This Just In

My car is fast.

Minor Good News

1. I talked to the woodworking guy, and he is going to get the information for some local dude that will fix some other stuff for me, and he's going to prepare an estimate for re-historicizing my porch, which I can't possibly afford, but it'd still be nice to have a specific number that I know I can't afford.

2. Right as I was finished talking to him, my crotchety old neighbor was going to his car, so I intercepted him and showed him what damage I had inflicted on his car, to which he said, "oh, that ain't nothin'. You got nothin' to worry about."

While wildly inaccurate, this was nice to hear.

Goddamn

Michael Bay actually made a good movie!

Caveats as follows:

1. it shamelessly filched from every other scifi movie ever made, but I only know this because I've seen them all.

2. anyone, and I mean ANYONE else, could've done a better job with that script and those actors. Bay's predilection for big stupid explosions and "edgy" camera effects mostly drew attention to the parts of the movie that were best left unfocused-upon, and were all kind of pointlessly drawn out.

3. I really like Ewan McGregor, so I'm probably willing to let some things slide that I might not've had, say, Tom Cruise gotten the part. That said, I really liked Minority Report despite Mr Cruise and his persistent exudations of wankery.

4. I guess it doesn't matter that the movie is kind of tanking at the box office, because it pretty clearly paid for itself entirely in gratuitous product placements... good lord, it was worse than The Goonies.

You will note, per contest rules, that despite having seen a 10:10 showing of a 2 hour movie 15 miles away, I managed to post this entry before midnight.

Ah, Community

Prompted in part by my righteous indignation at the NIMBY assholes across North, and probably marginally prompted by the fact that I had no one to go out and drink beer with last night, I sat on my front steps and drank beer last night, and as a result, got to talk to a bunch of my neighbors. Several excellent things happened as a direct result:

1. I retrieved, at long last, the front springs for the EPM, which were languishing in the hallway of the house of one of my neighbors that I almost never see; they were actually sitting on another neighbor's steps, with said neighbor, but still.
   
2. I whined about the crotchety older neighbor whose bumper I scratched, and one of my other neighbors told me that he had been going on about how his gas cap was all fucked up, and the fender was bent, and so on; the thing is, the gas cap and said fender are on the PASSENGER side, and I scratched the DRIVER'S side of the bumper. A-HA!!!!!!
   
3. One of the ex-residents was in town this past week, one who is apparently a gifted woodworker, and who has worked on all the rickety old wooden bits of all my neighbors' houses; he's coming over on Saturday morning to take a look at what it would take to fix my rotten old outside balcony, and what it would take to replace the ugly, non-historic metal supports for the balcony with something like the original turned wood supports, which I've been longing to do since I moved in. I am completely certain that I can't possibly afford the work, but it'd be nice to know what I'm to be saving up for.
   
4. I learned the name of the new young neighbor woman who has the Jeep Wrangler that Snay wants me to purloin for him, but I promptly forgot it. Sorry! (Because knowing her name totally would've gotten me the keys)
   
5. I said hi to a bunch of people that I hadn't really spoken to in months.
   
6. I learned that there is a big neighborhood cookout thing in a month, that I would've not known a damn thing about until just before it, so I would've been totally unprepared and would not only not've been able to go, but would've had to mumble excuses and slink off to the recesses of my house, alone.
   
7. I learned that the silver curlicues painted on people's cars and all up and down the sidewalk referred to the recent death of a young man a few blocks away, who was one an illegal dirtbike and was hit by a car, and to his gang. I also learned that there was some sort of interactive art thing at Artscape from which a whole bunch of spraypaint cans were stolen. Who could've predicted that???

So, all in all, one of the best beers I've had in a long while.

Mixed Feelings About "The BH"

In the issue of The Urbanite that had mad shout-outs to some of our local bloggers (one of whom I just met last night, although I think we were both at other previous meetups), there is also an article entitled "Crossing Boundaries" about some potential plans for Bolton Hill.

Now, I am all about Bolton Hill, mostly; I love the architecture, the landscape design, the proximity to things in the city that I care about. I wanted to buy a house there when I was in the market, although nothing came up that wasn't either awful, or immediately bid out of my reach by two gay men, or both, and now that I own a house in Reservoir Hill, I am all about what Bolton Hill does for my property values. That said, there are a lot of people in Bolton Hill that, well, kind of suck. And I'm not talking about the fact that they're mostly rich assholes that claim to be liberal but are among the NIMBYest bastards around... oh, wait, yes I most certainly am.

And now, if you will, a guided tour through this article:

The fruits of these continued community efforts can be seen in rising property values, falling crime, and the swift gentrification of nearby Reservoir Hill.

It's true that my property values are rising rapidly, and it's true that it helps to have BH directly to the south of me. However, BH is almost entirely residential, as noted later in the article, and is therefore not much of a destination for RH residents. What ARE destinations are MICA, and Artscape, and the Meyerhoff, and Penn Station, and the Charles, and basically all the same things that make BH a good place to live. The houses in BH tend to be larger, the lots deeper, but we have Druid Lake, and we have a LOT more affordable houses, even taking into account the amount of work that needs doing on some of them.

So when Maryland’s Department of Transportation (MDOT), Department of General Services (DGS), Department of Planning (MDP), and the City of Baltimore recently announced an ambitious strategy to open up Bolton Hill to the neighborhoods around it, some residents wondered if the village-like ambiance that had sustained Bolton Hill through many difficult years would survive.

I'm sorry. It's not a fucking village. Villages have commerce. Bolton Hill has an expensive florist, a tiny video store, a tiny hardware store that very few residents frequent, a Rite-Aid, a seriously ghetto supermarket (Bolton Hill residents would rather drive to Whole Foods or eat out than sustain a SuperFresh, apparently), a fairly expensive Karzai restaurant, and a tiny coffee/sandwich shop that recently changed ownership after being open approximately 8 hours a week for a few years. These are all very nice, don't get me wrong; I wish Reservoir Hill had half of that stuff, and I go to a number of these places myself with some frequency. But elsewhere in the article, they refer to BH as "an island" which I think is more accurate. Yes, people that live there know each other, some of them, and people that do not live there are mostly clueless as to what goes on in the community (unless of course they troll the community organization's forums) But most all residents work somewhere else (they have to) and most all residents leave "the Village" for all but a scant array of needs, such as with walking tiny dogs, and pursing ones lips at non-PLU's.

In March, the State of Maryland and the City of Baltimore announced plans to remedy just that need. They released a strategy to redevelop two area parking lots as phase one in the long-term creation of the “Eutaw District,” a 110-acre parcel of offices, stores, and homes that, planners hope, will rejuvenate the city’s State Center district and knit together the surrounding neighborhoods of Bolton Hill, Seton Hill, Upton, Marble Hill, and Mount Vernon.

This would utterly rock. Yes, it's about a mile or so from my house, but it's a straight shot down Eutaw, and I'd gladly walk it. The city and I agree, hurray! Although note that, despite wanking on about Reservoir Hill earlier, it is NOT one of the neighborhoods slated for reunification with the glorious Bolton Hill, despite being ACROSS THE DAMNED STREET. Madison Park? Also fucked. I sense a trend...

The strategy calls for an ambitious transit-oriented development, or TOD, centered on State Center, a modernist office complex where 3,500 state employees currently work. “It’s one of two places in the city where Metro and Light Rail come together,” says Don Halligan, the manager of the project for MDOT. (The other place is Lexington Market.) “We’re trying to put people around the transit system and create pedestrian-friendly communities.”

Hmm, didn't they just reopen that pedestrian stretch of Lexington Street a little while ago? As an aside: why the fuck is it so hard to switch modes in Baltimore's transit system? Oh, right, because it's terrifically lame, and no one would want to anyway! Moving on...

Under the plan, development would be densest around State Center Metro and the Cultural Center Light Rail station. Mid-rise residential buildings, offices, retail establishments, and possibly a cineplex would surround a “Plaza d’Art,” a central square that might include a boutique hotel. Changes are set to extend all the way to the edges of the 110-acre study area: 3,200 new mixed-income housing units, new commercial buildings, and pedestrian improvements would stretch southwest to Pennsylvania Avenue and northeast almost to Penn Station.

Rock, rock, rock. Seriously, if they did this, I'd never sell this fucking house. (unless it hit $1M, at which point, the ink wouldn't even be able to dry).

Ingles formed an ad hoc committee of the Mount Royal Improvement Association (MRIA) devoted to giving Bolton Hill residents a voice in the planning process. He called a neighborhood meeting this spring and, by his estimation, 100 people showed up.

Those in attendance were unhappy about two of the strategy’s recommendations in particular: bringing two-way traffic and buses to Bolton Street, which is currently one-way; and routing two-way traffic from Dolphin Street up Dolphin Lane, now a one-way alley running alongside the Swim and Tennis Club.

Now, these streets wouldn't necessarily be easy to turn into two-way streets, particularly not Dolphin Lane, and I'm not entirely sure what the point of this would be, anyway, since Bolton is much smaller than Eutaw and is therefore less well-suited to bus traffic (especially given that Baltimore's buses, by and large, and loud and smelly). But this reaction from the BH Elite is not about that, per se; it's a knee-jerk conservative reaction against changing their own lives in any way. Here's what the authority says:

I don’t think you can learn by looking at [cities] as some kind of macro destination. That has been the trouble with the limited access highways with their ramps. They lead into downtown as a macro destination. But people don’t go into downtown that way. They go for lots of micro destinations.

The question has not been asked of how can people more expeditiously reach all these micro destinations. You look at all the things that block them. All of the no left turns and one-way streets and send them as soon as they get off the ramps. Send them all around blocks that they don’t want to go around in order to reach their destinations. And these are all calculated by traffic engineers to make traffic move fast, to speed things. That’s their purpose. There is no other reason for one-way streets or no left turns. What a dream world they live in. The traffic is not being speeded with all these expedients.

One-way streets are stupid, and they always have been. They are, as Ms Jacobs says, intended as traffic expedients, but that logic assumes that only routine drivers use them, and that they don't come across an unexpected one-way street and panic and drive 20 blocks out of their way, tentatively, thereby actually crippling traffic utterly. I live right next to Bolton Hill, and I walk there all the time, but I fucking hate driving there, because it's just like driving in a suburb, all artificial barriers (albeit pretty ones) and pointless traffic controls and so on. Thank god there are no speed bumps. I'd be out there with a pickaxe every night. And the REASON it's just like driving in a suburb is because THAT'S WHAT THE RESIDENTS WANT. They want to be able to claim they live "in the inner city" and they want to be able to shock their richer, even-bigger-asshole friends out in Stevenson or Lutherville or wherever with their "urbanness", but they also want to leave the area whenever they want, in their cars, and be able to come back to guaranteed parking, and they want no non-residents (and preferably no renters, I suspect) to ever come in or through. This is not "a village", this is a giant cul-de-sac pod zoned "R1". Meanwhile:

Planners have already backtracked on routing buses and two-way traffic down Bolton Street, an idea that Halligan now says “doesn’t make any sense whatsoever.”

Oh, no, of course not, you craven fucking worm... of course, it's possible that he is talking about the buses only; I'd certainly agree that it'd be stupid to funnel those onto Bolton. But come the fuck on.

In April, the state and the city issued an RFEI, a request for expressions of development interest, inviting “experienced developers of mixed-use projects” to submit concepts for the two parking lots at State Center. The RFEI took Ingles by surprise. It seemed to him that the state and city were moving too fast, and hadn’t specified their “measurables” (i.e., precisely how they would evaluate developers’ concepts according to the broader strategy for the entire Eutaw District conception). If Bolton Hill is to be reconnected to the city grid, how will the entirety of that grid look?

While I agree it'd be nice to have some assurances that the city does not have its municipal head up its municipal ass, a gi-normous masterplan for the entire city solves nothing here, except the next few years' income for, oh let me guess, Struever Bros. The proposal should be only as large as can be funded, and no larger, or it'll never happen. This does not mean that the planners shouldn't consider the surrounding neighborhoods, but they don't need to plan everything out to the last detail, or it'll NEVER HAPPEN. I'd be more concerned about the fact that the residents who get all fucking arch at these meetings are unwilling to walk three blocks to a decent grocery store, than that the planners might not have considered the impact of Camden Yards on development of the State Center parking lots.

“State Center is a now a divider, rather than a bridge between Bolton Hill, Upton, Penn Station, and Mount Vernon,” says Otis Rolley III, Baltimore’s director of planning. “This process started the conversation about how something positive and creative might come into being here.”

Yeah, you know what else is a divider (or as Jane Jacobs calls them, "border vacuums")? North Avenue, aka "Route 1 for trucks"; MLK Blvd; the row of nearly derelict houses and crap across from BH on Eutaw (in Madison Park); Maryland General Hospital on Howard; etc, etc, etc. Given how many of the city's planners are sure to have read The Death and Life of Great American Cities, precious few of them can articulate much of any of it.

State Center is only a divider in the sense that no one from Bolton Hill has any reason to walk there or past there, nor does anyone else, nor will they ever. No one takes the Metro who isn't ing from Owings Mills to JHH, or State Center, or Charles Center, or whatever ivory tower they work in. No one gets off the Light Rail at Cultural Center and crosses Howard.

Making it a destination will make it a destination, not a "bridge". No one from Seton Hill will go to the new development, then go past it to Bolton Hill. No one from Bolton Hill will do the reverse, either. Building something like this WILL add value to all surrounding neighborhoods, don't get me wrong. But doing so without relaxing the zoning around it guarantees that it cannot and thus will not spread. And did I mention, Bolton Hill residents don't want it to, anyway? They also don't want outsiders coming into the neighborhood, so they'll continue to find bullshit quasi-plausible rationales for clinging to their little island of rich-enough-to-pay-the-property-taxes.

Farther down Eutaw Street we arrive in Seton Hill, whose leaders, Ingles says, hope that the State Center development might reach past Maryland General Hospital into the heart of their neighborhood. “I think this could be one of the premier spots in Baltimore,” Ingles says.

It won't. No one wants to walk past five blocks of rarely-open antique stores and a giant brick wall to get to a retail center, so they'll drive. That's not a neighborhood, it's a thruway.

Bolton Hillers are having mixed reactions. “If the development could bring a quality grocery store to Eutaw Street, that would be great,” Cross says. But others worry that development, along with increased traffic and higher numbers of pedestrians, will threaten the neighborhood’s cherished privacy. “Construction could last twenty-five years and cause … more traffic, congestion, and noise,” said one respondent on the neighborhood’s busy online bulletin board. “We don’t need any more density.”

Yeah, real fucking mixed; there WAS a quality grocery store right off Eutaw, twice, and Bolton Hill couldn't sustain it. If she's talking about a Whole Foods, forget it. Regardles of demographic, and regardless of supposed liberalism, there are not enough people in Bolton Hill who would walk to ANY grocery store to keep one open (I would, but I apparently only grocery shop once a year).

But here we get to the real issues: "privacy" and "density". Privacy is a function of traffic, both pedestrian and vehicular. Density is a function of building types and ownership rates, and has NOTHING to do with traffic, except inasmuch as increased density (ie: more rentals) will increase both sorts of traffic. It's not clear how development way the hell down Eutaw Street would affect Bolton Hill at all. "Privacy" is code, I'm fucking sorry.

When I was in the market to buy a house, I wanted to live in the city because I wanted to know my neighbors and be involved in community associations and so on, but a) I'm really busy/antisocial, and b) a lot of them are kind of weird. Suffice it to say that I don't feel like I really live in "a neighborhood" but that's all on me; I don't HAVE to walk past my neighbors' front-stoop gatherings with a diffident wave. I could join in. I could have my own gatherings. I'm not GOING to, but it's not because I value my "privacy". If you want privacy, you withered old prune, go fucking live on an island in Maine. Get the hell out of my city.

In Under the Wire

So, I don't really have anything all that exciting to say this evening. Went to the meetup at Nick's Fish House, it was good to see everybody, and meet some new people, although several regulars were absent, including the current frontrunners in Content Challenge, who I am too lazy to link to.

It was hot as shit, although not quite as bad as it might've been, since it was on the water. There were also virtually no mosquitoes, which was pretty sweet, but which also most likely had something to do with the nine million billion spiders that had made the outdoor seating area their home. Big spiders, too; at one point, they trapped a car.

Meanwhile, when I sat on my front stoop for 20 minutes after I got home, but before I went down to Nick's, my legs were bitten to hell. Apparently my spiders are really lazy.

Also, I have neither been arrested nor had any massive life-changing nether traumas, so I'm pretty much out. I have to say, I'm pretty happy about both.

No Good Deed Goes Unpunished

So I got around to calling my antique neighbor today, and with some effort, as he appears to be stupendously deaf, he revealed to me that I had "bent the bracket that holds the bumper to the car."

This is, of course, purest bullshit, as all I did was scrape his bumper halfway across my rear passenger door, thereby removing a few gouges of paint from the plastic of his bumper, and making a really ugly denty mark on my door.

His claim is also likely to require the replacement of the bumper, because bumpers aren't intended to survive crashes; they are intended to take one for the team, and then be replaced. They also tend to cost a shitload to replace, because automakers and mechanics are all assholes.

There's NO WAY I did that to his bumper. None. Still, I was tired of talking to him, so I said, "well, find out what it will cost to fix, and I'll write you a check." He agreed, and now I am officially pissed off. If it were a hundred dollars or something to get it repainted, that'd almost be fine, because, I mean, I DID fuck up the paint. If he wanted to take advantage of the fact that he had to repaint his bumper to repaint his whole car, I might not mind paying for a substantial part of that. However, I did NOT cause hundreds of dollars of damage. If he comes back to me with some ridiculous figure, I may have to stage a reenactment for him. I don't think he really understands what I did, which is fine, since all he knows is that I hit his car and left a note with something about the bumper. But there's no way I'm on the hook for hundreds of dollars. Apparently it is irrelevant to him that I could've just NOT left a note. It's not like he saw me do it.

Meanwhile, when I was inspecting his bumper tonight to see if there was any evidence of any damage (there was not) I noticed that some little fucker on the way to or from Artscape had spray-painted a series of silver curlicues on his driver's side doors and rear fender.

Is it wrong that I laughed?

Hooray!

So, while I continue to avoid my life, inasmuch as I have not called my crotchety neighbor, and I have not cleaned my house or caught up on any chores, or really accomplished much of anything that anyone would care about (although I am almost halfway through the Harry Potter books, which I'd been neglecting for the last, um, six books), I did do something this weekend that made me happy.

I worked on the Mercedes, and progress was made. A couple of months ago, my dad and I discovered that the idiots that had the car before me had, at some point, replaced the motor mounts, or at least, had taken the engine off them and put it back on after committing still unknown sins, but the problem is, they are complete fools. When I first got the car, there was a giant dent in the oil pan, obviously because they had jacked the car up with the jack under the oil pan. We never understood why they might've done such a stupid thing, but then we noticed, after I decided to replace the fan shround and radiator mounts (because the radiator was hanging off-kilter, and so when the engine got hot, which it does very quickly, the fan, which is supposed to spin faster the hotter the engine is, via a mechanism called a "viscous clutch", scraped against the shroud, which kept it from spinning fast enough to actually cool the engine properly; the radiator mounts were well and truly fucked up, and easy enough to replace), I noticed that the entire engine seemed to be pivoted a bit towards the passenger side. Upon further investigation, it became clear that this was because the motor mounts were not correctly installed, and so the engine was basically free to vibrate all the fuck over the place, no doubt wasting gobs of power and possibly also affecting the fuel economy.

So we decided to replace the mounts. Upon reading the engine manual, we discovered that the first instruction was "jack the motor up under the oil pan"... apparently, however, the yahoos who did this previously failed to read the next clause, which was "...using a shim to avoid damaging it". Fuckers. I ordered a pair of mounts and preemptively took out the radiator a few weeks ago, but had not had a free weekend since then. Not entirely true; we did manage to remove and replace the driver-side mount, which, in addition to not being secure, had the heat shield installed under the mount, instead of over it, and so had been completely fried by the manifold. So replacing this made us very happy, but we were dreading the other one, because it was much harder to get to (nothing like cramming a 4.5L V8 into an engine compartment designed for a 2.8L I6). Today, we conquered it, and there was much rejoicing. Last step is to replace the engine shock absorbers, which had basically been doing double duty for the entire time I'd been driving the car, and for who knows how long before that. I ordered some today, and hopefully, they will be here for installation next weekend, at which point I can put the radiator back in, and DRIVE THAT BEEOTCH! Woo-hoo! I am very excited. Tune in next weekend for the saga of my arrest for driving 100 mph somewhere in Columbia (possibly in the mall parking lot).

Meanwhile, the Evil Practical Mobile needs its front springs replaced, which I already ordered, and which are currently languishing in my neighbor's hallway because he wasn't around any time when I tried to get them. This is theoretically a much more important fix, since the EPM has been riding so low in the front since the day I bought it that I frequently bottom out on trivial bumps. While I hate the car and want it to die, it would actually really be terribly inconvenient were it to do so. So why is it that the entire process of fixing it will annoy the shit out of me and make me hate it even further (much as will getting the bodywork done and getting it repainted), yet incremental work on the not-yet-driveable Benz makes me unspeakably happy?

I think there's a lesson in there somewhere.

Fuckity Fuck, Revisited

So I got the mail today, and in addition to the usual bullshit waste of time and paper Sun A+ section, and the usual bullshit free software development magazines that I never read when I had the company paying for them, and which I've never paid for since they told me my subscription was about to lapse, and which I've still been getting and not reading for several years, and the usual bullshit credit card applications from every company in the world, there was a note.

The note said "here's my number, give me a call and talk to me about my car".

Fuck. Since this happened, and I haven't heard from him, I was sort of assuming that he was going to just let it go, but apparently not. I mean, it was my fault, and it was stupid, and I want to make it right, but fuck.

I haven't called him yet.

Pique Oil

This will by no means be the most trenchant thing I will ever write on the subject of Peak Oil; I've been thinking about it far too long and reading too many different articles and rants on the subject. And also, I'm lazy. Suffice it to say that this summarizes my feelings on the matter admirably; part sky-is-falling, reveling-in-the-end-of-civilization doom and gloom, part snarky it's-just-a-flesh-wound cavalier.

See, we ARE running out of oil, by definition, because all the oil in the world was produced by a millennia-long process of decay, a really long time ago, and we are using the hell out of it, and have been for over a century. We use it for pretty much everything, too: we drive on it, make plastics out of it, heat our homes with it, make our electricity with it, power every form of freight transportation with it, pave our streets with it, seal our roofs with it, and so on.

So, it is impossible to deny that we will, eventually, run out of oil. Anyone who does deny this either actually means what I am about to say next, or is an idiot (possibly both, but that's neither here nor there). What I was about to say is this: we don't really REALLY know when we're going to run out of it, and we don't really REALLY know how fucked that will make us. The biggest concern, really, is not our cars, it's our commercial transport. But the thing is, the reason commercial transport is the way it is is because oil is cheap, and has been for decades. When it becomes more and more expensive, there will be ever-increasing pressure on the energy industry to start coming up with alternatives, be those coal or synthetic oil or shale oil or tar sands or wind power or solar power or hydroelectric or wave power, or... all of these are currently more expensive than oil, and will be for some time. But there will also be pressure on the distribution industry to shape up and find efficiencies that right now aren't worth finding.

And if it's going to happen over the next 50 years, maybe, just maybe, we'll be able to head it off with Priuses and windmills and cheap plastic solar panels and high-EER AC units and high-R-value insulation etc.

Maybe. And now I have lost the thread because the phone rang, but I'll flesh this out later.

Maybe.

Further Proof I'll Die @ 40

Today was the second time I foolishly agreed to play soccer with some of my coworkers, most of whom are younger than I am, all of whom are apparently better at soccer than I am, and yet, it would seem that I learn nothing from my life.

It would've been the third such instance, but I bailed last week for a variety of reasons, the main one being that I had just found out about the new job, and I would surely have let it slip, because I am compulsively honest, and then it would've been less soccer and more "let's kick the ball at his head for an hour"... So.

It's possible that the combination of my historic fatness, my worthless bronchii, and my sneakers, equipped with loafer-like smoothness, are not a winning combination. I fucking hurt my neck while stretching, and then proceeded to overextend both knees in turn and pull the other hamstring, to match the one David forced me to ruin many months ago in the course of our short-lived bout of self-abusive hill sprints. I incurred all these injuries while playing some epically bad soccer; I had about 900 shots on goal, and made approximately zero.

Basically, my arms feel all right, and my back is aching no worse than usual (never should've left the goddamn trees), but my legs are completely ruined. This is going to make it awkward to walk around in the future, but luckily, I am working from home tomorrow (so as not to lose my parking space, as I live in the Artscape Expansion Lot), but unluckily, the weekend promises to include a great deal of walking and standing upright. Fuck.

There isn't enough gin in the world. I gotta get me a Rascal. Or maybe a hover-chair. Or maybe some more gin.

Zombies

So in lieu of the usual (which has been horribly thrown off for the last couple of days in any event) I agreed to go over to my friend's house to watch Night of the Living Dead tonight.

Basically, to sum up, it would really suck to be in that position, but watching it? Not so scary. Also, since I am 100% rational, I was not remotely scared of having my brains eaten while walking the five blocks back to my car. I spent most of the walk, actually, trying to think of a way to contact my other friend, whose house I parked in front of, in order to convince him to come out and have a beer or seventeen. Sadly, we have failed to anticipate the need for such a system, and any option I had would most likely result in a woken baby, which would be bad. No beer for me. I suppose I could drink the sole survivor in the fridge, but a) that's kind of sad and b) that's for emergencies.

It's worth noting (albeit not very interesting; you get what you pay for) that I had already successfully hung out with the latter friend (and his family) earlier in the evening, while waiting for the former to get his commuter ass back from DC (apparently there was a MARC train delay, or some such lame excuse). Since they all live near each other, and since I needed to replenish my stocks of cat food from this place, also nearby, I parked equidistant and commenced to tour their newly and awesomely more-or-less completed house. While taking care of their excellent dog a couple of weeks ago, and looking at the mostly-completedness of said house, it briefly occurred to me that, were I to enlist said friend to finish up my house, and then were I to sell this money pit, I mean fine investment property, I would have about enough money left over to pay off all my debts, buy his house, and if not buy it outright, at least lower my payment massively.

Unfortunately for me, they are much more efficient than I am, and will probably have long since put their house on the market, sold it, moved, raised their child to adulthood, and come by periodically to mock me before I'll even have the upstairs bathroom done.

Still, it was a nice idea. Maybe if I were able to employ zombie labor...

Also, there was Indian food.

UPDATE: This is pretty much exactly how I felt about the film in every respect, except I am a little reluctant to wank on about how it's the greatest movie ever made, EVER... it's obviously very important, though, like Citizen Kane.

CAUTION: This is as spoileriffic as it is possible to be...

The Limits of Technology

This just in: it's freakin' hot.

Meanwhile, after being heckled about the superiority of one blogging program over another, I decided I would research a means of providing "cut" content, which is to say, I'd have something like:

more fun crap here

And clicking on that would take you to a much longer post in which the "more fun crap here" would've been replaced with one or more paragraphs, or a picture, or whatever. This is handy for a number of reasons, and it seemed like it'd be easy to do via a simple JavaScript, such as this one:

< SCRIPT type="javascript">
 if (document.title=="title of this blog post") 
   {
     document.write("Short text anchor");
   } 
 else     // if the post was being viewed with comments
   {
     document.write("Long ass block of text");
   }
< /SCRIPT>

...but alas, Blogger does not play well with others, and gleefully yoinks out any such script block (unless one takes the precaution of making the tags invalid with judiciously placed spaces).

Which kind of sucks. And really doesn't make a lot of sense, since, while you could in theory do all sorts of annoying things with scripts, Blogger could also do as others do, and create a simple proprietary scripting pseudo-language that could be used for such things.

C'mon, guys, you're owned by Google. Smarten up.

I can do this, though:

messy_hair_girl

Cookies

...seem like a very good idea. Ice cream even better.

Meanwhile, I can't help but notice that this the second consecutive day of Heat Index 100+. This blows.

And now, to continue with the 3000+ page game of catchup that I like to call: Preparing to read Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince...

More o' the Same

Yeah, I pretty much have nothing to report today. I changed the oil in the EPM, badly, since I didn't bother to check how much it took, and put in about twice as much as it needed, then drained it all out and put in what I hope is the correct amount.

Meanwhile, both the old oil and the next gallon of new oil we flushed through it came out pretty much black, which does not bode well for the sludge factor in my engine. Given that it is my intention to drive this car until, as previously mentioned, it sublimates into a cloud of ash, this is not a big deal, especially as the new job requires virtually no driving at all, but still, theoretically worrisome.

Meh.

Content Challenge Panic

I have absolutely nothing to say, and yet, cannot be the one to choke on Content Challenge...

Bluh.

This weekend thus far has been a pretty good example of why I don't want to live in Baltimore for the rest of my life; it's hot and sticky and gross, and while it seems like a good idea to sit inside in AC and drink beer and watch TV, you occasionally have to go outside and then you realize that it's really fucking hot and sticky and disgusting out there, and you have to just finish whatever it is that you were out there doing (probably getting food and more beer) and then you go back inside, rinse, repeat, and who wants to live like that?

I mean, besides, given the evidence, me.

I'd like to get into the whole "loving summer" thing, but in order to do that, I'd have to have something to offset the unpleasantness, like a trip to the ocean, where I could ignore all the fucking rednecks and swim way the fuck out and be in the water for several hours, or better yet, if it would stop fucking raining every weekend, I could fix my goddamn Mercedes and go on roadtrip picnics and shit, and just drive way too fast burning too much gas while I can still afford to do it without taking out another mortgage.

Bluh bluh bluh bluh. Maybe I should go visit my friends in Florida, where in addition to the hot and the humid and the oog, there are also hurricanes and deadly sea creatures...

Snooze of the Weird

So the news is (which I previously could not write about because at least one of my current coworkers occasionally reads this, and I sure as fuck don't want anyone finding out about anything important like this), I done got me another job, this one marginally closer to home, marginally more located in the middle of the city, marginally more working on a buncha different applications, some of which are not written by Indian programmers, but will in fact be written by me.

Also, and perhaps most importantly, because I am a greedy slug, it will pay me a crapload more. Still not the crapload to which I so readily became accustomed, but what do you think this is, the late 90's?

The higher salary, plus the much-anticipated unused vacation check, should put me temporarily in a position of relative fiscal stability. Hooray!

And no, I'm not buying all the beer.

Rhubarb, Rhubarb...

So there's some news. News there is. This news will be properly elucidated sometime tomorrow, but not before then. It appears to be good news, but that may not be known for some time.

It is definitely not bad news, although it bears with it a concomitant opportunity to be a total disappointment to someone I'd prefer not to disappoint, to which I say, preemptively, "dem's da breaks."

In other, not that news news, I have removed the second ring of the Bizarro Kitten Toilet Training Device. The cats are not amused.

OH YEAH: as a consequence of the decision which spawned the above cryptic gabble, for those of you who routinely email me at work, feel free to try out the gmail account. If you don't know it, email me at the account on my userinfo page and I'll give it to you.

Fuckity Fuck

Don't you hate when something stupid happens, and you can't even blame it on someone else? I just parked my way into my neighbor's car, and while I scratched the shit out of my rear passenger door, I also managed to scrape a bit of paint off his bumper while I was at it.

Not being an asshole (well, not being dishonest, anyway) I left him a note apologizing and asking him to tell me what it cost to repair so I could write him a check.

Two things are irking me beyond the basic "YOU'RE A DUMBASS!" voice I keep hearing:

a) that he might decide to tell me it cost a crapload of money to fix; while I don't want him to have to pay for it, parts of his car are also held on by duct tape. Is it wrong to hope that he tells me not to worry about it? As it is, I'm worrying that he's going to get the whole car chromed and bill me.

b) I think I've finally put enough little scrape-y rust magnets on the car that I'm going to have to pay someone to hammer out the dings, fix the rusty bits, and repaint the goddamned thing. While I could just emulate my father, and drive the car until it actually crumbles into ash on the freeway, I have a bit of pride. Also, I fucking hate the fact that my car is mint fucking green. Fuck.

Did I mention, "FUCK"?

Phoning It In

I had every intention of posting something hard-hitting and substantive this evening, but my wireless network is being irritatingly poky, this computer seems to be passing a kidney stone, and I don't really have anything pithy to say about Guns, Germs, and Steel, part one of which was on PBS last night, save that it was awesome, and I am totally glad that I took off running from this guy and this guy's very fine dinner to catch it. It was a little padded with gratuitous production goo (NB: the show, not the dinner), but it still delivered the gist of the book (that I have not yet read) well enough that I immediately wanted to go read the book.

It also created yet more unusual stirrings in me to actually write my fucking novel, which currently stands at 7 dead-end boring-ass pages that seem unable to get off the first scene. Bluh. But there are some themes in common (which is even more evident to me, as the novel is currently nothing but themes in my head) and I am in a doldrums of feeling like I've accomplished nothing, which I'm sure has nothing to do with my recent mostly uneventful birthday. Odds of me actually being spurred into something resembling action? Go play the lottery if you're that hopeful.

To sum up: bluh. Also, I too am fond of cookies.

Reuters Annotated, So You Don't Have To Think

From a Reuters article today headed, "Bush: London attacks targeted civilized world."

Drawing parallels among fighting terrorism, World War II and the Cold War, Bush declared: "Like fascism and communism before, the hateful ideologies that use terror will be defeated by the unstoppable power of freedom and democracy."

...except that fascism was instituted separately (as Fascism in Italy and as National Socialism in Germany) largely by two leaders and their cabals, and their countries were forced, willing, or simply perceived as aligning behind those leaders. Fascism is, by definition, the control of all aspects of life by The State. Nazism was foremost about empire-building through military power. Both of these should sound familiar to those who, say, open their eyes each day, but that's not my point; my point is that Islamic terrorists have no state, and have no military to speak of. There is no convenient target on the map that can be circled and marked "bomb here". The very idea of a "war on terror" is as silly as a "war on drugs" or a "war on poverty"... all are, in theory, good ideas, and are so named to make it seem like these are priorities of utmost importance to our government, but all are revealed to be nothing more than marketing slogans when the vast bulk of political and economic decisions relevant to actually addressing such problems are decided in direct opposition to those goals. As long as we cut security funding for public transit, as long as we allow the CIA to wage covert wars in South and Central America, and as long as we pass giant tax cuts for the rich DURING WARTIME, mind you, it should be clear to both our populace and to the world at large that, as a nation, we have no priorities other than those that we actively pursue, namely, cheap oil, imperial control of the Western Hemisphere, and plutocracy.

"The only way the terrorists can win is if we lose our nerve. This is not going to happen on my watch," he said to applause from agents, Marines and emergency workers at an FBI facility south of Washington.

It's impressive how much support Bush gets from people whose jobs he is guaranteeing by his Administration's every action, namely, soldiers and intelligence agents. What they don't seem to realize is that, while they had a more or less free ride under Clinton, who also wasn't quite as gung ho about closing bases, they actually stand a pretty decent chance of getting deployed and shot or blown up under the new policies. The idea that an entire nation, which is what he is talking about, could "lose its nerve" is ridiculous, and his speechwriters know it. Every American might be as scared of dying in an explosion as they can be, but huge swathes of the population would still throw themselves at a hijacker given the unfortunate opportunity. It's simply the case that many more such opportunities will present themselves, the way he's going. Have you ever noticed how many of Bush's lines are empty platitudes that mean nothing and solve nothing? There's no way you can dispute them, because they're not wrong; America is great, and it will continue to be great, despite the not-so-gentle ministrations of Emperor Chimpy and his cronies.

Bush [...] said it was unclear who was responsible for the bombings that killed more than 50 people, but noted that "we have damaged the al Qaeda network across the world."

Again, the "bombable enemy" fallacy. There is no network, there is only a mythology and a steady stream of desperate people who have nothing to lose, and who are misguided in the belief that the death of civilians will in any way concern the elite. Damaging al-Qaeda is like destroying goods as they come off an assembly line; you can amass a huge pile of broken merchandise, but as long as the line is running, you'll never be done.

"The attack in London was an attack on the civilized world, and the civilized world is united in its resolve," Bush said. "We will not yield, we will defend our freedom."

This is unbelievably disingenuous. Islamic terrorists attacked the US because they were attacking Western Capitalism and what they deem a dissolute and heretical society. They attacked Spain because Spain supported the war in Iraq, and Spain pulled out their relatively small number of troops. The UK has the largest deployment of troops after the US, and is therefore the next logical target; if only the US is in Iraq, terrorists can focus on the US, and no doubt would, except that the UK's political aims are too closely aligned to ours for them to contemplate a rapid pullout. However, the terrorists have not attacked France, Germany, Italy, Denmark, etc, and very likely will not, because they know they'd undermine their cause more than they'd bolster it. This attack on London was an attack on America's staunchest ally in Iraq, nothing more.

"This week there's great suffering in the city of London. but Londoners are resilient. They have faced brutal enemies before. The city that survived the Nazi blitz will not yield in the face of thugs and assassins," he said.

This is true, but it has nothing to do with that smug fucker. Note that Blair was able to make this point without mentioning the Blitz at all. This is how you know that Bush was speaking to his ignorant base.

"And when the Middle East grows in democracy and prosperity and hope, the terrorists will lose their sponsors. They'll lose their recruits. They will lose their hopes for turning that region into a base of attacks against America and our allies," he said.

This would be totally true, if only we were doing a goddamned thing to foster anything like democracy. Sadly, we are not. And I've got news for you, bright boy, "that region" already IS a base of attacks against America and our allies, and has been for 50 years. Also, assuming that Bush actually intends to free America from dependence on foreign oil, what exactly does he think will happen to "Middle East prosperity"? What, does he plan a concomitant rise in date and sand imports?

As for Iraq, Bush cited progress in training Iraqis to defend themselves, which he said was a requirement for U.S. troops to be able to come home.

And we can all see how well THAT'S going.

Neither he nor White House spokesman Scott McClellan gave credence to reports about a secret memo in which the United States and Britain were said to be drawing up plans to pull out the majority of their troops by the middle of next year.
"Our plan can be summed up this way: As the Iraqis stand up, we will stand down," Bush said.

McClellan told reporters later the military "always plans for all contingencies" and that any troop drawdown would be based on "circumstances on the ground."

"The president has made it clear he's going to complete the mission," McClellan said.

I've never been so happy that they're lying. And they are sooooo lying. Because that's what they do. It'll be a shame when I have to take out a third mortgage to fill up my gas tank, though.

Sunday Cat Blogging

In the realm of TMI, I am training my cats how to use the toilet.

There are a number of methods of doing this, all of which involve gradually tricking the cats into believing that the toilet is, in fact, an appropriate place to relieve oneself. Usually this is done by putting the existing litter box next to the toilet, at or near the same height, and then on the toilet, and then replacing the litter box with a big bowl filled with litter, then gradually reducing the litter, then eventually removing the bowl.

The better literature suggests you not teach cats how to flush, because they enjoy it a bit more than is strictly speaking necessary, and your water bill will skyrocket.

Which brings me to my main point, which is that I love capitalism.

I've had them on it for a little over a week, and I just removed the middlest ring. We're all very excited.

Whereas you people are all just very happy that the batteries in my digital camera are dead.

Nothing to Add

I spent the better part of the day hiding from the world. I woke up extremely late, which certainly had nothing to do with going to bed extremely early the same morning, and furthermore had nothing to do with the quantity of drink I consumed still earlier in the evening.

I had every intention of going to my parents' house to work on one or both of my cars, but the fact that I was fairly bleary, plus the fact that gas had inexplicably gone up $0.20 overnight, plus the fact that it was already too goddamned hot and I wasn't terribly eager to stand on blacktop, bent over an engine compartment, made me reconsider. So instead, I drove around for awhile, somewhat less than skillfully, it must be said. Meh.

More importantly, after I got home, I did a load of laundry, and did not get online, did not turn on the TV, did not turn on the radio. I just didn't want to know. It's moods like this that make me want to go camping for several weeks, but my obligations and my miniscule savings make that problematic. Luckily, an entertaining shopping excursion and dinner seem to have mostly snapped me out of it, but I still don't really want any contact with the outside world. That's what tomorrow's for. Or possibly Monday.

Last Minute Technicality Post

Look, we all know I'm going to be the first to fail at the content challenge, right?

BUT NOT TONIGHT, BITCHES!!!!

PS: It's true, I have no honor.

Cowards and Hypocrites

I want to say something pithy and incisive about today's attacks in London, but my head is a mess of horror and disgust. Part of me is even a little unhappy that a completely pointless attack on my favorite city in the world wasn't big enough to keep pro-establishment types from crowing, "obviously our War on Tara is working!"

But mostly, I fail to see, again, how using the tools of a society that you supposedly hate to attack that same society makes any kind of point. How killing innocents (even if you rationalize that they are part of the society, so cannot be innocent) makes any kind of point. How anyone can think you can possibly have any sort of endgame. How anyone can think that, even if they believe that the total destruction of Western Civilization is a reasonable and attainable goal, you're ever going to attain it by killing an arbitrary selection of civilians ever couple of years.

I. I don't know what to say. But I will say this: if you were trying to scare me out of going to London, you've fucking failed. All I want to do right now is go to London and stand in the American Chapel and cry. And then drink a fucking lot of Sam Smith's. You can't win, not because Chimpy says so, and not because "there aren't as many of you as there are us" but because the reason Western Civilization is overrunning the earth is that, despite its crappy side (and its crappy side is vast), it's a better deal, on balance, than anything you could possibly offer.

And to the followers of these terrifying shadowy men of legend of whom you're so proud, ask yourself: why aren't THEY willing to sacrifice their lives for their cause?

Early Struggles with the Content Challenge

So I decided I would post something, pretty much anything, after I got home from work today. I brought the two gallons of motor oil I bought earlier into the vestibule so they wouldn't get stolen from my car by some crackhead motherfucker, fed the cats, removed unnecessary pants, ate a spoonful of peanut butter (lest it be said I am not a sophisticate) and then surfed a little bit, trying to think of something to write other than the above.

I considered eating more peanut butter. I considered writing my threatened bitching-about-my-car-getting-broken-into post, but then realized that I hate my car, and while it sucks that they stole a couple of irreplaceable items, fuck it. And then, like a dumbass, I read this.

So, really, now what? I mean, I agree with all but a couple of little quibbles; I am not quite as despondent about the long-term fate of our country or our government, although I think he's right on with the contributing factors. I tend to favor the "everyone always thinks the world is going to end, and they've all been wrong so far" theory, and I think that Clinton just got incredibly lucky with the economy (although I would suggest that even the late 90s couldn't swallow up the cost of all this "War on Tara" bullshit).

The big problem, though, is that I'm just TIRED. No one that doesn't already care cares. None of them are going to. You can't take a bunch of people that can say things like "There's no proof for evolution, but I know the existence of God is true, because he lives in my heart" and expect to convince them of anything that they aren't inclined to believe. Arguing with these people isn't arguing, it's shouting into a void and expecting an answer, which is just foolish. Last year, before I'd really realized that blogworld is mostly just an excuse to meet people you hope to hook up with, and to fan your ego while pretending that you're doing people a favor by bestowing your pearls of wisdom upon them, I briefly engaged in a political comment thread on a recently-folded blog (no points for guessing). I did my best to be courteous and rational, although I made no attempt to hide my incredulity at the opinions expressed by the author and the other commenters, but there was never any discussion. I was labeled a liberal (not inaccurate, in the sense that labeling James Dean's Porsche "a car" is accurate; it's true, to a point, but it's not what's interesting about it) and the lines were drawn.

While I'm absolutely certain that none of the opposition believed that they'd be able to change my mind on anything, that was only true because they never had any intention of trying. For my part, I actually WAS trying to change opinions by pointing out logical or observable flaws, whereas they were piling ad hominem attack on irrelevant taunt. They had no intention of changing my opinion, because they neither knew or cared what it was, they were just certain it wasn't theirs.

And this, right here, is the problem; I've wasted years and years and years of my life, accomplishing next to nothing, because it was easier to bitch about things than make any kind of attempt to fix anything. It was easier to construct elaborate excuses for inaction than to address the underlying problems or reconsider core opinions. Similarly, it's a lot easier to obfuscate and annoy your opponent until he decides he's rather be off somewhere else drinking beer than it is to actually engage in meaningful discourse.

The Republicans are by no means alone in this. The Democrats do nothing but piss and moan and wring their hands about how "things would be different if WE were in charge"... you know what? They weren't, not really, except for the specifics. If the industry you choose to fuck the country over for is the oil industry, OBVIOUSLY you're going to have to go to war in the Mideast, which obviously brings all the spin control and long-range boondoggle and so on. But we would've needed oil just as much under Kerry, or under Nader for that matter. And we're only going to need it more in the coming years. And no amount of Priuses can save us.

But what if we'd sold the country out to the pharmaceutical industry? Can you honestly tell me that some bullshit scheme like Bush's Prescription Drug Cards wouldn't've come out? Who, precisely, do you believe makes these laws? It's not the lawmakers, they just present them and sign them and vote on them. Our government is the political equivalent of USA Today, except that instead of getting all its news from wire services and barely-veiled corporate press releases, barely editing it, and passing it off as their own, they get our laws whole-cloth from lobbyists and pass them off as their own after larding on some pork to ensure reelection.

What's the solution in an argument like this? Do you keep trying to establish blame and trying to convince your opponent that he's wrong? No, you figure out what the right thing is to do, without wondering how your friends are going to feel about it, and you start doing it. Chances are, even people that are inclined to argue defensively with you when you attack them are unlikely to ignore a good idea if they see it just quietly being done. Yeah, I'm sure that packs of assholes still point and laugh at a Prius as it drives by, but I'm also sure that one of them is thinking "fuck, that's getting almost four times better gas mileage than my truck." And that's why people change their minds. And that's how people change their minds.

So what should Congress do? Ignore this pointless blame game and posturing, and propose laws that are right for America. Not laws that are miserable for America but are called "The Liberty Freedom God Bless America Act", which should just be called out as they are, nothing but shallow, cynical marketing attempts to shame us into voting for them, but laws that are just not arguable. I haven't any to hand, but I'm not a Congressman, and I want a beer.

Talk amongst yourselves.

A Day Late and Several Dollars Short

First, let me say, when in the course of human events it becomes necessary to tell Campbell to bite me, so be it.

In the spirit of arbitrary Brit-bashing, which is, after all, what Independence Day is all about (well, that, and beer) allow me to take you back to a time back yonder, just before I was engaged to the Evil Ex-Fiancee (who was, if you're following along at home, British), I had come to Boston to visit a couple of my friends and incidentally the soon-to-be-Evil soon-to-be-Fiancee, and we decided to take a break from pool-playing at bars near Fenway totake in some historickal education.

So we went to Bunker Hill, the eponymous Battle of which actually took place on nearby Breed's Hill, and took in the little museum there. The high point of this visit was the selection of dioramas, which were ostensibly of pivotal moments in the battle, but mostly seemed to be an excuse for the modelers to make the English look very foolish. I, of course, took great pleasure in pointing this out to the soon-to-be-EEF, because I apparently don't understand courtship very well. Eh.

The battle was actually won by the British, in that they took the ground, but the reason the battle was significant was that the British vastly outnumbered the Americans and were vastly better prepared, and yet were decimated while the Americans came away relatively well. One might charitably observe that firing on rank after ordered rank of brightly garbed British soldiers from high ground should, in fact, result in the near-annihilation of said troops, but we are here to mock the English, not excuse them.

The dioramas all featured Colonial troops kneeling in the act of blowing away some Limeys, said Limeys in various states of cowardly retreat and/or ignominious death; my favorite part was that they had gone to the trouble of posing some of these dying troops in such a way as to suggest that they had been shot multiple times while fleeing, so they were prone, desperately trying to drag themselves to safety, their goofy hats askew... given that it was the Americans who sustained their biggest losses in retreat (the Brits mostly ate it trying to charge a fusillade from the low ground), and given that we apparently learned no lesson from this, as Custer later pitched camp in a basin so he'd be more easily massacred, it was incredibly entertaining to me to see how much gratuitous effort had gone into making the British look silly.

In the same spirit, last night I drank nothing but good ol' 'Murican beer, except for one Bass, but I shot that in retreat. So, like, it's all good. Happy Fourth of July! SWEET!!!