I should mention that we went to see the IMAX Lewis and Clark Expedition show, and the whole time I was thinking how seeing this, particularly the stuff about Sacagawea, would give badger an explorgasm.
At long last she has a weekend when she's not on pager duty, and we're going to get together for the first time in person. We've talked a bunch on the phone, and that seems to be going pretty well, so I hope we hit it off in person. We're meeting at the science museum for an IMAX show; her choice. Is she a geek or what?
I'm "conditioning" the battery on the new laptop, so I've got at most a couple of minutes before the computer goes into sleep mode willynilly. Once it does that I'm plugging it in to charge and then I'm off for bed; so far sitting on the couch in the airconditioned living room and surfing the net, checking out my favorite blogs is all that I hoped.
This sounds right up badger's alley: Slashdot | Designing Virtual Worlds The author of the book is one of the co-developers of the world's first MUD.
Well, I'm sitting here in bed, with my new 12" Powerbook G4, connected to my wireless router in the other (unairconditioned) room, writing my first blog entry, and it's all that and a bag of chips indeed. Thanks to badgerbag for a) the inspiration and b) the recommendation of this particular setup (bed and all ;) )
I've never used a Mac before (well, except at badger's place), so it will take a little getting used to I'm sure, but so far everything has worked more-or-less as advertised--a few teething problems connecting the Airport Extreme wireless in the notebook to the 3rd party router since I wasn't prepared to shell out the bucks for the Airport Basestation or try to get it configured with my desktop Windows XP machine. The security still isn't working, so just anybody can attach, but at least I've locked down the configuration and have a firewall up so it shouldn't be too bad; given the fantastic insulation qualitiies of the walls in this old apartment building (no cell service inside, and even going as far as the living room drops the Airport connection from four bars down to one) I don't think that I'm going to find a bunch of freeloaders camped in the alley....
I just wasted another hour or so trying to figure out why comments are screwed up. If blogger had a built-in comment system, like Movable Type does, this wouldn't be an issue. As far as I can tell MT just does what it's supposed to, and blogger just doesn't. Maybe MT doesn't scale well or something, so blogger is preferable for blogspot, and hey it's free so how much can you complain? Still, I think I'm going to move this blog, if I can find another free service (preferably one that allows you to import from blogger). The only reason I don't just put it on my website is I like the semi-anonymity of this blog--it's not like it would be too hard to figure out who's behind the mysterious letter J (as if the two regular readers of this blog didn't know), but I don't want some of the people I blog about (J and K, primarily, but also Rhode Island Red and his godawful s.o. whatserface) to stumble across it and recognize themselves. Maybe if I hosted it on my site but didn't link to it from any of the site's pages that would be sufficient...
My coworker and pal GL is out today; apparently his wife had a stroke over the weekend. She's only forty-something, and they have three kids, the youngest about a year-and-a-half old (IIRC). Even imagining what this is like for them is making me ill. (I should clarify: as far as I know at the moment she's hospitalized, not dead, and I have no idea how much danger she's in or what the prognosis if for recovery.)
Here Chef explains a theologically coherent explanation of the Problem of Evil to Stan, from the South Park episode "Kenny Dies" (#513):
Chef Explains
Or, if you don't have a good way to play wav files:
Stan : "Why would God let Kenny die, Chef? Why? Kenny's my friend. Why can't God take someone else's friend?"
Chef : "Stan, sometimes God takes those closest to us, because it makes him feel better about himself. He is a very vengeful God, Stan. He's all pissed off about something we did thousands of years ago. He just can't get over it, so he doesn't care who he takes. Children, puppies, it don't matter to him, so long as it makes us sad. Do you understand?"
Stan : "But then, why does God give us anything to start with?"
Chef : "Well, look at it this way: if you want to make a baby cry, first you give it a lollipop. Then you take it away. If you never give it a lollipop to begin with, then you would have nothin' to cry about. That's like God, who gives us life and love and help just so that he can tear it all away and make us cry, so he can drink the sweet milk of our tears. You see, it's our tears, Stan, that give God his great power."
Stan : "I thnk I understand."
K's new responsibility-dodging theory is that J is becoming an alcoholic, like his father. She reports that recently she was looking at the bank statement and saw several ATM transactions J had made (after he had left) and looked up the address where they were reported, and found that it was a liquor store. She then compared the purchases with last year's record in Quicken on liquor expenses and found that J spent twice as much this July as he did last July.
Suddenly, she said, something "clicked" for her. So she called me to ask whether I had noticed him drinking more heavily lately. I truthfully reported that I hadn't, but I was too cowardly to ask her what the fuck she thought she was doing. This is no doubt why J's lawyer told him the first thing he should do is get his own bank account and get a new cell phone service. I know he's done the former, but he hasn't gotten around to the latter, and I wonder whether I can hint to him that it's about time without breaking confidence with her. Should I tell her that she just shouldn't talk to me about J any more? I really want to still be friends with her, but this is putting me in a really awkward position.
I just talked with my sister E for the first time in a couple of months last night, and it seems like her marriage is in a certain amount of trouble, too. She and her husband L are currently living in different states; E was offered a dream job in Utah, but L didn't want to move from Texas, so they agreed that she'd go and try out the job to see whether it really was all that and a bag of chips and then they'd see (also the job held out the possibility that after six months or so they'd consider letting her spend half or more of her time telecommuting). This much I knew; what's new is that after about four months of E really really enjoying her job, L still refuses to even visit her in Utah. They talk regularly on the phone, and they get together in places like Vegas and have a really great and romantic time (according to E), but whenever she suggests that L come see where she's living he says he's not going to live in Utah and there's no point, so when is she coming back to Texas? Well, E, asks, what about someplace like Vegas or Flagstaff (where L's sister lives)--close enough to her job in Utah that she could swing it since she doesn't have to be there every day. Nope, nope. If L were to leave Texas, says L, he might consider moving to the ocean, but that's it. Nevada or Arizona are inconceivable. Now, granted that L's job isn't tremendously portable (there's a substantial amount of seniority and dues-paying that you generally have to build up in order to make a half-way decent living at it, there are pretty steep market-entry barriers in the form of examinations and licenses to practice in a new state, and it requires a fairly sizable city to practice in), neither is E's dream job; the place in Utah is essentially the only place in the country that does exactly what it does, and her conditions of employment are pretty sweet. It is, however, out in the ass end of nowhere, so I can understand L's reluctance to move there.
What I can't understand, or maybe I do understand but can't condone, is L's refusal to even consider compromise. As far as I can see it's either straight up sexism (L has a career, whereas E just has a job), which I'm sure L would deny--being the good left-wing Democrat that he is--or it's pure selfishness. That is, L thinks E should give in just because L is more stubborn. A problem with that line of thought is that E is extremely stubborn herself, and hates the thought of feeling "like a sucker" as she put it, if she goes back to some horrible punch-a-timecard sort of job just because L won't budge. This is the same thing that bugs me about K in the J and K contretemps. It seems to me that at some point, respect for the other party requires that you consider compromise even if you yourself are entirely unmoved by the reasons for the other position; to do otherwise seems tantamount to saying "I don't even respect your feelings as feelings: get over them or get gone." If L would be miserable anywhere other than Texas (or the beach) and E would be miserable in a different job, that's a real problem but so far E is the one who's tried holding down the crappy jobs and L doesn't seem to have seriously considered moving anywhere else.
Fortunately, I guess, the problem isn't urgent; they don't have kids, and don't intend to, and they both seem to be moderately happy with things as they are this very moment and as Herbert Stein once said "Anything that can't go on forever, will stop." IOW, while they both seem a bit worried about what will happen in the future, neither is sufficiently dissatisfied to actually do anything about it, and if and when that eventually happens then they can do something. This doesn't seem like the kind of situtation where prudence or foresight will help; what's needed is change or clarification in their feelings and priorities, not any concrete action.
I can't for the life of me figure out why the comment count only works for some comments and not for others. Blogger can be pretty damn irritating at times; I like Movable Type much better...but my only readers are here (all three of you. Hiya friends!)
I like to read a bit of poetry just before going to bed. Recently it's been C. P. Cavafy, a Greek poet from early last century (1862-1933). My favorite of his poems is also probably his most famous: Ithaka, which we read in High School. I think that Cavafy may be the only author other than Shakespeare who survived my English teachers with my esteem for him intact; at least I can't recall anything else that was forced on us that I could stand to look at for years afterward, and even now I'm only beginning to be able to appreciate some of the works tainted by that time (Frost, for instance). One of the interesting things about reading chunks of Cavafy at a time is how he switches from poem to poem between the modern and the ancient world, as if it were all one to him, and the events of 1903 are really no further from mind than 200 B.C., nor the café down the street from Thermypolae or Galba training his men in Spain. For me, this makes it excellent bedtime reading.