Unfortunately it seems that climate change has brought, along with the pine beetle, the common street mime to Southern California. Usually confined to northern climes (NYC, SF), these pests have been spotted locally. While they have no natural predators, and like coyotes with dogs, can crossbreed with humans, their population is usually kept in check by the unwillingness of human females to breed with them.
Today I was listening with half an ear as I didn’t go to the gym, and heard this:
“One thing most of us didn’t expect was the Iranians [going] from zero to 60 in about eight months,” Lewis notes. “China, Russia, these are responsible countries. They’re not going to start a war. How comfortable do you feel saying that about the Iranian Revolutionary Guard?”
I dunno, Mr. Cyber Expert James Lewis of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, maybe it has something to do with the unprovoked cyber-attack upon Iran about three years ago? You see no connection there? Turn in your Cyber Expert card, James Lewis.
And the NPR host saw no need to bring it up, to ask the next question, the hard question [1]. They never do.
The war drums beat. Everything Iran does is unexpected and unprovoked and everything we do is forgotten. The DJIA is at a record high, so now we can turn our attention to drumming up another Middle Eastern war and reducing the deficit, never mind that unemployment (the real U6 number) is still above 10%, and that the banking system is still broken. The bubble has been reinflated and that’s all that matters.
[1] I tried to use a link from NPR, but Stuxnet turns up zero hits on the NPR website. Yet Another Reason why they’ll never get a dime from me.
So not only does it slow down the entire octo-core Xeon machine to unusability, it's just dumb. Mired in 1995 feature. Can I set two alarms for an event? No! What would be the possible use of having an alarm the night before to remind me that I have a 7:30 am meeting? And also have an alarm 5 minutes before to remind me to call in?
And I also can't change the alarm time. If I get invited to a meeting, I can't change the alert to be 5 minutes, or 1 minute, beforehand. No, the host decides that for everyone. Never mind that he's a 15 minute walk away, and I'm a 1 minute walk away. Everyone gets the same choice, which is to say, none.
Yay. I'm so glad that our current CIO came from MS and, surprise surprise, chose the MS infrastructure to chain everyone else to.
Don't even get me started on the stupidity of “vaulting” email.
So we've gone back to Daylight Savings Time, and I paid the price with a couple days of legally induced jet lag. But now we get more light at the end of the day, for those of us whose lives are run by Exchange.
Why do we even change the clocks? Is it to satisfy the farmers? Less than four percent of the population, and shrinking. And thanks to FDR and REA, even cows have electricity now [1]. So they don't care when the sun comes up.
Think of the children! Well, I live next to a school, and I can count on one hand the number of kids who walk to school without a parent in tow. Bicycling? Zero. So the kids don't need it.
So let's just stay on this cycle, and not change back, and just forget about PST and PDT, and call it – Time.
[1] Why isn't internet as essential these days as electricity was in the 30s? I'll believe that the current administration is remotely progressive when universal internet gets a strong push.
Attention. This is a test of the [blank] emergency announcement system. […] If you are unable to hear this announcement, please contact your floor safety coordinator.
I'd call 'em just to fuck with them but it would cause more trouble than it's worth.
In other lack-of-fourth-amendment news, the SC has now ruled that as long as you keep something illegal secret enough, then you don't have standing to challenge its harm to you. Is the NSA wiretapping you? Former techs have sworn under oath, yes. But since you can't prove that they are, you don't have standing. As long as it's secret, no law can touch them.
See also destroyed CIA torture tapes. Another stake in coffin of the fourth amendment, which now looks very like a prickly pear.
There was only one catch, and that was Catch-22, which specified that a concern for one's safety in the face of dangers that were real and immediate was the process of a rational mind. Orr was crazy and could be grounded. All he had to do was ask; and as soon as he did, he would no longer be crazy and he would have to fly more missions. Orr would be crazy to fly more missions and sane if he didn't, but if he was sane he had to fly them. If he flew them he was crazy and didn't have to, but if he didn't want to, he was sane and had to. Yossarian was moved very deeply by the absolute simplicity of this clause of Catch-22 and let out a respectful whistle.
“That's some catch, that Catch-22,” he observed.
“It's the best there is,” Doc Daneeka agreed.
Tagged another amendment down
Money, sex, and coverups. All up in a puff of white smoke. Maybe they shouldn’t have made a pope out of a Nazi brown-shirt.
My focus is on what I can do with RAW files. I don’t give a crap about what JPEG images out of camera look like.
Finally a camera review that doesn’t spend half its space on what you can do with the JPEG. If you have RAW, why would you ever shoot JPEG?
Even if the dog has already gotten it wrong twice on the same person, the dog is presumed reliable. Meaning any cop can search anything they want just by getting their trained animal to “alert” on someone they don’t like. Meaning anyone.
And by “trained”, I mean trained to please their master, nothing more.
You can’t even introduce evidence that the same dog had gotten it wrong before with the same person and the same truck.
There’s no fourth amendment anymore. Just a pretense. Get a dog to sit, get a judge (likely a former prosecutor) to sign a form, or just make up a non-existent CI. Or claim you smelled marijuana.
More disgraceful, there wasn’t a single dissent.
So, I don't have cable anymore. I don't want to be that guy, and say that I don't watch TV [1], because I do watch TV. I have a big TV, and I love to watch it. I await 4k excitedly. I mercilessly mock those who think SD is good enough. It's not. HD barely is. I think we're in a sort of Golden Age of TV [2]. Long form, story arcs, tales that couldn't be told before on TV, or not at all in movies [3], and in higher fidelity than you can currently get on the big screen [4]. And no one in front of you live-texting the movie on their phablet with brightness set to stun.
But back to the point, I don't channel surf anymore. I pick something and watch it. By whatever means, fair or foul. Archer, Justified, House of Cards (both versions), Deadwood, TDS, etc.
So when I sit in a hotel room and watch what's on, my first impression is, thanks be I don't waste time trying to find something to watch anymore. Apparently there aren't any happy finds of history, nature, or general interest anymore, something I could watch with half a brain, and maybe find out something I didn't know before. Or even just old movies.
Last night, I was struck by how many shows are just people picking through other peoples' junk. Weighing, judging the former owner, whether present or absent or unknown. Pawn shops, barn finds, storage lockers, junk yards, attics. And hoarders, in the end, the ultimate purveyors of the obsession with old things [5]. Cars, antiques, and emotions. Real Blank of Location and Top Whatever seem to be the equivalent of these shows, except holding up others' emotions, foibles, and follies up for our perusal, instead of junk.
Oddly, the BBC is to blame, followed by PBS. Antiques Roadshow (BBC first, then PBS) and An American Family both started these obsessions. Of course, we are apes, so maybe it was inevitable that the same need to observe others in our tribe gave us The Wire, and American Pickers. Dickens, and Jeff Probst.
[1] Though since I cut the cable, it's a lot less – lots of TV watching is just background noise.
[2] The original Golden Age was honestly not that golden. I Love Lucy is just not that funny, and never was. And now it's not really fair to call what we have now TV, except that it plays on the box in your living room, same as I Love Lucy. But that box is probably a computer, whether it's hooked up to a 50 inch flatscreen [5] or a tablet. It's not the networks. It's the internet.
[3] though it's possible that with the rise of HBO, Netflix, movies will figure out a way to play long form. That's what I'd be looking at if I were head of Universal.
[4] Yeah, at the old Hastings Ranch, on the 130 foot screen, it was better. And at the Arclight, with the projector set properly, and the current version of Die Hard not playing in the next theatre, it's better. But like the vinyl/digital argument, with all things optimized, and new vinyl, it sounds better on the first play. 100 plays in, digital wins every time.
[5] Pitch to Bravo execs – the guys from Pawn Shop go through hoarders' houses. Can't miss! Gets both the mullet and the all important schadenfreude demographic… No sorry, I just can't do it. Plus I'd say schadenfreude and I'd be out of that elevator.
[5] Flatscreen. Like “dial a number” (my Google Voice app still says “dialer”), Ma Bell telephone rings on mobile phones, static, modem noises, and record scratches, still around, but no one will remember the last time they actually saw/heard one.
I thought it a bit odd that the pope was retiring (for “health” reasons) for the first time in six centuries, just a few days after the unredacted papers of the LA prelate were released. I didn’t see anything about it in the RSS feeds though, but Digby put voice to that nagging little thought in the back of my head as usual.
Turns out Ratzinger was the head of the section that was supposed to oversee such things. And they say that that brownshirt business was just youthful indiscretion.
And, as predicted, Dorner was not taken alive, though he could have been. Funny how he got burnt out, all Waco-style.
And for all the rounds expended (46 in one case) shooting at trucks that didn’t look anything like the one he had already burnt up (more flames), only one small Latina lady spent any time in the hospital. So much for the deadly assault rifle.
Blue screen
So all the techie sites now have leaks, screenshots if you will, of Windows Blue. Windows Blue Screen shots.
If I were a marketing guy, and one of the biggest claims to infamy of my past products was the Blue Screen of Death, would I want to call my new product “Blue”, and know that it was often going to be followed by “screenshots”?
I can't decide if it's meta, or ironic, or embracing and extending, or oblivious. All I know is I keep seeing Windows Blue Screen and my brain fills in the rest.