dannyman.toldme.com

I was cleaning out the spam trap today, when I stumbled on a link from Aaron Fischer.

Hrmmm. Does this seem at all familiar to you? Maybe? Just a little? His top index page reveals the influence of a superior web designer too.

I love you, Aaron! Now publish an RSS feed so I can follow you in my aggregator!

Meanwhile, if you like to post data about your finances on the web, I have a pretty sad-looking graph to share as well:

Yeah, kind of extremely flat there in the middle. I just started started using Quicken in July 2002, when I saw a major income spike from severance pay that helped tide me over for the next six months of world adventuring. Then it was back to America, and only this past December did I land a middle-class income, incurring some credit card debt on new home furnishings.

Not as responsible as Aaron, but I have my good times.

I’m still kind of freaked out that I have a job. And that despite my misgivings, I’m actually digging the gig much more than not. And, it is really damned nice to have my own place, and a girl to share it with. Too bad she’s allergic to Cats, but then Jordan’s been letting his kitten run around the office during the day, so that he’ll be less hyper at night.

Got it all.

For now.

/danny

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Special multimedia feature, from someone else’s website:
http://cop-players.com/cop-media/apache.mpeg

This is a video clip that’s been raging around the Internet the past few days. It is a one-minute clip from an Apache helicopter, shot from the sights of a night-vision gun. In it, you hear one man giving instructions to the gun operator, who tracks down three moving figures, squeezes the trigger, and blows each one into a great big mess on the sand.

I’d have warned you that it was graphic, but aside from the fact that the figures going splat are actual human beings, it is nowhere near as graphic as a kid’s video game.

Welcome to future warfare. Now, even men are glowing blips on a video screen. Configure your weapon, spot your enemy, point, and click.

I got a thrill out of watching this video, because it is educational. I’m not living in the sandy, gritty, heat and cold and cultural alienation and homesickness and constant fear of death that my countrymen are going through over there, and I have even less of a chance to really understand the Iraqi experience over there, but I appreciate … knowing. Seeing a little bit, of what it is like. It gives me a chance … to wonder, what is that guy behind the video screen, pointing the weapon and clicking away the lives of his enemy, what is he going to go through later?

There’s a big, and old, and to many people, a tired debate in this country over what constitutes a human life. This is the abortion debate. Many of the same people who adamantly advocate the humanity of even the smallest collection of cells, gestating embryonically inside a woman’s uterus, are the same people who support the subsequent murder of convicted criminals, who may even feel a sense of righteousness at a video like the one above. The philosophy is that human life is sacred until it has proven itself to be evil. Only then, may we exterminate it, and in doing so, we can take pleasure in eliminating evil.

But I don’t think that way. To me, every human being is a source of potential. Potential good, and potential evil. An embryonic human? A fetus? Its potential is based in large part upon the determination and capacity of its birth parents. The potential is infinite, but the investment is also small. I feel uncomfortable at the thought of abortion, but morally, I can accept the idea that it is better to back out before you embark down a difficult road you are ill-prepared for. In the old days mothers and communities that could not accept the burden of the newborn dispatched with the baby soon after birth. Abortion is the modern equivalent, for a world that remains imperfect, where the new being is smaller, even less identifiably human. We erase potential. We erase life, before it has happened.

But the debate wears on. Was that baby a human being?

And the debate wears on. Was that blip on the screen a human being?

Or was it an arbitrary, non-human arrangement of cells, which for some unfortunate accident found itself trying to kill our human beings, and had to be aborted?

Are the murderers on death row, are they human beings? (Well, there’s the harder question of whether they’re even murderers, and would they have made it to the executioner’s hall had they been wearing another color of human skin.)

Are they human only before death? Are they human even after they’ve ceased to be alive? Is the embalmed corpse, cold to the touch, in the casket, human? What of the steaming streaks of entrails in the sand?

We know why we kill convicted murderers, and we know why we kill enemy soldiers, but from a video console from far away, these recipients of our justice are no more than abstractions to us. How many inmates awaiting execution have any one of us known, face to face, in a human capacity? How many idealistic, or just plain confused, and desperate guerilla warriors have any of us known? They remain just as unknown to us as the babies who are never born. We must trust that to others, they were human beings.

A big problem is, we’re hung up on this question of abortion, and we’re rolling along full steam into the DNA age. We are already changing the cellular blueprints of living cells, and designing altered organisms. We have a debate on the legality of using “stem cells” … human cells that can grow into any other human cell, because they come from the process of conception. But if these same stem cells come from bone marrow, that’s okay, because bone marrow doesn’t normally grow into a baby … though it probably could, under the right circumstances … is a fetus that is not itself the product of conception a human?

It gets worse. We’re working on the transgenic pigs … pigs grown under very careful conditions, because they are pigs who have bits of human DNA in their own pig DNA, and these pigs are conceived, birthed, fed, grown and killed, not for their delicious pig bacon, but to harvest their organs, which thanks to their hybrid, human DNA, can be used to replace the failing organs in a human being. Are these pigs human?

But, wait, it will get even worse. We currently train intelligent animals, including dogs, dolphins, and our primate cousins, to assist us in ways in which they are uniquely capable. Some dogs lead the blind, or sniff for contraband. Dolphins are able to spot and tag explosive mines underneath the water. Some species of monkeys are trained as service animals, who help humans with physical limitations to get through their day, by opening the fridge and whatnot. Let us not also not forget the innumerable animals currently confined to laboratories, which are using them as test subjects that will educate us on the dangers of the world, and potential medical practices to improve our survival. Any number of these creatures might serve their function better with a little human DNA. Once upon a time we marked black people as non-human, so that they could labor in the brutal heat of the southern fields, growing sugar and cotton in the worst of conditions. What will we make of some future race of especially intelligent gorillas, designed, “manufactured” and marketed as companion animals, who may have sufficient aptitude to drive the car, perhaps fix it, or work in factories. Are they human? What if we design them without human DNA, but they have sufficient intelligence to do our taxes?

We’ve got plenty of work cut out for our philosophers.

I had a minor epiphany in Thailand. I walked into an American-style shopping mall. It felt like any store in America, except that every five feet, peppered through the merchandise, was an employee. How can they afford so many employees? Because labor expenses are low. There’s a question of supply and demand … the most alien thing for me about Thailand was the population density in Bangkok. I come from one of the largest cities in the United States, but what passes for a crowd in the U.S.A. with its mere 280 million human beings, aint as impressive as New Years Eve in Bangkok, where getting off the Sky Train, I was in a mind-boggling human gridlock, that started a few feet from the train platform, that took me half an hour to walk a block to my destination.

Someone remarked on Colin Quinn the other night that “sure, the Middle East is full of Weapons of Mass Destruction — they’re called Arabs.” I attended the lecture of a Neoconservative “Objectivist” last year in California. He explained that the solution to the War on Terror was to eliminate Radical Islamists. This meant that we had to invade not only Afghanistan, but Iraq, Syria, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and anywhere else there were Islamic Radicals, figure out which people were predisposed to killing us, and kill them first. Aside from the logistical problem of scale, the real problem I have with this strategy is that, well, you just don’t know who is, or who would be, a Radical Islamist. If the roles were reversed, which among us would be the suicide bomber? And just what would it take to bring us to such an act?

I looked around, when I was in Eastern Asia, agape at the density … the sea of people. The amount of life surrounding me. And I had just passed through Jordan, a poor, easy-going Arab country, sandwiched between Israel, Saudi Arabia, Syria, and Iraq. I travelled in Southern Thailand and briefly crossed the Malaysian border. Muslim territory, where the women wore scarves on their heads. I wondered at the people I met, the people that passed before me, the infinite seperate stories, and I wondered how does Thailand provide for all its people? How does China provide for all its people? Japan is very crowded, with limited resources, but they are one of the most successful nations on Earth. In contrast, how do we do in America? How do they do in Afghanistan, mess of a nation that it is. How are they doing in Arabia?

The key is potential. If you have humans, they could go either way, or both. A woman can be both mother and suicide bomber. All these humans, spinning off in their various directions, could go either way. We can be saints, and we can be monsters, devoid of what the rest of us understand as “humanity” … and it is a matter of potential … we are what is made of us. If we can not give our gestating baby humanity, then we will not have a baby. And whether we have babies or not, we must reassure the rest of us that the humanity in each of us, the good, is more valued than the inhumanity, and the evil. Whomever operated that gun in that Apache, had to call on their inhuman capabilities, their capacity for evil, to kill three more humans who were themselves, as best as we can tell, operating from that same evil. Each evil was done in the service of a larger perceived good. We murder to make the world a better place.

But at the end of the day, we each have to live with our humanity, and our inhumanity …

Maybe I should just stay away from videos.

/danny

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I mean, this is funny, because Tom Brokaw is like a big-time news anchor. You’d think he’d be aware of “The Nation of Islam” movement in the United States. Maybe he’s seen the movie “Malcom X”? Okay, well, maybe not. But maybe he’d understand that, aside, possibly, from Saudi Arabia, there is no Nation of Islam. As Al points out, there are Islamic nations …

Okay, but then he tries to pass as sophisticated by sliding under the words “movement” and “transcend” … like all over the world, people are coming together under the banner of Islam as a response to contemporary challenges of globalization and the excesses of the right wing policies of the Bush administration.

Well, actually, I don’t know what he was thinking. I’m just highly amused that he’s running a Presidential debate, mistaking contemporary world Islam with a 1960s era black power movement, and choosing to deploy the term in a question to Reverend Sharpton.

No wonder we are so doomed.

/danny

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It got cold again. I seem to only post when it gets cold. Gives me something to ramble about, I suppose.

Ah, so, my laptop is getting older and older. The mini keyboard I hacked in to replace the old internal keyboard has now failed. Just before that though, I invested in a desk. Yayoi gets her own desk, ya see? Well she liked the first one I picked out so much, so I went and bought another to go with it. Where she had liked the broad, open spaces of now-cluttered desktop, I opted for a compact footprint that reaches for the skies. It’s designed to hold a nice computer system.

Well, so what good is a desk designed to hold a nice computer system without a nice computer system to hold!? I went over to MicroCenter and spent a whole bunch of money on parts. I already had a hard drive, you see, and a sexy video card, and a mouse, keyboard, lotsa stuff. So, I bought a case, a motherboard, a CPU, and half a gigabyte of DDR RAM.

Dennis volunteered a DVD drive and a CD burner, and with all these parts and a fair bit of patience, and a lot of weird random black majic and mojo tweaking to get Windows XP to accept its new environment, I’ve now got a nice workstation in my home.

The system is nice. 2.66Mhz Intel Pentium 4, 800 Mhz bus, to 400Mhz DDR RAM, weighing in at half a gigabyte, which is excessive, unless you’re trying to do something with Windows XP, as I am, in which case, it is just right. ASUS Motherboard has such bells and whistles as on-board RAID, gigabit ethernet, an AGP slot for the graphics card, and a WiFi expansion slot. The case is really nice, with low-decibel fans, and rubber bushings for the hard drive mounts, all to reduce noise. I can not hear the computer, especially with the apartment’s heat, water heater, washer, dryer, or dish washer running, or the space heater, which we have out here because it is so damned cold!

Eh, I lost my train of thought. As if I had one. Let’s play SimCity 4! Now I’ve the first computer I have where this game doesn’t suck through a straw.

/danny

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I’m exchanging IMs with my father, and I’m reminded of his brother, Uncle Bill, and I’m getting set to tell some strange and wonderful story here, and I’m reminded that you know, mad rambling on and on kind of runs in the family. And it must be genetic because I wasn’t raised by my father, but he imparted that gene for rambling on and on, constantly shifting between obscure topics, he imparted that into me before I was even born.

Well, if you’re going to inherit a quirk, it might as well be mildly entertaining.

Yayoi is out for the evening. She’s spending the night in Champaign. This is just as well, as I’ve got some leftovers to consume. She has a thing for cooking new foods. That’s not such a bad quirk, but with her out of the way for the evening, I can clean the fridge out a little.

Part of my job is checking the Technical Support voicemail in the morning. I called one lady who seemed like she was kind of still in bed, or wish’t she was. I apologised with my understanding that we had a few customers in California, but she said actually she was an hour behind California, up in the great white wilderness of Alaska.

She didn’t call it the great white wilderness, that’s just my penchant for flourishing embellishment. I ramble a bit like a mad man, if you’ll recall.

And I said to her, how cold is it up there? We’ve got twenty five below windchill here. As I explained to Yayoi last night, twenty five below means fifty seven degrees below the freezing point of water. She’s used to thinking in Celsius. But, you figure if we’re fifty seven degrees below the freezing point of water, that’s opposite of fifty seven degrees above the freezing point of water, or ninety degrees Farenheit.

It is really god damned awfully fucking cold in Chicago these past days. Not just like, really really bad god damned cold, but like, worse than that. Real bad. And I asked the lady in Alaska, and she spoke of zero, and twenty degrees, and maybe even getting up towards freezing, but you know, while it is definately really cold in Alaska, “we don’t get that kind of brutal wind chill you get.”

I don’t know if she was just trying to humor me. “Oh that poor midwesterner wants to believe it is that cold down there.” But, well, anyway, it makes a good story at any rate that it is so cold here that people in Alaska say it is warmer up there.

And we don’t even get oil revenue checks merely for living here six months out of the year. Nosiree. But, I can’t complain if they’re giving Yayoi resident tuition.

I have innovated. We got Yayoi’s stuff up here this weekend, and among her inventory was an electric space heater. Well, now we get to do it Japanese style at night. We turn the main heat off and just warm the bedroom. Cutely enough, we’re already sleeping on a futon. So, the rest of the house gets down to about 45 when I get out of bed to turn the heat on. This poor garden apartment just sort of leaks heat. But we’ve got a gas fireplace and a space heater so it aint so bad. Yayoi points out that we probably lose out on the bottom, since heat rises.

Oh yeah, what other random things to share real quick? Moveon.org! I wrote a few words of my own on that matter today:

I am not a football fan. As far as I am concerned, half the fun of the Super Bowl is watching the commercials. If you want people to watch the Super Bowl, you should provide us with entertaining, compelling, and topical commercials that raise interest in the institution of popular culture that is the Super Bowl. The White House anti-drug ads suck – give us all something to get excited over!

First off, if you have broadband, and you haven’t seen them already, see these awesome commercials. Well, they were going to go and air one during the Super Bowl, but in our land of Free Speech, where the Founding Fathers carefully crafted a weak Federal Government that would have limited access to the Abuse of Absolute Power, in this very same nation of ours CBS has declared that it doesn’t air “issue ads” unless of course the issue is whether the big beer companies think men should be inspired to drink more beer by the image of skinny, bikini-clad hot hot babes getting wet to help you cool your manly self off, or, unless, of course, the President of the United States, this very same man who has had one hard-drinkin’, coke-snortin’ year of his life expunged down the memory hole, well, if his office of whatever it is wants to scare kids into thinking that one toke off of one joint of marijuana will destroy you for the rest of your life, that’s okay, but if some collection of citizens wants to remind us all that maybe, oh maybe, lordy lordy lordy god almighty maybe you know, running up this massive Federal budget deficit for no good reason is going to have ill consequences for our childen?

I lost my train of thought.

But you know where I’m going.

And where I went, where I went was over to http://www.moveon.org/cbs/ad/ to help sign the petition and tell those silly people who make those silly decisions that you know what? It only makes sense to air a cool commercial!

As Howard Dean would say, “YEAH!”

Now, I’m going to get some dinner.

/danny

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So … where to start? On Sunday, Yayoi went back to Champaign. By Tuesday, she had determined that yeah, she really was better off in Chicago, and I said yeah, I think you really are better off in Chicago, won’t you please come to Chicago? And she said yeah, well, but you’re enjoying having your space to yourself and getting it kind of cleaned up and room and time to think and I said you know what, that is not so important that I couldn’t have you.

So, I have a new roommate. She came up on Tuesday and registered at Harold Washington College. On Wednesday we ran around and bought a lease form at the office supply store and then got it filled out so that she has saved 70% on tuition, she now being a bona-fide resident of Chicago.

And it is kind of nice, since she’s a foreigner, that since I’m working full-time at home, I can sponge some of the enchanting alienation of being a Stranger in a Strange Land off of her own private odyssey that she now shares with me.

Tangentially, I was watching the Daily Show last night and I was digging that Carol Mosely-Braun was a guest. You know, I think she’s put on some weight? But nevermind that, I really like her. And I was thinking that I should vote for her in the Illinois primary because I like her and she should get a few votes in her home state! Ah, well, but today she dropped out and endorsed Howard Dean! HAHA! Well, I guess nowadays a vote for Carol is a vote for Dean.

Yayoi and I were both enchanted with the latest Republican smear ad on Dean, that he should take his latte drinking, sushi eating … body piercing freak show back to VERMONT, where he belongs! I love that ad! It is awesome! Yayoi is further enchanted with the notion that some Americans would equate “sushi eating” with being unforgiveably liberal. And, well, we saw this on the Daily Show, but as Jon Stweart pointed out, the type of person described doesn’t exactly belong in Vermont anyway. I love that the only people this ad would appeal to would be the people who are inclined to believe it anyway. What, if Dean’s so bad, don’t you want him to win the Iowa thing so he can be an easy foe for Bush to defeat? Who are you trying to convince: the xenophobic, homophobic portion of the Democratic party? It is more entertainment value than anything else!

Ya, anyway, Yayoi is calling me away for dinner, so I guess we’re done here.

/danny

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Wow. It has been nearly a month since I’ve written anything here. Well, you know, I have a few pretty good excuses. First off, as of 15 December I have a job. Woo! And, as of 15 December, I have an apartment. Woo! So, I’ve had to spend a lot of time outfitting said apartment. And, well, the holidays, right? Woo! So, for the holidays, Yayoi came up and spent a lot of time helping me to outfit the apartment. Woo!

Mom’s got a new cat. Woo! Mom’s got another new cat, too! Woo! Okay, the cats? One is named PJ. She is a yellow cat, not at all unlike Madeline. Well, okay, she isn’t Madeline, but the physical resemblance is close enough to be really weird, okay? But the other day Mom was chasing off the little black and white kitty who’d been wandering around several weeks in the cold. She was pregnant, and the neighbors had been neglecting her. It was painful. Then the neighbors explained that the owner had moved out and left her, barefoot and pregnant, out in the very cold cold. (It got really cold here a ways back.) I said hey, if there’s abandoned pregnant cat who needs a home, I’ll put up with her and the kittens! After all, I got room, now. Well, Mom since let her in the house.

But the story gets more complex than that. You see, she really likes this cat, who is horribly affectionate. Except, well, she don’t get along with PJ, so well, but I’m getting ahead of myself. This new cat, Mom took her to the vet, and the vet said we can get this cat fixed up, kittens and all. You know how they fix girl cats? Well, they do a hysterectomy. Hysterectomy is actually an interesting word. The Greeks or some other ancient types called the womb hysterium, or something, and so anytime women got crazy, it was attributed to that organ that woman had that men didn’t. Thus, hysteria is in fact, a general label for women acting crazy. It is, or at least, was, in fact, sexist. Kind of like getting gyped, or receiving and Indian gift, but we can talk about that later.

Anyway you see, they take the womb out of kitties so they won’t go having baby kitties. This helps cats mellow out, because when you take the womb, you take the ovaries, and you take the hormones. Hormones can make you a bit, if you’ll pardon my choice of word, hysterical. So, there’s two things going on here: if you take all that stuff out, you will have a more mellow cat. You’ll also have no kittens, who were until so recently busy gestating in that womb.

I thought it was pretty bad for Mom to have to go and make so many feline life and death decisions, especially after Madeline was sick. Well, she contacted me, to get my opinion, and explained that while she’s totally pro-choice for human women, she doesn’t like making choices for others. She said the cat shelter was full of kittens who needed homes. Well, you know, if a homeless cat can’t get adopted, in our imperfect world they don’t live long. So, well, I agreed, with the same sadness, that yeah, getting the new cat fixed that way, that was wise.

I still feel kind of bad, though. Having choices can be tough, but making tough choices beats being stuck without options.

Well, so, me and Yayoi visited the new cat today. She sure is cuddly. She’s black and white, looks kind of like Joe and Lorah’s Max. Well, not really, except that Max is also black and white. Anyway, I’ve never been much for naming cats. I got one in high school and called him Kitten until Grandma came over and pronounced him Dinkum. Well, in California I found myself with two more kittens, and took to calling them Stripey Cat and Gray Cat. This because, well, I’ll let you figure out why.

Mom said that this new cat was kind of struggling without a name. Well, Mom was struggling. The cat herself didn’t seem so worried about that. She was more concerned with PJ, and whatever crazy hormone balances were floating around her body since her life-changing surgical procedure. She tends to hiss at PJ, and then at whomever is petting her, even though she really loves petting and actually doesn’t mean to hiss …

Well, so, you see, PJ came to Mom from my Sister, who has another crazy cat who used to terrorize PJ. So, if this new cat can’t stop being a nut, well, I might have to take her in. PJ was really horny and weird today and this new cat wasn’t exactly herself either but after Mom gets PJ fixed this week, she’s hoping her girls can settle down a bit, and live in playful harmony. She says the vet said that if you have kittens, better to have a pair, because they can entertain each other, even while the humans are busy spending most of their time going to work, sleeping, reading books, and sewing quilts, like my Mom. That, and Mom really likes both of her new cats.

Well, so I was talking about how I don’t name cats but today I looked at sweet little black and white cat folded up in my arms purring in ecstacy, and Mom explained that Uncle called her BF as in “Bare Foot” as in “Barefoot and Pregnant” but Mom, being the liberated woman that she is, had a hard time liking that name, and I did too, and I looked down at this cat and called her Oreo.

Oreo.

Cookie, for a nickname. And then we can call PJ “Biscuit” for after all, she does have that nice honey color.

PJ’s got her own name problem. She was named, as I recall, by my Sister and my Sister’s then-boyfriend, and they … well, they think divergently from each other, so PJ stands for Persephone José.

Yeah, I can’t handle “PJ”, so maybe, just maybe, Oreo Cookie and PJ Biscuit or something? Well, Mom likes “Oreo” so as far as that goes, maybe Oreo she is.

I was actually thinking of the time that Sheila said that she’d gotten pregnant with Dad’s baby, and they referred to this would-be black-and-white baby as an “oreo cookie” so when I had to go thinking about aphorisms for black and white critters, this half-sibling that I may in fact have out there somewhere in the wild jungles of the South Side of Chicago shares a very strange nomial heritage with Mom’s black and white kitty.

Well, it beats “BF” anyway.

Speaking of which, time to return the GF’s call. I had to drop her off in Kankakee today so she could drive home to Champaign, thus freeing me up at long last to start writing some more here for a change. That I had to drop her off in Kankakee is another story. So, I guess I got plenty of material to work with this week, in terms of telling stories, but like I said, first I gotta call the GF.

/danny

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Jesse lost his non-paying job last week, so I bought him an abundance of beer. I drank enough beer that I don’t remember much of the actual beer drinking, but he did lend me a book I had long wished to read. It’s a biographical account of a Marine Corps grunt who made it through the Gulf War in one piece. I’ll share a couple of paragraphs from Anthony Swofford’s _Jarhead_, along with my own commentary. Here we find him marching through a valley filled with bombed-out Iraqi equipment, and dead, burnt, and surrendering Iraqi soldier:

This is war, I think. I’m walking through what my father and his father walked through — the epic results of American bombing, American might. The filth is on my boots. I am one of a few thousand people who will walk this valley today. I am history making. Whether I live or die, the United States will win this war. I know that the United States will win any war it fights, against any country. If colonialism weren’t out of style, I’m sure we’d take over the entire Middle East, not only safeguard the oil reserves, but take the oil reserves: We are here to announce that you no longer own your country, thank you for your cooperations, more details will follow.

More than illustrating a high point, a moment of victory, this excerpt also touches on a real problem of America’s ambivalence. Are we the colonial empire, or aren’t we? What responsibility do we have beyond having great military power? If we are to conquer, should we also rule?

Which is why I favored the second invasion of Iraq … the first time around, we were afraid to rule, to expropriate, administer and engage in prolonged occupation — we were unable to own up to the imperial ambitions that put us there in the first place. If it were up to me, we wouldn’t bother going to war for the sake of domestic economic stability, but once we bomb the heck out of a country, we ought to finish the really hard work of trying to put the pieces back together, as best we can. Yes, occupation is far bloodier than the invasion itself, but without occupation, the invasion itself is pointless. We are the imperial authority in Iraq, the conquering, hopefully benevolent empire, and beyond the fact that we are a lesser evil than the rule that preceeded it, the people there owe us no love.

Swofford’s next paragraph sums it up:

Our rucks are heavy with equipment and ammunition but even heavier with the burdens of history, and each step we take, the burdens increase.

A long hard slog, indeed, long delayed, and all the worse for it.

I hope the frustrations and the blood that will continue to be spilt in Iraq will discourage the Americans at home from engaging in further military adventurism. Syria? Iran? France? Not worth it. They can regime change themselves, as we can regime change ourselves, since none of us are especially encumbered by economic sanctions and a regime that controls the UN food rations, as a consequence of our previous militaristic dalliances.

The hope that one dubious bloodbath will deter future bloodier, even more pointless massacres, is the ultimate hope that we took from Hiroshima and Nagasaki. My reassurance is that after the Cold War we are more concerned with Global Warming than Nuclear Winter.

-d

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Are you doing enough for the war effort? I just discovered that the government is giving soldiers two-week furloughs to visit home, but the air fare only takes them as far as Baltimore, Atlanta, or Dulles. That is the suck, and hopefully an embarassment for the Commander-in-Chief, but that’s not the point, the real point is that plenty of patriotic folk are chipping in their unused frequent-flier miles, and the airlines are allowing this, so the troops can make it home for Christmas, and in the coming months, to visit their loved ones, without having to shoulder the steep financial burden of short-notice airfare on their modest military pay.

Got miles? Support our troops! http://www.heromiles.org/

/danny

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Sometimes I’m sending out a cover letter for a job, and you know, sometimes it’s time to have some fun. I prefaced one today as follows:

My resume, below
Will show there’s
Little about e-mail
That I don’t know

Dedicated, I am
To the task at hand
I am qualified
To Kill your Spam

I figured this was fair game because the company is a start-up and I was going to brag about my word-ic background among my bullet points anyway:

• I have a degree in English Rhetoric, and a minor in Computer Science. Computational linguistics and heuristic content analysis turn me on.

The company had listed “an almost fanatical desire to kill spam” in the job req’s bullet points, at which point I figured we had some shared mentality. I then pasted my little poem on IRC, and got a local job lead at another fun-sounding company who needs someone to engineer better ways to send out lots of e-mail.

Meanwhile, I’ve got one month and one day of unemployment income in the pipeline. So … I’ll start checkin’ out the market for waiters later in the week.

/danny

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Former U.S. Senator from Illinois, and Democratic candidate for President, Paul Simon, has died.

Former U.S. Senator and Democratic candidate for President, Al Gore, has endorsed former Vermont Governor and Democratic candidate for President, Howard Dean.

Dean referred to Gore as “the last elected President of the United States.”

2004 should be exciting.

I’ve got some more job possibilities in the water.

And my glasses broke this weekend. Got some new ones. Pretty sharp, I think, if a bit expensive.

Maybe I’ll type some more, later.

/danny

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In case you haven’t already received some e-mail from your favorite nerds about it, it is noteworthy that if you visit Google, enter the phrase “miserable failure” and hit “I’m Feeling Lucky” you’ll be treated to the official biography of our featured American President.

Well, I felt it my patriotic duty help elevate the status of our Fearless Leader by posting this. Huzzah!

/danny

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