I have been negligent of my LC duties this week but I’ve been extra busy with finals and a project for my IT class. If anyone wants to see what has been the bane of my existence besides Newt Gingrich and his damn Dissertation (see below), take a look at the Digital Docent, for the College Park Aviation Museum. Comments and suggestions are welcome.
My vote for this weeks The Truth Laid Bear’s New Webblog Showcase: Echidne of the snakes: Sigh.
Dan Savage, sex columnist extrordinair is making considerable headway in getting an Anal Sex byproduct named for Senator Santorum.
And frankly, it couldn’t happen to a nicer guy.
Oh, is this too mean? Too dirty? Tough shit folks.
Senator Santorum, along with an awful lot of our elected (and at least one unelected) leaders are trying to deny a portion of our citizens the same rights as everyone else simply because of the form their love takes. If they were trying to deny the same status to ethnic minorities (and some have been in office long enough to have tried that already) we’d be raising hell. So why are we letting our Homosexual brothers and sisters have their rights trodden on? There’s no reason other than bigoted fear and loathsome superstition. And that just isn’t good enough.
If it sounds like this is a personal cause for me, well it is. I may be a heterosexual married man but I still love my fellow man. And I’m not going to settle for having my friends and loved ones denied the same rights just because Richard Fucking Santorum doesn’t approve of who they fell in love with.
Jesse Crispin at Bookslut points us to a collection of memories, just in time for the holliday season:The trials and tribulations of the Barnes & Noble employee.
Her: (Extremely pissed off) I just don’t understand you people! You leave to show people where a book is and then you’re so slow to come back!
Me: (Dumbfounded)… Well actually I haven’t been gone for more than a minute.. (My coworker walks up behind me) … and neither has she.
Her: (Insanely pissed off) Well whatever! I need ‘Call of the WIld’ by Jack London.
Me: (Thinking) You’re standing less than a foot away from a shelf that says ‘fiction, alphabetical by author’ and you can’t find Jack London? (speaking) O.K. it’ll be right this way.
Apparently she didn’t hear me. She just stared at me in a “I hate everyone and I will destroy them by being rude until they die from it” sort of way. So I went to the section and grabbed the two different editions of ‘Call of the WIld’ that were in fiction. Meanwhile, she has remained at the information kiosk, raving like a madwoman about how I walked off in the middle of helping her because *I* was rude! My coworker is trying to convince her that I went to get her book.
I arrive with the books. My coworker says, “See I told you he was helping you.” which only pisses her off more. She takes the two volumes from me. The first contains both ‘The Call of the Wild’ and ‘Whitefang.’
“Did you ask me if I wanted more than one story in the book? No, you didn’t ask me that.”
She looks at the second version. It’s annotated.
“Did I ask for an annotated version? No I did not. These are way too thick. I want a thinner version.”
At this point I’m pretty well pissed, primarily because this woman is going out of her way to be rude to me. Barely resisting the urge to point out that she didn’t specify that she did not want an anthology or annotated version, I take her to the childrens classics section and show her versions that are ‘thinner’ because they don’t contain ‘white fang’ or annotations. She wants a blue cover. There are three versions with a blue cover. She wants the thinnest version with a blue cover. She gets it.
I ended up showing her at least 6 versions of Call of the Wild, and do you know what she did on her way out? She complained to my manager that I was inefficient
As a former B&N stooge myself I can attest to the veracity of the author.
It reminds me of the time a woman who was displeased with the luminescence of her quarters demanded I call a manager and open the drawer so I could give her new, shiny quarters. On Christmas Eve.
Other stories are not for the feint of heart, involving magazines in questionable places and customers who divulge far too much information about their sexual orientation or tastes.
An example from my own experience:
The time the men’s room was doused in shit. The walls, the floors, the bathroom stalls. The ceiling. Yes, the ceiling. How, you may ask? As near as we can figure, someone took extra strength laxative; at least ten times the recommended dosage, and then proceeded to wait until the dire moment to do a hand-stand. I’ll let the physicists out there calculate the force and velocity.
This sort of thing happens in every B&N store on the planet, with a frequency that is alarming and wholly unnatural.
I’ve made a few additions to the blogroll. Byzantium’s Shores is chock full of blogorificness and if your aren’t already a dedicated reader of the The Rittenhouse Review you really should be. I’ve also added Ayn Clouter who has a number of interesting things to say about plastic trees, faulty obituaries and humbugs.
Know how I said posting was going to be light for the rest of the month? What I actually meant to say was it’s going to be virtually nonexistant for the next two or three days. Finals and all. But once I have that blasted Newt wrangled and in the box, I’ll make a half hearted attempt to say something informative and witty before I run off to visit the in-laws for Mithra Day.
Finals are a major drain on my cogitating skills right now. Seriously, Newton Leroy Gingrich can kiss my ass. Him and his frickin Doctoral dissertation! Who the hell wants to read about Belgian Education in the Congo from 1945-1960 anyway? So I thought a little blogaround was in order:
Over at Corrente the Farmer has located a long lost memo that explains why all the best news stories of the past 76 years are about drunken, ambitious sexual encounters/ murders at weddings or funerals.
And at Bark Bark Woof Woof, Mustang Bobby tells us about how The Religious Reich Is Endangering the Lives of Our Children.
Speedkill informs us that Israel is training US Assassin squads in Iraq.
But don’t get too depressed. It isn’t all bad news today. Mercury X23 has a great answer for all your pest control needs.
And for an added bonus check out the always witty and informed Ayn Clouter.
Or at least we now have conclusive proof that the Bush Administration is based on Monty Python’s Flying Circus: Bush signs the medicare bill while the band plays Sousa’s Liberty Bell March.
When the administration in control of every branch of the government begins to overtly resemble seventies British satire, it’s time for a new administration (let’s call this one Kisser’s law).
Via Eschaton.
What with finals and the holidays approaching, posting will be light for the rest of the month. However, in the new year I’ll be starting a new round of submissions, trying to get the MS of my novel into friendly hands so I’ll have plenty to rant and rave about then. Maybe I’ll post some novel excerpts on my secondary page. (Right now I have a bunch of fragments for my next novel-in-progress on that page but once winter break starts, I’ll be taking it down to work on it. Comments, suggestions and especially criticisms are always welcome on the fiction front).
Information Use and Information Seeking Behavior of Neo Conservatives
“This is truly a great Wall.”
~Richard M. Nixon
It should come as no surprise to anyone by now that George W. Bush is intellectually incurious. We even joke about it. Some seem to think it adds to his down home, awe shucks image as a red- blooded commie terrorist hatin� American. He’s even gone so far as to admit publicly that he does not read newspapers, nor watch news programs on television but instead relies upon his aids to deliver to him all pertinent information.
Think about this for a moment. Let it sink in.
It isn’t just that he prefers to gather his news from the Internet as many of us do (I admit that I prefer Internet sources to print sources myself) but that he receives all of his information second hand. Now we assume that the Leader of the Free World has some smart cookies roaming around the halls of the White House. We shouldn’t but we do. And there inlays our problem: We assume too much and let Bush get away, literally with murder, while he pretends he just didn�t know any better.
The Bush administration, like all administrations before them, is full of people who have made it their careers to get into a position of power. I will not speculate here about their motives for wanting this power but we’ve all seen their faces on television and every one of them, from Wolfowitz on down to Condi Rice has that Lean and Hungry Look about them. What separates this administration form others, however is not that they are career politicians with desires for power but that they are, almost every one of them, career business people with extensive experience in the corporate world, complete with the bottom dollar mindset that seems almost genetic in Capitalists. This creates an almost tangible disconnect from reality. They are all overwhelmingly preoccupied with furthering their own agendas that they will do whatever it takes, including misinforming (or in popular parlance “spinning”) data when delivering it to the President. All so long as they create the appearance of competitive competence rather than actual integrity.
Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson, in their book Illuminatus! call this the SNAFU principle. The SNAFU principle asserts that accurate communication can only take place among equals, that in corporate or governmental hierarchies where equality is secondary (if it exists at all) there is always a subordinate reporting to a superior. And as we all know from our own experiences in hierarchical oriented situations, subordinates do not always report facts accurately to their superiors, especially when the situation is deemed important or there is seen an opening for advancement.
The ramifications of this disinformation bubble are all too apparent on the geopolitical stage. All we have to do is look at the recent Niger Yellowcake scandal to see how voluble and important accurate, authoritative Information really is.
As if this dithering about with false information wasn’t bad enough for the President there is also his faulty decision making behavior which creates the real dire situations (See: iraq, illegal war in).
I’m speaking of the Slippery Slope Argument.
This is a classic Neocon philologistic game wherein a Reduction by Inference is made by falsely associating unrelated ideas and building sloppy syllogisms to then back up the asserted conclusions; conclusions that were not reached by logic but were made using �Faith Based Intelligence� or according to ideological wish fulfillment. A clear example of the Slippery Slope Argument was made back in April when Senator Rick Santorum (R. Penn) asserted that if homosexual unions were acknowledged by the state, this would lead, somehow, to an escalation in the occurrence of man on dog sex.
The first problem with this sort of thinking is that it is not based on credible logic at all. It isn’t even comparing apples to oranges. It’s painting the apples orange, dusting them with Tang and then complaining that they diminish the overall Orangeness of all oranges.
The second problem with this sort of thinking is that it occurs all too frequently in the Oval Office and on the Senate Floor.
Truly, this is a great wall indeed.
My wife, parents and I spent this past thanksgiving weekend in a cabin on the Eastern Shore. One day we drove up to Salisbury, MD to visit my mother�s aunt and uncle. Over lunch, we chatted about the usual family gossip and goings on. It was the usual mixture of pleasant familial nostalgia and awkward inability to relate to elderly family members. Especially when talking with Great Uncle Roy, age 85, who has memory problems. The doctor isn�t sure if it�s first stage Alzheimer�s, the result of a minor heart attack he had several years ago or just the onset of senility. Whatever the case, Uncle Roy would forget my name one moment, call me by my brother�s name the next and then turn around and talk to me just like normal. It was akin to having a conversation with two identical brothers, one sharp as ever, the other very obviously not long for this world.
Uncle Roy may not have remembered my name, but he could not forget where he was December 7, 1941. As it turns out, Uncle Roy was in Savannah, GA that day. My wife and I currently live in Savannah (or rather, Elvira lives there now while I�m in MD attending grad school. Another story for another time). On December 6, 1941, Uncle Roy and a Navy buddy were on leave from the Marine base just across the river in Hilton Head, SC. They came out of their hotel the next morning in search of some breakfast and were stopped by a man on the street who told them they�d better get back to the base.
�Why�s that?� my uncle asked the man.
�Why?� replied the man, �The Japs just bombed pearl Harbor!�
We don�t call them Japs any more, we call them friends. I can�t help but wince every time I hear this story but that�s my problem as a conditioned child of the nineties. I don�t want to offend anyone with racial slurs. But then, as little Annie Coulter will tell you, I�m just a treasonous liberal. If I were a true blue Conservative like her, I wouldn�t have problems with overt racism from a bygone era.
Uncle Roy, despite his age and senility, will always call them Japs and I don�t fault him for it. Because he will also always remember what he was called on to do during World War Two. Not even senility can dull the red hot glare of those memories.
It�s supremely unfortunate that my Uncle is having his Veterans benefits cut by the AWOL coward currently residing in the White House. You�d think, what with Poppy Bush also being a WWII vet, that George would be a little more thoughtful about where he makes his budget cuts so he can give his rich friends more money. But then, Daddy Bush isn�t exactly short of the long green either, unlike my Uncle Roy.
Did I also mention he fought in Korea?
So yes Anne, you foul mouthed bitch (and all you other mealy mouthed sideways talking Neocons), I support our troops. I do not however support the despicable attempts by Our Glorious Leader to co-opt their achievements and their suffering for crass political gains. That is why I will do everything in my power to remove him from office come next November. I�ll do it for the vets Bush uses only as a cheep photo op and I�ll do it for my unborn children, so they won�t have to grow up in a Neocon police State. I do it for me and for my wife and for everyone else who wants to move this country forward into the twenty First century, not back to the squalor and entitlement-for-the-rich-only of the Nineteenth.
So on this, the most Infamous Sunday, go and visit your own Uncle Roy. Take a moment to think long and hard about what it is you really want out of a Democracy. Then act.
Regime change truly does begin at home.
