Is "conservative movement" an oxymoron?

I am spreading good cheer?

I had to watch this video as a "training." I mean, I was supposed to watch the "preview" video online and record in my service log the time it took me to watch it. I think I got about seven minutes into it before I wanted to punch that guy in the face and curse at my boss for sending me the link. Am I that much of a cynic? Why does this video make me so angry? Is it the sweeping emotional language, or the footage that looks like a christian inspirational CD commercial? (Experiment: if you watch any of it, replace "National Geographic" with "Jesus" or "The Good Book" and see what happens.) Is it the bursting-at-the-seams, restrained passion with which this man tells me, in far too many words, to alwayslookonthebrightsideoflife, accentuatethepositiveeliminatethenegative, or the hushed awe he wants me to feel for the glass-is-half-full world in which he is privileged to live?

His message isn't that bad. Look for the possibility in life, keep an open mind. I like National Geographic. I like the photography.

Then it hit me: This guy is peddling his clichéd outlook on life for $800.00. Eight Hundred Dollars. Celebrate what's right with the world, indeed! Maybe he's completely in earnest, and he found an outlook on life that works for him. Congratulations, you've found the meaning of your life, but is step 2 to package it and "slap in on a plastic lunchbox" and charge $800 for a dvd and a powerpoint presentation and a reminder card to keep in your goddamn wallet? What the hell is the matter with these people? I guess if you're too busy looking for all the goodly, positive possibilities, you notice it less when a snake oil salesman tries to sell you happiness and robs you blind.

"Underneath every cynic is a disappointed idealist."

LastGraph

Go here, enter your last.fm username, and travel through time with your listening habits!

My last.fm username is 'iv4iv4' if you were curious.

The Government and Public goods

Read this first:
http://divisionoflabour.com/archives/005506.php

So the question is, should the government be in control of the airport as an owner. I say yes, mostly because of the importance of the public good itself. Airports are vital to the nation, though one might not ascertain that from the airline industry itself. The enormous overhead that airports take to build - the fact that the Minn-Minn airport is valued at $6bn should clue you in - represents a giant sunk cost that I'm not sure that the industry could accept. In 2006, via stock market bid valuation, Delta was worth at most $16bn. Suppose the airline industry then had to enable themselves to purchase even just a share of the airport - say a terminal - instead of essentially renting it as they currently do, and you have quite a sticky situation on your hands, as margins fall in the existing climate.

So it's probably unlikely that the industry would be capable of stomaching such a shift. But what if an investor (or group of investors as the case may be) took over the airport? Well, this is again an argument for the state controlled management. My guess is that MinnMinn doesn't have a whole lot more commercial airports in the area. Sacramento has two airports, but only one of them is commercial - the other only takes smaller-sized planes. So we understand that this would essentially constitute a monopoly. It's reasonable to continue in this frame: it would be easy for the controlling group to increase the fees for the use of the airport - either as a fee to the airline or directly to the consumer; either way would result in an increase price of flying from that particular airport.

What could also happen with a monopolistic situation? Who is contracting the air traffic controllers? As it is, the FAA does all this, but if the airport was handled by an exterior entity from the state, it opens the door for the existing people to leave or at the very least for lesser-qualified individuals in the future. The state does already have issues with air traffic controllers leaving and the new generation is stagnating in terms of population.

I strongly believe that the private sector/competition is capable of bearing out the most efficient solution for almost every market and situation. Transportation is not one of those situations. There's a reason we did not have a national highway system until the government decided to fund one. The airport network is the same. Further, monopolies and pseudo-monopolies would be catastrophic to an already suffering industry, and would introduce externalities that would be difficult for anyone to control.

This is what saturday nights were made for

The server now supports automatic pickup of torrent files for those of you who are unfortunate enough to live in areas where torrents cannot be downloaded. Simply place the torrent file into the drop folder, ensure that it subsequently disappears, and your torrent should have automatically been started.

Once it appears in the Complete folder in the Torrents directory, it's ready for pickup. Archives of all torrents (yours and mine) are in the Torrent Files folder, and if you would like to monitor the progress of your torrent, you can check the Incomplete folder. If this isn't satisfactory for some of you, I can work on a web interface for Vuze.

Cheers!

Fucking cool!

A couple of you know about my recent obsession with the TV drama The West Wing. For those of you who don't know, I have recently become obsessed with the TV drama The West Wing. 

And I think you should check it out.

Please don't call me names before my morning coffee.

Story Time:

I'm at work about 15 minutes early, before we open and when I get there first, (one of) my boss(es) usually says something benign like "Good Morning" before sitting down across from me. This is how today went...

him: "Important day, huh?"
me: "Oh, because of inauguration?"
him: *hmphf* "Yeah, my wallet feels lighter already."

note: this is where I should have stopped talking, obviously

me: "You're a republican then, I take it?"
him: "Yeah. And I can feel my wallet tightening already. This is a terrible day."
me: "Oh, well I can feel my liberties slowly returning, so I'm okay."
him: *stunned/angry look* "Well you people should know this socialism thing isn't going to work."
me: erm. "Yes, I know socialism won't work in this country the way it is?"

So is the moral of the story that I'm a socialist because I'm excited about the 'decrowning' of Bush? I'm a socialist because I'm looking forward to the reversing/revising of decisions that have been made in the last 8 years in efforts to overthrow Roe v. Wade, reallocate monies earmarked for inner city schools because they refuse to teach absidence only or the "theory of creationism," or to repeatedly to remove endangered animals from the endangered species list like the gray wolf (4 times!)? Not to mention the war, the environment, the economy, immigration, and countless other 'unimportant' things.

I guess as long as you're rich and can stay rich those things don't matter?

I only ask so I am up-to-date on what to label myself as these days. Socialism here I come.

End rant.

This is a lovely argument against god. Not just against the existence of god. Against the justness of god, if god as he's written in the bible were to exist. Even if the bible were literally true, every word, the supposed morality it represents is something I would want no part of. For example, I want no part of a world where people are damned to eternal torture for anything. There is no crime for which that is a proportionate response. The author's argument about "original sin" is very eloquent.

I argue

i think that you should see Run Fatboy Run if you have not
staring Simon Pegg, written by Michael Ian Black
and no zombies or swans, but its very enjoyable

A Poem!

Our first assignment for my poetry class (which is godawful, by the way) was to write a poem. I have several already up my sleeve, of course, but I decided that the hour I had between classes would be enough time to compose something new. Not wanting to be dramatic or emo, I stayed away from any sort of expressive, emotional poem. Below is the result, and while it might not be that great, I was able to give myself a chuckle and it was fun to write, so I thought I'd share.

The Haunted House

 

There is a great big house

Upon a great big hill.

Every time I go by that place,

I get a strange little chill.

 

The windows are stained and shattered,

The wood is warped and cracked,

The fence is bent and broken,

The weeds are ten feet tall out back!

 

When it’s windy, the door swings and creaks.

When it rains, water leaks through the roof.

Every time I pass by I hear voices –

Honest! Come with me! I’ll show you the proof!

 

Whenever I see it I want to run.

Even the sign outside says BEWARE!

But I can’t run or hide from this haunted house

For I am the ghost who lives there.

SWEET ODIN'S RAVEN!

moments like this make me feel like the universe might be winking at me.

Is it a jellyfish that dreamt it was a sock or a sock that dreamt it was a jellyfish? oooooooooo

I post here a lot. I acknowledge it, but I can't seem to get around it. Awesome stuff just keeps happening to me?

I sort of really like jellyfish. A group of jellyfish is called a "bloom"--what's not to like? I also enjoy making things. One classic Freudian defense mechanism is sublimation: take those negative and uncomfortable emotions and channel them into something else. Clean your apartment, for example. Or make handicrafts. It's like Woody Allen plus Martha Stewart. Knitting is good for anxiety and sewing is good for a guilty conscience (you occasionally stab yourself in the fingers, and it's like self-flagellation on a teeny, tiny scale. It's like balance is being restored to the universe). Perhaps my calling in life is some sort of synchronization of Therapy, Feminism, and Handicrafts. I would be okay with that.

I made a prototype of a sock-jellyfish. I am a little bit sad that there isn't an awesome punny name like socktopus (TM) for this one, but I think it'll be okay.

I'm joking about the Freudian bullshit, but there is something cathartic about taking dumb stuff that's laying around and transforming them into a thing that you made. It's a Franken-Jelly-Fish. I'm still working on the name.

I have a functioning XBox

Hello all,
I've been pretty impressed with the xbox online game features playing with darren, so if there are any people out there with an xbox which happens to be online, friend me. my gamertag is 'zwerd'. Right now I have Halo and Fable II. Any additional titles you might suggest?

(this post is almost entirely directed at ash, I know.)

absolutely sublime or, What I Learned Today

I just had an 50-minute-long intellectual orgasm in the form of the single greatest television program I have ever seen. I fucking TOOK NOTES. It was a PBS "Independent Lens" documentary about typeface, and specifically about Helvetica. I just learned from the internets that it was actually titled, "Helvetica"! (clips) Some of those notes are summarized below. I'm sure this is not quite so revolutionary to anyone who is at all familiar with graphic design.

First of all, people design typefaces. Purposefully, artistically, and imaginatively. One guy in the movie said if he's going to design a typeface, he starts with a lowercase "h" because it gives him horizontal lines and a curve. It tells him how heavy or light and whether there's going to be serifs. Next, he'd put a curvy letter like "o" beside it, and look at the height versus the width of the "o". He'd do p and q because they descend, and b because it ascends. In just a few letters, you have the DNA of the typeface. He would type a few words in the typeface just to see what they "said". Checking out "the experience of reading something".

Apparently, Helvetica was a serious step in typography. I never knew this: It revolutionized the field. One designer: Helvetica is neutral. It got rid of manual differences in hand-carved typefaces. It's really its horizonal terminals that make the difference. Helvetica doesn't have serifs, and every end terminal's (like the tops of I's and h's and the bottoms of p's)'s corners are at horizontal and vertical right angles. Something about the lowercase a's curves, too. Also, and I'm closely paraphrasing a man in the documentary, the interrelationship between positive and negative spaces are such that the negative spaces appear to hold the letters. The letters exist in a "powerful matrix" of white space.

Once it was invented (innovated?) [1957] there was a giant boom of Helvetica advertising. Helvetica "felt" accessible, transparent, and accountable, and many government offices and large corporations used it. Typefaces can elicit a particular emotional response, and the one Helvetica elicits is a balance of push and pull. Someone in the documentary described it as the "typeface of socialism" because it ws available to everybody. If you wrote "Buy jeans." in Helvetica, it says the jeans are clean, you're not going to fit in or stand out. He said those jeans are sold at the GAP.

In the 1970s, there was a reaction against Helvetica. One designer spoke of feeling that, in rejecting the neatness of helvetica, she was overthrowing her mother's "always being clean" motherly oppressions. She associated helvetica with corporations responsible for the Vietnam war, and rebelled against all of that. Other designers wanted freedom from helvetica's "horrible slickness"--they wanted to express their subjective, perhaps irrational selves into their type designs.

A guy said that the qualititative nature of typeface is such that there's no way to describe it except to use things entirely outside it, like describing a typeface as "espresso" or "Debussey".

The '80s was a period of postmodernism: the concern was being reactionary: they wanted to be "not modern"...they were against Helvetica but not necessarily for anything in particular, or in a particular positive direction. There was something called the "grunge period" where type was disorganized and expressive and rallied against Helvetica.

"Just because something is legible doesn't mean it communicates," said one designer. He pointed to the word "caffeinated" in Helvetica and said, "That doesn't say 'caffeinated'!" There's nothing about that that says "caffeinated." A guy said that all something written in Helvetica says is, "Do not read me because I will bore the shit out of you!"

Others believe that Helvetica inherently communicates certain things, and in fact said, "You will do what the typeface wants you to do," meaning Helvetica itself contains a design program. The font ITSELF is a design that resonates only at certain frequencies.

One man said he wished some undiscovered science could prove that there exists in Helvetica some "inherent rightness" about the way it expresses and communicates. You can't improve upon it, he says. It's un-improvable, un-fixable.

Myspace, etc. (and I would add things like blogger), allow people to customize the typefaces of their personal web pages, making it a way to subtlely express yourself. Someone in the documentary said it's something people care about now, like their clothing. This reminds me of handwriting analysis.

Before, I had only had weak inklings of the idea that typeface might be expressive, had to be designed by someone, and conveys things other than the words it comprises. Thanks to this documentary, I feel like I'll be constantly noticing the Helvetica around me. (it's the font of firefox, meijer, target, microsoft, 3M and countless others.) It's a nuance of written language I'd never considered before. AND it's completely relevant to psychology. And art. And Language.

Mostly, I watched the entire documentary with my jaw dropped because I couldn't believe the people in it were serious. They were speaking with such incredible passion about the expressivity of serifs, or the importance of negative space, which are things that I think most people don't ever notice. Ever. Or maybe just I didn't, and that's why it was so mindboggling. Consider my mind blown.

This Is A Weird Thing That Happens To Me Sometimes.

Let me know if it happens to you too, or if I am crazy, or both?

Things like this have happened to me several times, but here is the latest example, just to illustrate what the hell I am talking about. Stay with me. So: several days ago (maybe on Monday?) I was at work doing English vocabulary on freerice.com (during work time, yes. Academic enough that an ESOL teacher can pass it off as a legitimate work activity? Perhaps.) and I encountered the word "salvo." It was a word I had never encountered before except in Italian names (my teacher Mrs. DiSalvo and Mamma DiSalvo's Italian Restaurant), and, in fact, did not even know was an English word. So I looked it up.

That's step one. Here's step two: TODAY I was reading my Google Reader, and I got to Pharyngula, which I usually just skim. And the title of a post is "The geologists fire a salvo".

To recap: on Monday, I had no idea this word was even a part of my language. On Thursday, I see it in print, used in context. It's a coincidence, of course, but the two things happened so close together as to give me pause. Close enough together that I noticed it. It's happened to me a few times.

I can think of a few explanations: 1) total coincidence. 2) Some sort of cognitive bias that makes this newly-learned word more salient in my mind and therefore I simply was more apt to notice it. It's a relatively rare word; maybe before I learned what it meant, I really had seen it in various places, but didn't look it up and skipped over it. 3) I am drawing a connection where there really isn't one. Freerice.com and Pharyngula are, I think, entirely unrelated...the only actual connection is that I read them both, and they both happened to contain the same word. I'm sure they contain lots of the same words, and this one only stands out because it happened to be a word I took the time to learn.

What I'm really wondering: Has this ever happened to you? I'm just curious. Maybe it's common like deja vu. Or I'm a nutjob who likes to find patterns and make connections, and my brain does it on autopilot.

And now a brief note

I just want to comment on something here. I know it's an end in/and/of itself but it still gets me really pissed sometimes.

I hate it when women blame their mood on their periods.

There. I said it. That felt good to get off my chest. At any rate, I'm not really sure I can offer a decent explanation for this one. I knew a few girls in high school who would blame shit on their hair color. Kirsten was awesome at math, for example. But whenever she got a below average thing going in any other class, she became the 'stupid blonde.' Stuff like that.

This new one's different though. I feel kinda, well, bad about feeling this way. Periods do change hormones, which - if i remember correctly - can impact pretty much anything in the body, so is it really far to exclude this as a valid reason? Placebo. Not this whole period thing, but maybe we've just been brought up expecting this sort of phenomenon to the point that it allows women - for whatever reason - to vent once a month. And anytime after 45yoa.

Anyways, I'm asking for more of a discussion between the people who actually have vaginas than my own stupid ramblings.

hunter s. thompson motivational posters

There's more where that came from.

Savage Chickens January 1 comic

I know I post a lot of simple links to other sites here, but...

click here.