valerie Plame or Joe Wilson. Probably fewer than we would imagine even in our hedging estimates.
And I think this phenomenon isn't poised to change anytime soon, if this quote from the linked Slate article is any indication:
Plucky liberal Joshua Micah Marshall offers what he hopes will be the Democratic line on the scandal. "The entire Wilson/Plame story and the Rove/White House criminal probe sub-story are just so many threads thrown off a much larger and more consquential ball of yarn: the administration's use of fraudulent evidence of an Iraqi nuclear weapons program to seal the deal for war on Iraq with the American people," he writes at TPMCafe.
You know what? To the American public, for whom the news is a story that unfolds over the course of years rather than hours, Iraq isn't this writhing chimaera of moral equivalence that it's been dolled up as by Michael Moore and the MTV scene; it's not about IEDs and speeding Italian reporters and plastic turkeys and tote boards listing how many WMDs have been found and of what type and whether any of them have Osama bin Laden's autograph on them. It's about Gulf War 1. It's about Kuwait. It's about SCUDs versus Patriots. It's about no-fly zones. It's about Clinton firing in cruise missiles. It's about the comedians of the 90s who urged us to worry more about Saddam Hussein than about stained blue dresses. And it's about mass graves. Lots and lots of mass graves.
We knew, in our collective souls, by the evening of 9/11 that the face of the Middle East would have to change, and that we'd be the ones who would have to do it. We sat down to somber dinner imagining the grim job ahead of our military, the one we knew we'd ask them to undertake. We knew that routing some medieval theocrats from a comically faraway country in the mountainous outskirts of the old Soviet world wasn't going to be the end of the story begun with those planes and those fireballs and those falling monoliths. We knew a lot more countries than just Afghanistan were going to have to learn to fear the living crap out of us. And Iraq, we knew, was a damned good place to start.
Just as the WMD question is irrelevant and silly to the Iraqi man on the street who remembers life under Saddam, and just as aging rockers are irrelevant to peasants in African countries kept too poor and sheltered from the outside world by their respective despots to know that Live8 had even taken place, the details of Saddam's alleged nuclear ambitions aren't even on the table for most Americans. We already know him: he's Saddam Hussein. We remember him from last time. We knew him when he was clean-shaven and grinning in a beret, not just as a sad and decrepit bearded prisoner in BVDs. The daily tide of news that springs forth upon the blogosphere fully formed and devoid of long-term context largely passes by the general public, to whom 9/11 is still far too real and present to turn into a schoolyard joke, like the ones we learned by rote as kids about Nazis keeping their armies up their sleevies, without even knowing what Nazis were.
It's not that people are disinterested; it's that they've got different priorities. Most people know full well that Saddam never posed a direct threat to them, specifically; but then, most people understood that although they'd had no plans to travel to New York and visit the World Trade Center on a Tuesday morning a few years ago, that doesn't mean 9/11 has no relevance to them. Despite what Moore might say, it's not all about whether New York made a good target based on the political makeup of the city and who voted for whom in 2000. Most people are less fine-grained in their alliances, less fickle, less provincial. Most people see the bigger picture.
To most people, getting rid of Saddam was a clear benefit that needed to be achieved—hell, we'd been arguing in favor of it for years, and now the people wailing that it was a mistake look like guys who stumbled drunk into the movie theater halfway through and loudly demanded to know what that guy on the screen was doing and why he just said that to her. We're too busy to dispense plot summaries for those whose attention spans don't extend past last night's rave.
We know there's more to come, too. The London bombing, most people understand, isn't about "retaliation" for slights in Iraq recognized in the past six months, any more than 9/11 was a response to the policies of Israeli prime ministers enacted after it happened. These things take time to plan. They also require secrecy, and sometimes we fail to stop them. Sometimes the bad guys get away. People watch enough CSI to understand that. And whereas the blogosphere and the news infrastructure often fail equally badly to apply Occam's Razor to any given situation in the news, to call terrorists "terrorists" and to take them at their word when they declare war on us, to presume that it's not a conspiracy about oil and Halliburton and stolen elections and racism, to give our elected leaders the benefit of the doubt when they tell us they're doing the best they can, the public at large is expert at it—and we could stand to take a lesson from them.
The mainstream news media's hemorrhaging of viewership has to be attributable to such things as, well, that people are sick of hearing bad news—bad news might sell, but not when we're still feeling like we're in the mood for some of the good stuff. And relentless coverage of Michael Jackson trials and runaway brides doesn't help. What we want is to see some righteous ass-kicking. We know we're entitled to dispense some, and we're in no mood to be told to sit down and shut up and listen to boring details of yellowcake and out-of-context memos and he-said-she-said rumormongering. We saw those towers fall. We saw those tube bombs go off. We heard what that asshole in Amsterdam said, and we're listening now to what London's dry-brush-in-summertime contingent has to say. This is no time for self-reflection. This is no time to wonder whether this is what it must have felt like in Germany in 1938, with all that implies. The endless news-chewers of the blogosphere think they've got a great handle on what's going on in the world, but perhaps it's the core Jacksonians who are our last best hope for seeing this thing through—and we have to remind ourselves that there are enough of them out there that perhaps we don't have to worry so much.
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| Thursday, July 14, 2005 |
11:14 - I'm sorry, all right... sorry I ever came back here
http://timblair.net/ee/index.php?URL=http://www.alternet.org/columnists/story/23493/
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Memo to Dick Durbin, Juan Cole, Dr. Laura Schlessinger, Ward Churchill, David Ahenakew and anyone else who thinks an "apology" means saying "I'm sorry if my comments offended anybody" or "I'm sorry some people are so petty as to demand that my numbers be accurate": this is how it's done.
This is a horror. In a column written June 28, I asserted that more Iraqis (civilians) had now been killed in this war than had been killed by Saddam Hussein over his 24-year rule. WRONG. Really, really wrong ... I could hardly have been more wrong, no matter how you count Saddam’s killing of civilians. According to Human Rights Watch, Hussein killed several hundred thousand of his fellow citizens. The massacre of the Kurdish Barzani tribe in 1983 killed at least 8,000; the infamous gas attack on the Kurdish village of Halabja killed 5,000 in 1988; and seized documents from Iraqi security organizations show 182,000 were murdered during the Anfal ethnic cleansing campaign against Kurds, also in 1988 ...
My sincere apologies. It is unforgivable of me not have checked. I am so sorry.
I've said it before: the ability to say "I'm sorry" or "I was wrong," directly and honestly and without couching it in a veiled slap at the vindicated accusers or professing wounded moral rectitude, is an important life skill that very few people seem to learn. Phony, unrepentant apologies are a stupid way to get people to like you—and that goes for politicians as well as bloggers and journalists and everybody else. If you own up to your mistakes, people will respect you better than if you obfuscate and try to convince everyone you were right all along. Especially if you're so demonstrably, spectacularly mistaken.
Whatever Molly Ivins' faults, she's so far beyond all the above-listed crocodile-tear-drippers she's lapped them twice.
Via Tim Blair.
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| Tuesday, July 12, 2005 |
18:35 - This week on "How To Do It"...
http://timblair.net/ee/index.php/weblog/comments/superior_strategies_invited/
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Tim Blair asks: "You are the President of the United States on September 11, 2001. How do you respond to the attacks of that day, and to the wider issues of North Korea, Iran, and Iraq?"
The ensuing discussion is very revealing.
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| Monday, July 11, 2005 |
17:50 - Hanging on in quiet desperation
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So I was reading this Hitchens piece (in which he makes the assertion that "By George Galloway's logic, British squaddies in Iraq are the root cause of dead bodies at home. How can anyone bear to be so wicked and stupid?" —without really explaining himself, which he really ought to do, because plenty of people see no logical disconnect there, regrettably enough); but over on the sidebar I saw this:
Tony Parsons
IN THE aftermath of Thursday's mass murder, it was one of the first pieces of breaking news: the Muslim Council of Great Britain had been sent so many hate emails that its computers had crashed.
I immediately thought, bullshoes. Do you know how many e-mail messages a modest Pentium-III-class server can handle per second? Anyone peddling a line like the above, as the mainstream press in Britain apparently did in the immediate aftermath of the attack, would simply have to be playing cynically on the public's general assumptions not only that right below the surface of polite Western multicultural society lies a stratum of bestial rabble hurling itself against its fragile bonds laid upon it by their moral betters and shouting invective at anybody with skin darker than a mocha latté—but that computers crash. Hey, doesn't yours?
Mail servers don't "crash". Gimme a break. Think about how much spam you get, and marvel at the abilities of mail servers all over the Internet to get it to you and all the other untold millions of lucky recipients. All without "crashing". Bogging down, perhaps. Refusing connections temporarily, sure. But an overload of traffic doesn't crash a dang thing.
To paint a phantasmagoria of so much vitriol being spewed out of a British troglodyte underclass that it dwarfs the volume of spam that's so effortlessly passed around the Net these days is stupefyingly dishonest on its face. Perhaps the MCGB received some nastygrams. I don't doubt that one bit. But it's painfully transparent that someone saw a PR opportunity in those one or two examples of the kind of shaven-head distorted Britishness that the unfortunate few saw in Pink Floyd's The Wall movie, and decided to tell the press that they'd received so many pieces of hate-mail that ... well, we received a lot, okay? So many, in fact, that.... [leaning in close] ...Why, it crashed our e-mail server!
Who could refuse to run with a headline like that? It's got everything: confirmation of latent bigotry, an angle of self-blame, and a hook to engage the readership: stupid crashing computers.
So when I finished the Hitchens piece, I clicked on over to read the whole piece. (No permalink yet; if it's no longer the front-page article, it's "FOR SHAHARA'S SAKE, DON'T HATE MUSLIMS".) And lo! What to my wondering eyes should appear?
Not true. Or at least, it is not true that so many people felt a sudden loathing for Muslims that they were compelled to bombard the Muslim Council of Great Britain with hate email.
Because it now turns out that 30,000 emails were sent to the Muslim Council from just one source.
Imagine that. And I'll bet it was totally genuine. Wasn't "planted" at all. No way.
The rest of the article is good, too. I hope to see a lot more of the attitude this guy shows: one that both sides of the aisle can agree on, like we did in those long-bygone days following 9/11, where Left or Right, we could all agree that there was a real threat that needed to be neutralized, and that it could not be identified by any means so easy as "race" or "religion". Not that that means it's too hard to attempt. It's crucial that we do.
But it doesn't help one bit for rabble-rousers like whoever sent the 30,000 bogus hate-spams, or the operative who parlayed them to the press as a grass-roots deluge of bloodline-purgers that brought SMTP servers to a tottering halt, to cynically try to convince us in the Western world that we're too socially diseased to presume to try to defend ourselves.
We know ourselves better than that.
UPDATE: Specifically, no, we don't need to "hate" smiling Shahara Islam... but we do need a way to put the fear of God, as it were, into these people. Seriously. Now. (Via LGF.)
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| Friday, July 8, 2005 |
17:46 - Britishness
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Let the hand-wringers wring; to the rest, though, there's work to be done:
Now that's a bounceback. Go Brits.
(Now watch: people will start claiming that the attacks were perpetrated by day-traders looking to create a buying trough...)
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| Thursday, July 7, 2005 |
11:44 - Test of mettle
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So now that London has been attacked, it seems hard to escape the speculation that the terrorists—if indeed today's attack was by the same people—are moving from country to country, feeling each one out to see which way it will jump.
They know now how the US and Australia reacted, they know how Spain reacted. Now they'll find out how the British will react.
We won't know for another couple of days; today, people are still giving speeches in the heat of the moment, and many folks are saying very encouraging things, including even Ken Livingstone. But time will tell whether that kind of ire will last as it has here, or whether the Galloways of the world—with their connecting the dots between the claim of responsibility citing Iraq and Afghanistan as the reasons for this "retaliation", and the necessity for Britain to withdraw from the War on Terror—will win out.
Many are claiming that the British Isles are made of sterner stuff, but I fear that the world has become so cynical by now that the hope for a muscular response is slim.
In any case. The main thing today is for our thoughts to go out to the victims, and that's where mine are.
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| Wednesday, July 6, 2005 |
17:17 - "Devastating urge to do good"
http://service.spiegel.de/cache/international/spiegel/0,1518,druck-363663,00.html
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Oh, man. I wonder what'll happen when the Koslings and DUers read this?
I mean, it goes against just about every accepted truth of global economics, charity, Western decadence, welfare-statism, independent achievement, and the transformative power of rock music that so many hold so dear. Hearing a Kenyan economist speak in such candid, eloquent terms, while the Der Spiegel interviewer sits there in shock and horror while his country's largesse is pushed away with pleading words—it's stunning.
...Wait, I know what they'll say. They'll turn to Bono's identification of Bush's commitment of world-leading aid to Africa, and use that as reason to blame America for ruining Africa with our filthy dollars. It makes perfect sense!
(Via VodkaPundit.)
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| Tuesday, July 5, 2005 |
20:54 - The Hatred Gap
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"Hate is a strong word," some caution. "Not strong enough!" others retort.
And all I can think, when I see something like this, is that some people's lives are just so consumed by hate—either feeling it directly, or fantasizing it in others—that I can't even fathom jumping the gulf that lies between myself and that kind of mentality.
From the linked discussion thread at Daily Kos, the genesis of which was a seemingly innocuous bit of satire, we get this:
These wingnuts have my goddamned adrenaline going, these days more than ever. After all the truth that has come out, they're still spweinhg filth about "liberal traitors."
Shit, I'm ready to snap back into old form and whale on a few of them. They're fucking asking for it.
What will it solve? Not sure. Maybe nothing.
But it'll sure shut their fucking mouths while I'm pummelling them, and that'll be enough for the time being.
Let them call me a traitor. Please, let some doughy piece-of-shit Rove wannabe call me a traitor.
It'll be the last word he says for a MONTH, because his fucking jaw will be wired shut.
by chumley
And
Here's to Truth, Orwell! (none / 0)
I know you got lots of flame for that comment, but I'm with you on it. These right wing assholes play games with the lives of many thousands of others, all for money and power in Washington, and IMO it is time they get their due. If these right wing personalities were to get the bar-b-cue treatment that those mercenaries in Fallujah got, it could very well turn public opinion in America, which in turn could save thousands of lives both American and Iraqi. The religious right is destroying America by putting us on a path to a sort of neofascist theocracy, and anything that derails their agenda has got to be good on at least some level.
As long as it's Independence Day, we should remember that our nation was born in a blood bath. Jefferson was never afraid of being called a "King George hater."
This is the problem with Democrats; we are too nice, we are too careful about hating only the policies and not the politician, we quiver in our boots when media personalities call us "Bush Haters". Fuck that! I AM a Bush hater, I hate that man and everything he stands for, just as I hate Saddam and Stalin, and yes, Jefferson Davis and all the slave traders and owners he represented. It is good to hate evil.
I guarantee you that most of those republican activists out there HATE all of us, and in particular they hated Kerry and especially Dean. And in a society enveloped in a noxious smog of fear, hate wins. Democrats will keep losing if we don't learn to hate and DESTROY our enemies.
Now let's be clear, I'm not saying I want those right wing hacks to die on their vacation in Iraq, I'm saying I don't give a fuck if they die or not. But if they do die - Shadenfreude.
"Religious bondage shackles and debilitates the mind and unfits it for every noble enterprize." -James Madison
by Subterranean
What kind of terms does this guy's "guarantee" promise? We hate people like Kerry and Dean? Where does this even come from? This is politics, not some kind of backwoods family feud. I don't hate Howard Dean. Hell, I barely know him. I believe he's tone-deaf and counterproductive, but I bear him no ill will, either personally or even for his political prospects. John Kerry? The only thing that could make me hate someone in his position is if he were proved to have consciously and egregiously betrayed his country and caused a lot of soldiers to be killed, and I don't think anyone has conclusively shown that—or that he was anything less (or more) than a fairly mediocre minor officer, and the primary emotion I feel when anyone mentions his name is boredom.
Hate? Jeezum crow, people, get a grip.
Do I hate the people in comment threads like this, at Daily Kos and Democratic Underground? That would be a stretch. I might be said to despise them, but that's not the same thing—I abhor the things they say, and I find it repugnant that they tend to celebrate a lot of sentiments and ideals that I disagree with firmly. But primarily my reaction upon reading the stuff I see there, like what's quoted above, is sadness and futility. How can I even talk to people who say these things so blithely, so earnestly, like they're desperately working out some kind of deeply held passion? How much mileage lies between their opinions of, say, George W. Bush and a discussion that would involve statements like "Well, I disagree with his policy on such-and-such issue, for the following reasons"? I'm not even asking for consensus on issues like the war—just a common ground of rational discourse, something that doesn't involve conspiracies of power-drunk idiot madmen in thrall to Satanic oil companies (yet, for some reason, stumping for nuclear power). How do you weigh the pros and cons of an issue in a calm manner with someone who thinks he's being a brave representative of the "reality-based community" by saying I AM a Bush hater, I hate that man and everything he stands for, just as I hate Saddam and Stalin, and yes, Jefferson Davis and all the slave traders and owners he represented. It is good to hate evil? What kind of forum is it where—far from pointing out that even a politician from the far opposite side of the aisle from where you stand has human constituents and is trying to support them as best he can—merely expressing the idea that Iowahawk's original parody was funny gets you banned?
"Sure," some will now say, "This is extreme stuff. Yeah, we say we hate conservatives. But that's only because they did it first!"
And sure enough, one of the new Family Guy episodes that I caught last night while I was half-dozing in my chair features Brian the dog (who now, in the zombified Second Coming of the show, drives a Prius with a "Kucinich '04" bumper sticker and reads Michael Moore books) starts an alarming spate of loud and fierce baying at a black man that enters the room (waking me up in my chair with a start). Immediately, though, he catches himself and apologizes profusely to the man: "Sorry! I'm sorry! I can't believe I did that—that just completely isn't 'me'. I have no problem with black people; I vote Democrat!"
(It would have been great if the black man had said, "Yeah, well, I'm a Republican. What, you vote for the party of the slaveholders and the fire hoses?" —But that's not something we can expect out of Seth McFarlane, no sirree.)
It's become such an unquestioned article of faith on the Left—"conservatives hate"—that this kind of thing is par for the course, and whether it has any basis in reality or not, it's the grounding for the philosophy espoused by these people on Kos' forums.
It's as good as proved, for example, that Bush wants to kill gays. What good would it do, then, to point out the "Bush tapes", wherein he said behind closed doors that he didn't want Republicans to be "kicking gays"? Well, not much good, apparently—rather than take such words at face value, as off-the-cuff utterances captured on tape that reflect not just a policy statement but a directive from his own heart, the sentiments are interpreted as a "turnaround", and as a "weasel-like, cowardly approach to gay bashing".
Occam's Razor means nothing to these people. There's no such thing as assuming benign, humane, or even human principles in explaining the doings of someone on the other side. It's all just part of the greater tapestry of regimented hatred.
I honestly don't know what to do or think when confronted with these earnest pledges, by people who claim to be the vanguard of compassion and understanding and peace, to beat the life out of me for the opinions I hold.
I'm no Christian, but I know what it is to feel the sadness of watching someone willingly damn himself. It's born of love, and pity, and a wistful wish to be able to bridge the gap and bring the person back from the brink. Despite Kos' insistence that the Religious Right thrives on hatred and lives to damn those with which it disagrees, I have to say that after some four years now of dwelling primarily on the right-hand side of the aisle, I haven't even seen anything that comes close to the truly frightening level of murderous rage that emanates from what claims to be the country's rightful moral guide. I can't even remember the last time I saw someone on the pro-war/pro-Bush side even say or type the words "I hate..."
But I'm probably just not paying attention. Kos' people aren't just our moral guardians, they're our intellectual superiors, too.
UPDATE: I know I asked for it by using a blanket statement, but please refrain from pointing out Google results for "I hate" that appear in places like anti-abortion forums and white-power sites. Addendum here.
UPDATE: As if there were any doubt: reaction to the London bombings.
I'm not even shocked anymore. That's a very bad thing.
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| Monday, July 4, 2005 |
22:44 - Explosions will find a way
http://66.135.33.181/~btman/Fireworks/Fireworks.html
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Ahh, suburban California life.
These pictures were taken from a sidewalk a block from my house, pointing in all different directions as each pyrotechnic went off, each from any of at least ten different discrete locations within the residential sprawl. Backyard displays, in other words: pretty impressive ones at that. You can bet the people putting them on had smuggled the firecrackers in from Nevada or Arizona or Mexico, because they're sure not available around here. And judging by the people who kept walking by me alone or in pairs, with U.S. flag t-shirts and glasses of wine, and stopping to make small talk and enjoy the impromptu show that needed no organizers or traffic controls or announcers or (heaven forfend) fire control, one can hardly help but think that at least some people around here have that old-time spirit.
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| Sunday, July 3, 2005 |
10:53 - Hello from the 21st century, wish you were here
http://www.ucomics.com/doonesbury/2005/07/03/
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Wow.
Thanks a lot, Garry. I would have thought this was beneath you, but... I guess you've been digging for material so long, there's nothing left down there.
Y'know, I think maybe he's just jealous of people who can do journalism and hold down day jobs at the same time. Lord knows he doesn't meet many in the MSM.
Via Tom G.
UPDATE: Egad. I'm almost starting to pity these people for the untenability of their arguments.
Via Erich S.
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| Saturday, July 2, 2005 |
01:48 - Up the voltage
http://littlegreenfootballs.com/weblog/?entry=16480_How_Can_the_Future_Be_So_Primati
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I've just got one thing to say to this guy:
"Why don't you go eat a decroded piece of crap?"
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| Thursday, June 30, 2005 |
16:50 - Don't bother me with facts
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This may be part of the problem in today's intractable political divide: people simply decide in advance what they're going to believe about a given thing, and then even facts that directly contradict that belief don't make a dent in it—they just become transparent.
Case in point is today's SomethingAwful entry by Frolixo. I realize that SA is hardly what anyone considers a great profound think-tank, but if we're trying to get an accurate picture of how people interpret the world who aren't complete obsessive news-hounds and politics junkies, it's as good an example as any.
Did anybody watch that speech about the plans for Iraq that Bush outlined on Tuesday? I guess our plan of action to stem the tide of insurgent attacks and have democracy flourish in the region is to "defeat terror", "spread freedom", and "sacrifice". Wow, I'm sure all those buzz words that we've been hearing for the last 4 years will be just the solution to this clusterfuck we willingly walked into. I've never mentioned any politics in any of my updates because I tend to be fairly moderate in my views, and Zack Parsons does a good job of it anyway, but I just lost it after the speech on Tuesday. Anybody that knows their history or even has a shred of common sense knew that invading Iraq was a really bad idea unless you had a solid plan for the post-war.
This is looking more and more like a Vietnam situation, where hostilities are increasing and instead of pulling out we are digging deeper, sending more men and material over. The more we commit over there, the less of a chance we have of getting out. I just find it really tragic that thousands of young men who think they are fighting for a good reason will lose their lives over the next few years, just because this country is being led by a group of greedy, ignorant, and self serving men. The people who voted for Bush are finally wavering, but its far too late. We're fucked.
I didn't watch the speech, no, but I read it. And if there is any core unifying message in it, it's this:
The new Iraqi security forces are proving their courage every day. More than 2,000 members of the Iraqi security forces have given their lives in the line of duty. Thousands more have stepped forward and are now in training to serve their nation. With each engagement, Iraqi soldiers grow more battle-hardened and their officers grow more experienced. We have learned that Iraqis are courageous and that they need additional skills. That is why a major part of our mission is to train them so they can do the fighting and our troops can come home.
I recognize that Americans want our troops to come home as quickly as possible. So do I. Some contend that we should set a deadline for withdrawing U.S. forces. Let me explain why that would be a serious mistake. Setting an artificial timetable would send the wrong message to the Iraqis, who need to know that America will not leave before the job is done. It would send the wrong message to our troops, who need to know that we are serious about completing the mission they are risking their lives to achieve. And it would send the wrong message to the enemy, who would know that all they have to do is to wait us out. We will stay in Iraq as long as we are needed and not a day longer.
Some Americans ask me, if completing the mission is so important, why don't you send more troops? If our commanders on the ground say we need more troops, I will send them. But our commanders tell me they have the number of troops they need to do their job. Sending more Americans would undermine our strategy of encouraging Iraqis to take the lead in this fight. And sending more Americans would suggest that we intend to stay forever, when we are in fact working for the day when Iraq can defend itself and we can leave. As we determine the right force level, our troops can know that I will continue to be guided by the advice that matters: the sober judgment of our military leaders.
Mmmyep. Sure sounds like Vietnam to me. Sending more soldiers every day. A draft is imminent. "Instead of pulling out we are digging deeper, sending more men and material over. The more we commit over there, the less of a chance we have of getting out." That's exactly what Bush was saying.
But, see, the people who believe this stuff have their justification when these contradictions are brought up, too, and it's simple: Bush was lying through his teeth.
If it's bad news, it's confirmation. If it's good news, he's lying. That's how this works, right? This is one of those "My brother is lying"/"My brother is telling the truth" things, huh?
But hey, it's good enough to sound funny, so it's good enough for modern America.
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| Tuesday, June 28, 2005 |
16:28 - Our unbiased media
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In just a five-minute trip to the bank and back, I've had confirmation that KCBS's bizarre slant these days is not an after-midnight-only thing, but something they do all the time.
"In just under an hour," they intoned, "President Bush will make a speech in defense of the war in Iraq. The president will make the case that all the sacrifice of blood and treasure, all the images of horrific violence, are all worth it." With detailed foresight, they rattled off all the points that Bush's speech is expected to cover, complete with all the exaggerations, coverups, and outright lies that KCBS evidently expects to hear. The only thing they stopped short of saying was, DON'T YOU BELIEVE IT!
Then they trotted out polls showing flagging support for the war, one-liners from people on the street (the pro-Bush guy as dull and moronic as possible and making incoherent noises about "that 9/11 thing", the anti-Bush guy sharp and snarky), notes about how everyone mistrusts Bush now because no weapons of mass destruction have been found, and some expert or other who issued a peevish critique of the administration for not having gone on record with a guarantee that we wouldn't be building long-term bases in Iraq.
Missing, naturally, is any opinion piece that would make a case in favor of the war, or that would point out that hey, maybe it would be a good thing to have bases in Iraq—better than in Saudi Arabia, yes? Missing is any invocation, however matter-of-fact, of the stated mission in Iraq and its stakes, or an articulation of why it was important to take out Saddam with or without WMDs in his hands, or of positive facts on the ground that might just support what the president has to say on the subject in half an hour. Missing, naturally, are any polls or interviews from soldiers in Iraq, or, heaven forfend, Iraqis. See, by doing any of those things, KCBS would be "touting the Administration line".
Which amounts to publishing enemy propaganda, don'tcha know. Because the Administration is The Enemy.
And just this morning, as I drove in, the anchor was expressing shock and hurt pride over the revelation that the American people don't trust the news media as far as they could throw it, or that it could possibly be construed as having a slant that's too critical of the Bush administration. Perish the thought.
If it sounds like I'm registering my disgust every time I hear a snippet of KCBS that doesn't involve the weather or traffic report, well, I pretty much am. It's because that's what the radio is tuned to in the car I'm borrowing, and this just gives me all the more incentive to get the Jetta fixed as soon as possible.
UPDATE: Oh yeah. Just after the item described above, they did a story like, "Facing a potentially embarrassing political situation, House Republicans backed off today on a bill regarding veterans' welfare benefits... House Democrat So-and-So had the following righteous speech on the subject..." —and I honestly can't remember the last time I've heard them do a story like that with the roles reversed. If I heard one, it would stick out like a sore thumb. It's not like such stories don't exist, you know.
And the day before, there was a story about California implementing bio-screening technology (at taxpayer expense) to test everybody for bodily toxins caused by pollution and so on. They played a bunch of sound bites from doctors and politicians saying how great it would be; and then, at the very end, said, "The bill is opposed by some chemical companies." Seriously! That's the extent to which they described the "con" position. And then they cut away to something else. Boo! Hiss! Bad chemical companies! Must be because they're evil. But that's all we hear of their side, so that's the impression we're left with.
It's as though they've started taking for granted that they're only playing to a certain audience now, so they simply no longer care about alienating people who don't agree with their slant.
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11:36 - The DMV: the New Ellis Island
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Evidently the same people in the California Assembly who have twice failed to pass legislation allowing driver's licenses for illegal immigrants are going to try a third time, thinking they have the Governator's support (though they don't, really, judging by his reactions reported on the radio this morning). This time, reportedly, they plan to distinguish illegals' licenses (a contradiction in terms, it seems to me) with a unique color and special security features, but the California Homeland Security department still isn't pleased. Which seems about right to me, but I can't help but think it's absurd that the question has even gotten this far.
Let's leave aside the philosophical question at the heart of whether it's right to give the legitimacy of documentation to people who are in this country illegally, who cheated the system to sneak in where others spent years in line waiting.
My question is a more basic one. It's about logistics. See, what people seem to be forgetting, perhaps because of the monotonic overuse of the term, is that these are illegal immigrants we're talking about. IL-LEG-GAL. As in, criminals. As in, they should not be here. As in, if the authorities find out they exist, they deport them. (Or should.) The life of an illegal immigrant is a life of hiding from all forms of authority, of lying low, of staying the hell away from any mode of detection by those with the power to discover that they have no right to be in the country. It's a life of skulking from under-the-counter job to under-the-counter job, seeking a living from sympathetic or (more frequently) exploitative employers willing to be party to the crime. It's all underground, and documentation is the very antithesis of the enterprise.
With that in mind, then: why on earth would an illegal immigrant go to the DMV to pick up a license, or even provide a mailing address to have one sent him?
Wouldn't this be like a Venus flytrap or something—just set up a special line at the DMV with a door in the back wall saying "Illegal Immigrant Licenses", and as each person steps through he falls onto a chute that carries him into a paddy-wagon idling in the sub-basement? If so, it'd be rather ingenious.
Or—as seems more likely—does this proposal merely amount to the decriminalization of undocumented immigration? If, as a self-demonstrated international criminal, you can walk with impunity into a government office and get official state documentation with your name and your address imprinted and reflected in a government database, instead of being arrested on the spot, then in what sense is illegal immigration "illegal" anymore?
It's like, say, if a notorious bank robber were to walk into a police station, and under a bulletin board with his name and portrait staring down at him from a WANTED poster, he told the cops about a neighbor whose music was turned up too loud. And the cops took down a police report and knocked down the neighbor's door. And the bank robber walked out happily into the sunshine.
It's hard for me to understand how the proponents of driver's licenses for illegals can have any other ultimate goal than the destruction of the concept of "citizenship".
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| Thursday, June 23, 2005 |
14:50 - Is that really a piece of fairy cake?
http://littlegreenfootballs.com/weblog/?entry=16344_Koran_Abused_in_Nashville_Seethi
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They're calling 911 now, when they discover a defaced Koran?
Methinks someone sees harvestable PR advantage in the relentless Gitmo drumbeat. Too bad we aren't buying it.
At what point does it become okay to suggest that these fellows need to be taught a sense of perspective, by whatever means necessary?
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13:18 - More office hijinks
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When a senior VP has a younger engineer in his office, talking about potential international support deals, and you hear the VP say, "Wanna go to Vietnam?" ... there's not much anyone within earshot can do but burst out laughing.
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13:04 - Incorrigible punster—do not incorrige
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So I was looking for friends and/or colleagues to go out to lunch with today. It turns out, though, that everybody I usually go with is either on vacation or had lunch plans of their own. I'm also on my bike today. So I did something I don't often have to do: rode my bike down to Chipotle, got a burrito, and rode back clutching the paper bag over my handlebar while I cut through parking lots so as to avoid being blooped at by cop cars noticing that I was on the wrong side of De Anza Boulevard (bike lanes are one-way-only and aligned with car traffic, and I wasn't about to go find a major intersection and cross over just to traverse the four blocks back to work). Kind of a pain, but worth it. I do so love Chipotle.
I got back to the doors of my building just at the same time as two of my friends did, who had skipped out for lunch on their own shortly before I went looking for them. "Oh, we went out for lunch a bit early," one of them said.
I replied, "And so I went out for lunch bitterly."
Then I jumped into the elevator so they couldn't chase me down.
(Great, now someone's going to T.P. my server.)
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| Tuesday, June 21, 2005 |
13:29 - GET'S!!
http://outpostnine.com/editorials/teacher.html
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"I am a Japanese School Teacher".
And thus it begins.
Not safe for work, but only because people will wonder why you're laughing so hard.
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| Monday, June 20, 2005 |
11:32 - All propaganda, all the time
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Now I know why, when Narsai David does his "Food News" segments on KCBS every hour, he no longer ends each one by saying the tagline "KCBS All News 74". And it's not just because they're saying "740" now, moving away from the old and not-very-explicable tendency for AM stations to call themselves by their frequency in tens of kilohertz, whatever sense that ever made.
It's because KCBS can't really claim to be a 100% "news" station anymore. Oh, sure, they pipe in the CBS News feed every hour. But if what I heard on Saturday night, driving up the Central Valley from the wedding in San Juan Capistrano long after midnight, is any indication, well... all I can say is that it's a shame. It used to be such a great news source.
For the three hours that I listened, as the dark fields swooshed past and distant fires burned, KCBS flogged the Downing Street Memos, saying over and over how they "proved" something evil and nefarious about Bush and the war, though they were oddly coy about explaining exactly what, or about quoting them verbatim. They repeatedly played a clip of a BBC anchorwoman who summarized the memos' scandalizing contents thus: "The memos show that the Bush Administration had been planning war with Iraq as early as the spring of 2002." Shock, horror. Guys, we knew by the end of that week in the middle of September 2001 that we would be invading Iraq. Remember that? Remember how we all thought we'd have taken out Syria, Iran, and Saudi Arabia too by now? Once we'd come to terms with the idea that the solution to Arab/Islamic terrorism was to reform the Arab/Islamic world, we knew—or at least some of us knew—that it was pretty much an all-or-nothing affair. Some countries would reform voluntarily; some would require military intervention. But fighting a War on Terror with Saddam still in power—whether he had any WMDs currently in his possession or not—was simply not an option. This was Saddam Hussein. He would have done all he could to thwart us, and he was long overdue for a tumble—besides, a free and US-friendly Iraq would be a huge positive first step toward the rest of the war we knew we'd have to fight, one that would make the remainder a ton easier. We all understood this. Why is it such a huge scandalous surprise now?
KCBS even interviewed Joe Wilson, who has a new book out all about this scandal (I guess his publisher gave him two weeks to write it—blast, my record has been blown open!); and it was almost farcical, listening to the CBS interviewer prod him again and again to give them a juicy bite o' sound they could play over and over once the sun came up:
CBS: What is your personal impression of George Bush?
Wilson: Well, I don't know the man, personally, so I can't say how I feel about his character...
(later)
CBS: If you could tell us what your personal impression is of George Bush—
Wilson: As I said, I don't know him personally, so I can't give you a good personal impression...
CBS: His administration, then.
Wilson: Well, then I can say that this is the most obstinate, secretive, and authoritarian Presidency that I've seen in all my thirty years in Washington.
Thank you. End interview. End story. And if you thought CBS would, you know, bring in someone from the other side of the aisle to, y'know, rebut Wilson's chest-puffing claims that he had made all these BUSH LIED!!!!111 claims a year ago, and now the memos "proved" him right, blah blah blah—to, perhaps, explain that anyone who is surprised to discover that the White House had plans to invade Iraq back in early 2002 had apparently been asleep throughout the entirety of the 1990s, when calls for toppling Saddam were a matter of daily discourse from college campuses to Comedy Central—well, get used to disappointment. Confuse the listener with multiple viewpoints? Bah! We'll tell listeners what to think. Surety makes them feel more comfortable than having to make up their own minds. Don't give people contextual information that might help them decide for themselves whether Guantanamo has any resemblance to the Cambodian killing fields or Auschwitz; don't point out that the worst the Gitmo guards are accused of doing is kicking a book, which some might regard as notably less objectionable an offense than, say, clipping off people's fingers with gardening shears or forcing them to drink motor oil. No, "Invasion of Personal Space by Female" has such a compelling symmetry with "Rape Room" that it's just too good not to use. Remember, we're living in a Nazi dictatorship, so we elites in the mass media have to get the subversive message out, somehow, so the people are informed but so the goons don't smash down our doors. Wait! Look at all this huge broadcasting equipment we have. Let's use that!
It's getting so I can't even trust Narsai David anymore not to be giving us recipes that rob us of our precious bodily fluids.
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| Thursday, June 16, 2005 |
21:12 - Out of my way! I'm a motorist!
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This is a continuation of the saga begun here and continued here. If I didn't know better, I'd think there might be a pattern starting to form.
The current cavalcade of whimsy began when I got my clutch replaced at Midas, last Thursday. In the process, they checked to see why the power outlet in the trunk wasn't working, and in so doing apparently yanked out the stereo from the dashboard, unplugged it, and crammed it back in, damaging it in the process so that the faceplate no longer fits on snugly and immovably. I guess they figured I'd never notice; who turns on their stereo system in this day and age, honestly?
So I then took it to the smog place to get the smog check done for the registration renewal. On the way home from work after that, I noticed that the Check Engine light was on. This, I discovered after having Bob Lewis (the dealership) look at it, was because of a faulty mass airflow sensor—something the smog check apparently didn't test for. (It gave me a perfect bill of health.) So Bob Lewis set about fixing it, for an estimated $450 all told, parts and labor. I can handle that. I can rationalize that. $450? Why, that's a mere three months of bandwidth, or a paltry four months of cable. I've still got lots of cash from the latest book. It's all good.
I should know better than to expect that the initial estimate will ever be the whole story, though. They called me up on Tuesday to tell me that in test-driving the Jetta around the auto mall after installing the new mass airflow sensor, they got more engine fault codes blipping up—which turned out to be misfires from the ignition coil unit. (Which, of course, reminds me of those aviation repair zingers: Problem—Number 3 engine missing. Solution—Engine found on right wing after brief search.) My new service advisor, "Matt", called me up and told me the unfortunate news: a new part that cost $500 would have to be ordered and shipped up from LA; I would have no use of my car until Thursday. Oh, and by the way, the stereo's fixed—Midas unplugged it and broke the faceplate, the morons. But the rear power outlet is fixed, at least—it was never plugged in by the factory, so it would seem.
I resigned myself to this new reality: not $450, but more like $950 plus a bunch of extra labor hours—call it $1200 and I'd be lucky to get out of there. I did some poking around, found an aftermarket VR6 ignition coil pack for $302, called Matt, told him about it, gave the okay to go with an aftermarket part if he could get a hold of it and it was cheaper. Taking whatever shortcuts I can glean, here.
I drove Lance's car to work on Wednesday. Then, this morning, I called Bob Lewis to verify that the car was done—it was—and had him drop me off at the dealership, where I finalized paperwork and paid the final bill: $968. Hey, less than four figures—a pleasant surprise! "Now, we did over eight hours of work on your car," Matt told me with a conspiratorial smile, "but we're only charging you for four. Well, three, actually, when you consider that we didn't charge you anything to investigate this window problem you reported or to fix the rattling thing in the armrest." I agreed, that certainly sounded like he was giving me few causes for complaint. I had them drive the car out so I could look at the stereo faceplate before I handed over my money; they amiably agreed, and I found that it was seated quite firmly—you could move it up and down a little, but just pressing buttons you'd never shift it. It was pretty clear to me at this point that Midas was wholly at fault for breaking the stereo, and I couldn't fault Bob Lewis for anything. At last! Out of all these service places, at least I can be sure that one has treated me right the whole time... or at least has only given me cause for suspicion and circumstantial evidence for failures that could just as easily have been one of the other place's fault, which I could never prove.
You see where I'm going with this, perhaps.
I got in the car and started it up. Sounded great. Shifted into gear nicely (I'm still basking in the joy of a new clutch). I pulled out onto the expressway, U-turned, got onto Guadalupe and then onto 85, and headed to work. I got off 85 at Stevens Creek and pulled up at the first stop light.
That's when I noticed that the idle speed was wrong.
It's supposed to be 700. On the Jetta, especially the silky VR6, 700 rpm is just about silent—I can barely tell the car is running and hasn't stalled out. It's a beauty at idle. But not today... because the car was idling at 1000 rpm. Which, coincidentally enough, happens to be the harmonic frequency of the VR6 engine block. So now it's noisy and wobbly and I feel the vibrations traveling up the gearshift lever into my forearms, and the needle is buffeted around the vicinity of the 1000 rpm mark as the vibrations kick up stronger and back off, batting the engine back and forth across the spine of the complementary waveforms.
I pulled in to the parking garage and went to my cubicle. I called up Matt and got his voicemail; I left a message noting that the idle speed seemed to be set too high. Was this because they'd reset the engine computer while installing the ignition coil pack, and it was now tuned for Jet-A fuel? Was it because they'd put on the wrong part, the one for the R32 or something? I didn't know, but it sure didn't seem right for the idle to be right on the harmonic frequency—there's no way they'd do that on purpose. Right?
No calls had arrived by lunchtime, and all the other guys decided to go to the Chinese place, so I was left behind to forage for myself. I got in the car and started it up. There was a slight hiccup as it started, but nothing to worry about, surely. I noticed, before leaving the garage, that the idle speed was back down to 700—oh good! So that's all taken care of, then. Jolly.
How charmingly naïve we can be sometimes, eh?
I drove down Bandley and up toward Stelling. After about three minutes I noticed with some consternation that the engine was idling at 1000 rpm again; apparently the gremlin of the ECU had not departed after all, and only required a certain amount of engine heat to prod him to liveliness. Ah well, so it's idling at 1000. Whatever.
But then I pulled into the drive-thru at Taco Bell. Sitting motionless in the line, waiting to give my order, shifter in neutral and clutch out, suddenly I notice that my instrument cluster was full of weird red shapes. Warning lights.
"Welcome to KFC/Taco Bell. May I take your order?"
"Uh, just a second. You seeing this?"
The seat belt light was on. The ABS light was on. The hell? I checked my belt; it was securely fastened. I checked the brakes; nothing happened to the light. My seatback was in the fully locked and upright position. All cigarettes were extinguished. And yet these mysterious lights were glaring at me. And, as I watched in numb silence, the ABS light began to blink on and off.
Then the seatbelt light went off. Then the ABS light went on solid again for a second, then started to blink faster than before, once or twice, then went off.
My car is haunted!
I bought the most occult-repellent items on the "Mexican-inspired" menu and picked them up at the window, staring at the instruments. No lights showed their faces; only the engine continued to judder and putt along at 1000 rpm. I drove back to work and parked.
Back in my cubicle, I talked to automotive necromancer CapLion, who told me to go back out to the garage and pop the hood and check a variety of possibly loose electrical connections. Unfortunately, the VR6, being crammed into the engine bay through the magic of Teutonic cylinder placement that lets you fit six cylinders into a hole made for four, exists under a carapace of plastic that pretty much obscures the entirety of the engine bay, eliminating any chance of even seeing such things as the wires leading from the radiator to the engine or from the battery to the alternator or the vacuum hoses leading to the throttle body, much less checking them for loose connections. All I could do, really, was poke at things with an index finger and note that they were hot. "Hmmm," I said to myself, rubbing my chin sagely.
I made a couple more calls to Bob Lewis, trying to get a hold of Matt and tell him of the new developments that had occurred, which would surely be of interest to him, especially considering that I am sort of planning on driving this car to San Diego on Friday afternoon, if he doesn't mind. But he hadn't called back in response to my initial message, and he was still away from his desk. I asked the service department receptionist to take down a message to have a service advisor—any service advisor—call me back pronto to tell me whether I should worry about the car abruptly dying on me somewhere in the middle of the Central Valley, most likely at Coalinga where the stench of cattleyards overpowers anyone not hermetically sealed into an air-conditioned car cabin.
Finally, just before 6:00, Matt called me back. I told him the whole story that had transpired at Taco Bell. He made clueless sorts of noises that belied his earlier seeming conversance with all things potentially odd in JettaWorld. "You say the seatbelt light was on. Was your seatbelt buckled up?" Uh, yes. "Sometimes when the engine needs to kick on certain systems, like the air conditioner, the revs can drop for a second or two, then come back up to speed." Well, true, but that's not what's happening—the engine is at a normal 700 rpm idle for the first three minutes of the drive, then shifts up to a 1000 rpm idle. "Ah. Hmm."
He advised me, in his expert opinion, to bring it in in the morning if I was really worried about it, but that it was probably okay to drive to San Diego. Well, phew. Now I can rest easy. And lo, it's 7:00 now. Time to go home.
I go out to the car and sit down in the driver's seat. I put in the key. I turn it. It goes COUGH... and stops. Nothing.
The battery is totally dead.
Now I am seriously unamused. I call up Bob Lewis—by this time of night there's only a single on-call person to take questions and appointments—and ask if it's okay to bring in my car and leave it there overnight, because if I get a jumpstart I'm not about to drive it home and go through this all again tomorrow morning, because there's clearly a short somewhere, or at least a gremlin that feeds on electrical energy and might escape from the car into my computer at home or something. She says that's totally fine. I get Kris to give me a jump, and I drive to Bob Lewis, high-revving the engine on every shift to make sure I don't kill the engine and strand myself on the side of the freeway with a dead battery. (Kris left the parking garage right after I did and tailed me all the way to the Guadalupe exit, for which I have no doubt he'll be rewarded with karma points or other valuable spiritual prizes.) I fill out a statement of My Royal Displeasure, write a big fat 0 in the "Amount approved for repair" space, seal my keys inside, and get ready to leave with Lance, who's met me there.
But who should still be there, burning the midnight oil, but Becky?
I couldn't resist. I went over to her desk, where she was chatting with the on-call person, whom I asked where I should turn in the night-owl envelope with my key in it. She pointed to the slot outside. And Becky took the bait: "I didn't expect to see you back here so soon!"
And I regaled her with a condensed version of the story. This time I could afford to be dismissive and a little magnanimous, because it was painfully clear that this time—instead of the first, where the brake fluid flush may in fact have been done as claimed, or the second, where maybe Bob Lewis broke the stereo faceplace or maybe Midas did—it was pretty damn cut-and-dried that whereas I had given Bob Lewis a working car with a working electrical system, what they'd given me back was a big sparking pile of crap. Becky's face was gray and wooden. There were no sneers of condescension this time. There was no attempt at passing of blame. It was all she could do to turn a wan smile in my direction and tiredly promise that if they found anything wrong—and I knew they would—I'd know by noon.
It's anybody's guess whether the car will be in any shape to drive to San Diego tomorrow. I'll call in the morning and see if there have been any developments. But in the meantime, I can't help but notice that this makes three consecutive car repair places that have, in the process of trying to fix or verify one thing, succeeded in breaking something else. I'm beginning to wonder what chance I'd even have if I knew what made all these mysterious car parts work together—they seem hell-bent on thwarting me at every turn, no matter how hard I work to head them off physically and psychologically. This game is just too intricate for the likes of me.
I'll stick to installing Windows 2000. It's less aggravation.
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| Wednesday, June 15, 2005 |
01:32 - They don't make Hitlers like they used to
http://www.deanesmay.com/posts/1118894835.shtml
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Dean, who has had a dog in the Terry Schiavo fight since before most of the rest of us had heard her name, has a good reaction piece to the autopsy results today that ostensibly prove that the position he took was "wrong". The point being that it's just a bit fatuous to be drawing "right" and "wrong" lines in a case like this, and the consequences of erring on the one side versus the other are anything but balanced, particularly depending on your individual moral/ethical compass.
But that's just background. What I wanted to note was this:
In Washington, White House spokesman Scott McClellan said the autopsy did nothing to change President Bush's position that Schiavo's feeding tube should not have been disconnected. He had signed a bill, rushed through by Congress in March, in a last-ditch effort to restore her feeding tube.
...And yet, somehow, the judicial arm of the government overrode him and brought his decree to naught.
Exactly what kind of Fuhrer is this? The kind that can be brought low by people working normally within the system? The kind who can't even intervene meaningfully in a life-or-death decison regarding a single citizen whose newsworthiness isn't even political?
Oh, but he's a Christian and a Republican, and you know what that means.
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| Tuesday, June 14, 2005 |
22:21 - Down in front
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20050613-104823-1601r.htm
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I saw part of this Dick Cheney's press conference yesterday morning when I was dropping off my car at Bob Lewis; it was being shown on the big TV in the waiting room, which was tuned to CNN. (Apparently it was only one brief period of the day when the coverage was not devoted exclusively to Michael Jackson, whom I would thank to please recuse himself from the public spotlight for a while so we can move on to the next celebrity scandal or tabloidy human-interest murder case to demand weeks on end of attention.)
Cheney explained, defensively, that the people being held in Gitmo are in fact terrorists—the real deal, the "20th hijacker" kinds of people—and that even so there was a definite process in place to determine whether each one posed specific threats to the United States or should be released. He then began to cite examples; he started by telling the story of one who had been picked up on the battlefields of Afghanistan, who had after seven months in Gitmo been determined not to be a threat to America's security, and was released to Afghanistan with a new Koran and several extra pounds around the waistline. Five months later, US forces killed him in a skirmish with Taliban forces in the mountains near Kandahar—because this released prisoner had immediately joined right back up with them and become the Taliban's regional commander.
Cheney began to recite the story of a second prisoner whose humane treatment and early release would seem to be unwarranted; but CNN chose that moment to cut away, and the anchor started talking over it, saying "Vice President Dick Cheney has been defending the conduct of guards at Guantanamo Bay, where interrogation practices have been criticized recently as "torture"; politicians on both sides of the aisle have called for Gitmo to be shut down." And then they cut away to more Michael Jackson crap.
Don't let the man talk, or anything. Don't let him make his case to the American people. Just shut off his microphone and remind us all that what he's defending is TORTURE CRITICIZED GITMO SHUT DOWN KORAN FLUSH URINE AAHHH! And then jump off in another direction before anyone has time to process what they've just seen. In the name of all that's secular, don't let the last impression in people's minds be what Cheney said.
I would wager that Cheney is more hated among the general public here and abroad than even Bush; nobody knows anything about Cheney except that he's a big grimacing evil bald corporate vulture, whereas at least Bush has a dumb innocent vacant look on his face. Why, just put up their pictures next to each other—you know who's running the show! —And yet if anybody actually listened to what either man says, in speech after speech, particularly off the cuff, so many of these preconceptions would just dissolve.
Not that CNN is about to let us make up our own minds or anything.
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21:05 - Beep... beep... beep
http://quake.wr.usgs.gov/recenteqs/Quakes/usziae.html
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Just got word of a very large earthquake off the coast of Northern California, with a tsunami heading toward Eureka and Crescent City (the latter of which was severely damaged by the Alaska quake/tsunami in 1964). The quake seems to have been 7.0.
Just heard the Emergency Broadcast System beeping on the TV upstairs...
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| Monday, June 13, 2005 |
22:08 - Huh boy
http://www.cartoonbrew.com/archives/2005_06.html#001139
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Well, this is an unpleasant little blast from the past. Remember Loonatics?
Well, it's been redesigned, presumably in response to thunderous audience feedback. As I'm sure everyone remembers, the big problem was that everyone had sharp pointy red laser eyes and huge sharp teeth in a gnashing snarling expression. Also they weren't recognizable as whatever species they all were.
So ... their adjustments were to ditch the giant pointy sunglasses and give everyone bland "Have a Nice Day" smiley faces and anime eyes.
Perfect. That's just what it needed.
Urg.
(Via Steven Den Beste.)
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13:22 - Service sucks
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There have been some intermittent downtimes of this server over the past few days. The machine is randomly crashing. The crashes appear to be hardware-related, since I haven't installed any new software on the machine lately, and they happen at seemingly random times of the day or night.
Managed.com doesn't have phone support; rather, they have this bizarre e-mail-to-web-forum system whereby you e-mail the support address, and a trouble ticket is opened automatically, and a message thread in the online ticket viewing system is begun. This would work great if it weren't for a few small problems: a) Follow-up e-mails sent in response to the messages that are e-mailed to you from the system don't seem to get added into the web system, so if they respond to your request for help via e-mail (which also goes onto the web thread), and you make the mistake of answering in e-mail, it just disappears into the ether never to be seen or responded to again; and b) During most of the day and night, if you try to use the web support forum to post followups, when you click "Submit" it takes more than ten minutes on average to process your response—so the browser invariably times out, and you have no way of knowing whether the message was posted or not.
If they only had a phone number you could call, there would be none of this "E-mail a message asking for help with the repeatedly crashing server; get a response asking for your password; reply, only to have the reply disappear and not get posted to the web forum, which is the only thing they read, and where they close a ticket every time they respond to it, and only if you reply does it get reopened; wait twelve hours before realizing that they never got your response; find the link to the web forum thread; repost your response into the web form; wait half an hour while the browser times out and you try in desperation to get back into the system while it spins and chokes; e-mail a new trouble ticket; repeat" nonsense. But nooooo.
So I'm stuck with sending reboot requests to the reboot request queue, which is apparently staffed by onsite "techs" who are trained in the art of pushing the little button on the front of the box, but not in the art of anything else (like, say, looking on the console to see if any telltale kernel panic messages have been echoed to it, or telling me accurately whether the server was down because it crashed or because it was "disconnected", no matter how many times I ask for this information); and they refer me back to the support forums, where the techs alternate between irritably telling me to send reboot requests if the server goes down, petulantly telling me that "Well, I can ping it, so your server seems to be fine" right after it gets rebooted after a crash, and passing my case from one tech to another, each of which must be briefed on the entire case history from day one and shows no knowledge of my previously submitted diagnostic profiles, even though they're posted right at the top of the support forum thread. (I strongly suspect that there's only one support guy in the entire company, and he just keeps changing his name and feigning amnesia whenever I send a new support request; this way they won't have to fix anything, and I'll take my troublesome demanding "I would like for my server not to crash all the time" business to some other company. Fix bad RAM or CPU/motherboard? Bah! Who do these customers think they are, anyway?)
So there's that. And also there's my car. See, here's the timeline:
Last Thursday I took my Jetta in to Midas to install my new clutch. (This part, at least, went dreamily; it now drives like a whole new car.) At the same time, I asked them to take a look at the power outlet in the trunk, where I would like to plug in a GPS unit for the Alaska trip; I tested it a couple of weeks ago and it seemed not to be working. So when I got the car back, Midas told me they agreed it was broken, but couldn't find any loose fuses or anything; I'd have to take it to the dealership. Fine, I can deal with that.
On the way back to work, though, I noticed that my stereo system wouldn't turn on. Not "came up in Safe mode," or "all my radio stations had been reset" or anything—wouldn't turn on. At all. Completely dead. Also my clock had been reset, and the power windows seemed not to be working properly (they have a one-touch feature where if you push the button and release it, the window goes up or down all the way; but that only occurs if the engine is running or if the engine has been shut off but the doors haven't been opened yet. Now, however, they seemed not to be one-touch-capable even in the engine-off-doors-still-closed case.) I talked to the service person at Bob Lewis, and she told me confidently that the readiness codes simply needed to be reset, and these—stereo, clock, windows—were all common symptoms of a tripped readiness code. Okay, fine. Sounds nice and cheap. I made an appointment for Monday (today).
The following day (Friday), I took the car to a local smog place on De Anza—little mom-and-pop place that has been in the same location since 1969, well respected and a community fixture. They gave me the smog check I needed to renew my car registration. I got the certificate; all readings looked fine.
Yet when I started up the car to drive home at the end of the day, the "Check Engine" light came on. You know, otherwise known as the "Please insert $125" light. Because that's how much it costs to get the dealership to take a look and find out what the hell it's doing on. Mind you, I have just come from the smog check place, one of the functions of which is to identify any conditions that might cause the engine light to come on in the near future; and they found nothing. Later that same day, the engine light comes on. What the shoes did they do to my car?!
Oh yeah, and over the weekend the engine hesitated on startup a couple of times. Which is real reassuring when I picture it happening at a remote campground somewhere between Whitehorse and Haines Junction. I figure it's another symptom of the electrical system being screwed, possibly coupled with having the smog check done; after all, my radio still won't come on, and the windows are still being a little unpredictable.
The car is now back in at Bob Lewis, where they're going to charge me a big wad of cash to fix something that apparently broke while I was getting the smog check done, possibly complicated by something that apparently broke while I was getting my clutch fixed and the fuses looked at. Seems like every time I get someone to fix my car, they break something else.
While it's in there, I'm also asking that they fix the little piece of plastic buried inside the latch mechanism of my armrest, which is dangling over a piece of wire and making a rattling and buzzing sound at highway speeds; also, if I'm lucky, they'll fix that rear power outlet that was the cause of all this in the first place. I'm sure it'll cost me the entire profits I've made from the latest book, and considering that I'm about to send in the Estimated Tax Payments on it to the state and fed, I'm going to end up owing money on balance. If they can't fix the armrest cheaply, I'm just going to drip some Elmer's glue in there.
What else? Oh yes: Cartoon Network has its audio all screwed up. None of the other channels. If I switch to Cartoon Network in the middle of the night, the right audio channel is cranked WAY UP LOUD to the point where it's clipping. I can turn the balance knob back and forth on my stereo and verify this: the left channel is barely audible at all, and the right channel is blaring and grating. I have verified that it happens on no other channels, and it happens on other TVs in the same house.
So I sent Comcast an e-mail through their handy little "Ask Comcast" e-mail gateway. (I'd tried their "24/7 Web Assistant" thing, which I discovered to my dismay was merely an AI bot designed to scan your questions for keywords and give out canned answers.) My hopes weren't high, but the notes on the e-mail gateway said that a technician would respond "usually within 24 hours", which said to me that an actual person would reply to my carefully explained problem, which outlined precisely the methods I'd used to isolate the behavior of the audio channel and verify that it was not in any way the fault of my equipment or configuration.
And—surprise, surprise—I got a canned response back explaining to me how to properly seat the coaxial F-connector for better reception and how to set up porn-blocking for my kids. And a little footnote at the bottom that said, "If you exhaust all of these options and are still experiencing poor reception, a tiling picture, a "One Moment please" message, or a communication error, please call Customer Care at 1-800-xxx-xxxx. A technician may need to visit your home to rectify the issue."
Boy, I sure hope someone got paid handsomely for setting up all these barricades between clueless customers like me and any hope of getting competent assistance.
Oh, and I'm not even going to get into how many bugs I've filed against Tiger Mail and its infuriating behaviors such as downloading and caching every single message in my Junk and Deleted folders when I come in on Monday, which after a typical weekend usually comes to some 10,000 messages or more, meaning that my computer is useless for about two hours while it keeps trying to grab thousands of messages at a time and cache them locally, while I stand there with my mouse posed over the Activity palette like a Whac-a-Mole game killing the sync processes every time they start.
And how my machine here at work seems to have got it into its head that I want my Keychain to lock itself automatically every time I step away from my desk, so I come back to find that all my apps have popped up cascades of "So-and-so wants access to your Keychain!" authentication dialog boxes which jumble up against each other and drag the system to a standstill.
I must be at some kind of karmic confluence of misfortune at the hands of all those who provide service to me on which I depend. Sounds like a perfect time to be driving merrily off into the Northern wilderness!
UPDATE: Kenny B. writes:
I imagine that at this point you might be considering a wagon, oxen, compass, map, and log book for this trip.
If you do, don't forget to bring a barrel of axle grease and a couple of extra wagon wheels. :)
I'll just stop off at Hiram's shop. If he can't sell me what I need, at least I'll be able to find solace of another kind.
UPDATE: Seems it was the mass airflow sensor that went out. A paltry $350, plus the cost of investigation labor and installation.
As for the stereo not turning on, Bob Lewis discovered that the reason was that the unit had been unplugged, in the back—it had been yanked out and unplugged when Midas checked for reasons why my trunk-mounted power outlet wasn't working. (BL also said that the stereo faceplate is now fitting loosely, like there was some damage to the unit. Funny, it was fine this morning.)
And the reason why the trunk-mounted power outlet wasn't working? It had been ... unplugged. Sometime between 1999 and now.
Moral of the story: don't ask Midas to check anything electrical, as they will apparently manhandle your stereo out of its socket, leave it unplugged, damage it, and then cram it back in and hope you don't notice that it's not working anymore.
And this also means that I somehow managed to pass the smog check with a bad airflow sensor, which I can only assume means that the smog check place is crappy.
There are fewer and fewer places around here that I feel I can trust with my car.
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| Friday, June 10, 2005 |
23:39 - Meaningless Trivia for a Better Tomorrow
http://www.striderweb.com/blog/128
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Steve Rider has one of those meme things they've been going on about in the newsreels, and I'm supposed to submit my scintillating contribution to the general discourse surrounding iTunes and music in general. Never having done one of these before, I don't know how likely it'll be to be entertaining, but hey, I don't recall guaranteeing anything to begin with, so here goes:
Total size of music files on my computer:
14.02 GB. Not even enough to make my 20GB iPod really stretch its legs. Pity. Note that this amount includes 2.1 GB of FreePlay Music, which would be great to use in iMovie projects if I ever did any of those anymore.
The last CD I bought was:
I honestly don't know if I can remember which of my recently acquired physical CDs I bought myself, rather than were given to me as gifts. I've certainly had a lot more of the latter than the former in recent years; my purchases have been almost 100% digital since the iTMS opened. (Though I'm going to have to break down and slink into a Tower Records or something if I ever want to get some Beatles music, or even the odd guilty Zeppelin tune, as those groups appear to have no plans to join the digital age in our lifetimes.) So I think, for myself, I'll have to point back at late 2002 when I bought The Essential Leonard Cohen and the Spirited Away soundtrack while I and some friends were mooching around a mall after attending the Bay Street Apple Store opening. Oh, and I think I also got Rufus Wainwright's eponymous debut album at that same time. And a copy of William Orbit's Strange Cargo, not realizing that it would sound nothing like his later stuff that I enjoyed a whole lot more.
Song playing right now in iTunes:
Right now? I don't actually listen to music while I'm typing; I find it too distracting. The only times I ever fire up the tunes is when I'm puttering about the room doing some mindless thing that requires no cognitive interaction, like drawing or folding laundry or peeling a pomegranate.
If I were to arbitrarily hit Play right now, though, Party Shuffle would serve up "The Big Chair" by Da Vinci's Notebook, followed by Trevor Jones' main title theme from Last of the Mohicans.
Five songs I listen to a lot, or that mean a lot to me:
Just five? Oh, very well:
- "Don't Touch Me" by Andy Merrill as Brak. Perhaps the most quintessential auditory morsel from the Cartoon Planet glory days. It's got everything: Brak incoherently yelling, Space Ghost beatboxing... uh... Brak incoherently yelling... yeah, like I said, everything.
- "This Land", the essential instrumental theme by Hans Zimmer on the Lion King soundtrack. Probably no other piece of music has anything like the same ability to transport me to a specific date, time, and place: when I first listened to this soundtrack on the Fourth of July 1994, lights off, watching the fireworks in Ukiah—ten miles away over the southern horizon—out my bedroom window. I'd graduated from high school about a week before, the same weekend when I saw the movie for the first time; and I tend to mark the days of my adult life more or less from that moment.
Yeah, shut up. Like you don't have a maudlin fetishized indulgence like that.
- "One Man Guy" by Rufus Wainwright. When his father sang it, it was about morose firelit self-reliance; but given Rufus' all-pervasive homoeroticism in lyrics and delivery, it takes on several weird extra meanings, and it becomes—in Cartman's words—all about gay cowboys eating pudding.
- "Prince Ali" from the Aladdin soundtrack. Howard Ashman's last hurrah (one of the last lyrics he wrote before he died), and one of the most finely textured, elegantly structured Broadway-style songs Disney has ever produced, with a logical progression in theme from verse to verse that's downright exhilarating, and counterpointed patter with intricate harmony that you're still finding new nuances in the fiftieth time you hear it. Robin Williams is at his finest, Alan Menken's music is crashing and rollicking like it simply enjoys being alive, and the whole thing comes cascading down in a frenetic finale that's somehow all the more satisfying without even the visuals to go with it. Stephen Schwartz gave us a couple of game attempts in later films, but this song really was the peak of the craft.
- "The Ballad of Peter Pumpkinhead" by XTC. Yeah, sure, politically speaking it's matchlessly vapid and shallow:
Peter Pumpkinhead put to shame
Governments who would slur his name
Plots and sex scandals failed outright
Peter merely said, "Any kind of love is all right"
Hearing this stuff in high school, though, was like shoving a candy cane right into the cerebral cortex: Fed the starving and housed the poor; showed the Vatican what gold's for! Hallelujah! Preach it! And as insipid as I find it today, as full of misdirected recrimination and useless platitudes and bored persecution fantasies, I still gotta admit that the tune is damn catchy and the texture is sublime, especially the soft final verse with the distant bells. And it still makes the heart catch in the throat, just a little.
Five people to whom I’m passing the baton:
Oh, great. You know this is by far the hardest part, don't you?
CapLion, which I guess goes without saying.
Paul Denton, because that simply oughtta be a fun read.
Mike Silverman, if he's still blogging. (Wait, he is!)
Mike Hendrix. I'm sure he has some tricks up his sleeve for us.
Damien Del Russo, likewise.
And I'd say Lileks too, but I don't know if his format would allow for it or his interest would encompass it; besides, he gives us plenty of this same kind of insight on a daily basis anyway. Be cool to see, though.
Well, that was fun...
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13:25 - Stop wigglin' around, you jackass
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I just have one thing to add to this, in response to this:
Brock Freaking Samson.
"Be a maaa-a-a-an..."
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| Wednesday, June 8, 2005 |
11:56 - You sound surprised
http://vodkapundit.com/archives/007868.php
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You know, just curious, but what did you think all those guys meant by calling the WTC replacement proposals the "World Cultural Center"?
The World Trade Center Memorial Cultural Complex will be an imposing edifice wedged in the place where the Twin Towers once stood. It will serve as the primary "gateway" to the underground area where the names of the lost are chiseled into concrete. The organizers of its principal tenant, the International Freedom Center (IFC), have stated that they intend to take us on "a journey through the history of freedom"--but do not be fooled into thinking that their idea of freedom is the same as that of those Marines. To the IFC's organizers, it is not only history's triumphs that illuminate, but also its failures. The public will have come to see 9/11 but will be given a high-tech, multimedia tutorial about man's inhumanity to man, from Native American genocide to the lynchings and cross-burnings of the Jim Crow South, from the Third Reich's Final Solution to the Soviet gulags and beyond. This is a history all should know and learn, but dispensing it over the ashes of Ground Zero is like creating a Museum of Tolerance over the sunken graves of the USS Arizona.
I wish I could say I'm surprised or disappointed by this, but I'm not. I saw it coming the moment they floated the first "Freedom Tower" models with sixty melty-ice-cube stories and another fifty diaphanous stories of wickerwork and papier-maché on top.
The people with the real power in this country and the Western world, the ones whose momentum is in the ascendancy, have as their ultimate goal our own humbling on the world stage, not to say our own destruction in favor of giving someone else a turn being king of the hill. (That's "fairness", see.) We may as well just get used to it—because in light of what's coming in the next few years as 9/11 matures into our social consciousness, this will just be par for the course.
Terrorism will be in all our backyards, and we'll welcome it with open arms.
UPDATE: Bill Whittle has these guys' number. Too bad there are a lot more of them, and they run the nightly news.
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| Monday, June 6, 2005 |
13:31 - I'm running out of link paste
http://www.lileks.com/screedblog/index.html
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Gotta save at least enough for this one. Heh—apparently enough people dislike the Screedy Bleats as to drive them onto their own page. Well, that makes 'em all the easier to find and archive, then.
Stories like these must be told, of course, if only to show what the media finds important, and remind us how good things are going. I can imagine in late 2001 asking a question of myself in 2005:
What’s the main story? The smallpox quarantine? Fallout from the Iranian – Israeli exchange contaminating Indian crops? A series of bombings in heartland malls?
"Well, no – the big story today has to do with soldiers mishandling terrorists' holy texts at a detention center."
Mishandling? How? Like, you mean, they opened it up without first checking to see if it was ticking, and it blew up –
"No, they handled it in a way that disrespected it. Infidels are supposed to use gloves."
Oh. So we lost, then.
Not yet, but I'm sure we've got it in us.
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| Thursday, June 2, 2005 |
00:34 - A little too much honesty, perhaps?
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BayAreaJobFinder.com has been airing these weird, weird ads late at night by a "Dr. David Batstone" who sits behind a desk like a personal injury attorney and issues proclamations such as:
Most employees, on the day of their termination, express surprise. Yet upon reflection, they realize there were certain signs that should have warned them that the end was coming, if they'd just connected the dots. Just remember: just because your last employer may have been happy to get rid of you, doesn't mean that somebody else won't be happy to employ your brains, skills, and work ethic.
And
Have you ever been forced to choose between your sense of business ethics and your job? Many employees in the technology sector have found themselves asked to do things by their employers that they themselves found objectionable. Just remember, even though you may have been fired for refusing to compromise your principles, another employer might be happy to hire you for those very principles.
Just a tad direct, don'tcha think? I mean, I suppose I can't argue with either one of those sentiments, but I don't think I've ever seen such raw honesty in that kind of ad before...
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| Tuesday, May 31, 2005 |
11:33 - This should not be difficult
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Okay—so I'm trying to figure something out here. Anyone with any expertise in the GPS world, your input would be greatly appreciated.
I'm trying to find a cheap, small, portable GPS unit that will do one thing and one thing only: keep a long and detailed track log. The purpose being that I can record my route for the three weeks I'll be in BC, Yukon, and Alaska this August, come home, download the track log into my computer, and then link up the GPS data with all the photos that I intend to take.
I don't want any funky mapping stuff, or two-way radios, or route waypoints, or a heart monitor, or directions to local hotels and In-N-Out Burgers, or even a compass. I just want a long and detailed breadcrumb trail.
Looking at the Garmin product page, and poking through the specs for each individual unit, it seems that the company is being unnecessarily coy in conveying exactly how big a track log each unit will support. From what I gather, a 10,000-point track log is considered "large" these days, but what does that mean? How long will that many points last me? This page seems to indicate that the situation is nice and confusing:
In addition to these choice you will need to decide whether to place the tracklog in "automatic" recording mode or "time" recording mode. In automatic mode the unit itself decides when to drop a bread crumb (trackpoint). (The G-III family also supports a "distance" recording mode.) Generally, in automatic mode, it will enter a trackpoint when you have turned more than 25 meters (82 feet) from a straight line projection from you last point or you have significantly changed the speed from the last entry. Using these two criteria allows the Garmin to accurately map your journey, however it becomes difficult to judge exactly how much data can be collected before the tracklog becomes full. Some units will also make a log entry when the unit draws a new screen. With a typical 1000 point log you could overflow the log in 40 miles or in 400 miles depending on the terrain and your driving/hiking/riding habits. On the G-III family you can change the setting for the turn distance. The Street Pilot uses 50 meters by default and this turns out to be a good setting for driving down the road. This, of course, will increase the length of data that can be collected at the expense of accuracy on turns. The etrex vista, legend, and venture have both time and distance. Automatic mode has a setting where you can adjust the sensitivity to distance from the projected straight line from less to more often.
And every single unit seems to handle it differently—and Garmin doesn't seem to care too much about telling potential buyers about whether the interval is configurable, whether you can select "distance" or "time" mode, whether you can select whether new data will wrap around and overwrite the oldest data points or whether the whole log just shifts to keep the newest points (discarding the old ones as it adds the new) or whether it simply stops recording when the log fills up. I'm playing with a GPSMAP 295 that my neighbor lent me, and it doesn't seem to be configurable at all—you can just turn the track log "off" or "on", and in driving the 15 miles to work I used up 9% of the available track log space. Clearly this feature doesn't appear to have been a very high priority in the design criteria of this thing. And certainly nothing online sees fit to tell me how many track points the GPSMAP 295 has, so I could compare it to the capacity of a unit made in the last five years.
I don't mind downloading the log to my computer every night—I'll have a laptop along with me. I just don't want to have to pull over and suck down all the data every three hours lest I miss any numbers. That's ridiculous. How hard can it be to keep a day's worth of track points in a unit the size of my armrest?
Garmin's offerings seem to downplay the track log feature in favor of blaring headlines about how so-and-so unit is reliable and extra-precise as WAAS can make it or uses animated graphics that will help you identify your marked waypoints. The closest it ever gets to talking about track point capacity—even in the specification pages—is that it boasts Garmin's exclusive TracBack® feature that will reverse your track log and help you navigate your way back home. Wheeee! How helpful! Now give me some fleepin' NUMBERS, you morons. Even a price would be useful to add to some of these product pages.
(And Magellan seems to only support 2000 track points on any of their units, which—in light of the 10K that some of Garmin's units seem to have—seems a bit light.)
So: Anybody have any great insights? I don't want to spend hundreds of dollars here. I don't want to know where reefs and buoys are; I don't want to plot waypoints to VORs and airport towers; I don't want cute colorful icons of fish on hooks; I don't need it to be waterproof or camouflage-colored or even have a screen. I just want something that will log my trip (preferably on car power) and let me download the log.
Does anybody make such a thing? Can someone advise them as to how to advertise their products or maybe get them into Google?
UPDATE: Looks like the eTrex Legend is the way to go. Thanks to all who mailed!
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Brian Tiemann
