This page features every post I write, and is dedicated to Andrew Ho.
So, my car is now compliant with Chicago emissions. I’ve been neglecting to take it in since the last time it failed, after which I got it tuned up, and started working full-time, with a long-ass commute of about thirty feet. Yeah, well, it failed the second test, at which point they gave me a booklet with a list of shops in Chicago, sorted by their success rate at fixing emissions problems. Since I’m in a new neighborhood, I took the beast over by Car X. Now, normally I’m a bit wary of big chain stores when there’s plenty of greasy guys around willing to do a perfectly good job in a local garage, where the money will stay in the city, and not be siphoned off to some offshore, or at least suburban tax shelter. Yeah, well, the guy figured out my catalytic converters were shot – I mean, they were fifteen years old, right? So, for $475 those were replaced. And it was a slow last Friday over there so you know what they took it by the emissions testing station and passed me through the test!
I am in love. They fixed my car, and they saved me a boat load of time. Car X rocks!
What else? Ah, you may have noticed this funny little strip on the right-hand side of my home page, of little photos. Check it out — You can leave comments and stuff, and I’ll read them. And it is easy for me as sending an e-mail. Hopefully this adds a touch of … whatever.
Other fun things, in case you need to waste some time:
The New York Times has an an article with a plainly funny graph showing optimism, to the point of “no, wait, you guys are so obviously full of Bullsh!t” in the Bush administration’s job projection figures. Every year the administration’s graph goes stright up at a steep angle. Every year the reality graph goes down at a very soft angle, and every year the administration has to move their steep line over to the right …
A Moveon web site called Daily Mislead points out that Bushs’ new campaign ads, which I haven’t seen, which feature the image of firefighters carrying a body bag from Ground Zero, are all the more hypocritical given the administration’s ban on filming body bags returning from the War on Terror.
But it is not all grim, depressing politics. The New York Times has a fun, insightful article on pickpocketing research. A study posted by BBC reports that teens who take a vow of celibacy have less sex, but the same rate of STDs as their morally loose peers, in large part because they are not prepared, with condoms, when they do succumb to their hormones. I heard an NPR story about the abstinence curriculum that schools do in many places, and the main reason to be “abstain” is to avoid STDs … but … well … I don’t know, this just sort of shoots that side of the argument all to heck. Maybe we’re better off with the advice “you needn’t rush into a sexual relationship, but if you’re going to do it, get a damned condom first! Promise me you’ll carry a condom with you, just in case your sex drive overpowers your good judgement! Thanks!”
What else? It’s been some windy times in Illinois. In fact, back in Champaign-Urbana, an MTD bus took a fall off a bridge. That’s some wind! It turns out that eBay has been spanked by New York State because PayPal plays a little too fast and loose with “the truth.” Silly PayPal! Bad PayPal! Hooray for Eliot Spitzer!
And, for your grinning pleasure, a piece on how Californians see United States geography.
Alright.
Last, but not least, I was really productive at work yesterday. (7MB AVI file, but the paper shredder is fine.)
/danny
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Happy Birthday, Sister Girl!
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Geese and ducks on the ice at Indian Boundary Park, February 29, 2004. The ice is melting, but the water fowl are still on “solid ground”. Note that many of the ducks are standing on one foot, because the ice is cold. A few others are huddled with their heads tucked closely against their bodies.
Many of the fish — carp — were dead, or moving very sluggishly where the ice had melted. Some seemed dead but were in fact still moving very slowly, their metabolisms drastically reduced to survive the winter. The weather’s been very nice in Chicago lately, after what has qualified as a genuine winter, with oppressive cold, and snow on the ground for months at a time.
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So, I’m told to send an e-mail to a third party. Microsoft Outlook conveniently highlights the e-mail address, so that I could click on it to end an e-mail. But the e-mail I’m sending is actually based on another e-mail, so I’d rather forward.
So, I right-click. Can I add the e-mail to my contacts list? No. So, I pull up contacts window. I put the guy’s first name in and drag the e-mail hyperlink to the e-mail address field. Close and some annoying dialogue pops up and I click it away without reading it because I don’t care what silly advice Outlook has for me.
So, I can not find the contact in my contacts list. Okay … I keep clicking away trying to make the search work right because I tell it to search all lists but it keeps switching to “search global list” but whatever.
So, instead of searching for the contact I guess I screwed up when I entered merely a first name and e-mail address, I go and drag the little blue e-mail address to the To: field in my message composer. Edit edit edit proof-read double-check contacts hey … why is the To: address prefixed with mailto:? Edit that …
Edit that … I mean … each time I try to edit the To: address it only let’s me select all or none. I can not edit an e-mail address. Can I right-click on it? Yes, but unlike, say, the file browser, there is no “rename” or other “edit the fucking e-mail address option.”
Stuff like this drives me crazy. Why do we put all these features in the software when none of the features are actually useful, and we actually have less ability to do things than we did in the evil bad old days when software was “hard” to use?
So, I delete the mailto: address, highlight the blue blob from the other message, right-click, and paste a well-formed e-mail address into the To: field.
Sigh.
I just have to rant sometimes. I’m usually a very easy-going guy, but over-engineering that interferes with my ability to do simple and obvious things I take for granted, like editing an e-mail address … that stuff makes me really really irritated. Dang.
/danny
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I read something on the BBC today that gave me hope. You know how John Kerry and John Edwards are scared to say anything nice about gay marriage because the Republicans would use it as a wedge issue to deny Democrats the bigotry vote? Well, the thing I read made the point that if Bush is going to come out, so to speak, on the Straight Marriage Amendment, then the rumors that he could replace Evil Dick Cheney with Gay-Friendly Hero of 9/11 Rudy Guliani were entirely pointless. And it occurred to me that, in this scenario, Gay Marriage could cost the Republicans the election.
It is hard to hold a big tent up when your specialty is driving wedges.
Yeah, well, I should get back to work. A little bit of reading for those interested:
If anyone is doing some sort of pink pride parade, I’m down with that.
If people want to love each other, I’m down with that.
/danny
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I was feeling ill just before New Years and went to bed early on New Years Eve, but Yayoi dragged me out of my dreamy reverie to watch the ball drop. I saw the throngs of happy people cheering on a cold Winter’s day in New York City, and I felt unusually emotional about it. I let it go … let it go, and figured that what it was is that it has been a pretty strange few years, for the country and for my own self. Strikes and gutters. World travel and layoffs. Lovers and heart breaks. Progress progress always progress. And nothing seems to symbolize a victory over the things that dog us more than a throng of New Yorkers packing in to Times Square to boldly shout that they are alive and happy. Ah, what a tasty target they must be … but they don’t care. They’re proud, and confident, and even if times are a bit rough they believe that tomorrow ought to be better. Fates bless ‘m!
Some time on the first I managed to pull this one out, to the tune of Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young’s _Woodstock_:
Well I came upon a child of God
He was walkin along the road
And I asked him “Tell me where are you goin?”
This he told me,
Said “I’m goin down to NYC,
Gonna join with the American way
Got to get back the people,
and set my soul free.”
We are stardust
We are golden
We are billion year old carbon
And we’ve got to get ourselves
Back to the Apple
“Well then can I walk beside you?
I have come to lose the fog
And I feel myself a cog in something turnin
And may be all the time that we live in
Or maybe too much CNN
But I dont know who I am,
and life is for learnin.”
We are stardust
We are golden
We are billion year old carbon
And we’ve got to get ourselves
Back to the Apple
By the time we got to Times Square
We were over one million strong
And everywhere was the sound and the celebration
And I dreamed I saw those death-bombin planes
And those buildings in the sky
Turning in to butterflys
above our nation
We are stardust
We are golden
And we all die Americans
And we’ve got to get ourselves
Back to the Apple
/danny
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Thank you, NTK:
More cheap hacks to counter-impress smug MacOS X owners.
Yes, Panther's "Preview" app is a super-fast PDF viewer that's
a lot snappier than Adobe "OMFG! A vector! How do I draw
that??!!" Acrobat. Close the gap of shame (and stop yourself
eating your own fist off waiting for Acrobat to start up) by
running ADOBE READER SPEED-UP, a eensy-weensy Windows
program that deletes a bunch of Adobe plugins that you don't
care about. Voila: spend your spare time reading your doc
rather than watching Adobe go "Loading dumb-ass marketing
rubbish/lousy DRM feature" for a thousand hours.
http://www.tnk-bootblock.co.uk/prods/misc/index.php
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He will not be our next President, but he has already helped change our country. Put best by Robert Menendez, House Democratic Caucus chair, via Thomas Ferraro, of Reuters:
“He gave a stiff spine to a lot of Democrats.”
Menendez said he and other members of Congress who had backed Dean had a conference telephone call with him shortly before his speech in Burlington. Dean first disclosed his plans to drop out about an hour earlier in an online message to backers.
Menendez said Dean told him many of his supporters backed consumer advocate Ralph Nader in the 2000 White House race.
Democrats with stiff spines, who oppose George Bush instead of appeasing George Bush. Bringing disaffected liberals who voted Green in the last election. I’d like to think that even though he’s not the candidate, he has already helped his party to win this year’s election.
I’m still disappointed that he didn’t get anywhere.
/danny
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Cleaning out the e-mail box. A few gems:
- Which Dysfunctional Care Bear Are You? — A link to my sister’s blog. She’s Bondage Bear and I’m Gay Bear. That’s what we get for disdaining the Christian Coalition.
- Moveon.org are up to … advocating censure of President Bush for misleading us into War. Hey, it’s not like he lied about a blowjob or something pernicious like that!
- Let us say your local municipal or state website is disinterested in helping you register to vote. Franchisement is such a pain in the ass! Okay, well, You can visit rockthevote.com and get yours squared away. They asked me questions and generated a PDF file for me to print out and mail in.
- Billed as “Yet Another Mirror” — A Crazed Lunatic Prevaricator — I’m told that the P word fits and “sounds a bit fancier than ‘liar’.”
- Ever had to send a test message to a mail server without relying on sendmail and/or DNS, but couldn’t recall the SMTP commands? Yeah, I hacked up a little script to take care of that for me.
- Does your Windows box maybe have one of the many virii that have been ravaging the Internet the past few weeks, but you’re too lazy to install a danged virus scanner? Well, drop in on Trend Micro and they can help you clean your hard drive up quick and free.
And then, I share with you a bit of my childhood that I typed to another list . . .
The song on my schoolbus went like this:
I was down at the bar
Tryin’ to pick up some chick
But none of the girls were good to go
So I said “Hey what’s wrong [with my dick]?”
I looked over down
At the other side of the cantina
I asked the guy why you so fly?
He said “I’m funky Daniel Howard!”
-d
My factual lack of funk in those days had a profound impact on the gifted, bored children I rode the schoolbus to and from the magnet school every day. By the way, some of you get excited because I’ve dated quite a few Asian girls what’s my strange fetish from? Heck if I know — I don’t really worry about these things — but since I mention many a long hour of my adolescence spent aboard the schoolbus, I will note that a very cute Korean-American girl blossomed before my eyes on a daily basis over a few years, a couple hours a day. I shall always have fond memories of that young lady, yes indeed.
See, we live at the far north end of the city. My grammar school was downtown. We were the first to board in the morning, and the last to alight in the evening. About an hour each way. Those were long hours indeed. Confessions of lab rat.
On that note . . . BADGER BADGER BADGER BADGER ! ! !
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On Tue, Feb 10, 2004 at 05:01:41PM -0800, Benjamin Feen wrote:
> Hey, this reminds me — it’s time once again to talk about Italian
> beef.
> Anyone have a recipe that can approximate the real thing?
I saw some in the Deli Case at Jewel today. I bet you get a few pounds of that sliced up REEL THEEN and some beef stock, french rolls, and peppers and onions, if you’re in to that stuff, you could have yourself a good ol’ time.
Personally, I dig the italian beef at Pizza Chicago. It aint all that authentic, but when I worked there’s I’d fuckin’ drench that thing super-juicy, and slide a slice of provolone in there that shit was good.
I just got some Natural Ovens whole grain bread, toasted it, good mayo, good good wonderful mustard, deli pastrami, swiss, tomatoes, lettuce .. put that shit together so fine my baby was like damn it’s like the elements blend harmoniously I feel like I’m on Iron Chef and I’m like yeah baby, this is the European equivalent ta SUSHI!
Guess I need some horse radish to dip that shit in.
-d
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Yesterday I dropped Yayoi off at Harold Washington so she could join a ski trip to Wisconsin. Not a big fan of skiing myself, I returned home, and it being a pretty nice day, I struck off in search of adventure, or at least a quiet coffee shop to have a sit and read through my magazines.
I made my way to a coffee shop I like, Filter, in the Flat Iron building at Milwaukee and Damen. The place was crowded, and a poster in the window accounted for it – there was one heckuva artist’s exhibition going on upstairs. I wandered for hours the serpentine hallways of the Flat Iron building, visiting studio after studio, and all along the hallways were artists who didn’t have their studios there, but had brought their art to show and tell and sell as well.
It was a great time.
On my way back, I read through a New Yorker article that talks about Howard Dean, and his biography, which he has avoided sharing with us so much. He’s the eldest of four brothers, from a wealthy family, so of course he went to Yale, just like George, where he was also an underachiever, getting a B- average, just a little higher than George. Except, well, Howard’s kind of different. He requested black roommates, because the place was integrating. Those roommates recall that, unlike many white liberal contemporaries, Howard was approachable and open-minded, and not at all uncomfortable with open racial dialogue.
After Yale he went into the stock market business, but he wasn’t really enjoying it. He had this weird notion that maybe he wasn’t put on this Earth to make money. Well, what then? He hadn’t been a big fan of 1960s radical politics, and figured that the way to change things for the better was to help one person at a time. He’d done some volunteering at a hospital. He went to his Dad and said “I want to become a Doctor.” His Dad thought he was crazy, but didn’t say so, and gave Howard the support he needed.
And, well, he met a girl, moved to Vermont, eventually got engaged in politics, almost as a hobby, ended up Lieutenant Governor, which is pretty much a ceremonial position, then the Governor died, and he found himself with a full-time gig and a great big budget deficit. He turned that around by pretty much just being smart and sharp and persistent and listening to the right people.
Hey. I like the man. Whenever I see him talking, I feel like I’m really hearing him, and not John Kerry’s focus-grouped, campaign-managed message. Howard Dean is complicated enough as he is without having other people tell him who he should be. What I dug was his bizarre explanation as to why he isn’t in to dishing his biography out:
“That I don’t talk about my background, I have a feeling, is what makes me as passionate as I am. If I laid out the biography for everyone to kind of ooh and ah, it would be gone. I know this is sort of Zen-like. I don’t really have it down. The fact is, the experiences that are the most intense in my life are the ones that are not readily available to me, so they come out in a different way. I think that has a lot to do with my desire to have social justice, the passion I have about fairness and truthtelling. The two are connected. The fact that I’m the least autobiographical is very much connected with the fact that I’m the most passionate. Experiences that I don’t have access to consciously are what drive me — personal experiences that I can’t tell you about because I haven’t processed them.”
“I know this is kind of Zen-like. I don’t really have it down.”
Folks, the man is in it because trying to make the world a better place is what gets him off. Yeah, he’s prone to get carried away and let loose a war scream, and that’s because he really wants to fix your country bad.
Or, I’m just believing the hype. I’m ascribing what I will to Howard Dean, because, slacker college student kind of drifting through life as I am, I identity most readily with Howard Dean. My friend Jesse, a Marine Corps Veteran, digs Wesley Clark. Southerners dig Edwards, and his syrupy drawl. There are at least a few black folk who dig Sharpton for being an eloquent black man. And, well, there are plenty of squares in our nation that identify with Kerry.
At any rate, I hope Dean pulls through Wisconsin, and at least keeps the primary interesting. I’ve read some analyses that win or loose, he has made a great contribution to invigorating the Democratic party. It is important to get people who might vote excited about the idea of voting. That is what Al Gore failed to do. John Kerry’s riding around on his motorcycle, and dropping his Senatorese, and inviting George to “Bring it On”, where “it” is a debate as to which party is better at national security. So if he is the nominee, he ought to get not only the “Anyone But Bush” crowd, but also the “Damn, I’d like to feel maybe just a little inspired by our leaders” crowd as well.
Anyway, I went an picked up Yayoi at around six. Took forever to get my car out of its slippery, snowed-in spot. But after I picked her up and turned the corner we saw what looked like a big fireworks show inside of the Sun Times building. Huh? Gotta be a reflection in the windows. So, I swung right on to Wacker, and there were fireworks lighting up the scene, and well, Yayoi loves fireworks, and she squealed that this was indeed a very very good day, and I pulled to the curb so we could watch the fireworks.
A cop shooed me away. I left Yayoi on the street to enjoy the show as I slowly navigated the wagon up the road a bit, pulled a u-turn, picked Yayoi back up, and we cruised up the pretty winter lights of Michigan Avenue.
Yes, folks, Chicago is truly the greatest city on Earth.
/danny
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On Wed, Feb 04, 2004 at 12:50:06PM -0500, Ed Burns wrote:
> >>>>> On Wed, 4 Feb 2004 09:19:44 -0800, Danny Howard <dannyman@toldme.com> said:
> > On Wed, Feb 04, 2004 at 06:48:56PM -0000, David Jeske wrote:
> >> — Rev. Joe Doyle Ardent wrote:
> >> > (all other candidates pale in comparison to Kucinich in my eyes).
> >>
> >> Why is that?
>
> > Openly anti-war.
> > Advocate of single-payer healthcare.
> > Concerned with equitable trade agreements.
>
> > He’s a solid liberal. The Ralph Nader of the Democratic party.
>
> Here’s a digression. Could anyone please explain to me why it seems
> that “liberal” is a bad word in today’s America? I don’t understand
> why being seen as “too liberal” would be such a bad thing.
Liberals are reluctant to kill the enemy.
Liberals would have protested at the systematic extermination and expulsion of the Native Americans.
Liberals would have questioned the Spanish American War that brought us half our territory.
Liberals are responsible for the socialism of Roosevelt, and the evil 1% rate-of-return from Social Security.
Liberals like French Wine.
Liberals would just as soon have seen a Red America where labor unions control the means of production, instead of free market capitalism. This is why Germany sucks.
Liberals hate nuclear power.
Liberals want you to walk.
Liberals eat tofu.
Liberals live in cities.
Liberals are well educated.
Liberals think they are better than you.
You need to hate somebody, and it sure shouldn’t be your patriotic corporate overlords. And you can’t openly hate black people anymore. So, you have to hate Arabs, Muslims, foreign migrants, and Liberals, who are responsible for the existence of Arabs, Muslims, and those “illegal” foreign migrants, who might speak to you in Spanish. They also made racism passé.
And remember, even though freeing the slaves was arguably a liberal act, it was a backwoods hickerbilly named Abraham Lincoln who founded the Republican party and yes, fought a long and bloody war to bring it about. That is the threshhold for when liberalism can be tolerated.
All other liberalism is anti-American. And you know where that belongs: Guantanamo Bay, Cuba!
-danny
P.S. Or if you prefer footnotes on why GWB is Evil, ask Dave.
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