Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2003/09/03/recall-thoughts-anyone/
From: Danny Howard
To: tuna
Subject: Re: [tuna] recall thoughts, anyone?
>I signed the anti-recall petition around the same time that the recall
>petition was getting press. I’m certainly voting against the recall,
>because I think this is the biggest sham, and frankly I don’t know
>much about Gray Davis. Unless there is blood in the streets, people
>can stick with the damn candidate they voted for until the term is
>up.
Well, you see, and I was out of the country for much of this, so I never got to not vote for Gray Davis, but the reason Gray Davis got elected is because he smeared the moderate Republican in the GOP primary, who had been leading in the poles until Davis pointed out that that anti-Christ wasn’t solidly pro-life.
So, instead of running against a the charismatic, moderate, and popular Republican mayor of Los Angeles, Davis ran against and just barely defeated his hand-picked opponent: a right-wing ogre.
You claim that Californians should stick with whom they voted, but very few Californians bothered to vote either for Davis or his opponent, because few Californians really wanted either one in office. Very few people in California have ever voted for Davis. Maybe a show of hands on how tuna fish voted in the last gubernatorial?
I, for one, did not vote, because I was in France, drinking wine and trying to explain George Bush to people, but I would have voted for Camejo. Davis is a smarmy freak who survives by his adept political manuevering and otherwise does whatever it is that his money sources tell him to do.
>Right below my vote against the recall will be a vote for Arnold.
I’ll be voting absentee. I never wanted Davis in there and I think his claim on the office is somewhat dubious. I am heartened that Bustamonte is leading Ahnold in the polls, so I may just skip the recall question and Cruz straight to my preferred alternative.
–d
Feedback Welcome
Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2003/08/29/what-happened-earlier-in-the-month/
So, early in the month of August was Grandma’s seventy-fifth birthday. Not my Grandma Howard in da Yoo Pee of Michigan who died in May, who had previously turned ninety herself, but my Mom’s Mom in Chicago, who is pretty healthy and quite spunky. Anyways, since August is a big month for birthdays in our family, we had a big party at Grandma’s house in Chicago.
I also had to move out of the apartment that I was subletting from Dan. Moving myself out of an apartment is easy, because all my stuff packs neatly into a dozen or so boxes that fit into my station wagon with ease. The trick is, that I was also obliged by the terms of the sublease to clear all of the junk that had accumulated over the years in the apartment and store it with Dan’s Uncle Marty, who lives three blocks away. So, it wasn’t enough for me to just pack my stuff in my car, drive up to Chicago to attend Grandma’s birthday party, then continue a little farther North to start a new life at Mom’s house, but I’d have to come back to Urbana and clean out Dan’s apartment. By Tuesday. So I drove up Friday evening with the intention to return Sunday. But I’ll get to that later.
Friday, August 8
Now, being as I don’t drive much and my car is old and I value the occasional Confucian ethic of ritual, I keep a mileage log in my car of every time I fill up for gas. As I drove North toward Chicago with all my belongings and stopped for gas I noted with pride that I had not stopped for gas since May. The car has a fourteen gallon tank and gets a little over twenty miles per gallon on the highway, so you can see that I’ve been putting a lot less carbon dioxide into the air we breathe than your average meat-eating red-blooded American is obliged to. And that made me feel quite good about myself. All the same, since I was low on cash, I paid for the gas with my Busey Bank Visa debit card.
Saturday, August 9
The party was wonderful. We had old ladies, and neighbors, and family, and friends of the family, and plenty other people I don’t really know who they are show up. I invited a few friends myself though none were able to attend. There was lots of food and my sister Jessica brought lots of fancy pastries she home-made herself, and I brought some booze I’d found in the apartment that Dan doesn’t drink, and Aunt Linda brought a lot more booze, to add to Grandma’s booze collection, which was augmented by other gifts of booze, not to mention beer. And I was sent out to purchase ice with the neighbor lady who suddenly decided that we needed eight 22 pound bags of ice instead of 8 pound bags, which struck me as a bit excessive at the time, but what with all the beer and soda pop, there were many many coolers hanging around the place yearning for ice. And well anyway Aunt Linda, twenty-first century Renaissance woman that she is, is studying bar-tending, and was thus mixing drinks in Grandma’s basement. I don’t have to tell you all that we had a good time.
Anyway, I just tried to relax because the apartment was going to be tough, but I pitched in with getting the place cleaned up whenever I was asked. Uncle John and Mom did me the favor of driving my stuff up North in Mom’s mini-van. We pulled our tailgates together and shifted my boxes from my blue Ford station wagon to her blue Ford mini-van. And I proceeded to drive back South on Sunday, and carted several carfulls of Dan’s stuff to his Uncle Marty’s house.
Sunday, August 10
Now, Uncle Marty’s a good guy with an extremely beautiful house, and a good heart, near as I can tell. He asked was there any help we needed and I said maybe you have some boxes, and he said yes, he had some at work, which was in some agricultural research building on campus not far from Allen Hall, which is where I lived many years, so we drove over that way, and I noticed the University Police behind me, and then they were flashing their lights, so I pulled over across the street from Campus Visitor Center, where incidentally a friend of mine recently started working.
Now this here is where the story starts to get a little upsetting. I’ll share with you what I wrote to MikeyA about it:
You know when they pull you over, you have to go to court? They don’t just send you a fine in the mail and stuff. Well, I don’t even remember getting pulled over in Palo Alto, but the other day I was pulled over in Illinois on account of the license plate on the back of my car had no tags, because it was the license plate from the front of the car, because the license plate from the back of the car had been stolen while I was travelling in foreign lands.
Well they ran the plates and found my registration was expired. I’ve been putting off worrying about that because I’ve been kinda broke and not sure do I wanna change the registration to Illinois or renew in California or what. Anyhow, they pulled me over and asked for my license and insurance card. I have insurance but I don’t drive so often so I hadn’t gotten around to putting the new insurance card in the glove compartment yet and the one that was in there was two months expired.
Well, they ran my license through the computer and you know it was suspended!? I did not know that it was suspended. Well, so anyway, they asked if I knew why and I recalled them pulling me over in the Mission District one night when I was driving around, missing my back plate, looking for parking, and they had two cop cars then and they asked me to keep my hands on the dashboard because they didn’t know if I was really there to snuff anyone out, and they seemed nonplussed to find out that I merely had a missing license plate. I’d drove around the peninsula for two months or more and nobody ever wondered about my license plate, and the only reason the cops got excited in the Mission was because they thought I might have been up to something else.
I’ll interject here to explain that the Mission District is one of the less yuppified parts of San Francisco, where I was staying with some friends my last few days in California back in April before I went and drove through the blizzards back to Illinois. The cop told me that the license plates were a fix-it offense, and I’d receive a thing in the mail that I could send back to them after I showed my license plate to an Illinois cop and he signed off on it. For some reason, these past few months, this has not been foremost among the things that I’ve been worried about.
“They do it differently,” the Illinois cop told me. I had the front plate on the back of the car because in Illinois one day I was pulled over twice because I had no license plate and the second cop said put the front plate on the back for cryin’ out loud.
There was much more discussion about my shady story as to whether I live in Urbana or do I live in Chicago and the last time the University Police pulled me over in 1999 I said I was a student just about to leave town so it seems awfully suspicious to them that I had the same story in 2003, except that this time I wasn’t a student. Anyway, they said that since I must have lost my license because I had Failed To Appear that they couldn’t trust that I’d appear there. So they arrested me. The back seat of the cop car was split in half and I had my own little plastic bubble to myself.
Another aside here, but the cop who frisked me wanted to know if I had any Bad Things on me. I forgot about my tiny pocket knife, and he never found it. He examined my cell phone and castigated me that if I had enough to purchase a cell phone, but not to keep my car registered, that my priorities must be awfully screwed up. I couldn’t think of anything to say to that at the time, because I was more preoccupied with getting arrested. In my defense I’ll point out that the cell phone cost me $50, and was purchased when the car didn’t even have a working transmission, which was another piece of really foul fortune that I ran up against early this year, and that anyway, I do use the cell phone a lot more than I use my car, and have a greater need for it, as it facilitates job hunting.
At the Champaign County Jail a guy with a moustache and tattoos who looked like he had experience in such matters smiled and waved at me in the back of the cop car as we waited to go into the secret garage. Then another guy who had been working too long and was slap-happy took all my stuff, and my shoelaces, but then let me keep my credit card so I could bail myself out. I never went in a cell, but got my mug shot taken and fingerprints scanned and then my hands covered with ink so they could have an old-fashioned paper record of my prints.
When it finally came around time to bail myself out, they had me call this service that processes credit cards for people who are getting bailed out, and as soon as I was off the phone a fax came through verifying the payment. But they were confused because it was already signed. Huh? Dan’s Uncle Marty, who had been in the car with me, had bailed me out on his credit card. So we called the service up again and asked that Uncle Marty get refunded and I signed my own piece of paper and I was released.
Now, to get back to the story here, and the task at hand, which is that Uncle Marty had come with Milly, my subletting-from-Dan roommate for the summer, and I thanked Uncle Marty for being such a noble character here, and we drove all together in his Volkswagen Golf and picked up boxes from his office. I had a dinner date to catch up on that evening because Yayoi had baked an Apple Pie that she had wanted to share with me, but she’d been pretty confused when I didn’t show up, why didn’t I call? Because I got arrested. But then, why didn’t you call? Because they don’t let you do that, when you get arrested. And she said oh, because my friend Yayoi is from Japan, and maybe they do things differently over there when you get arrested. I don’t know. But I finally got to her place and we made curry rice together and it was delicious.
Monday, August 11
The next day I dropped by the bank to clear out my account. They had the $220 charge from Sunday recorded as deducted, and I hadn’t wrote any checks lately, so I took the remaining $400 or so in cash. I felt somewhat glad that even though I had had to post $200 in bail, I was leaving Urbana with a little more money than I had when I left Oakland.
Milly’s Dad and Little Sister came down in their own mini-van to help with the moving. Together, we loaded up the rest of Dan’s stuff and made a few more trips and completely filled Uncle Marty’s living room with stuff. Mom and Uncle John were nice enough to register my car in Illinois on short notice when I explained that the title was in a box of my stuff in Mom’s van in Chicago and I was down in Champaign without a license, but the Police Officer wasn’t satisfied to hear that the car was registered, he bitched about “plates on the car” that he never was going to look at anyway so I hopped the Greyhound to Chicago. I told Milly that I’d say that I felt bad about leaving the remainder of the apartment cleaning to her, but that I’d be lying, because I really wasn’t eager to scrub the apartment’s naughty bits, and anyway, I’d already hauled a dozen heavy bags to the trash in removing, among other things, cans of soup from the mid-nineties, and numerous other mysterious things, and all of Dan’s stuff, and I felt somewhat done.
I have my proof of insurance, which was actually in a box that I’d kept in the car when I was originally pulled over, but I hadn’t thought of that at the time, but I can’t get my driver’s license so quick. I called California DMV about twenty times and finally I got through and the lady said two FTAs, here are the docket numbers and telephone numbers in San Francisco and Palo Alto to call. Of course, the San Francisco number went to an automated system that only worked if I had my Courtesy Warning Notice with me, and the Palo Alto number played some new-age space music and said please leave a message. So I looked on the Internet and found an e-mail address for San Francisco that told me that they wanted $250 over the missing license plate, and an accurate phone number for Palo Alto informed me that they wanted $300 for a “traffic-related fine” and a $7 fee for a copy of the abstract that I could send to DMV to get my license un-suspended.
Tuesday, August 12
Anyway I rode back to Champaign the next day, though the surly Greyhound bus driver threatened to not let us on the bus because we must have been deliberately ignoring him when he said Champaign people move to the front of the line to get first crack at the local bus but because we hate his guts we deliberately stood at the very end of the line ignoring him, but he eventually swallowed his resentment, because we never met the guy and hadn’t had anything against him and had never even heard his voice before even when he told us to get at the front of the line, so he moved some people from the local bus to the bus that would get them wherever it was that they were going faster anyway, and drove us down to Champaign.
I needed proof of registration and two licensed drivers so we could all go over together in one car and return with two, but I wasn’t a licensed driver. I got Raad, who is another great guy with a white heart, and Yayoi, who has a great attitude about life, to join me at the Public Safety Building, where I showed them the sticker and my two friends driver’s licenses, and then Raad drove us over to Tatman’s and I got my car out of the towing lot. It had been $75 to tow and $15 / day to store. And since it was two days to get everything together, he wanted $105, but he didn’t have any change, and none of anybody else was around had any change, but the boss was around and said make it an even $100.
We dropped the car off at Yayoi’s and then Raad took us to his place for dinner. We ate a delicious, hand-made, vegetarian pizza, because Raad’s a vegetarian, and drank beer and wine, and Raad shared with us what he believes is the greatest movie ever, Pink Floyd’s “The Wall” which I admit was pretty good, but Raad was probably uniquely able to relate to it most vividly because he grew up in Iraq and I don’t think Yayoi got much out of it, but it was a nice way to punctuate everything else that is going on, and I got to see Raad’s paintings and his cats. Yayoi likes cats. And I got to see a picture of his girlfriend in Malaysia, and he was flying to Texas to see his son next week. It was all extremely homey in that comingled diaspora kind of way that makes me smile. Such distances we all have to go to live and to love!
And then as I had further written to MikeyA:
So, I got my car back but I couldn’t legally drive it. My Japanese friend, Yayoi, drove it back to her place, where I stayed for a couple of days, coaching her driving skills. You see, Yayoi grew up in the enchanted land of public transportation infrastructure. And she was kind of scared of the Interstate, but she wanted a ride to Chicago, on the next Friday, so we got along well enough.
Eventually the big day came and we drove up North. We got started kinda late though, and when it got dark I took the wheel, brazenly driving without a license, on the story that it is better I drive than Yayoi deal with my unreliable headlights while driving into Chicago for the first time at night. No troubles … no troubles.
Ugh.
So, you can see, I’ve been kinda slow in getting around to updating my web site. :)
/danny
Post Script
I returned to Urbana for court the other day, and I was the first called. I was charged with insurance, and I showed them my proof-of-insurance card. I was charged with driving without a valid license, and I showed them my driver’s license. The charges were dropped. I’m waiting for the $200 to show up in the mail.
Why did that go so easily? Because driving on a suspended license implies that you were busted for a DUI. It’s a really big deal that I think you actually do go to actual jail for, so unless the cop thinks that you deserve a Really Bad Day, they just charge you with the technically incorrect, but inconvenient offense of driving without a valid license. Apparently my license is valid if you show it to a prosecutor in a court room, but suspended if you have it run by a traffic cop. All the same, I have the CTA at my disposal, so I’m not driving until some unemployment comes through.
Two weeks after I filed for unemployment in Ilinois I was told that I had to re-open my existing claim in California, which had previously been determined invalid, but was subsequently validated when I showed them my earnings from the Coffee Shop. Since I was terminated, I had to do a phone interview, and the lady was able to just pull my account of the story right off of the Internet via a private URL. She was very pleased to have this, because it turns out the Owner lied to her about what had happened, but the burden of proof is on him to show gross misconduct. She has ten days to make a determination in the case, and that was a week ago, so I’ve been anxiously watching the mail for word, and likely cash from the State of California so I can pay off the State of California and drive around Illinois.
Anyways, Busey Bank later called me because they received the charge from the gas station for $19.24 on Wednesday. And they wanted that and $25 fee for overdrawing the account I no longer had. Gah! Anyways, I had put off paying them until I have a bank account, but the other day they called and said, really, the $19.24 would make them happy, so Yayoi said she’d take care of that on my behalf and I get to pay her back. After that call I returned a call from a recruiter who thought I was in California but wanted to present me to a very prestigious University in Chicago. The job sounds good and we’re working to tune my resume, so … things are looking up for a change.
Feedback Welcome
Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2003/06/18/stumping-for-a-smart-democrat/
I heard the first version of what is perceived to be President Bush’s re-election “stump speech” on the radio this morning and it goes something like this:
“The terrorists declared War on us, so we declared War on them back. Twice! In Afghanistan and in Iraq.”
“I inherited a recession, and already it is getting better. I cut taxes to make things even better!”
Unfortunately, I think many Americans will buy the simple logic that it makes sense to attack Muslim countries when Muslim wackos attack us. Be that as it may, Afghanistan is a neglected mess that is just begging to be brought up by a smart Democrat to haunt President Bush, and Iraq sounds like it is ready to stew and fester and get worse as it is neglected and left to underfunded and ignored efforts at reconstruction. I really hope the Iraqis can mostly pull it out of the fire themselves, but plenty are going to get angry, and cause increasingly photogenic scenes of violence starring American troops, and it will start to look like Vietnam, and proud Americans who might otherwise support war will become angry at the profiteering civilian good ol’ boy network responsible for the flag-draped coffins.
Which connects neatly to that “out of touch with reality” thing that licked Bush I: the economy, stupid! It is already getting better? I myself have left the dot-com wasteland to kick it in Middle America, and it sure doesn’t feel like things are getting “better” out here. Unemployment remains high, wages remain low, and back in the middle class, 401ks remain shriveled. Health care keeps getting worse, and the schools are chafing under more and more standards while their funding gets cut. Things are already getting better? Things are doing what they can not to burst apart at the seams!
There are plenty of us disposed to view the White House as filled with a pack of sanctimonious lunatics hell-bent on making as much personal gain as they can at the expense of our welfare and our liberty. The federal budget is loaded with silly pork-barrel programs that our children and grand-children get to pay for, and we don’t even get an economic bubble to enjoy in the process. A smart Democrat will point out how we alienate the world by rejecting global treaties like the Kyoto Protocol, the prohibition on landmines (OUR military needs something as barbaric as landmines?!) the Convention on the Rights of the Child. And then there’s all the international stuff we like to hold up because when it comes to controlling human populations we dare not let any of our federal money touch abortion … perhaps that is a wedge that can be driven between the lunatic fringe of the right and the more moderate, reasonable American who may find the thought of denying family planning aid to people in unimaginable poverty as even more abhorrent than the possibility that a Hindu might have an abortion.
A smart Democrat … well, maybe not a smart Democrat, so much, for Al Gore is a very intelligent person, but a savvy Democrat …
Here’s to wishful thinking! I just had to rant a little, you know, for the blood.
Feedback Welcome
Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2003/06/11/amazoncom-feedback/
Your web site is becoming a useability nightmare, which is discouraging given that this has traditionally one of your core strengths.
I have a gift certificate. I try to buy something with it. I order a used item, I go through all this stuff, and it says NO YOU CAN’T BUY A USED ITEM WITH A GIFT CERTIFICATE. Why not? Hasn’t someone given you $10 to send to a third party?
Okay, so a few days later I want to see your price on color sidekick. You don’t have them. Pity. Ah, but I could afford a heavily-discounted hiptop carrier! Okay, let’s put that in.
And it says “your gift certificate wont cover it” which is interesting because the item is $8 and the GC is $10. How much IS shipping? It won’t tell me HOW MUCH my order costs, just that it needs a credit card, and submitting my credit card is the ONLY navigational option.
Okay … well, let’s do that, and there are items in my cart from WAY BACK, like the used item I tried to purchase the other day. The only option is to confirm my thirty dollar order. Where do I say no? There is what LOOKS LIKE a navigation bar on the top of the screen, but it doesn’t do anything, not even clicking on “Amazon.com” to start over.
So, I go in to my web browser and TYPE Amazon.com to get to the point where I can clear out my shopping cart to just the item I want, proceed to check-out, and you STILL want $3 shipping for a little piece of neoprene. After all this hassle? FORGET IT! I could stuff that thing in a padded envelope and smack an 80 cents stamp on it and send it USPS, but you can’t, because you’re designed to extort money out of your previously-loyal customers.
Please fix your user experience.
Thanks,
-danny
I try to be very laid-back about most things, but I guess I take customer service really personal now, huh? And it is all the more frustrating to be thwarted by Amazon.com because for a long time they distinguished themselves by being pretty clueful and user-friendly.
4 Comments
Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2003/06/09/linux-will-dull-the-pain/
I decided to really really really clean out my e-mail inbox, purging anything I can. So I’m running across little ideas for things I should try and right about, and interesting links, and there is this wonderful post archived on Keith’s web site with this beautiful reflection from Anne:
From what I have observed from my male friends, though, this is exactly the climate required to learn Linux. Without a full and happy lovelife or distraction of soft lips and a reason to kiss them, there is enough room to grasp the intricacies and nuances of such a fine operating system.
It has already begun to happen. As I walk down the street I am not thinking of emptiness, kising, nathan or any other previous SO’s, I am thinking of penguins, rm -rf / and lilo.
I am already convinced that linux will dull the pain better than heroin.
I am reminded that in my youth, during times of family strife, it was suggested that one of the reasons I spent so much time playing with my computer was because it helped isolate me from the unpleasantries swirling around me. Being a geek was an anti-social reflex; I’ve always been such a nice boy, but for a long time I vented my Id on computer networks.
Since the layoffs and that wonderful little trip all over the world, I sense that frustration and a lot of the negative emotional energy is just not useful, so I tend to let it go. Every time I find things that upset me, I figure out a way to explain to myself why I shouldn’t be upset. Legitimate grievances with The Way Things Are are left as a big karmic to-do wall against which to I can formulate frustration in to little bits of positive action.
Or something. We’ll see how it goes.
You know, where computers used to be my escape from a troubling family situation, now it serves as a creative outlet for my surplus of time when I have the energy to interact and refine ideas, but I don’t know of an appropriate audience, so I work out in this little room here, and maybe if someone passes by and notices something and can provide feedback, that is all well and wonderful. But, I’m not waiting for them, because talking to the wall here is cathartic enough.
For the time being.
Feedback Welcome
Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2003/06/08/iraqs-underpants-gnomes-step-two/
I am reading Salam Pax’s web log and he is whining about how bungling and inept the American administration is now that it has control of his country, and about how scarey it is that despite all their claims of preparedness to the contrary they haven’t a clue what they’re doing, as if they only said these things to justify their presence there, and I’m starting to think that Salam sounds awfully lot like an American.
Our entire nation went through what sounds like a state of “military administration” when it went into a Total War economy to fight World War II. The stories we get now, somewhat removed from the actual events, is that while our nation was organized for the noblest intentions, it was Hell to live through this well-intentioned bureacracy on the ground. We went through it, though, because defeating fascism and Japanese imperialism seemed worthwhile. That, and it probably beat the Depression.
I am reminded of the Underpants Gnomes, who appeared on an episode of “South Park”, who had a great master plan to justify their nightly sortees of underpants theft:
- Steal underpants.
- …?
- Profit!
We read it at the time as an allegory for the dot-com boom, which has since gone bust. I can look at it now as the story for Iraq. I just hope the noble intentions leave enough room for something that could profit the people there. For now, though, let us acknowledge that Step Two can be Hell live through.
Feedback Welcome
Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2003/05/21/sobak-ham/
I stumbled into work about twenty minutes early yesterday, and Gallery Man asked what’s up, and I answered quickly, with a single word, shit, which is the sort of answer that Gallery Man can accept in stride as part of the pulse of things. Then I felt bad because The Boss was sitting over in the cafe. I don’t know if he heard me but when he saw me I asked how I was doing, and I said I was great, which was perfectly true. When I’d answered shit, I was thinking about how my morning started hearing that we were pulling out of our embassies and missions in Saudi Arabia, and an analyst was condemning our reconstruction efforts in Afghanistan as a clear failure because they don’t exist and we are so far repeating this performance in Iraq, while Israel and Palestine are at each other’s throats all the more this week, which doesn’t bother me so much as our nation piling new fuck-ups on its plate.
If you aren’t sufficiently quesy about our neglect of world affairs, the New York Times has a piece on the other Dangerous Lunatic World Leader, from which I’ll cobble together:
Stalin and Mao were revered for their perfect grasp of dialectical materialism, an omnipotent science that made them omnipotent too. Kim Jong Il and his late father, Kim Il Sung, are revered, like the monarchs they more closely resemble, for their perfect embodiment of national virtues.
Chief among these virtues is “sobak ham,” a hard-to-translate Korean term that corresponds closely to the word spontaneity in its Marxist-Leninist sense. The Soviets considered the spontaneity of the common people, especially their tendency to violence, to be a dangerous force unless tempered with political consciousness. In North Korea, the people’s spontaneity is seen as one of the country’s greatest strengths.
North Korean novels and movies often show the hero casting off the restraints of his book learning in a fit of wild, sometimes suicidal rage against the Japanese or American enemy. The central villain of Han Sorya’s novella “Jackals” (1951), the country’s most enduring work of fiction, tells of an American child who beats a Korean boy so brutally that he ends up in a hospital — where he is murdered by the American’s missionary parents.
This propaganda appears to be effective even among North Koreans opposed to the rule of Kim Jong Il. When I visited a resettlement center for refugees near Seoul last year, many of those to whom I was introduced as an American recoiled in terror or glared at me in hatred.
I’ve been thinking of plenty of interesting ways to improve my own position in an American context, but it seems far more valuable to improve the situation outside of my prosperous, fat and happy nation. I need to see if there’s anyone lobbying to make sure Congress and George budget money to make Afghanistan a better place – the Afghans need the money far more than the Iraqis, who have oil money and a tradition of economic prosperity. If these people exist, maybe I can help get people to write letters to pressure appropriate congressional representatives where such pressure is due.
More immediately, I need to fix out my sleep schedule, which seems to run from 3-5AM towards noon at this point, which saps productive hours ringing the 3-11PM working shifts to which I’ve been exclusively assigned. But first, I think I’ll head towards work and stop for a Vienna Beef hot dog along the way. Yum.
Feedback Welcome
Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2003/05/02/all-the-latest-k-rad-3-day-memezz/
Here’s an interesting thought that compares modern bloggers to the warez couriers of the BBS age. Thanks to my feed aggregator, I can 3-day warez this meme to you. I’m not in it for the ratios though.
I have been watching the blog phenomenon from a bit of a distance – I’ve been doing online journalling forever, in Internet years. Now all the kids have these crazy terms like “backtracks” and “blogrolls” and there was even some embedded reporter who started a blog and blog-ified everything to be hip. For example, he was no longer posting humble photos on web pages, he was photoblogging! Wooh! (Gag me!)
So, I’ve purposely avoided overly-bloggifying my humble web log. (A “blog” is a contraction of “web log” which is a term I adopted myself.) You won’t find “backtracks” here, which is where a blog site lists URLs that link to a particular post in some sort of point-whoring contest. You wont find “feedback forums” with floating heads of friends and bored strangers dissecting the minutea of my life, and I try to avoid the sort of post which basically amounts to “Woah, this link is the coolest thing ever I’ve seen in the past five minutes of web browsing!” (“Holy poop my ass is numb someone please come over and beat me until I get off the computer and interact with some real people!”)
But if someone wants to riff off one of my posts, I now have these little bylines to each post’s anchor. Citations are great, in my opinion, if they act as footnotes to original thoughts or otherwise provide a jumping-off point for discussion on a topic. If a reader has something to add, they can drop me a line.
Back to the aforementioned interesting thought which inspired this little rant, I find myself asking what my role in the, ahem, blogsphere is, in the context of the “blogger as courier” metaphor. And I guess what I am is a shareware author tinkering about as a hobbyist, trying to create the occasional interesting bit of software, or in this case, memes, that I can share with the community. Since I’m a low-budget hobbyist who is more interested in creation than self-promotion, I eschew the whole “warez trader” mentality of trying to be the first to post links out.
Of course, I’m not even focusing on memes so much, just trying to flex my muscles, because I enjoy the activity, and I have the vague idea that I could develop the skill into something marketable. I’m just playing, trying to come up with the occasional interesting thought. In the meme-coder realm of the blogsphere, I’m one of the older guys who isn’t into the hip, new scene, but instead puttering away on low-key “demo” releases.
I should try and break into the publishing biz sometime.
Feedback Welcome
Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2003/03/29/cnn-the-reality-war/
I’m too lazy to tune elsewhere, and BBC America doesn’t bother with war coverage anymore, instead showing reality shows where women are filmed with hidden cameras so they can be told how horribly they dress, and then given £2,000 to buy a new warddrobe with the advice of experts. So, I watch CNN a little bit every day, to see what war looks like.
It looks like whiz-bang computer graphics giving you a vague idea of where in Iraq the fighting is, and the vague capabilities of our high-tech weapons. “Well, it flies n miles per hour and is guided by satellites and it can be launched from a ship!”
It looks like grainy, jerky, crappy “live via Videophone” webcam images of guys driving around, getting into firefights.
It does not look like people getting blown up, maimed, wounded, killed, losing their loved ones. It does not show casualties. It does show Iraqi POWs sitting in the desert waiting to be trucked off somewhere, and of course eschews showing all but two seconds of Iraqi footage of American POWs.
The live dialogue always tries to bring up how fantastic their own news coverage is, thanks to technology, and their guys in the field, giving you unprecedented war coverage! Go CNN! And thanks to the philosophy of reality TV they can sink to the most disgusting lows – cheap emotional spectacle.
Last night, and it sounds like they love doing this, they got a soldier on the videophone, and then put his wife online, so we could watch them interact, awkwardly, in public, live: the courtship habits of the American military family. He was a bit shy, making sure to say “I love you,” and she was trying hard not to feel too upset at his being away. The worst of it was when he showed off his missing tooth, trying to reassure her that while he’d been hit with a concussive explosion, the worst he sufferd was a lost tooth. She was clearly distressed at the news he had volunteered that he had suffered a concussion; Sure it was just a tooth, but this just reinforces the knowledge that he’s in a situation where losing body parts is a very real possibility, and he’s being so cocky about it!
It is great, I think, that these two get a chance to talk to each other, but it is cheap, crass, disgusting exploitation that CNN is going to let a family use the videophone for the purpose of airing people’s private lives.
The decision to go to war, the decision to join the military, and the decision to marry a soldier are all very real, serious, difficult decisions that people make with great caution. The decision to be a journalist, and provide real, useful information to people, is far easier, in comparison. You don’t do that by exploiting people’s personal lives for spectacle. Michael Moore thinks Bush should be ashemed, but far more obvious to me is that CNN should be ashamed.
Shame on you CNN! I didn’t want to see you exploiting that family! Stick to the computer graphics of weapons if you are too inept to show us the real war.
Feedback Welcome
