Fahrenheit (Encryption Key) 451

Available as "Kindle"-ling

A really perceptive article in today’s CS Monitor: Kindle e-reader: A Trojan horse for free thought.

Until reading, I had not seen the great irony in the unfortunate naming of Amazon’s “Kindle” device and the title and subject matter of Ray Bradbury’s famous book. 

Some really thought provoking and sensible arguments in the article include:

That we are trading ownership for access – access that requires the pre-authorization of a corporation and “thingamajig.”

Well-established principles of Fair Use and First Sale are being marginalized and sweep away.

“…What the Kindle should be igniting is serious debate on the fundamental, inalienable right to property in a digital age – and clarifying what’s yours, mine, and ours.”

The article’s author (also a librarian) also includes a great Ray Bradbury quote on how ”You don’t have to burn books to destroy a culture, just get people to stop reading them.”  (or he might have added- just convince them to stop thinking they own them).

Mystery Solved

I always wondered how the daughter was able to successfully put hats, glasses, and you-name-it on our pet dog, when the second I tried to touch or place any object on our dog’s head, she would thrash violently until the foreign object was dislodged and summarily disposed of. 

The secret, as it turns out, as in all endeavors, is persistence.  Just keep doing it again and again (say for fifteen very gleeful and entertaining minutes to a child) and resistence apparently gives way.  At that point, the dog resigns to her fate as a dress-up model and will submit to almost anything (well, OK, even at that point, the dresses apparently are still a challenge).

The Whatifs and Other Monsters Under the Bed

The other night while I was lying awake worrying about something that I can no longer even remember, I came to notice my daughter lying on the floor beside the bed (a frightening shadowy apparition in itself until you learn to expect such behavior).  Eventually she presumably found the uncarpeted floor less hospitable than her own bed and returned there.

The next day I asked her why she was there and I got the standard kid answer for such nighttime behaviors: because of “Monsters under the Bed.”

I then wondered what I in the heck I was doing up at that time myself and realized it was pretty much the same thing: going to some cold, hard, dark place and worrying about my own “Monsters under the Bed.”  Those both irrational and rational fears we have when the din of the outside world quiets and we are left alone with our own unique thoughts and concerns.

This is a time and mood captured perfectly by the Shel Silverstein poem Whatif:

Last night, while I lay thinking here,
some Whatifs crawled inside my ear
and pranced and partied all night long
and sang their same old Whatif song…

…Everything seems well, and then
the nighttime Whatifs strike again!

Shel and I just need to keep telling ourselves: those nighttime Whatifs and Monsters under the Bed aren’t real, they’re just illusions of our overactive imaginations and worst fears.  Even our most rational fears only very seldom come to pass and as wittily told in Everybody’s Free (to Wear Sunscreen):

The real troubles in your life are apt to be things that never crossed your worried mind; the kind that blindside you at 4pm on some idle Tuesday

So go back to your own bed.  Turn on a flashlight or shine some hope and optimism into your worried mind and let those Whatifs and Monsters under the Bed fade away and melt back into the shadows.  4PM on some idle Tuesday will no doubt come soon enough, so for now appreciate and be grateful for the day you just had and look forward to and be hopeful for those yet to come.

Current Generation HK’s on Display at the Air & Space Museum

Hunter-Killer(HK) UAV Aircraft

Looking up from the ground floor of the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, DC, it is a bit creepy to see the southwest wing’s display of mostly armed UAV Aircraft (UAV = Unmanned Aerial Vehicle).  One cannot help but feel like he or she is suddenly transported to the year 2029 and is accompanying Reese from the movie The Terminator as he tries to evade the autonomous Hunter-Killers (HKs). 

It is interesting that in 1949 George Orwell envisioned a future 35 years in the future (1984) where world-wide totalitarian regimes enslaved their people (using mostly intimidation and propaganda).  Yet, when the year 1984 eventually rolled around, the movie The Terminator envisioned an even grimmer future (this time 45 years in the future) where machines enslave and try to annihilate the entire human race. 

If Darwinism is indeed correct, that may yet come to pass.  But nifty machines like these first crude UAVs may serve an intermediate step and bridge the gap between both of these dystopic visions.  A future in which totalitarian regimes can manufacture an entire robot army to subjugate humans at will (propaganda no longer required). 

Today’s generation still sees these machines as mostly non-threatening and neat.  But who knows? HKs may soon be coming to a neighborhood near you - and this time they may be a little more threatening than a Roomba?

HK Tanks from The Terminator

Good Things Can Happen…

The movie Office Space certainly is a biting and hilarious indictment of the soullessness, absurdity, and mind-numbing nature of modern office life. 

One of the movie’s best and lifelike characters is Tom Smykowski.  Smykowski is a middle-age, middle manager (“I take the specifications from the customers and bring them down to the software engineers! I’m a people person! What the hell’s wrong with you!“) who is edging closer to retirement, lives in constant fear of losing his job, and as a result is perpetually stressed.

Smykowski, generally a negative person, is ecstatically happy only after having just been in a horrible, crippling car accident – because it means he doesn’t have to go back to his office job.  Bandaged and incapacitated, he tells his coworkers that “if you hang in long enough, good things can happen in this life!”

Cindy Sheehan is Lydia Puckett

Pro Patria Mori

Cindy Sheehan is one of those controversial, polarizing, and annoying public figures that you are either “for ‘em or again’ ‘em.” 

I certainly fall into the latter category.  I could forgive her many wacky misstatements, using her son’s death in order to become a media darling, and her false claims to retire from public life and then running for congress after just 1 month of missing the media spotlight. 

But the one act I consider unforgivable is the act of claiming to speak for the dead, war dead in particular.  I just think these dead have already paid the ultimate sacrifice and deserve to be left in peace and no longer used as pawns in someone else’s ideological battles.   

In Edgar Lee Masters’ Spoon River Anthology, Lydia Puckett does this for Knowlt Hoheimer.  She falsely claims a spot for herself, no matter how far removed, in history.  When in fact she is nothing, she made no sacrifice, and certainly has absolutely no right to speak for the war dead:

Lydia Puckett

KNOWLT HOHEIMER ran away to the war
The day before Curl Trenary
Swore out a warrant through Justice Arnett
For stealing hogs.
But that’s not the reason he turned a soldier.
He caught me running with Lucius Atherton.
We quarreled and I told him never again
To cross my path.
Then he stole the hogs and went to the war-
Back of every soldier is a woman.

Given the chance to speak for himself, Knowlt Hoheimer makes one of the most powerful statements in all of literature about war:

Knowlt Hoheimer

I WAS the first fruits of the battle of Missionary Ridge.
When I felt the bullet enter my heart
I wished I had staid at home and gone to jail
For stealing the hogs of Curl Trenary,
Instead of running away and joining the army.
Rather a thousand times the country jail
Than to lie under this marble figure with wings,
And this granite pedestal
Bearing the words, “Pro Patria.”
What do they mean, anyway?

So leave Knowlt Hoheimer and Casey Sheehan alone.  Let their courageous acts and supreme sacrifices speak for themselves - and for goodness sakes, Lydia Puckett and Cindy Sheehan, please shut up!

Valentine’s Day, February 14, 2008

In Honor of William S. Burroughs

For Al Bundy
In hopes he is still on the couch

Thanks for the candy hearts and Hallmark cards, destined to be perfunctorily purchased -

thanks for an Expression to despoil and poison -

thanks for FTD florists to provide an escape from neglectful guilt -

thanks for St. Valentine and the Martyrs, to forget their lives and meaning -

thanks for a mandatory dinner at Applebee’s or Red Lobster -

thanks for the idea of TRUE LOVE to commoditize and sell until it stimulates the economy -

thanks for the MPAA, for judges who forget the First Amendment, for prudish soccer moms incensed about Janet Jackson’s breast -

thanks for “I (Heart) My Dog” bumper stickers -

thanks for dove-patterned bulk tableware -

thanks for “two months salary” and Diamond Eternity Rings -

thanks for a country where nobody is allowed to think on their own -

thanks for a nation of consumers – yes,

thanks for all the memories… all right, let’s see your credit cards… you always were a simple tender heart -

thanks for the last and greatest betrayal of the last and greatest of human emotions.
 

Smoking and Obesity – a Boon to Saving Health Care Costs?

In a refreshing breath of academic honesty, a study debunks the nanny state myth that smoking and obesity increase government health care costs.  So it may be time to dispense with this oft repeated myth.  A myth that has long been used as a major justification for governments’ intrusions into these health aspects.    

This should have been simple common sense, but unfortunately common sense just doesn’t work with bureaucracies hell bent on arbitrarily stamping out things they don’t like.  So a formal study was required.  The not-so-surprising findings and conclusions?  Smokers and the obese die earlier and thus have far less overall lifetime health care costs than the otherwise ”healthy.”  Moreover, smokers actually provide the added government “benefit” of paying extra taxes. 

Of course, as anyone who has ever watched “It’s a Wonderful Life” knows (“Zuzu’s Petals!”), when a person dies early (or as in the movie, ceases to exist) there are actually costs that are intangible, difficult to quantify, or impossible to know, so purely looking at lifetime health care costs in itself may not be a true measure of overall cost; but it is at least a start down the road of academic honesty.  An honesty that is sorely needed as governments seek to regulate more and more aspects of peoples’ private lives and behaviors.

Hash House Harrying and Krispy Kreme Challenging

I heard of a few amusing new “sports” this week: 

• The Krispy Kreme Challenge – a 4 mile jog while eating a dozen donuts – http://www.krispykremechallenge.com/ 
• Hash House Harriers – jogging, beer drinking, and a quiz rally – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hash_House_Harriers  and when you heard “beer” you just knew Pittsburgh would have a chapter

I figure such events are only the natural progression of all those supposedly well-meaning matrons forcing junk food on their kids at those youth sporting events.  I can remember at my kids’ soccer league games, I was always a bit peeved by the parents who were compelled to organize the ”halftime snack” of juice boxes and Little Debbies.  Especially since I figured that this was probably the only time half of those kids had gotten out of the house away from this junk all week; yet even here in the middle of the soccer pitch, junk food was thrust on them.

On the other hand to look at the positive side, if you figure folks are just going to eat donuts and drink beer anyway, they might as well get in some jogging (and puking).  But be careful, and I am not making this up, one of the few “rules” is “no puking on purpose.”

So move over bowling, darts, and pool, eating and drinking just found a new companion sport.  Krispy Kreme Pizza House Harrying Anyone?  Jog a 5K while eating a dozen donuts, a medium pizza, and drinking a 6-pack of beer. 

In Case You Didn’t Know It

Daddies will do anything for their little girls….