Last month I “cut and copied” the following letter printed in the Palo Alto Daily News. (Or I think its called the Daily Post now.) Now I shall paste, transcribe and share:
The text reads:
Bike changed a life
Dear Editor: A recent letter on “bikes vs. cars” stated that the over-50 crowd was “not about to go out and buy a bicycle” to replace their cars. Read on. Three years ago, I got in my car to go to an appointment and discovered that I had a dead battery. Frustrated (my wife had our other car) I slammed the car door only to notice right above me was my son’s old mountain bike hanging from the garage rafters.
I got it down — both tires were flat — pumped them up and rode off to my appointment.
Until that moment, I had not been on a bike in 40 years. After three or four blocks I wondered why it had taken me so long to get back on a bike. It was fantastic!
Several days later, I purchased my own bike on Craigslist and was soon riding to and from work — 15 miles round trip — taking the bus on days it was too cold or to dark. I’ve lost weight and never felt better.
After two months, my wife and I realized we could get by with one car, so we sold my car and used the money to put solar panels on our house. I now pay nothing for electricity. We’ve lowered our carbon footprint significantly. I’m 57 years old.
I have that uneasy feeling that I am forgetting something. I guess it may have something to do with the fact that after having resigned herself to my loyalty to my beat up old round-the-world college backpack, Mei had me empty it so she could take it in for repairs as a birthday present. Subtract that missing element from the new apartment I’m still unpacking in to after the holidays . . .
Or its that yesterday I spent some time at the hospital visiting a friend from older days, hanging out with his folks and keeping them company while their son, my age, drifted in and out of sleeping off the stroke he had on Friday. I remember the time spent in Colorado when it was Dad’s turn to shake off his own stroke.
And then there’s the Congressman shot clear through her left lobe. I listen attentively when they explain that, as with my friend and with my father, the left is where language is. One question is whether there is motor control in the right hand, since the hand is controlled next door from language.
I worry about my friend, but I know he will be okay, one way or another. One way he won’t be able to work, and may even need some personal assistance. Another way is that between his youth, spirit, and clean living, he will rehabilitate so well that years from now he will have difficulty convincing people who hadn’t seen it that he had once had a stroke.
Only time will tell. For now his folks are taking turns sleeping in the reclining chair next to his bed in the critical care. The son is there to rest and cooperate with the Doctors. The parents are there because there really is nowhere else in the world they can be right now. They attend to the details of managing their son’s life and care while he is down. I worry more about them, because I have some idea of where they are, and their needs can be better understood without a medical degree.
That may be it. I feel like I am missing something because instead of the hospital I am headed to the office. I would rather wait around at the hospital. Fortunately my friend and his family are inundated by visitors, and dropping by for a while in the evening after work, I won’t be in the way.
The man spends a few hours in the morning posting to his blog, and the rest of the day wandering the streets of New York City, his senses keen for prey, which he captures with the bravery of asking a stranger if he can take their photo.
How does he pay the rent? The video doesn’t get in to that. For me it is enough to see a guy has found his particular thing, that he’s in his element, and that he is this human archetype, the lone hunter wandering his territory in search of a prize.
Good news! Southwest Airlines offers wifi on my flight! Only $5 introductory price! I have to try this out!
The service is “designed by Yahoo!”
It is kind of really really slow to make connections.
Wait . . . WTF is this?!!
Yup. Southwest Airlines wifi does HTTP session hijacking to inject content in to your web pages.
This is a perfect illustration of the need for net neutrality: your Internet Service Provider should not interfere with your ability to surf web pages. This would be comparable to your phone company interrupting your telephone calls with commercials. Outrageous! Wrong! Bad!!
(On Mei’s computer there are actual ads in the blue bar on top, but my AdBlock plugin filters those.)
It gets worse from there. On the “designed by Yahoo!” experience you can surf on over to Yahoo! just fine. But I’m a Google man. Here’s what Google looks like:
Work-around #1: On sites that support them, use HTTPS URLs. Those are encrypted, so they can’t be hijacked. So, where http://www.google.com/ fails, https://www.google.com/ gets through!
But my little WordPress blog lacks fancy-pants HTTPS. And the session hijacking breaks my ability to post.
Work-around #2: If you have a remote shell account, a simple ssh -D 8080 will set up a SOCKS proxy, and you can tell your web browser to use SOCKS proxy localhost:8080 . . . now you are routing through an encrypted connection: no hijacking!
Update: they charge is $5/segment, so $10 if your plane stops in Las Vegas, and you get to type your credit card number a second time. Though, on the second segment, Google loads okay, but I still had to route through the proxy because the magic header was blocking WordPress’ media interface.
The Gogo Wireless on Virgin America always worked way better than this, and Google covers the cost over the holidays. And as far as I know: no session hijacking!
I honestly believe that Google really does intend to not-be-evil. And though I know they screw up and have to deal with some grey areas, I put a lot of trust in Google with my personal data. Trust I wouldn’t put in Microsoft or Facebook.
Anyway, my faith in Google was recently re-affirmed when I fired up Google Chrome on a new box and was presented with this dialog:
If you’re not being evil, you make it trivial for users to switch to a different search engine. If you’re making an effort to really do right by the user, you ask them which search engine they prefer, rather than just defaulting them to your own.
The people who plan to burn Korans to commemorate 9/11 sicken me. I would burn a Bible to piss them off, except I don’t think it is ever right to burn books. Which got me looking up a quote, and reading some good stuff via Wikipedia. I like that Heinrich Heine, foretelling the mess that Germany would make a century later.
Korans have already been burned: by the 9/11 hijackers themselves, along with all the bodies they incinerated. Fundamentalist Muslims already do enough damage to their own people, their own faith, and their own holy text that posers from outside the faith really have nothing to add. The difference between these lazy, bigoted American fuckwits who want to burn holy books and your average terrorist is the latter is somewhat more industrious, and less inhibited, more concerned with their vision of faith than with worldly comforts. They are both points on the same axis: “where they burn books, they will ultimately also burn people.”
Cook: You’ve said that if executions were made public, people would realize the brutality of this system and work to end it. Yet, in our past, crowds would show up for public executions, some with picnic lunches. In our age of violent media, what makes you so sure average citizens wouldn’t applaud the execution of a killer they were certain was guilty?
Prejean: There would be some, no doubt, who would pull out a beer and cheer that this terrible murderer had been killed. But for most people who see it up close, capital punishment is very unsettling. The head of the Department of Corrections in Louisiana has to arrange the protocol for executions, and part of that is gathering witnesses. At first he thought he’d have a line of people stretching across the Mississippi River waiting to get in, but soon he realized that no one who witnessed an execution asked to come back. When you’re in the death chamber, you see when they have to jab the needle eighteen times into the arm of the condemned. You hear the stumbling last words of those who are killed: “Mama, I love you,” or “I’m so sorry.” Imagine an ordinary American family having their evening meal, and the news comes on, and the kids ask their parents, “Isn’t that murder too?” and, “Why are they putting antiseptic on his arm if they’re going to kill him?” It would not take long for people to cry out against this, and that’s why it will never be public. You have to keep it from the eyes of the people.
Cook: You have served as spiritual advisor to six men who were executed. What were their last days, their last hours, like — for them and for you?
Prejean: Being with someone who is about to die is surreal. When you’re with someone in the hospital who is dying, it’s at least a natural process; you can see them leaving you. When someone is fully alive, and you’re talking to him in the way you and I are talking, you can not get your mind around the fact that in two hours, now one hour, now forty-five minutes, he’s going to be killed.
The death itself is almost scripted: Now they’re walking in. Now I’m telling him goodbye and kissing him on the back. I’m praying for him and asking him to remember me to God. Now the guards have me by my arms. They are sitting me down in a witness chair. There’s the big clock on the wall. There’s the exhaust fan, already turned on, that will suck from the room the stench of the human body burning. There’s the blank glass with the executioner on the other side. They’ve already tested the chair. It’s run on a seperate generator, so nobody can prevent the execution by throwing the main switch. The lights are bright floursecents. There are two red telephones on the wall: If one rings, it is the court issuing a stay of execution. If the other rings, it’s a pardon from the governor. Neither phone rings. The victim’s family is sitting in the front row to watch. The other witnesses and I are sitting behind them. There are two newspaper reporters writing vigorously on narrow spiral pads. And the condemned man is looking at me. And I put my hand out. And he can see my face. And they put the leather mask over his face, so tight I worry he can’t breathe. How quickly they strap him in the chair and step away. It’s an oak chair. They put a cloth soaked with saline solution on his shaved head and then the metal cap. A thick, curled wire runs from the cap to the generator. And then the strap goes across his chest.
I didn’t look the first time, because with the mask I knew he couldn’t see me anymore. With lethal injection he can see me, but not with the electric chair. I closed my eyes and heard the sound of it. The huge, rushing, powerful sound of the fire being shot through his body. Three times. They run 1,900 volts, then let the body cool, and then 500 volts, and then 1,900 volts again. What’s terrifying is that they’ve done autopsies of people who have been electrocuted, and the brain is mainly intact. We don’t know what they feel. We really don’t know, when we kill a human being, what’s going on inside, the pain of it.
Cook: You believe that the days leading up to an execution amount to torture.
Prejean: I don’t say this lightly. According to Amnesty International, torture is “an extreme mental or physical assault on someone who’s been rendered defenseless.” Just imagine if somebody took you hostage in a room and said that in twenty-four hours they were coming to kill you. And, when the time comes, they put the gun to your head and pull the trigger. It clicks. It is an empty chamber. They laugh and walk out and say, Not today. Maybe tomorrow. That’s torture.
Everybody I’ve known on death row has had the same nightmare: they dream it is their time, and the guards come and drag them out, and they are screaming and sweating, and then they wake up and realize they are still in their cell. Just think about when you have to go to the dentist for a root canal. If the appointment is for Friday, all week you are living in dread. That’s just for a root canal.
You realize that I don’t know the names of different kinds of plants and birds and rocks and things. So when I say I saw a hawk this morning flying off with something in its talons, and settle on a roof, and I could see that it had caught a chickadee, what I mean to say is that I saw a larger bird with a hook-shaped beak catch a smaller bird. I found this really interesting and so I stopped and stared up at the hawk, to better see what was going on. The hawk felt a little awkward about my staring. It was just trying to eat breakfast . . . was the hairless bipedal ape going to try to disrupt its meal? No. The smaller birds had become very quiet, because one of their own had just been snatched away for someone else’s meal. I admired the hawk for catching its breakfast, which seems more appropriate than the way I get my meat.
So, if you don’t live anywhere near Oakland, CA the long and the short of it is this past New Years Eve there was a bunch of youthful rowdiness at a train station, and the transit police came in to try to deal with the situation, and at one point a cop named Johannes Mehserle had a kid named Oscar Grant pinned to the ground, then he reaches for his gun and fatally shoots Oscar Grant in the back. (He said he thought he was reaching for his taser, which doesn’t make a lot of sense, but who knows what was actually in his mind?) The shooting was caught on grainy cell phone video from multiple angles.
Also, Oscar Grant is black and Johannes Mehserle is white, so . . .
Last Friday the verdict was read out for Mehserle, and Oakland braced for race riots, which aside from some vandalism downtown didn’t really happen. Thank goodness. Mehserle was found not-guilty of murder, which requires “malice aforethought” but he was found guilty of “involuntary manslaughter” which on the one hand sounds about right: it would be difficult to prove that he intended to kill Oscar Grant but a lot of people get upset at “involuntary” because the man voluntarily pulled his gun out of his holster and pulled the trigger. Due to the firearm, Mehserle faces 5-14 years in prison when he is sentenced.
Now, it seems there are only two ways to see what happened:
If you are a liberal person of color living in the flat part of Oakland then you never know when your kid will go out at night and be harassed, even killed by racist cops, who will then be slapped on the wrist because the system doesn’t care about the life of a black kid.
If you are a white Republican racist living in the posh Oakland Hills or beyond, then you see a poorly-trained officer of the peace working overtime on New Years to maintain public order in the face of black kids acting all “gangsta” on the train system. Dude made a horrible horrible mistake, and has to live with Oscar Grant on his conscience the rest of his life. He has to be sent to jail otherwise those kids down below will riot and burn their town again and blame it all yet again on white people.
I feel both ways about this. I’m dubious of Mehserle and I’m dubious of kids who want to run around fighting and acting like fools at night. I feel for Grant’s family and I also feel for Mehserle and I’m glad that when I screw up in my job nobody dies by my hand. I feel a vague sense of outrage at the entrenchment of black poverty and continued racism, especially when it involves cops, who do have really rough jobs and hell yeah I think rioting is about the most stupidly self-destructive reaction we could expect. And I’m really effing glad riots didn’t happen and I think that is something for which Oakland should hold its head high.
There have been demonstrations and what not in support of Oscar Grant. Today, apparently, there will be a rally for Mehserle in Walnut Creek, which if you don’t know is in the dry, hot inland just beyond the Ocean-cooled hills of Oakland. I have lived in different parts of the Bay Area, including Walnut Creek: it is the fault line between the outer fringes of Bay Area liberal orthodoxy and what I can only describe as “frat boys and wealthier rednecks.” So when word gets out that the inland rednecks are rallying for the trigger-happy cop, the reaction from the likes of sfcitizen.com reads:
“Anyone who supports Johannes and our Law Enforcement Officers may attend. This is a peaceful rally to show our support for Johannes and the injustices he is experiencing.”
I don’t know, I’m not sure which “injustices” we’re talking about here. Killing somebody by mistake, that can put you in prison, right? Is anybody saying that the jury verdict of manslaughter is an injustice? (Obviously, the absurd murder charges* just weren’t going to happen, right? So, what else was there for the jury to choose from?)
Anyway . . . I don’t think I’d call the verdict an “injustice” and I doubt I’d want to attend this rally but dammit, if a few folks out beyond the ocean-cooled hills want to get together and have their own rally for the other party to this awful tragedy, we can snicker at their obviously racist delusions, or we can accept that this is a complicated mess and not merely the simple black-and-white 1960s oppressor-victim narrative that is so precious to Bay Area social-political orthodoxy.
This is 2010. In this day our hearts should be large enough that we can afford compassion not merely for Oscar Grant and his family and friends, for the life cut so suddenly and brutally short, but also for Johannes Mehserle and his family, the other lives that are forever derailed in this stupid tragedy.
I spent my share of time collecting unemployment insurance in the previous recession. I managed to land a job just as my benefits were nearly expired — I thanked my lucky stars on that one! Sure, the job paid 60% of my previous salary, but that was still several steps up from unemployment insurance.
Now I worry that the Republicans, in an uncharacteristic bow to “fiscal responsibility” have put the kibosh on extending unemployment benefits. It is rough out there and everyone expects the economic recovery that seems to have begun to possibly take a very long time. We have millions living hand-to-mouth somewhere between earning a living and being desperately poor. Now we want to cut the cord and let them plunge?
And, okay, let us say we are rugged individualists and we don’t care about the suffering of the unemployed. But . . . these unemployment payments go straight back in to buying groceries and other necessities . . . we’re taking a huge chunk of consumer spending offline! That means falling retail profits, that means more layoffs, a tumbling stock market . . . we are inviting upon ourselves the next Depression, or at least a “double dip” recession.
We need to not f*ck the economy in the rear while it is still teetering on its knees. I wish the nation were more shrill about this issue . . . I hope I am wrong but this just seems incredibly stupid and self-destructive. Americans will be hungry, times will be harder, and Obama will go down in history as one of those haplessliberal presidents who couldn’t rally the nation in a moment of crisis, to be replaced by some jingoistreactionary.
I like the New York pizza for its own sake, and I like the Chicago pizza for its own sake. They’re just different dialects of the same Sicilian mother tongue, equally valid, and equally susceptible to variance of quality among speakers.
“You got a sweethweart? How are they?” Boys are sweethearts, girls are sweethearts, husbands and wives are sweethearts, and maybe your sweetheart is a cat, or a video game, or your spinster sister, or what-have-you.
The only place where I see this maybe falling down is with poly-amorous people who have multiple sweethearts, but in my experience these folks are so busy getting laid that they don’t have much energy to take offense at the most superficial of trivialities. Sweet!
Travelling to Europe? Perhaps you have a guidebook. Perhaps you have a few guidebooks. Considering the expense of travelling in Europe, it doesn’t hurt to have multiple guidebooks at hand. Alas, guidebooks can be bulky.
But you’re not planning to visit everything in each guidebook, are you? Nah! So, make your own guidebooks!
Step 1: remove the bits you are actually interested in:
Step 2: collate those bits into mini-dossiers. Now, both your “Italy” chapters from Fodor’s and Lonely Planet are in one convenient place!
So, occasionally someone asks “well, what will we replace Facebook with?” We don’t really need to replace it right away, but there are some NYU kids who figure it would be a fun project to build a distributed social network where you get your own little “seed” site on a server somewhere, and you can connect with your friends, determining what you intend to share with whom. It sounds totally doable, though who knows if they’ll actually manage to execute and gain traction.
They asked the Internet for $10,000 via KickStarter. So far they have been pledged $174,915. $25 of that is mine. I guess they won’t fail for lack of interest or money. Go go underdogs! :)
Oh, and if you’ve been tempted to ditch Facebook, but didn’t want to be the only crazy dweeb out there, you can join just over 6,000 other folks planning to quit on May 31: http://www.quitfacebookday.com/
I love Metric, but I think for human purposes, Fahrenheit is more useful, and actually closer to the convenience of metric:
Celsius:
0: water freezes
100: water boils
Fahrenheit:
0: colder than Denmark
100: warmer than human blood
If I want to boil and freeze water: hell yeah, Celsius. But if I want to know how hot or cold it is outside, explain it to me in terms I can understand!
