I'm not sure if I'll have a chance to put up an entry this weekend like I normally do, so I figured I'd put one up tonight. It will be short because it's a school night and I'm tired. Although, sometimes I say that and then I end up writing a lot, so we'll see.
I watched the State of the Union last night. It was OK, I guess, way too much clapping. If you give applause to every other sentence the president says, eventually it loses it's effectiveness. It's like reading something where half the words are underlined. By doing that, you essentially make nothing underlined.
It will be interesting to see if Obama wins reelection. I think he will, but I wouldn't put much money on it. These things are very hard to predict with any accuracy.
[Obama doing a little Al Green.]
On a completely different note, on a blog I read there was a video of the hip-hop group TLC performing on the Arsenio Hall Show in about 1992. It's so bizarre in retrospect that I had to mention it here.
The song harkens back to an earlier era when it was cool for hip-hop kids to where the least flattering clothes possible -- giant baggy pants, track suits, and overalls with one strap undone.
I was in junior high then, but I wasn't that into hip-hop. There was kind of a divide between rock kids and rap kids, and I was on the rock side. Predictably, the same divide was also between white kids and black kids. I never liked that, so I always put a picture of Jimi Hendrix on my binder, just to say, "Hey man, I might listen to rock, but I am totally down with black people." (Of course, I doubt anybody of any color really gave a shit about my musical tastes, anyway.)
The Hendrix picture came from the cardboard box of his greatest hits CD. This was back when CDs were attached to those weird antitheft plastic things, so they had to be packaged in super elongated boxes. I used to cut out the covers and save them. Every so often, I'd put a new one on the other side of my binder opposite Jimi. I can remember going through Guns N Roses, Use Your Illusion II; Nine Inch Nails, Pretty Hate Machine; and Big Audio Dynamite, The Globe, to name a few.
Anyway, watch the TLC video. You have to copy and paste the url or click on it, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2-YGwLJpxt4, as the embed option seems to have been disabled.
Crazy, huh? For one thing, they look so young, which is probably because they were so young. According to Wikipedia, "Left-Eye" was born in 1971 so she would have been right about 20 or 21 when this was shot. (Her page is pretty interesting, she pretty much broke up the group, died in a car crash before her 32nd birthday, and once burned down the house of former NFL wide receiver Andre Rison.)
For another thing, what the hell are they singing about? Begging their men for sex? Is that a feminist message, a misogynistic message, some weird mix of both? I don't know. And the lyrics, "Two inches or a yard, rock hard or it's saggin', I ain't to proud to beg"... Um... OK.
Oddly, I remember some girls in junior high lip-syncing this song and performing a skit to it for a class project. That doesn't seem right, but I swear it's true. (Was there a clean radio version?) For the same project, I used Nirvana's Territorial Pissings, for the skit part I just repeatedly beat a stuffed bunny with a club. It was pretty damn funny, as I recall.
Anyway, since I'm talking about music I'll leave you with this song. I heard it in the grocery store the other day and thought to myself, "This might be the shittiest song I've ever heard." It's certainly the blow-hardiest.
Seriously, can you imagine anybody listening to this and actually enjoying it, I mean, not ironically? Me neither.
Another major virus attacked my computer this week. It was similar to the one I got before, where a fake security warning pops up and tells you every program you try to run and every site you try to visit is a threat. At first it's easy to ignore, but it quickly becomes more and more invasive, and pretty soon you can't do anything, as every three seconds a prompt for a "security scan" pops up, and all open programs freeze until you close the prompt. I think the idea is that people will believe the scan is real, follow the steps to remove the fake malicious programs, and eventually give their credit card number to buy nonexistent clean up tools.
It's especially annoying because I pay for real antiviral software (I've tried both McAfee and Norton), but it does nothing to stop it. It can't even detect it when I run a scan. All the solutions I find online require me to pay for additional malware removal software that I know nothing about, which I'm hesitant to do for obvious reasons. I trust that the software is legitimate, but without a guarantee that it will work, I'm not throwing more money at the problem.
[This is what was constantly popping up on my screen.]
S's solution is to buy a new computer, but S's solution to everything is to buy something. She just likes shopping. Instead, I restored my computer to factory settings (again) which wipes out everything you have on it, but solves the problem. I had enough forethought to not put a bunch of stuff on my computer since the last time it crashed, but still, it's very annoying.
I'm trying to figure out why my computer is so susceptible to these viruses. Perhaps the problem is that I will occasionally stream football games from shady peer-to-peer sites. That's the only thing I can think of, as otherwise I stick to pretty legitimate places. I generally don't delve into the back alleys of the Internet. I should probably stop streaming games, which will be easy since the football season is almost over, anyway.
The subject of streaming football games is particularly apropos given the recent foofaraw over the proposed anti-piracy bills SOPA and PIPA. Online piracy is something I've given quite a bit of thought to over the years, and I come down somewhere between the lines of illegitimately obtaining copyrighted material should be stopped at all cost and everything should be freely available to everybody. I probably lean a bit toward the latter sentiment, because my experience is that piracy is often the result of a broken or outdated business model, and once people recognize that they can't stop it through traditional measures, it spurs innovation.
[No, it's PIPA, not Pippa. I don't really see what all the fuss was about over her. I mean, she's a nice looking girl, but you'll see dozens of women like this walking around DC everyday of the week.]
In the early 2000s everybody stole music using Napster or Limewire not necessarily because they wanted to be a thief, but because they didn't like paying $18 for an album with one good song on it (or worse, $7 for the single with five different dance versions). Now, everybody uses iTunes and buys individual songs legally. It's a somewhat similarly story with movies and Netflix. Sure, there are always going to be actual online pirates, who just want to steal stuff, but I think the vast majority of people want to buy things above the table. They just want a system that isn't tilted so heavily away from the consumer.
[Wikipedia protested the anti-piracy bills by shutting down for a day.]
And this is the litmus test I apply when I stream something online. Is there an easy, fair way I can get this legitimately? If the answer is yes, then I will do that, if the answer is no, then I might watch a questionable stream of something. In the case of football games, the NFL and cable companies have shown little regard toward their fans in providing easy and affordable access to their games (they mainly just fight among themselves), so I have little compunction about streaming the occasional Seahawks game (although, apparently computer viruses are my payment).
Plus, I'm not even sure if it's illegal to watch an unauthorized stream. I don't think it is. Downloading something copyrighted without permission, sure, that's got to be illegal, but just watching something that somebody else is providing. I don't know. To use an analogy that anti-piracy people use frequently, I'm not going into a movie store and pocketing a DVD from the shelf. I'm going over to somebody's house to watch a DVD they pocketed from the shelf. Is that wrong? Maybe. Is it illegal? Probably not.
[Remember when Metallica vehemently took on Napster? Kind of a double-edged sword, that one, since in a way they were going after their own fans. Independent of all that, this song objectively rocks.]
At the heart of piracy, in my opinion, is an utter lack of innovation. People that used to make shit tons of money off a system when technology was limited are now only making tons of money (1 shit ton = 100 tons, if you were wondering) and instead of figuring out new ways to monetize their products they're trying to regress to the old system. It's unlikely to work, because technology is only getting better and more widespread, and because there's a group of nouveau riche who are making shit tons of money off the current system (ahem, Google) who will oppose any changes to the new guard. (Will we see the day when somebody invents some new controversial search engine and Google is the one lobbying congress to limit it?)
In my view, this speaks to a larger problem with big business in the US today. To quote The Wire's Frank Sobotka, "We used to make shit in this country -- build shit -- now we just put our hand in the next guy's pocket". There's a real lack of innovation at the top. Yankee ingenuity seems long gone. That's what makes the Republican trope about a meritocracy, so laughable. The current GOP's idea of a meritocracy is that the rich get richer no matter how incompetent they are, no matter how much damage they inflict on society.
This is a point I feel doesn't get mentioned enough. If the rich are really the best and the brightest among us, the pillars of society, the job creators, the innovators, the John Galts, then why do they scream like little bitches whenever they don't get exactly what they want? We're the country who put a man on the moon over 40 years ago, and you're telling me that, today, our best and brightest can't figure out a way to generate energy without decimating our environment? They can't profit from investments without completely turning us into a country of debtors and rentiers? They can't grow their businesses without lucrative tax benefits? If this is the case, our best and brightest ain't so best or bright.
[If you had to come up with a personification of "The Man" could you do better than Mitt Romney? White, male, middle-aged, good-looking, born to wealth, super corporate, politically amoral -- I don't think it gets more The Man-like than ol' Mitt.]
What's becoming apparent is that the Republican idea of a meritocracy -- of the rich being innovators who earn their money by working hard, and providing otherwise non-existent jobs and benefits to everybody else -- is, in large part, unadulterated bullshit. That is, unless you consider new ways to litigate and lobby as being innovative benefits to society.
OK, that's enough of that. It's time for me to alight* from my high horse and get on with my day.
Until next time...
*I just played the word "alight" as the winning move in a game of "Words with Friends", so I wanted to use it in a sentence.
[The actual ruby slippers worn by Judy Garland on display in the Smithsonian. I've seen them several times. They are right next to Seinfeld's "puffy shirt".]
Had a nice little Sunday today. We went to Home Depot, but not to Bed, Bath, and Beyond. We didn't have time.
Actually, I was dreading this trip, but it turned out to not be so bad. We just picked out a bunch of materials with a contractor. S wants to have some work done on our house before we move in. In particular, we're completely redoing the bathroom in the master bedroom. S is the one who really wants to get it done -- I'm pretty indifferent (admittedly it will be cool when it's done) -- so she's taking the lead. She wanted me to go to Home Depot with her, so I did (and I missed most the Giants / Packers game), as part of an ongoing compromise. We go about things differently sometimes, so we're trying to meet in the middle.
See, I'm a man of leisure. My hobbies are a big part of me, so my free time is very important. I really don't want to spend it looking at tile, picking out a coloring scheme, and finding the toilet with the best feng shui. I understand there is an aspect of maintenance in life, and that sometimes you have to do these things, but I do them only when I absolutely must. If this means I have an ugly bathroom, so be it. I'm OK with that. But S isn't. Having a nice bathroom is important to her and since it's important to her and it's my bathroom too, she wants it to be important to me, and therein lies the need for compromise. What it boils down to is that I'm going to have to make a few more Home Depot trips than I normally would, and she's going to have to not hold it against me if sometimes I stay home and play online Scrabble for hours while she's out searching for the prefect ottoman.
[An apropos scene from "Old School". I'm usually not that into stupid comedies, but I thought this movie was pretty funny.]
Speaking of online Scrabble, I've gotten really into this game Words With Friends. It's not quite Scrabble, but pretty close. The biggest difference is that the bonus for playing all seven tiles is only 35 points in Words as opposed to 50 in Scrabble. This means that memorizing a bunch of obscure seven-lettered words is less valuable in Words. For most people this is probably a good thing, but for me it's a bad thing. Still, I'm damn good at Words. I've played five different friends multiple games and have yet to lose. However, my friend BJ is a very strong player as well, and we've had several close games (we have one going right now). If we keep playing he's going to beat me soon. There's enough randomness in the game that you simply can't win every time against a competent opponent.
In sporting news, I've been doing some (very) low stakes gambling on the NFL playoffs. I've been nailing it. Last week I took the Broncos both against the spread and straight up on the money line. That alone put me in the black for the week. My bets this week: 49ers (money line), Saints-49ers over (46.5 points), Patriots (-13.5), Texans (money line and +7.5), and Giants (money line and +7.5). That's seven bets and six of them hit, three of which were money lines (e.g., netted me more than I bet), for a profit of 114%! That is a-ok. Now, of course, two good weeks don't really mean much. In the long run, almost all gamblers lose (that's why gambling is possible), but there are a few people, Vegas sharps, who can barely win enough to consistently turn a profit. I have a dream that I could be one of these people. (I mean if there are two things I know, it's math and sports.) I'm probably too risk-averse to ever seriously raise the stakes (which is not a bad thing), but I like to think that if I did I'd be one of the rare winners.
Alright, that just about puts a bow on this post. There was talk of watching Moneyball later, so S and I might do that. It's a baseball movie, but S doesn't mind because it has one of the sexiest men of all-time in it . Ladies, you know who I'm talking about, Jonah Hill.
Today was a great day. We closed on our house. While killing time in a book store before closing I came across a book of crosswords in which two of my puzzles appeared. It's my younger brother's 30th birthday (which kinda makes me feel old, but still), and it's my 100th entry on this blog, to boot. That's honestly much longer than I thought I would go with this, so that's good.
Anyway, I don't have time for a long entry today, I just wanted to share the good news. Because I'm paranoid, I'm not going to post where the house is with any detail, but you can get some frame of reference from the picture below (click on it to make it bigger). The 'A' is the White House. (Due south from it you can find the Washington Monument. If you follow that west you go through the reflecting pool and hit the Lincoln Memorial, if you follow it east you go through the National Mall to the Capitol which is labeled. I never really realized how it's all arranged on an almost perfectly straight east-west line.) Our house is north of the White House at the top of the pic. It's a bit northeast of Piney Branch Park.
It's a nice house and a nice location. It seems pretty family-friendly which is good because we hope to have a family someday soon. You have to be careful in DC, because a lot of the affordable houses are in parts of the city that were once really rough, but have since become "gentrified". They're fine for adults, but the residuals of violence make them less than ideal for children, in my opinion. That is, unless you want your kid to play with malt liquor bottles when they hop out of their bulletproof stroller.
A few more pics and then I'm out. This one is my old apartment building in Adams Morgan where I live for three years from 2007-2010. I loved that place. It looks much nicer now that it has been completely refurbished.
This one is a snapshot of the intersection of 17th st and Corcorcan in the DC "gayborhood". Our closing appointment was very close to here.
Since this is my 99th entry, I've titled it "The Great One" after Wayne Gretzky who wore number 99. I had a friend in high school who idolized Wayne Gretzky. I'm not sure exactly why. Gretzky was pretty far past his heyday at the time, and there was no geographical connection whatsoever. Gretzky is Canadian, my friend emigrated from South Korea. Gretzky played in LA, we lived in the Northwest. His adoration was pretty funny though, he used to sign his middle name as "Gretzky" on his assignments, and then write "#99" at the end. Once he wrote a "love letter" to a girl, and he signed it the same way. My friend JY actually obtained the letter somehow years after it was written, and I think he still has it. I remember it being HILARIOUS. I'll talk to JY, and see if I can post it on this blog in the near future.
[The Great One recently after his trade to the Los Angeles Kings from the Edmonton Oilers, with whom he won four Stanly Cups and eight MVP awards in nine seasons.]
Anyway, as I mentioned in my previous entry, we returned from our trip to the South Puget Sound region at the beginning of this week. It was a great vacation, except for the flight from Dulles to Sea-Tac. It was probably the worst experience at an airport I've ever had. I missed a flight once (a whole other story that I won't go into) and it wasn't as bad as this, because it was over in a few hours, and I just went home. This dragged on and on and on.
Here's an abridged version of what happened. We were supposed to leave at 5:30 pm, but due to unrelated mechanical problems on two different airplanes, we didn't takeoff until 12:30 am. Both times the airplane was completely boarded and then had to be deplaned. It was exhausting and frustrating. Friends asked me later what S and I did during all that time, and I responded, "We fought, mainly", which elicited some laughs, because everybody could relate. If you're stuck at the airport you're guaranteed at least three fights with your traveling partner. If you're dating or married to said partner you can up that total to five. I think if S would have been alone, she would have just changed her flight and went home. I was insistent we stay until the bitter end (which was very close, our flight was literally minutes away from being canceled when we got the go-ahead to depart), in part because I was hearing rumors that there were no available flights the next day, Christmas Eve.
I was pretty annoyed with the airline (United), but I was much, much more annoyed with the other passengers. People were flipping the fuck out -- shouting at and berating the employees, threatening to sue, and file complaints with the FAA and DOT. It was absurd, and not at all helpful. I understand people pay a lot of money to fly and expect things to go smoothly, but think for a second about the process of air travel. You are getting into a giant metal tube that hurtles through the sky at 500-600 mph, so fast that you can get across the entire country in the time it takes to watch a long football game. And remarkably this process is safe. The probability you will be seriously hurt or die on a commercial flight is essentially 0. That is freakin' amazing if you step back and think about it. So I cut people a lot of slack when it comes to mechanical problems. They are an unfortunate byproduct of air travel, and they're relatively minor in the large scheme of things. (This Louis CK bit is particularly relevant. I've embedded it before, so I'll just link to it this time.)
Plus, I don't know what passengers want the service reps to do about a mechanical problem. Should they demand we leave anyway? ("C'mon, how important can landing gear really be?") Should they hijack a different plane for us? Should they go down on us in the bathroom? What do people want? (Ultimately, we got a $125 voucher for our next flight, which isn't worth it, but it's something, I guess.) I'm not trying to let United off the hook, we should expect to leave when scheduled, I'm just saying I handle things differently. I'm not so hotheaded and reactionary. My strategy is to get through the current ordeal as quickly as possible, complain to the airline later if necessary, and then keep it in mind the next time I buy a ticket. I don't see what is accomplished by yelling at some lackey, who makes $12 an hour, who can't do anything about the problem, and who probably doesn't like her company that much more than you do. I mean, it's kind of entertaining to passengers like me, but other than that it's pretty much pointless.
In other news, the Iowa Caucus was interesting, kinda. You know, it was interesting if you're into bullshit and hot air like I am. Romney barely won and looks primed to take the nomination, Santorum finished a close second with his utterly insane anti-sex, anti-gay strong family values platform, and Ron Paul finished a robust third (Newt finished a very distant fourth). A lot of "liberals" like Ron Paul because of his anti-war, anti-war-on-drugs, and anti-torture positions (a few of my friends are ardent supports), but I personally think he would make a god-awful president. Michael Lind (a writer for Salon.com who I'm so-so on) does a really good job of laying out the anti-Paul case in this article (thanks Regulus for posting excerpts on your blog). It's largely a philosophical take-down, but it has very practical implications, in my opinion. I like the Abraham Lincoln quote at the end.
[Yuk, yuk]
A key point about libertarianism that Lind makes that I agree with. Is that libertarians have this idea that only government can be an oppressor. They don't seem to be particularly scared by the prospect of corporate interests and monied elites running roughshod over the American people absent strong government-imposed regulations. This seems quite wrongheaded to me given historical perspectives both old (trust, child labor, slave like working conditions, etc.) and recent (uh... the 2007 financial crisis, maybe). As I've said before, libertarians have a very bad habit of viewing the world as they would like it be, as it is in their pristine ideology, not as it is in reality.
OK, enough of that. I need to close out this entry soon... and speaking of closing... We're closing on our house on Tuesday (coincidentally, my bro's birthday). Everything is supposedly in order now. All we should have to do now is show up, write a check for every cent we've ever made, sign some papers, and celebrate. We shall see, though. I'm not getting excited until it actually happens.
Well, that's all for this week. Until next time...
We got back from our holiday vacation last night. It always feels weird for me to come home from "home". On one hand, it feels good to be home (DC-region), because I'm back where I actually live my life, and my life ain't so bad. I've carved out a little niche for myself here, and I like it. On the other hand, it's feels bad to leave "home" (Seattle / Tacoma / U.P.) because that's where most my family is and where most my nearest and dearest friends are. It's a real ambivalence.
Anyway, the trip was great. I'm not going to go into it much, because I don't have time for a long entry today. I hope to get back to my long-form, meandering entries -- that cause my friend Regulus's eyes to hurt and that my few other readers probably just skim -- this weekend. Until then I'll just leave you with a few pics I took of Chambers Bay golf course in University Place, Washington.
[I think a bit of my sleeve got in the upper left corner of the shot. A less lazy man would probably Photoshop that out.]
The entire area used to be a sand and gravel quarry until about five years ago (long after I moved from the area), such a waste for such a nice piece of real estate. (Once, when I was about 14, my friends and I climbed the fence, it was off-limits to the public, and rolled down the sand dunes. It actually kind of hurt and caused us to ingest about a pound of sand each, but we thought it was cool, anyway. That's basically life as a 14 year-old male. Doing stupid things and thinking they are cool. Come to think of it, that's basically life for males until age 30.) Now, it's not only a public golf course, but also a park with a running/walking path and a play area for kids. As far as public use of land goes, it's probably about as good as one can expect. Also, it will host the U.S. Open -- a huge tournament in the golf world -- in 2015, bringing a small bit of pub to my home city. (Well, technically it's not really my home "city", because for 17 of the 18 years I live there it wasn't officially incorporated. In fact, growing up I just consider Tacoma my home city, but you get the idea.)
[A pillar of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge is barely visible in the distance.]
Well, that just about wraps it up, but first a political comment. Right now, Rick Santorum and Mitt Romney are tied in the Iowa primary. I'm pulling for Santorum if only because it will almost certainly cause more people to Google "Santorum", and I think Dan Savage's online smear campaign (pun intended) against Rick "Man On Dog" Santorum was genius.
