Geoff's Room

Why the Middle Class is done for

2012-01-22T23:33:00.004-05:00

The New York Times published an article yesterday describing how Apple has moved production of most of its popular lines to China.

If you are willing to accept 12-hour workdays, 6 days a week, for approximately $17 per day, yes, you too have what it takes to work for the robber barons of Apple Computer. Although they could build the phones here in the USA for about $65 more per phone and still be profitable, they claim there aren't enough semi-educated engineers here willing to work for cheap. Over in China, they have armies of cheap engineers who will make enormously complex product changes in next to no time for very low cost. There's no way to compete.

A lot of people want to put the blame on the U.S. Government for failing to enact trade policies that prohibit taking advantage of conditions like these, but I don't buy it. There is a larger force at work: IRAs and 401Ks.

As the largest, greediest generation the country has ever seen moves into retirement (some advertising I've seen lately claims this is occurring at the rate of 10,000 people per day), they are looking for ways to take the last 30 or so years of their lives off and not wind up eating Alpo. These people aren't satisfied with living in a modest home with a modest standard of living. No, sir, they have to have $150,000 diesel pusher R.V.s, travel by jet airplane with the seasons, and stay comfortable in their 2,500 square foot homes climate controlled to a steady 72F year-round in places like Arizona, Nevada and Southern California.

Where are they getting the money to do this? Stock investments, mostly.

That pressure from the Baby Boom generation is why Apple Computer's executives must maximize profits at any expense, including, even, the loss of the middle class in their home country. It is why Hewlett Packard has a regular, recurring program of workforce reductions designed to maximize the bottom line in those parts of their diversified business that are showing signs of having a weak quarterly performance. It's why all of the Mom and Pop stores have disappeared from Downtown, USA, displaced by corporate behemoths able to trade retail profits for market share and the corresponding increase in their market capitalization.

The demand to maximize the stockholder's investment is precisely what is killing the middle class in the USA.

When the people who own the company aren't even remotely related to the people who work for the company -- when they've never even met -- it becomes possible, nay necessary, to treat the employees like expendable commodities. And there is no better place to find commodities, er, expendable workers, than Asia. The people there don't expect a good quality of life. They are coming out of a particularly dark period in their history and have little in the way of expectations for a life of prosperity or comfort. In short, they're at the very bottom of the economic pile compared to western nations, and for them, $17 a day is a good deal.

The essence of modern capitalism is that the bottom line reigns supreme. For a long period of time the profit motive built our proud nation up from being yet another agrarian society to the most formidable economic power the world had ever seen. The United States turned the saying "build it, and he will come" into the the nation's motto. We dreamed big, and nothing was out of our reach. We settled the American west, built the world's largest highway system, conquered dozens of life-shortening illnesses, and created a middle-class utopia in many respects. It wasn't perfect -- utopias are fiction -- but it was pretty darn good.

But the wheels started falling off when that stockholder demand for capital exceeded the nation's ability to supply it. Generations have retired before, it is nothing new. But no generation has retired with the expectation of being wealthy as the Baby Boomers expect to in large number. So they invested their dollars with the people who promised the largest possible returns, and ruled with an iron fist via their proxy votes to ensure that all the stops were pulled out to secure those returns at any cost.

As demands by stockholders for continuous growth and dividends weighed heavily on the minds of those in the corporate boardrooms, they started seeking ways to preserve their cushy positions at the top by maximizing those profits at any cost. And since they neither knew nor cared to know the middle class people working for them, moving production to less expensive places in the world was easy. Technology caught up just in time to make it a relatively painless transition: with the Internet, the cost of communicating with far-flung production facilities approached zero, and it was possible to source virtually any component from a vast number of competitors quickly and inexpensively. Why produce in the USA, paying the inflated cost of labor and lifetime healthcare benefits demanded by labor unions when you could ship your entire production overseas to where the people worked for 12 hours a day, fueled by tea, biscuits, and a check for $17 with no further obligations?

What's worse is that we are all complicit in stealing our very livelihoods from ourselves via our participation in the stock market, either directly or indirectly. Virtually anyone employed by an American corporation in a white-collar job has a 401K, stock investment options, and virtually no means of saving for retirement otherwise. Keeping your discretionary income in the bank is a fool's game: the value of the money depreciates more quickly than the interest on the deposits can replenish it. For all the good it does you might as well keep your money in a mattress rather than in an interest-bearing account. You can buy gold, but your money only buys as much as your money is worth in gold, and any appreciation you see is really just a reflection of inflation, rather than true growth.

So you're left with the stock market, which has thus been touted by countless business professors as the only way to save for retirement. It is an article of faith that the only smart thing to do with your money is to sink it into the stock market. Anything else is, well, just asking for inflation to depreciate what you have.

But if your very participation leads to the destruction of the economy for yourself and the rest of the middle class as outlined above, what can you do?

I'm afraid the cure will sound worse than the disease, but there really are only a few ways out: one is to not plan on retiring, and keep your money out of the stock market, then work until you are physically unable. The other is to tremendously lower your expectations of what your retirement will consist of: no yachts, luxury homes, and year-round vacations. Both of these solutions are anathema to conventional wisdom regarding one's "golden years", but both of these solutions are the only things short of a paradigm shift in our economy that will resuscitate the middle class long-term.

Although it is not impossible for such a paradigm shift to take place, they are extremely hard to predict and even harder to create. Modesty and frugality are really the only things that will reliably bring about the return of the middle class.

A raccoon rescue

2011-11-21T00:29:00.001-05:00

So this afternoon my cellphone rang. It was my across-the-street neighbor asking to, um, borrow my .22...

Why? I ask...well, turns out he's got a raccoon in a trap behind the house, and he wants to dispose of it.

Thoughts of the legalities of loaning a firearm to somebody knowing that he's going to commit a misdemeanor with it swirling in my head, I decided I'd drop by and see what he had on his hands but leave the gun at home.

When I got there I found him with a healthy, calm raccoon in a cage trap behind the house. The thing was scared to death and trying to hide in its own fur.

Now remember, I don't live in the back woods. There's a five-lane highway running alongside both of our houses that is heavily trafficked. A lot of frickin' people live here, and just about all of them within view of this guy's back yard are from Iraq. A gunshot is gonna get noticed. And this raccoon...well, he was a menace to my neighbor's lattice work under his deck, but not much else.

I couldn't kill this animal. I wasn't hungry. He wasn't a threat, nor was he mortally injured. He hadn't attacked anybody's dog, he wasn't inside anybody's house or garage, and he sure as heck wasn't
going to harm anybody in that cage. His only crime was being in the wrong place at the wrong time, and well, that's not unusual for animals in Metro Detroit.

So I guess I'm not a hunter. I guess I'm not bloodthirsty. Some people would maybe say I'm not much of a man. Maybe I'm just a sap for furry animals.

I carried him back with me across the street -- in the trap -- to show him to my kids, then I loaded him in the back of the Jeep, drove him five or six miles to a secluded spot along the banks of the Clinton River, and cut him loose. He promptly hopped into the river, swam across, and then went off to do whatever it is raccoons do in the woods.

I am fully aware that what I did -- transporting a live, wild non-game animal without the proper permits, licenses and say-sos from the authorities -- probably was a crime. A lesser crime than shooting him would have been, but a crime nonetheless. If left to his own devices minus my .22, my neighbor probably would have poisoned the creature -- he's done it before. If we had waited until Monday for Animal Control to be available, who knows what would have happened to the critter spending the night in a cage in his back yard without food or water. So I took the situation and did the best thing I could think of, and I guess if they want to cite me for it or lock me up, well, that's the way it goes.

I'm not a believer in the supernatural, so I don't think I get any points with the almighty for sparing this animal, but I have to say it's probably the most satisfying thing I've done in a month.

How To Capture City Council Meeting Videos

2011-11-04T10:17:00.001-04:00

How to delight your political friends and annoy your enemies via YouTube

Viewers of my PolitiBlog have been wondering how I accomplish the trick of taking video of the City Council's meetings from the city's website, edit them, and then display clips via YouTube. Readily available tools for downloading YouTube videos don't work on the PegCentral.com website the city has contracted with to share these meetings; the site designers have deliberately taken steps to keep the videos locked up. Frankly, they don't have the right to do this with video of a public, government meeting that we're all paying for the city to host, so I've devised a work-around for those who wish to comment about things that happen during the meeting.

Unfortunately, there is nothing quick and easy about this; video displayed on a computer is intrinsically complex, and video editing on a computer is a skill they pay professional people a lot of money to do. I'm a hacker/hobbyist, with probably above-average computer skills, so I've figured it out, but it wasn't easy.

Remember, I use Microsoft Windows products and tools. If you're a Linux hacker or use a Mac, the steps are similar but use different tools, although some of the tools are the same for Linux.

I cannot comment on whether or not there are commercial tools that substantially shorten all of this into a point-and-click process. I don't believe such a thing exists, and since my budget forces me to use freely available software, it wouldn't matter to me if it did. Your mileage may vary, of course, and if you have a budget to work with, it would be worth your time to see what's out there.

Capture the video
I use a free MS-DOS program called RTMPDUMP (version 2.1) to download the Flash video from the city's website. It takes approximately the same length of time to retrieve it as it would take to watch it. In order to automate this somewhat, I've written a Perl program that calls RTMPDUMP with all the proper command switches set, because otherwise it's difficult to get it right. RTMPDUMP is not for the faint of heart, I struggled with it for a day and a half before I figured out how to make it work.

Convert the Video to a Format That Can Be Edited With Free Tools
I convert the downloaded .FLV (flash video) to an AVI file. This most recent time I used Pazera Free FLV to AVI Converter. Note: there are programs out there that will edit the Flash video directly. The free ones I've found are buggy and defective. The ones that aren't free are out of my price range. There is a slight loss in quality that takes place during this conversion -- the Flash video is much crisper, and the colors are more true, but the output is still acceptable for the sort of thing I'm doing. It would never work for something you intended to broadcast via TV, but if all you're doing is a little snippet intended for YouTube, it's fine.

I've tried other things with various levels of success: you can just watch the FLV using the free Gnu Video Lan Client (VLC), and press the 'Record' button during the segment that you want to work with. The problem with this is that the resulting .MP4 file often seems to have audio out of sync with the video.

Edit the Video
I use Windows Live Movie Maker (WLMM) to edit the AVI file. WLMM is a free download from Microsoft if you have Windows Vista or Windows 7.

If you're still on XP, download Microsoft's Windows Movie Maker application, it's pretty much the same thing as WLMM.

You will find WLMM to be pretty straightforward to use, an hour or two's worth of experimentation should be all you need to figure it out. It was designed for the consumer to use to take video from a Mini-DV video camera and build a DVD so they can preserve their home movies. Not terribly full-featured, but it does the trick.

You can then export the video directly to YouTube via WLMM, or you can render the clip to an AVI file and do what you wish with it. Alternately, you could re-render back to FLV and host it on your own website without YouTube's help, but I'm a computer technician, not a masochist!

Using a DVD

Another possible way --- probably less time consuming, but no less complex -- is to get the video on DVD from the library and avoid the RTMPDUMP step. You will need a program to decompress the video from the DVD and save it to a file on your hard drive -- something I have never bothered with figuring out, but there are legions of hackers online who 'rip commercial movies all the time. This is pretty much the same thing, except I doubt the city is encrypting their DVDs. You will doubtless visit a rather shady area of the Internet to find what you need to do this, but it is completely legal since the city has no legal copyright claim over the contents of a public meeting. This would produce a video of excellent quality -- perhaps even broadcast quality.

Using CamStudio

Another possible way which again, is less time consuming, but the video quality becomes noticeably lower: use the free CamStudio v. 2.5 to "capture" a region of your screen while you play the video on the city's website. You will have to configure your computer's sound drivers so that CamStudio can "hear" what's going out over your speakers and include it -- and you will have to configure CamStudio to capture it. It's simpler than it sounds, but it would take a long time to write out the description. This outputs an AVI file which can then be directly edited via Windows Live Movie Maker. The problem is that the outputted video is "grainy" -- again, it's good enough in a pinch, but it's not professional quality stuff by a long shot. However if you're just archiving meetings for posterity, this is by far the easiest, least time consuming way to accomplish this.

Are Conservatives Really Troglodytes?

2011-10-05T23:34:00.000-04:00

Lately, it has been quite fashionable in left-leaning circles to imagine American Conservatives to be witless, corporate-directed robots with little gray matter between their ears. According to this line of thought, the American right spends its time running around convinced the culture is in decline from an imagined pinnacle reached sometime in the 1950s. Supposedly the right is driving itself to distraction fretting about gay marriage, the negative effect Hollywood has on our children, and when to hit Walmart for the best deal.

As the story goes, Americans of the 'Red State' variety could not care less about the outside world and are so poorly educated that they couldn't tell the difference between a scientist and a street sweeper. American right-wingers are believed to be blatantly racist whites who would crown bumbling idiots to head the nation if not for the wisdom and erudition of the precious few intellectuals that remain--who are all conveniently members of the Democrat Party. Portrayed as warmongering heathens who universally worship at the altar of an ancient Middle Eastern tribal god, Conservatives are dismissed by the left as unintelligent, unprincipled throwbacks to America's heritage as an Iron Age agricultural nation.

I'm here to tell you that it just isn't so.

As generalizations go, it's a fairly successful one in terms of its reach: people on the left, who make up approximately 50% of the voting public, seem to accept this stuff as the unquestioned truth. Ex-pat writers such as Fred Reed are making a cottage industry out of portraying the American Right as people who have to take their shoes off to sum up numbers that go past ten. The New York-dominated mainstream media are eager to promote their version of this story to an adoring left-wing audience, which presumably believes it a little bit more with each retelling.

The only trouble with this theory is it has little relation to the actual facts. Let's take the conservatives-as-racist meme for example: some of the most admired of today's Conservatives are educated men of color such as Thomas Sowell, Walter Williams, Clarence Thomas, and recent newcomer Herman Cain. When confronted with the reality of a small but growing black Conservative movement, the mainstream, left-leaning response is to treat folks such as them as the exceptions that prove the rule. Logical fallacies such as this abound in the Left-leaning universe of commonly accepted 'knowledge'; I suppose it's hard to let the facts get in the way of what is, after all, a pretty convincing story line.

For those of you reading this who accept the myth of conservative stupidity, I'd like to impart upon you a few 'inconvenient truths' of my own which I hope will inspire you to some independent, critical thinking.

First of all, not all Conservatives are religious fundamentalists, bound and determined to remake America into what they fantasize was the idealized Christian nation the Founding Fathers supposedly envisioned. We're not all chomping at the bit to bring the Lord's Prayer back to the public school classroom. True, you are more likely to find a Republican in church than a Democrat in some precincts of the deep south. If you look carefully, however, you will find a fair number of non-Christian, and even non-theistic folks that number themselves among those on the right, although they mostly do not make a point of drawing attention to this fact. And here in Michigan, you'll find that most of the people filling the pews down at the local Catholic Churches vote Democrat more often than not.

Similarly, Conservatives do not uniformly reject scientific knowledge in favor of Biblical explanations for the Universe. If anybody I knew supported the Kansas Board of Education's decision back in the late 90s to toss out evolutionary theory in favor of "intelligent design", they kept it to themselves. True, many of us are not in agreement with the idea of anthropogenic global climate change, however most of us accept that the climate is, and always has been, in a state of flux. We just don't agree that, as Al Gore famously stated, the debate is settled on the matter and humans are the culprits, because, quite frankly, it isn't and they aren't.

Although Conservative justices, including the Mr. Thomas mentioned above, have earned a reputation for interpreting the Constitution in favor of the government rather than the people, most of the Conservatives I know are civil libertarians who resent government intrusion in their lives. If the people behind the bench in the Supreme Court were elected every few years rather than appointed for life, I expect that civil liberties would enjoy a resurgence heretofore unseen in recent history since perhaps the fall of the Berlin Wall. I doubt we'll see the election of Supreme Court justices come to pass in my lifetime, but were it to be so, I think people would take a very different view of the predominant attitude of the right wing towards the Bill of Rights.

Regarding Conservatives as warmongering pigs bent on bringing 'democracy' to places like the Middle East: lemme tell you something. Roughly about the same time the word 'Taliban' came into common currency, many of us on the right were advocating against the invasion of Afghanistan. My personal opinion was and remains that a couple of well-placed nukes would have settled the score. I strongly suspect there is more support for the ground war in the Afghan provinces among members of the Obama administration than there is in all of Conservative America combined.

When it comes to being xenophobic, anti-intellectual narcissists, note it is the ones on the right who have been learning the foreign languages and instantiating trade with the outside world; so much for our xenophobia. You'll note that the anti-free traders all sit on the left side of the aisle. If you're interested in eradicating anti-intellectualism, could I please direct your attention to the true bastions of anti-intellectualism in America: the labor unions? Never have I seen or read of a group so devoted to keeping the common man in a box than Big Labor. If only people in the unions could truly see how they're being held back, I am convinced they would give up collectivism in favor of individual achievement and self-improvement.

I suspect my voice alone will convince very few that the portrayal of the right by those on the left is so badly distorted. If reading this imparted nothing else, I would hope that the one thing you came away with is don't believe everything you hear. The American Conservative is a multi-faceted beast.

9/11: Ten Years After

2011-09-07T21:20:00.004-04:00

It is still hard to look at images of the terrorist attacks of 9/11/2001. It still seems like it happened yesterday.

Angela, Savannah and I were en-route to a doctor's appointment that morning; Angela had broken her ankle the week before. Savannah was just a little tyke and Joshua wasn't yet conceived. On the way from one doctor's appointment to the other, we stopped at the McDonald's on John R south of 12 Mile Road for breakfast. We were listening to children's music in the van to keep Savannah happy, so we didn't hear the news until walking into the second doctor's office. I think we walked in just as the second plane hit. Not knowing what was going on we didn't understand why there was a sudden uproar as we went into the room.

I was still commuting to work in Dearborn then, and I decided that I would take the whole day off instead of just the morning like I had originally thought. I called my boss, Moddy Bonney, and he told me I should do what I thought best. He later told me to think of it as "a long coffee break" for time reporting purposes. I'm sure nothing got done in the office that day.

My next call was to my friend Jon Banfield's cellphone. I suddenly remembered he was supposed to be in NYC visiting Sloan Kettering hospital. He had developed a rare cancer and wanted the very best doctors. It happened that he was standing in the audience at Good Morning America when one of the planes flew overhead. He says a nearby producer looked up, saw the impact, and declared it to be an act of terrorism right on the spot. Apparently the producer knew what he was looking at.

I did manage to get a call through to Jon; strangely, he couldn't call anyone else but somehow my inbound call made it to him. He was standing in the middle of the ash field. That ash proved to be more harmful to him than the cancer was; he still has serious lung problems today that nearly killed him. The cancer has been gone for years. He also developed pancreatitis after that incident; he hasn't been able to eat a meal in years. It's a wonder he's alive.

Meanwhile, back here at home, I went out and bought empty gasoline containers and filled them up, topped off both vehicles, and made ready to bug out if we had to. People at the gas station remarked to me they thought Saddam Hussein was having his revenge.

In the following days, I remember seeing the Civil Air Patrol planes flying over our house in Madison Heights, very, very high up. Since all air travel was stopped for a week, you knew that any plane you saw was military. Within a day or two I built a home made flagpole out of a piece of 1" dowel; you couldn't buy one anywhere. It still flies on the front of our house every day. I've had to replace the flag a few times, and it has come down a couple of times because it got caught up in the Christmas lights, but it's up 48 weeks a year at least, 'round the clock.

Finally, I'll never forget going to work the morning that air travel resumed. The Dearborn office was in the flight path for Detroit Metro Airport; the low flying planes making their final approach sent shivers down my spine. It took a long time for the airplanes to fade back into the scenery afterward.

What does the ten year anniversary of 9/11 mean to me? Personally, the world has never been the same. It was definitely one of those events that divides time into a "before" and "after", and I think the things which happened that day caused permanent damage to the American psyche. I know the experience of just watching it on TV scarred me, and I was 700 miles away from Ground Zero.

I'm thankful it has been 10 years since the Islamist sons of bitches have managed to do anything even remotely as destructive. I am sincerely grateful that George W. Bush was in office instead of Al Gore when it happened. And I'm glad that W broke the back of Al Qaeda before he left office, since the current idiot, Barack Obama, wouldn't have been up to it. For that matter, I give no credit whatsoever to Mr. Obama for Osama Bin Laden's recent death; in my opinion the raid was a foregone conclusion he can hardly take credit for. I still very much want to see pictures of his body; I'm not sure I completely buy the story that he was quickly buried at sea, although I am quite certain he's dead.

I don't know if something like 9/11 will ever happen again in my lifetime. Former Vice President Dick Cheney, a man whose opinion I happen to respect, frequently opined that it would, that it was just a matter of time. He may yet be proven right. I feel that the country has become lax again and I doubt much thought is given by everyday people to the possibility of another attack. For most, I think, it's a painful memory most would rather not think about much less consider as a repeat possibility. Years of the "elevated threat level" have had the effect of inoculating us against the idea that the government can really predict what is going to happen.

For the youngest adults among us, 9/11 was something they learned about in school and have no direct recollection of. Time passes regardless; people who were 7 years old at the time will vote for the first time in the 2012 general election. I hope their educations on what took place mean 10 percent as much to them as my own recollections do, but I doubt it.

One thing I am sure of is that the country is not better off now than it was before this happened. In fact, it is much worse off. I think the destruction of civil liberties that came after 9/11 were at least temporarily necessary, but have now lingered beyond the point which is acceptable. Obviously, we were stupid to try to pacify Afghanistan, and the cost in blood and treasure in that particular misadventure is ghastly. I did and still do think the invasion of Iraq was necessary; history may be kinder to George W. Bush on that score 100 years hence than the press is today. But the legacy costs of trying to "fix" Iraq after Saddam Hussein was deposed due to the geopolitical need to keep Iran in check has been a bitter pill. I wish we were done with those two wars already. Obviously, the financial crash of late 2008 has had a grim effect on the country. We here in Michigan may now have some basis for comparison between our own experiences and that of those who lived through the Great Depression. I believe the downturn and 9/11 are somehow indirectly related.

It seems every moment in history such as 9/11 shines brightly in the memories of the people who were around to witness it...right up until something equally tragic and disturbing happens. In the last ten years we've certainly had some bad stuff happen domestically, but nothing that eclipses 9/11. Surely even 2005's Hurricane Katrina pales in comparison; that's really the only thing I can come up with that's even close in terms of scope. Although tragic, I don't find a natural disaster to be nearly as disturbing, thus it really doesn't compare well. Maybe the people of New Orleans feel differently. Perhaps Londoners remember 7/7 as bitterly as we remember 9/11; I'm not sure.

My feeling is that 9/11 will go down in history right alongside Pearl Harbor as being one of the two most tragic and disturbing events of a century's time. Of course, there are 30 more years to go before the centennial of Pearl Harbor. If I live to see that anniversary, I hope the foregoing remains true and there are only two such events.

I've seen some pretty horrifying things in my time. One night nearly twenty years ago Angela and I witnessed what we believe was a murder a scant 20 yards in front of the car we were driving in. We have been at the scene of some tragic automobile accidents where many people lost their lives. I have been fortunate in my life to never have been sent off to war; it is the only thing, I think, which could have been more horrifying than to see the Twin Towers collapse on that sunny September morning. Nothing else I've seen has even come close.

Transmission Fluid Change

2011-07-10T23:29:00.002-04:00

I wrote the following in response to an MML post asking how a transmission fluid change is done. I rather liked what I wrote, so instead of letting the bits evaporate into the ether, I'm publishing it here for posterity's sake.

Supplies:

Giant cookie sheet-shaped oil drip pan

Old newspapers (lots)

Large (12 quart?) oil drain pan

Mopar ATF-RTV sealant (available at the dealer parts counter)

8-10 quarts of ATF-4

Transmission filter kit (should include an O-ring and the filter)

Old milk jugs or the like for old fluid

Roll of blue shop towels

Mineral spirits, paint thinner, what-have-you for cleaning purposes

Funnel with long spout

Oil-dry (optional, but recommended)

Tools:

Jack stands and wheel chocks. Ramps optional.

Liquid-proof safety goggles

Rubber nitrile or latex gloves (optional, but nice to have)

Clothes your wife won't b**** about you getting dirty. Not optional. Don't ask.

Large rubber mallet

Torx bits

Torque wrench calibrated in inch-pounds (optional, but recommended)

Metric sockets, ratchet, short extension, adapter for torque wrench if applicable

Steps:
Drive the car for three or four miles to warm the transmission up to operating temperature.

Raise the front of the car and support it on jack stands. Chock the rear wheels.

Put down a big layer of old newspaper, then the cookie sheet, then the drain pan. Yes this is a belt-and-suspenders approach. Trust me on this.

Loosen and remove all the screws on the transmission pan except for the front-most three, which should be backed out about half-way. You're going to have to bust the pan loose, and those are there to keep it from hitting the ground and making a huge mess.

Using the rubber mallet, bust the pan loose from the transmission by hitting it on the side. Hard. Don't pry with anything, just wail away with the mallet, you won't dent it. This can be the most time consuming part of the whole thing. Don't give up until you bust it loose. No matter how much this sucks, it took me longer my first time, believe me.

Congratulate yourself for wearing the goggles and having put down enough newspaper and the cookie sheet when the pan finally breaks loose and the fluid comes out -- fast.

Remove the old filter, and its sealing o-ring. Removing the old o-ring is important! Make sure you get it.

Install the *new* o-ring from the filter kit. Install the filter. Tighten the screws to ~40 in-lb (if you don't have an in-lb torque wrench, snug them down by hand but don't go crazy)

Discard any rubberized cork pan gaskets you might get with the filter kit. Repeat: don't use these, throw them out. They leak in this application. If, however, you happen to find a (rare) rubberized/steel gasket, you can reuse it and skip using the ATF-RTV. In all likelihood you won't find this, it was part of an optional TSB and almost nobody did it.

Clean the transmission side of the pan flange with a plastic gasket scraper. Get all the old ATF-RTV off. Be a stickler for detail on this.

Clean the transmission pan's flange with either the gasket scraper or some coarse steel wool (but be SURE you remove any and ALL bits of steel wool.) Again: get it ALL.

Clean the transmission pan magnet with a blue shop towel. It will be covered with a fine steel powder and a small amount of sludge. If the pan is literally filled with sludge, or large (bigger than the head of a pin) chunks of metal, that would be bad news. (In that case, might as well have it rebuilt.)

Clean the transmission pan inside and out with blue shop towels. Sometimes a little paint thinner or another solvent will really help. Make it shine. Don't leave any dust or debris inside.

Apply the Mopar ATF-RTV to the pan flange. Try to make a nice, even bead.

Go clean the transmission side of the flange again with another blue shop towel (it will have accumulated drips by now.) Try to dry it off as best you can before the next step.

Carefully orient the pan the correct way THEN stick it to the transmission. Attach the pan bolts. Torque them evenly to 165 in. lbs.

Wait 30 minutes for the ATF-RTV to set up before adding fluid.

Lower the vehicle.

Add four quarts of trans fluid through the dipstick hole, and start the engine.

Top off the fluid as necessary. Remember to follow the correct fluid check procedure.

If the fluid still appears very dark in color after all of this, then you can proceed with a manual flush by disconnecting the cooling lines to the radiator. You will have to think on your feet for this to come up with a way to direct fresh, clean fluid into the inlet side while directing the old fluid to a drain pan. Every time I have done this job the fluid has been clean enough after a traditional pan-drop-and-refill to not have to worry about it.

How to learn to program

2010-09-23T09:14:00.004-04:00

This is a response to a post over on 37Signals.com that asks, 'how do I learn to program?' The answers the fellow got were interesting, but I felt they missed the key point: programming is more than knowing words, it's a mindset. Here's how I replied:

I’ve been programming computers since the early 1980s, starting with Commodore BASIC , 6502 assembler, a bunch of languages in college, and today, Perl.

Programming is a verbal activity. You program by expressing what you need the computer to do in a language it understands. In order to be successful doing this, you need to have a certain mindset, and that mindset, I fear, is something that books never teach.

Knowing a bunch of programming constructs - where to put a PHP tag, what a while loop is - these are all akin to a child learning his first words. The child may learn that if he parrots the words in a certain sequence, he gets things to happen. A lot of beginning programmers do the same thing: they cut and paste from examples on the web, see results that resemble what they need, cross their fingers and hope for the best. The problem is, they really don’t understand what they’re doing; they’re just mimicking something.

A real programmer can look at a problem much in the same way an experienced furniture mover looks at a house’s contents. He can tell that first the front door needs to be removed from its hinges, then the couch can come out - sideways - followed by the large lamp that stands behind it. There is an order to his approach, dictated by experience with what works and what doesn’t.

I tell people that if you can sit down and write out all the steps it takes to get from your kitchen table to the grocery store and purchase a carton of milk—down to the detail of finding your car keys, checking to make sure you have enough money in your wallet, selecting a grocery cart, etc., then you can program. It’s just a matter of learning the talk that gets you what you want from that point.

As the original writer found, having a reason that truly motivates you to learn, rather than a vague idea that learning something might be good for you, is important for the human psyche. It’s like the chicken and the pig walking down the street past a ham and eggs joint. The chicken turns to the pig and says “I’m involved in that!”. The pig knocks the chicken on his ass and declares “you might be involved, but I’m committed!” Having a problem that you need to solve makes you committed.

Good luck to the new programmers out there. It is a worthwhile, rewarding experience to program and do it well.

Time not spent chasing Microsoft = good

2010-09-14T09:57:00.001-04:00

The rise and fall of Microsoft's UX platform

I'm pretty glad I haven't put a lot of time into learning WPF or Silverlight, having read more than one article like the one linked above. What time I have put into .NET and C# in particular have not been wasted, but I'm unsure that they will ever completely replace the other programming skills I have.

Most of my day-to-day programming is done in Perl and T-SQL. When I read the MS-produced magazines detailing how they've morphed ADO.NET into the ADO.NET Entity Framework ORM and LINQ to SQL has already lost its development support, I look at the systems I build with good old Perl that just plain get the job done and wonder how much time, money and effort I could have wasted getting really good with something like LINQ, or ASP.NET, or Silverlight, or any of dozens of other new, gotta-have-it, run-and-go-get-trained things coming out of Redmond.

I started to feel that .NET was a niche technology when I noticed that the big, brand name Microsoft products, like Vista, let's say, didn't use it as their basis. Sure there are perhaps millions of corporate programmers who use it, do a really nice job with it, and earn a decent living too. I have to say that I admire the skills these people have developed in learning how to cope with new tech that has come around in my time such as C#. But as far as it being a be-all, end-all technology, it surely has failed to live up to the hype. And for the amount of complexity you work within to get simple things done in C#, you could have written it in Perl, or Python, or C and been done a lot sooner, had something that was truly cross-platform, presented far lower maintenance costs, and relied on a skill set that has been around for decades and held by millions of ordinary programmers such as myself.

The more things change the more they stay the same. At the end of the day, does the code produce the right output for the input? Does it do so in a tolerable amount of time? If so, then does it really matter how the output gets rendered on the screen as long as it's presentable, usable, and easily maintained?

It's sure hard to beat plain old HTML mark-up for your presentation layer. And with HTML 5 now gaining widespread adoption...who's going to need to devote a year or more to learning .NET?

Spend your time getting good with JavaScript. It looks like it's going to be the C of the 2010s.

Belkin F5D7230-4 Router Hack to Routable IP address

2010-05-28T09:07:00.004-04:00

We have a Belkin F5D7230-4 (version 7000) wireless router here in the house. Recently I have learned that my employer's VPN will allow me to do a split tunnel such that my work computer can still access machines on my LAN if I renumber my IP addresses to their registered address scheme. I wish I had a nickle for every time I've disconnected from the VPN to run my 64-bit Perl compiler on another machine, then reconnected to upload the modified code. A disconnect usually costs about a minute, and a reconnect usually about 3 to 5 minutes. It's painful, especially when you're trying to get things done.

The Belkin is no great shakes as a router. It was a cheap unit and we got what we paid for in terms of bugginess. I have an old Linksys BEFSR41 unit I was using as a switch upstairs here in my office that is hands down the better machine, still rock-solid stable on 10-year-old firmware, so when I began my renumbering project yesterday I swapped the Belkin for the Linksys for NAT/Routing duties, and relegated the Belkin to switching and as a wireless access point for the two wireless devices in the house. But, of course, the Belkin needed to be on the same network as everything else; the 192.168.1 subnet wasn't going to do the trick.

That's when it got interesting. The Belkin's web management interface bitches at you with a stupid 'invalid IP address!' complaint whenever you try to plug a routable IP address in as the device's IP. At first I thought I had found a bug, but then I downloaded the source to the management web page and discovered a lot of JavaScript deliberately designed to prevent me from making the change I needed.

This, of course, would not stand. :-)

Firing up my trusty EditPlus text editor, I hacked the JavaScript and removed all of the validation routines placed there by Belkin to keep me from using the IP I needed. The HTML was full of relative references (e.g. tags pointing to GIFs and FORM post methods pointing to executables) that had to be altered to point to "http://router-ip-address-here/" I then used EditPlus's debugging mode to run the modified web page locally in Internet Explorer.

Voila. Restrictions gone! The Belkin swallowed its new IP address without complaint, and immediately began talking over the routable IP on the local LAN.

From a technical perspective, this hack is NOT a big deal. I tweaked some JavaScript and ran it in a browser window. Script kiddies do that sort of thing all the time. It took about an hour and a half to find all the spots that I needed to change, but even undocumented JavaScript (which is a crappy programming language if there ever was one) is pretty easy to follow.

From a financial perspective, this was a net loss. Yes, I saved a grand total of $60, but my employer paid for the time it took me to do this, and I think they might have wanted to just spend the $60 to get me a new router when it was all said and done. There's an intangible "something" they got for their money in that I learned a thing or two in the process, but as bottom line-focused as these guys are, I doubt they care much.

But from a consumer perspective, this is a big win. These Belkin guys deliberately crippled this router for no good reason, and frankly it's bullshit. I don't know if they were thinking this was a security measure, or if they just wanted to sell me a more expensive router to do what I needed to do, but whatever their reasoning, the fact is that the device is capable of doing this, and dammit, I paid for the device's complete capability, not a subset thereof. I understand now why those DD-WRT guys are out there hacking $60 Linksys boxes into monsters with capabilities you would normally pay ten times as much for.

What I find truly upsetting, though, is that 99 times out of 100, this sort of thing drives people to just give up and go buy a different device. The average household consumer doesn't hack code for a living. Even the average telecommuting corporate employee would have been lost on how to make this work. And it's only because this company made an arbitrary decision to artificially limit this $35 hunk of plastic and silicon so they might sell a more expensive one to the people who need the capability. It seems unjust to me.

Note to my boss: I'll get back to work now.

Gangs and the cycle of violence

2010-05-27T21:53:00.002-04:00

This video is worth the hour and fifteen minutes of your time that it will take to watch it. It is a 2004 documentary on the LA gang scene, and after watching it you will see what the black community is up against in trying to stem the tide of crime and violence. The opening scenes of the video of people parading around and acting foolish might be offputting, and the language is extremely coarse, but stick with it, especially if you're a white suburbanite like me. These people live in a completely different world. It's tempting to imagine that the black perspective isn't all that different from the white perspective, but the fact is that the two are nearly diametrically opposed. This video probably produces more questions than it does answers, but it is worthwhile all the same. Of special interest to me was the minister from the Nation of Islam whose viewpoint is striking to say the least. He articulates a worldview that places the blame for black on black violence on Wall Street and white America. The sad thing is that his mind will never be changed about this, and as a leader in his community he's poisoning everyone he comes in contact with.

Our next house

2010-01-29T23:42:00.003-05:00

We bought our current home in late 2002, a typical four bedroom colonial in suburban Detroit. We paid a reasonable price for it in the context of that time: about $185,000 after a small rebate by the seller in consideration of a roof that had reached the end of its useful life. Interestingly, the seller had offered the house up on the market himself for a year or two before we bought it; he had been asking $235,000 and didn't find any takers. Apparently, a bit desperate to sell in the face of his advancing age, his wife's blindness and their inability to deal with the stairs, he allowed a real estate agent to persuade him to list it for $189,900 a month or so before we happened across it. Clearly, he thought that it was undervalued at that price, and his initial reaction to our offer was to reject it. In fact, we were about to sit down with our agent to write an offer on our second choice house when the phone call came in to tell us he had reconsidered.

I guess the point of telling you that is to give you some idea of what the thinking was about the housing market at the time. The houses were thought to always be worth more, year after year. We took the plunge at $185,000 because it seemed reasonable; it was well under what we could have gotten a mortgage for given our income at the time, so we were being prudent by "under-buying" and giving ourselves a bit of a cushion on the mortgage payment. And, after all, your house was an investment whose value would only increase over the life of the 30 year mortgage. Financial advisers of the time frequently recommended against paying your mortgage off early if you unexpectedly found yourself able to do so, urging you to take that money and make riskier investments in the stock market for the chances at a possibly even greater return.

Boy, I'm sure glad we didn't pay more.

Of course, the market in the country peaked in 2005, although I believe we probably bought near Michigan's peak, being that we were then in the beginning throes of what we now know is a depression here. Today as I write this, the City of Detroit is "officially" experiencing 30% unemployment, but the true figure without all of the accounting tricks is probably closer to 50%. And as we all now know, the rapid upward trend in prices during the early part of the decade was in reality a market bubble caused by a strange confluence of government mandates and tax policy, banking policies driven by greed, and a general euphoria on the part of the public regarding future home valuations. The money was cheap, what the hell, sign up for half a million bucks worth of mini-mansion and enjoy life. That all came crashing to an end somewhere around the latter part of 2007 here.

So this evening I was reflecting on the lesson I've learned from all of this. Our particular reality is such that our loss on the home is only theoretical; we haven't been forced by a change in employment or a life change to sell. We're lucky that we can continue to make the inflated mortgage payments, and perhaps even more lucky that we've been able to make some serious expenditures on maintaining the place without going underwater in debt. Having grown accustomed to working without a net, so to speak, with regard to my employment (if I lose the job, I can probably look forward to being unemployed for a lengthy period of time in this economy), I haven't done as so many others have and simply thrown in the towel on the mortgage payment. I guess it's something I can hold my head high for, at least for now.

But the stark fact of the matter is that this house represents a negative net worth for our family. Its market value has certainly plunged at least $80,000, and I am told that it would not be out of the question for it to have dropped as much as $100,000. Instead of building towards a sound financial future with my monthly mortgage payments, I would have been much further ahead paying rent to a landlord; at the very least I could have terminated the lease and moved out of town, which is a freedom I can ill afford under the current circumstances. I have serious doubts that the market will ever recover to the break-even point, and if it does, the house will be up for sale in the next ten minutes. I'm done with this particular roller-coaster ride at the first opportunity I have to get off.

That all being said, it lead me to consider what I would be willing to pay for my next house, should the opportunity ever arise to buy one. Suddenly, there is a new set of criteria in play here. I don't ever want to spend more than I can afford to lose. I don't ever want to be tied down to a 30-year mortgage again. As a matter of fact, my perspective has changed so much that I have abandoned the idea of a house purchase as being anything more than a cost to me, much like that of an automobile or other piece of equipment with a finite life. No longer will I ever see it as an investment that will grow. It will simply be a place to live.

I guess when viewed in this light, my next housing purchase's price starts looking a lot more like what one would pay for a luxury automobile, and not a particularly fancy one. If the purchase price is constrained to about $50- or $60,000 dollars, it should be theoretically possible to pay the place off in about 7 years or so, and own it free and clear. If we suffer rapid deflation, and
$60,000 is the new $180,000, well at least it's only cost me 7 years of my life, rather than 30, and if I suddenly can't make the payments on $60,000 , well I have still lost one hell of a lot less than I have in this case.

But the thing that scares me most is the fact that I can't be the first person who's thought of this, nor can I be the last. I think a lot of people my age and older are coming to realize that the old model of appreciating real estate is broken forever, and along with it the basis for the valuation of our currency. I am not financially sophisticated enough to know for sure what this means in concrete, dollars-and-cents terms, but my gut instinct is that it won't be good for a middle-class guy like me.

The whole thing makes me wonder if my children will ever afford themselves homes of their own, or will they too become renters, beholden to the sort of vast corporations that seem to be epicenters of wealth in our society, hoping at best for a future not at all unlike the conditions in Mumbai today, where virtually everyone who has a home lives in an apartment roughly the size of my living room.

Frightening, isn't it? This is not the first example of the third world making its conditions present in the wealthiest nation the Earth has ever seen. One only needs to look approximately 7 miles south of where I sit this evening to find people who are using garbage bags for a toilet and burning furniture for heat. It will not be long before "middle class" means little more than that you can pay for your mortgage and utilities. We're pretty much there right now.

Windows 7 and XP Mode's Poor Performance Solved

2010-01-26T11:38:00.003-05:00

I've been using Windows 7 on my primary work laptop (a Compaq 8510W) for about three weeks now. One of the main problems with striking out on my own and not using my company's supported OS is access to their Virtual Private Network (VPN) becomes difficult without their software.

Naturally, the VPN software is buggy, and it also doesn't seem to work and play well with Windows 7. Alas, I thought I might have to downgrade back to Vista when I remembered that Microsoft was touting it's new 'XP Mode'.

XP Mode is downloadable feature for certain editions of Windows 7 that basically installs a special version of Microsoft's Virtual PC software, along with a preconfigured image of Windows XP (Service Pack 3). Once installed, XP Mode enables you to run things in the virtual machine (VM) with full integration of host hardware devices. Optionally, you can 'publish' applications that are installed in the XP Mode VM onto the host Windows 7 OS, and they become available from the Windows 7 Start menu. This level of integration is designed to make the use of the XP Mode VM seamless; for the average user all they know is that their older applications just work.

Well, sorta.

My main intent behind using XP mode being to connect to my corporate network, I was pleased to see that Microsoft had worked out the integration of the built-in Smart Card reader, so I happily installed all of the VPN software, a Citrix client, and went to work.

Except...it was slow. Terribly slow. So slow that the VM could not keep up with keypresses. My passwords are required to use upper- and lower-case characters. The VM would get so far behind in processing keypresses that the SHIFT key inputs would be misplaced and the wrong characters would be capitalized. Did I mention that it requires an Act of Congress to get some of my passwords reset, and it's necessary for me to have remote access via the VPN to even request the reset? I began to experience my very own chicken-and-the-egg conundrum.

I tweaked the VPN settings. I disabled all but the bare minimum features and services in the guest Windows XP OS. I boosted the memory. I compacted the hard drive. NOTHING worked. The performance was completely unacceptable.

Today I started Googling for answers. Yes, the problem had been observed in the beta and early RTM versions of Windows 7. No, Microsoft didn't appear to have any answers. There were complaints from people with machines more powerful than mine (and mine is pretty powerful) that their boxes just couldn't keep up.

Then I found the answer: use VMWare Player. The latest edition includes an import tool for Windows XP Mode when run on Windows 7.

The VMWare guys got it right when it comes to virtualization. Microsoft has been in the market since at least 2003 and they still cannot equal the performance that a free download of VMWare can provide. I imported my Windows XP Mode virtual hard disk, reinstalled my VPN applications, and in about an hour or so I was up and running on my corporate network, typing full speed ahead!

I don't know how to explain Microsoft's shortcoming in this space. To be perfectly honest, they deserve any criticism they get in this department, and I am generally a Microsoft booster.

My advice to the would-be XP Mode user? Download and install it. Then after it's running, do not install any applications onto the virtual machine. Shut down the VM, and install VMWare Player. Import the XP Mode VM into the player using the convenient, easy-to-find menu pick. Install your older applications onto the VMWare image, and go nuts.

Incidentally, the Microsoft VM appears to co-exist with the VMWare VM, so in case you want to go back it seems like it's pretty easy to do so. There are no guarantees, of course, that Microsoft won't throw a fit about this and insert an XP Mode-on-VMWare poison pill into some future Patch Tuesday update, so maybe hanging on to the original VM is prudent.

Something is terribly wrong with our economy

2009-12-10T07:48:00.001-05:00

Last night I went through the McDonald's drive through to pick up dinner. Contrary to the usual experience, the person on the other end of the "speaker" was sharp. Real sharp, as in, caught me making a mistake. Usually it's the other way around.

So that piqued my curiosity. I usually want to get a look at the person I've been talking to, but this time I was even more curious than usual. As I pulled around and gazed through the window I noticed the young woman was wearing a familiar phrase on her pull-over. "Death before dishonor".

As she turned the other insignia on the garment confirmed that she was an ex-Marine. No wonder she was more on top of her game than the usual schlubs that populate the Mickey D's drive through. She was one of our best.

I was saddened by the realization that this gal came home from Iraq or Afghanistan, and the best she could find was minimum wage work slinging burgers. Nobody deserves to come into the workforce at a high station, of course, but she clearly was sharp enough to command far better employment than she had.

Our leaders have let us down terribly, and in so doing they have maimed, if not outright killed, our economy. Whatever the reasons -- be they the housing bubble, the collusion with the bankers on Wall Street, poor execution of the fiduciary responsibility that Congress has granted itself to provide oversight, or the Fed -- or maybe all of these -- those in charge have really screwed the pooch.

Now I'm not going to argue that getting the best value for my dollar at McDonald's is a bad thing, because it's not. It would be simply wonderful if our education system produced bright, dedicated young people just like this Marine every year, but the reality is that "average" sets a pretty low bar in this country for a variety of reasons. But I'll tell you this: unless this economic storm blows over soon, there isn't going to be much incentive for the bright and capable to use their talents to the utmost. And that will be the beginning of the end of our society.

Obamayomama's Afghanistan speech

2009-12-01T22:27:00.001-05:00

See http://www.cbsnews.com/blogs/2009/12/01/politics/politicalhotsheet/entry5855894.shtml?tag=contentMain;contentBody for the text of the speech. As usual, I couldn't stand to watch the SOB on TV.

What I find striking is that this is the same speech that John McCain would have given, or President Bush in an imaginary third term, plus or minus some griping about the war in Iraq, the immediacy of the threat, and the cost of the war. I find the Obama administration's Afghan policy to be virtually indistinguishable from that of a Republican administration, save possibly the "deadline" for bringing troops home, which is obviously so riddled with loopholes as to be practically non-existent.

Obama has clearly bet the farm -- his re-election chances -- on the outcome of this decision. He's totally pissed off the loony left, which even as I type this is having a hard time finding keys on their keyboards that aren't the symbols along the top. He's probably nonplussed the moderates, who neither buy the argument that Afghanistan is necessary for American homeland security, nor the argument that we'd not be throwing away what little progress there has been in that god-forsaken shithole since we kicked the Taliban out if we left tomorrow. I think that we're starting to see the prospect of a one-term Obama administration improve dramatically.

What I don't know is what to do with all of this. Obviously, we would have been much further ahead if we had tossed a couple of nukes at Kabul back in 2001 and called it even. We are clearly in an unwinnable war situation -- and now the bad guys know how long they have to lay low until we start to go away. On the other hand, anything can and will change without notice -- the word Iran comes to mind -- and I suspect that Obama will find that this is but the first time that extenuating circumstances force his hand in international affairs. Oh, well. It couldn't happen to a less-qualified President. Too bad the rest of the world already knows he's a pussy.

--
--Geoff
http://twitter.com/ggariepy

Building Stuff with Josh

2009-11-08T22:29:00.002-05:00

Yesterday morning, Angela took the kids to a Home Depot Kids Workshop, where they assembled a trivet. Yesterday afternoon, Joshua began asking me to go out into the garage and "make something."

Now I know someone more prepared might have had a project waiting in the wings for this opportunity, but I didn't. I knew that I couldn't miss my chance, however, so the two of us went out into the garage and scrounged around for something we could build.

Fortunately, I have some scrap lumber pieces out there, and the remnants of my attempts at making Christmas Tree ornaments with my scrounged scroll saw were still laying about. Josh wanted to build something using a hammer and nails, so we knocked a simple display stand together with a couple of cut-off hunks of 2x4 and a piece of 1x3, to which we attached the surviving remnants of the Christmas Tree project. 45 minutes later and he had something to bring inside to show to Angela. Perfect!

It has created an appetite for more. Today, Savannah fell ill with what we think is probably the H1N1 flu. Angela took her to the urgent care clinic--she's immune suppressed, so what would be a routine day spent in bed for the usual kid is somewhat more concerning for her. Meanwhile, Joshua and I were left to our own devices for a couple of hours, and guess what? He wanted to go out to the garage and build something. Of course, this is remarkable to me. I've been hacking and slashing mercilessly at helpless pieces of lumber and machinery in my garage for the kid's entire life and then some. Somehow, at about age 7 1/2, he's taken notice and decided he wants to participate. Awesome!

Today we started a bird feeder project. It will be a simple affair built from scrap lumber. Josh learned how to use a hand saw and an electric palm sander today. Immediately, as I was teaching him how to cut lumber, my mind traveled back over 30 years to when I had the same experience of being taught by my dad and my Uncle Mark, who happened to be visiting at the time. We were in Grandma G's basement, and I clearly remember placing the board on the bottom step of the basement stairs, putting a knee on it, and attempting to saw through it. It took me just as long, if not longer, than Joshua did today. Maybe that was the key to remembering it so well; I'm not sure. But somehow the connection between those two events slammed me right in the face this afternoon, and when it did, it was hard for me to keep the tears of pure, unadulterated joy from flowing (try explaining that emotional response to a little kid with a saw in his hand!)

When I think back about the course that my life has taken since that day sometime in the 1970s, I realize how important it was and still is to me. It didn't form the course of my entire life -- that has taken shape over decades in response to a million things that have happened -- but it was certainly one of the things that helped direct the current toward where I am today. A boy only gets taught how to saw a piece of lumber for the first time once, if he's lucky, and if at all. It will take him a decade or more to perfect the skill, if he ever does, and if he's like me he'll screw it up every way possible. I couldn't be more thankful that I got to be there when Joshua picked up a saw for the first time, and that I was able to connect two events, separated by 30 years. What a day.

Here's a quote for you

2009-03-31T00:53:00.002-04:00

I just finished watching the excellent Tommy Lee Jones flick "In the Electric Mist". In the movie, the ghost of a Civil War general by the name of General John Bell Hood offers up this quote:

Venal and evil people are destroying the world you were born in. It's us against them, my good friend. Don't compromise your principles, or abandon your cause.

Needless to say, I had to pause the movie several times to make sure I transcribed what he said properly. It literally stopped me cold in the middle of a very engrossing film so I could write it down. The circumstances we face here in the current political context are rather similar, are they not?! All I can say is that whoever actually wrote those words -- since I can't seem to attribute them to the actual General -- had a prescience and literary grace about them that simply amazes me.

By the way, don't miss the movie, it was extremely good. I'm a fan of Tommy Lee Jones in particular, but this flick was well written and cast in general, and the soundtrack is excellent!

President-elect Obama

2008-11-05T08:47:00.001-05:00

So if you're like me, you might have had some trouble sleeping last night. Despite my best effort to avoid election returns, the fact that Barack Obama won yesterday's presidential election in an apparent landslide did not escape me.

Diametrically opposed as I am to Mr. Obama's politics, this is a bitter pill to swallow. We are now going to sort out, firsthand, the difference between the fact and fiction of the claims made during the campaign by the Republican side. One certainly hopes that most of it was hyperbole, but we shall see.

In the meantime, there are some things to consider as being the bright side.

First, the election was won fair and square. Unlike 2000, where the balance was tipped by hanging chads and a trip to the Supreme Court, there is no doubt that Obama won this election handily. Our Democrat friends have been vindicated, and their anger over the Bush administration's very existence should dissipate. On the other hand, the Republicans don't have reason to become upset over the results. Hopefully the next 3 years of non-campaign time will be less contentious on the point of the election's legitimacy.

Second, the Republicans did not show up with a candidate that expressed their true strength: conservatism. What we got instead was a lame turkey of a candidate who at best could only describe himself as a "maverick", which is to say he probably really didn't stand for much of anything at all besides political expediency. Frankly, John McCain was this decade's Bob Dole, and the election results bear that out. Such candidates are not worthy of office, no matter how good their running mates are. Hopefully, Mr. McCain will now fade into the background and won't consider another run for the top ticket in 2012.

Third, for better or worse, George Bush's presidency will soon come to an end. I am a Bush supporter based on his foreign policy approach and his reaction to 9/11. Domestically, he has been a marked disaster, eschewing conservative values for the tiny political gain that expanding the nation's entitlement spending problems bought him. With a Republican like George Bush in office, we might as well have had a Democrat for all the difference it made in domestic policy. The small bright spots, those being the tax reductions, will unfortunately expire shortly after his term. Other than those reductions however, the net effect of his presidency was likely more negative than positive. Moving on from that situation is something we can look forward to.

Will Obama be the most liberal President in history since FDR? Undoubtedly. Will he get a blank check from an overwhelmingly Democratic Congress? It seems likely. Will he destroy America and irrevocably change life as we know it? Unlikely. Some people think this is the beginning of the end of the United States' remarkable run as the world's superpower, and that our prosperity is in question. I would argue that the beginning really dates back to the Vietnam era, if not before. We have a major city, Detroit, standing in ruins today, as it has been since the late 1960s. Three quarters of a million people live in squalor in that city alone. Its major industry is undergoing an unprecedented implosion, and a large percentage of its housing either won't sell, or sells for less than the price of an eight-year-old used car. I find it difficult to believe that a President Obama could make things worse. Call that a backhanded sort of optimism if you will.

Book: Gang Leader for a Day

2008-06-16T23:17:00.002-04:00

In Gang Leader for a Day: A Rogue Sociologist Takes to the Streets author and sociologist Sudhir Venkatesh describes nearly a decade spent in Chicago's Robert Taylor housing projects, interacting with members of the Black Kings, a gang that sold crack cocaine during the late 1980s and 1990s.

Having blundered into the gang's turf at the beginning of a seemingly innocuous sociology project, Venkatesh wound up being befriended by the local gang leader. The result of this was an opportunity to get an inside look at the inner workings of a drug dealing street gang, from the economics of selling drugs to the management of the gang's foot soldiers, and virtually every aspect besides.

The book is a fascinating read; Venkatesh is a very talented author who manages to make this work of non-fiction completely engrossing. We learn of his own moral struggles with being in the presence of men who are planning to kill rival gang members, we glimpse the surprisingly human side of the monstrous gang members themselves, and we hear some of the stories of the supporting cast of characters living in the projects.

One truth becomes painfully clear as you read this book: 'Poor Black America' is headed nowhere fast. The reasons for this are complex, but they can be boiled down to this: poor blacks in many cases are their own worst enemies. Venkatesh documents how a maleficent housing coordinator routinely shakes down the residents of the projects for the sin of being entrepreneurial; how the gangs are allowed to operate amongst otherwise law-abiding people because they have been paid off, and how bringing the police in to deal with the criminals can be as hazardous as taking matters into one's own hands would be. The situation Venkatesh lays out in the book would be ridiculous to the point of comical if it weren't so sad and so utterly devoid of hope. People living in white neighborhoods would be outraged if asked to endure conditions such as these that are routinely accepted as part of day to day life in the Chicago projects.

This book was an accidental find; a library search for 'Freakonomics' turned it up as a related work. Although it just came out this year, it somehow had found anonymity among the stacks upstairs in the library, instead of being featured as a new book alongside all of the anti-George Bush/Iraq War books that are the more routine fare on the 'new book' shelves.

Not only do I recommend this book, I strongly encourage you; hell I implore you to read it.

Listen to audio of Venkatesh reading an excerpt from the book on NPR
************************

Gang Leader for a Day: A Rogue Sociologist Takes to the Streets ISBN 1594201501; Penguin Press, 2008. Hardcover, 320 pages. $25.95

Movie: Juno

2008-05-12T23:05:00.002-04:00

Stop the presses! Hollywood actually comes out with a movie about a teenaged girl getting pregnant *and doing the right thing*??

...and *not* spending two hours whining about how unfair it all is?!?

There simply HAS to be a reason why this anti-feminist sacrilege was allowed to be committed to celluloid, right?

Oh, yeah, that's it. It was put out by Fox.

Good show. Pretty darn funny. It has a serious moment designed to show you how serious this business is, but it's not overdone.

Rent it.

This is delicious! Detroit mayor's house of cards coming down

2008-03-11T09:00:00.005-04:00

http://www.detnews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080311/METRO/803110374/&imw=Y

If you haven't been following the sordid tale of the City of Detroit's mayor, it is a wonderful thing to watch. An arrogant, powerful Democrat whose parents are also arrogant, powerful Democrats, Kwame Kilpatrick swept into office as the nation's first "hip hop mayor".

Turns out that his earring and partying weren't the only things about him that were "hip hop." He brought an entire host of thug buddies, many of whom he'd been hanging out with since high school, along with him in his entourage.

You've probably already heard about the text messages scandal, in which it was revealed that he and his mistress perjured themselves on the stand during a whistleblower lawsuit this past summer. Turns out that the mayor ordered the $8 million case settled after he found out that the text messages betwixt him and his illicit lover (who was his chief of staff) showed there had been a conspiracy to fire the police officers when on the stand they claimed that a.) there had been no such conspiracy and b.) the two of them weren't romantically involved. Whoops.

Well, the reason why this particular pair of cops were fired was that they started getting close to the source of something else the mayor has apparently been covering up: a legendary party in the mayoral mansion around the time he was first sworn into office involving strippers, drunken appointees crashing city owned vehicles, and a violent showdown between the mayor's wife and one of the strippers who, um, was apparently "extra friendly" with hizzoner during the show...

...you know, the stripper who mysteriously wound up dead in a gangland style drive-by shooting a few short months after the incident. An incident in which the stripper was about to press charges against the mayor's wife for assault with a wooden object. Incidentally, this was the same mayor's wife who somehow came into possession of a "Detroit Police vehicle" which turned out to be a leased Lincoln Navigator (which had to be returned to the dealership...one that I used to work at. How many car dealers do you know of that have a returns policy?)

Of course, the police disclaim any knowledge that this stripper's complaint ever existed, and an "official" investigation by the state's attorney general found the rumor of the party itself to be "an urban legend."

And also, of course, the police seemed to have other things to do when it came time to investigate just exactly why somebody would want to fill the stripper's Buick full of lead as she was driving on a city street. The rumor is that this is because one of the mayor's crooked cop buddies did the hit for him.

Well, those same text messages revealed a few days ago that the mayor was steering insider information on city construction contracts to one of his thug buddies who owns a construction company. (Yeah, this guy has poured concrete for free for the mayor's mistress, and yeah, his most recent brush with the law involved pistol whipping an employee.)

If you listen closely and cock your ear in the general direction of downtown Detroit...yep, that's the sound of a very large house of cards collapsing.

And now, it seems, somebody connected with the police department at the time of the stripper's supposed complaint who has since retired, suddenly remembers something about that complaint's existence before it went to the shredder. And has signed an affidavit to this effect.

Last night, when the affidavit became public, the Chief of Police suddenly called a press conference for shortly after the 6PM news.

And then failed to show up.

Oh, yeah, said Chief of Police is one of the mayor's appointees, who, curiously enough, is *another* appointee who happens to be an attractive black woman about the same age as the mayor. Hmmm.

Now I wonder why she would call a press conference and then within an hour or so decide not to show up? The entire news media in southeast Michigan is now wondering the same thing.

I can't wait to see Kwame "hip hop" his way off to the Jackson maximum security correctional facility, along with a bunch of his buddies. I will probably go downtown with a lawn chair, umbrella and a cooler full of fruity alcoholic beverages to watch them haul his ass off to the slam when it finally comes to an end.

Project Idea: UPC-based database

2008-02-12T09:54:00.000-05:00

I've been toying around with a few ideas lately regarding UPC bar codes. It seems like I can never find stuff in the pantry when I'm looking for it, for example. I also have noticed a tendency to buy the same thing at the grocery store when we already have it.

I discovered today that there is a guy running a UPC database with a web front end at http://www.upcdatabase.com. He's also offering an XML-RPC based API that can be used to automate lookups.

I plinked around with this for a bit. I came up with three items in my workroom here that had UPC codes on them, and sure enough, they were represented in the database accurately. It looks like you can get a Chinese-manufactured USB bar code scanner on eBay for about $15 shipped. Hmmm, I think to myself: here's another way to gather data! :-)

Some ideas:

UPC-based food inventory and automated grocery order compilation system
UPC-based home inventory system for use in case of an insurance claim
UPC-based inventory of books/CDs/DVD collection

I'm sure there are other possible applications that I'm just not thinking of. Of course, there are limitations with the idea: not everything in your house still has its UPC code, and the data is only going to be as good as the effort you put into gathering it. It's not something Angela would want to be bothered with, that's for sure! So I'm going to let this idea gestate for a bit and see if the killer app pops out of my head sometime. Meanwhile, it's here for posterity's sake.

Are we electing a President, or buying a refrigerator?

2008-02-08T14:30:00.000-05:00

Ever had to buy something you didn't want to buy?

Let's say the refrigerator goes on the blink. It ends up that replacing it will cost less than repairing it. Wonderful. So what do you do?

Unless you happen to have a passion for kitchen appliances, you probably go shopping for the best deal. Your mission becomes one of getting the most fridge for your money. You probably limit your search to units which have the same features as what you're used to having, or maybe a few more if it doesn't expand the price tag by too much. At the end of the day, you look at all of your choices, and keeping in mind that there's really no getting around it, make a selection and pay your money.

This is precisely the choice I'm being presented as a voter in the November elections.

Our current president is past his freshness date. There's no getting around it, we have to elect a new one. The Constitution says so.

Unlike kitchen appliances, I do happen to have some passion for politics. The trouble is, all of the attractive choices seem to be off the table now.

Ultimately, I think Fred Thompson would have been our best bet. For reasons known only to him, he didn't run a campaign that really had a chance of success. He was basically finished before he started. It's too bad.

With the Republican nomination all but sewn up by McCain, the only thing left worth wondering about is his choice for Vice President.

On the Democrat side, Hillary and Barack Obama are still slugging it out. It looks like it will be awhile before it gets settled. One hopes that the Democrats come to their senses and realize we have already seen what a Clinton presidency looks like, and cast their lot with Obama.

So the only two realistic choices if this were to come to pass would be between McCain and Obama. Ron Paul is somehow keeping the dollars flowing in, perhaps because his devotees expect that he'll run as a third party candidate when he fails to get the nomination. But if you watch Mr. Paul speak, he fails in one extremely important regard: he doesn't sound presidential. It's a quirk of his voice and vocal patterns. It's also a product of his political standpoint, which as a pundit far more experienced than me compared rather successfully to that of Cindy Sheehan. Honestly, I just don't believe the man stands a chance. And remember, we haven't talked yet about his actual policies.

Ideology aside, he just won't be taken seriously. I think we can count him out.

So that leaves me, the American voter, with a refrigerator-style choice to make. And I am most assuredly NOT a kitchen appliance aficionado.

What to do? I've been sternly reminded that regardless of how distasteful the choice might be, I am obliged to cast a vote. I guess sitting out probably is kind of dumb.

If you consider that the Republicans have utterly failed to deliver a candidate that aligns well with my political standpoint, I'm quite sure they're not gonna care much if I put their candidate on an even footing with that of the competition. Honestly, if it really mattered that much to them, they wouldn't have made such a mess of domestic policy since 2000. Obviously, they've bought into the same vein of American-style socialism that the Democrats have been pushing since the days of FDR.

So as a voter, I get to choose between the model with the crummy open-the-freezer-door ice maker I don't like, or the one without the gallon jug storage in the door. Exciting, huh?

If the Democrat nominee turns out to be Hillary Clinton, I'm pretty sure my choice is made for me. I won't cast a vote for her. Any fridge is better than the one that can't be trusted to actually be a fridge. If Hillary was a refrigerator, I believe she'd wait until 3AM and suddenly and quietly go on "heat cycle" and spoil all your food, then chill back down so you'd eat botulism for breakfast.

But if they run Obama, the only realistic thing to do is to go between his and McCain's web sites and see which one gives me the most stuff for my vote. Just like you'd check to see if both fridges had a self-defrosting feature.

I daresay that there isn't a hell of a lot of difference between the two men as candidates, with the possible exception of their policy in Iraq. And you know what? That issue has gotten so muddy that I don't know anymore what the right thing to do is. Somewhere in between staying in there and kicking every ass in sight versus pulling out a brigade a month is going to be the reality, probably regardless of whether we elect either of these two, or one of the dog turds lying in my back yard. In other words, it probably doesn't matter much which guy ends up in office; the military situation has taken on a life and mind of its own and the President only nominally has control.

Since the Republicans obviously don't feel like they owe me any loyalty, I don't feel like I owe them any, either.

So I'm left looking for the best deal out of two bad choices.

I might just vote Obama. And I'm not just speaking metaphorically.

Michigan's new saving grace: Marijuana Tourism!

2008-01-30T17:38:00.000-05:00

I was outside just now chipping through a 1" buildup of ice in 17 degree temperatures and 30MPH winds and thought to myself: Michigan, you gotta be high to love it.

Wait a minute!

Now's the perfect time, Libertarians. The gov needs money bad. We have this insatiable need to give money to poor people and special interests. Why don't we:
1. Legalize marijuana to save on the enforcement costs
2. Encourage "marijuana tourism": tell all the potheads that Michigan is the place to spend their vacations
3. Tax the living crap out of the stuff

Jennifer Granholm is a good Democrat and a Canadian to boot. You mean to tell me she hasn't been high sometime in her life? Hell, I'm surprised she doesn't go down to the parking lot behind the Capitol building to burn one every Friday after lunch. Why not take advantage of this perfect celestial alignment to rid ourselves of the onerous, intrusive laws, the outrageous enforcement costs, and in the meantime give Michigan a new cash crop? We're at the bottom of the economic barrel, folks, it's time to start scraping. With GM close to losing the number one spot, Ford with one foot on a banana peel, and Chrysler offering $100K buyouts to anybody on the shop floor with a pulse, new manufacturers are staying away in droves.

We've achieved the point where we can't tax anything new, because there isn't anything new to tax. Our displaced factory workers are going to need jobs. Let's have 'em sell potato chips and Doritos to tourists with the munchies! There's got to be a business opportunity there.

It's time for a Democrat's good friend Mary Jane to come in and save the day!

Who's with me?

2008: Coke vs Pepsi vs Kool Aid

2008-01-25T17:20:00.000-05:00

In reference to an article about the Reagan coalition being "broken up" and an email from Marty on MGAP contending that the coalition was broken up almost immediately when George HW Bush was nominated Vice President...

I've heard about this too. Your contention is interesting, but I think it misses the point.

The "coalition" never existed as posited by the pundits. What existed was the Reagan political machine, and it was formidable. It made the Clinton political machine look like a firecracker compared to a howitzer. Peace and love, redneck evangelists hugging blue blooded country club members: it was a sales job, and a damn good one for a damn good product, which is why it worked.

Or perhaps, Wikipedia has it right, and the chattering classes have it all wrong: coalition as the term is used today implies some sort of long term permanence that can be "broken up" -- as if by its very nature inertia holds it together. Wikipedia says of the word 'coalition': "A coalition is an alliance among individuals, during which they cooperate in joint action, each in their own self-interest. This alliance may be temporary or a matter of convenience. A coalition thus differs from a more formal covenant. Possibly described as a joining of 'factions'."

See, this is much more correct and a more astute observation of what actually took place. I like to think of this all as a soda pop competition.

In 1980, disgusted by the Carter mishandling of Iran, everybody on the Republican side decided they would buy conservative-flavored Coke, even though a lot of 'em liked moderate-flavored Pepsi better, because they knew if they didn't buy the Coke, they'd be forced to drink the Kool Aid offered up by the Democrats in the form of four more years of Jimmy Carter. Nobody really wanted Kool Aid. It was a serious time in our country, and a serious time with serious (international) problems calls for a serious drink. Even the Democrats of Macomb County, usually Kool Aid drinkers to the core, decided they wanted something with more bite: Coke. So Ronald Reagan rode the tidal wave of anti-Kool Aid sentiment and cleaned up in the election of 1980. In 1984, with the Soviets reeling and the positive message of Conservatism ringing true, and in the midst of some pretty good times for capitalists, Coke came through again.

In the case of Bush 41, the beverage of choice turned out to be the Pepsi of the blue blood Republicans. This was an election that took place in the absence of true coalition. The Coke drinkers--the conservatives, still tasting the Reagan in their mouths, thought Bush 41 was going to be more of the Reagan flavor they knew and loved. Why mess with a good thing? The guy already had his bags unpacked in DC. Maybe this George H.W. Bush was New Coke, and in 1988, everybody knew that New Coke would eventually get changed into Coke Classic, right?

But when the truth came out -- the Bushes weren't New Coke at all, but rather Pepsi, and Pepsi drinkers looked down their noses at conservative Coke drinkers...well, 1992 happened, and we all drank Kool Aid and got Bill Clinton. (Fortunately, few killed themselves as a result).

Now the Kool Aid faction in this country is a strong one. A lot of different kinds of drink lovers can agree to like Kool Aid: the union guys (shot and a beer), the minorities (Hawaiian punch), the fucking socialists (prune juice). And when the cola drinkers get bifurcated like they did in 1992, well, grape Kool Aid starts looking good to about 51% of the people--or is it 49%...I almost forgot about Ross Perot (V8 juice).

* can you tell it's Friday? *

In 1996, we got more Pepsi from the Republicans in the form of Bob Dole, and the Coke guys stayed home in droves. Nobody was ready to agree to drink Pepsi, even after the Coke drinkers enjoyed having the Pepsi drinkers come over for a sip during the 80s. See, Coke drinkers are more ardent in their passion for Coke, and are less willing to accept substitutes. Pepsi drinkers...well, if it's brown, wet and fizzy, sometimes they just don't care what label is on the can. Kool Aid ruled the day again.

Finally, the nation had its fill of Kool Aid in 2000. For some reason, the Democrats decided to try a new flavor altogether: the environmentally conscious Mountain Dew of Algore. Mountain Dew is quite similar to Kool Aid in some respects: it's sweet, brightly colored, and loved by children. And what the hell, the guy was already living near the White House. So the Democrats threw their lot in with Algore's Mountain Dewness.

But brilliantly, the Republicans came up with something equally persuasive, a Pepsi candidate in a Coke can: George W Bush. Wrapped in the conservative evangelical Coke can of a plain spoken Texan, this Harvard-educated son of privilege resonated well with the Pepsi drinkers of the Republican party, and a new "coalition" was formed. It wasn't the overwhelming coalition of the 80s; the product wasn't as good, after all, but it looked right to some, and tasted right to the rest, and as it turned out, it crossed the magic 50% barrier....just.

In 2004, nobody on the Cola drinking side gave a shit what label was on the can. Our drink of choice was the one that had been poured with some success on the fires of 9/11--even if nobody knew what brand it was (Walmart Cola, I suspect). Kool Aid tried to stage a comeback, but these again were serious times demanding a serious drink. Cola narrowly won out.

Here in 2008, all the flavors are back in play again. You have the Pepsi that is John McCain. You have the Kool Aid that is Hillary Clinton. You have the Hawaiian Punch that is Obamayomama. You have some Pepsi in a Coke can that is Huckabee. You had real, "true blue" Coke in Fred Thompson, but somebody let the fizz out. We've even got some of that new fruity V8 Fusion that is Ron Paul. So the question is, what flavor is America in the mood for? Are times still serious enough that a cola is going to sell? Have our inner children whined long enough that we're ready to feed 'em Kool Aid just to shut 'em up? Are we ready for the strange taste of V8 Fusion because we're tired of the same old flavors and are willing to risk gagging on something completely new and different?

I just wish somebody was selling water.

2008-01-13T15:12:00.001-05:00

It's not too often I run across a truly laugh-out-loud give me the giggles cartoon. Here's one that did it for me..

Sterling Heights Citizen's Police Academy: Week 1, Introduction

2007-10-06T00:17:00.000-04:00

Last year around this time I took part in the Sterling Heights Citizen's Fire Academy. I had a lot of fun doing stuff like crawling through a smoke-filled building, using a fire hose, cutting off the roof of a car, etc. So when I learned that the Fire Academy was based off of the city's long-running Citizen's Police Academy, I knew I had to sign up. Our first class was yesterday.

There are 19 of us in the class, which is being held in a training room at the police station next door to City Hall. Last evening's class was hosted by Capt. John Wilk and Lt. Jim Hack. These two men are responsible for all of the hiring and training done in the department and took it upon themselves to introduce us to what we will be going through for three hours a week over the next 10 weeks.

Essentially, this class was really just a chance for people to familiarize themselves with the syllabus as well as to get a tour of the department. Both of the men presenting were personable guys, and it's easy to see that they're well-suited to hosting this class. The Police Department offers the course as part of its community outreach effort and as an attempt to show the citizens their side of how policing a medium-sized city works. There were some interesting things that came out of the discussion:

The Police rely very heavily on the drug forfeiture laws to fund equipment purchases. One of the guys actually said, "we really make a lot of money off of drug busts." According to the Lieutenant, that's fortunate, because they have a hard time getting the city to pay for any equipment outside of their squad cars or their regular operating expenses.
Technically, the Police Department is understaffed if you use the rule of thumb which indicates you should have 2.5 officers per every 1,000 residents. At approximately 127,000 residents that would amount to a force of 317 officers. Sterling Heights has 170 or so, so they're well below the level they would have even at 2 officers per 1000 residents. Paradoxically, the city's low crime statistics acts as a disincentive for the city to fund a larger department.
There are three shifts in the department, with considerable overlap between the shifts. At any one time there are approximately 15-20 cars out on patrol, servicing nearly 60,000 runs per year. This compares to the Fire Department, which serves all of the EMS in Sterling Heights at ~12,000 runs per year. During the overlap period they might briefly have as many as 30 cars out on the road at peak times during the year.
The department has several different divisions, e.g. patrol, etc., but is undergoing a significant management restructuring after the departure of the previous chief two years ago. As a result, the number of captains has been reduced through attrition from four to two, and there has been a corresponding consolidation of the department's divisions. Captain Wilk himself is in his last 14 or 15 months of service as he has nearly 30 years on the job and is obligated to retire at the end of that time.
As both of the men mentioned, the Police Officer's union has a strong presence in Sterling Heights. There was mention of the fact that there are two officers assigned to keep the jail operation under control at all times -- regular officers that are rotated into the assignment from their duty on the road. It was suggested apparently that perhaps it doesn't require a full-fledged police officer to keep an eye on his half of 24 cells (not counting the drunk tank and the other holding cell), but the union balked at this. There was another mention of the union's strength during another part of the discussion as well. Clearly it is a force to be reckoned with.
Mention was made of last year's failure of a measure on the ballot which would have funded a new police department headquarters on city-owned property a few hundred feet down the street from the current location. Both of the presenters mentioned the age of the building (it was first occupied in 1980) and their disappointment that the tax levy didn't pass. On the same day, another measure passed that funded the modernization of several of the Fire Department stations, so I definitely got the sense that there is a little inter-departmental rivalry going on. Like most of the voters, I didn't feel the Police Department had really made their case as well as the Fire Department had. The Fire Department clearly had older, more dilapidated buildings and a more demonstrable need for additional space for equipment and modernization of their buildings with the introduction of female firefighters to the force. After the tour of the police building concluded yesterday, my impression remains the same. The building they're in, despite their characterization of its age, really does not give the impression of being inadequate to the task of housing the police. I suppose that if I had a tour of more than one police department, perhaps some of the differences would stand out and it would be easier to see why the cops want to update their facility, but taken on its individual merits as a building, I'm having a hard time seeing much wrong with what they've got. I think they're going to be right where they are for a long, long time unless they can make their case stronger.
The events surrounding the Iraq win of the World Soccer Cup earlier this summer, in which hundreds of people spontaneously came out to celebrate -- all in the streets around my house -- did catch the department off guard, especially the near riot I witnessed at 1AM on the following morning as two groups of celebrants, numbering approximately 400, shouted at each other from opposite sides of Ryan Road just north of 15 Mile Road. The cops both kind of shook their heads and said, well, we learned a few things from that experience about how we would handle it if it came up again, but we had absolutely no preparation for it.

Unlike the Fire Department, the Police Department would clearly love to leverage the citizen academy program into a volunteering program at some point in the future. There was a considerable amount of talk about putting civilians into patrol cars, or having them volunteer for other efforts such as directing traffic during peak times like Sterling Fest. They clearly want the support of the community, which is why the program has been an annual reoccurrence since 1993.

I have to admit that I have some misgivings going into the program. Personally, I know the police to be a necessary part of our society, but I also know that there are guys who end up in the job who don't belong there because they tend to go a bit mad with power. Having some libertarian sensibilities in my character, I tend to mistrust government in general, and the police really embody some of that mistrust for me. I think this will be an interesting program for me, because unlike the case with the Fire Department, I really do have some preconceived notions about the police. This course will either really confirm some of those preconceptions or give me a new way of looking at the force. I'm looking forward to seeing how that turns out.

One thing that clearly is an issue for me are the drug forfeiture laws that I mentioned earlier. These guys are pretty enthusiastic about the money that these laws bring to their department, and I'm uncomfortable with the fact that there is a financial incentive to the police for some of these really draconian drug laws to be enforced. It opens up the specter of "policing for hire", which only serves to exacerbate the problems that I believe the so-called 'war on drugs' has brought to our society as a whole. On the other side of the coin, the other 16 or so people in attendance didn't seem to have a problem with this at all, judging by their reaction. Of course, the guy on the one side of me was deaf and the guy on the other side was asking non-sequiter questions about diversity on the force, so maybe some of that apparent attitude can be discounted. Wholesale.

The group of folks I'm in there with range between ages 27 to someplace in their mid seventies, with a strong bias towards the older end of the range. There are three other people in the class which are under 40, near as I can tell, and the ones that are below the median age are mostly female. One of the overall group is a "happily divorced" apartment manager, one is a slightly neurotic fifth grade teacher, and yet another guy is an immigrant from IDon'tKnowWhere-istan. There are quite a large number of retirees -- it looks like the McDonald's breakfast club in there. I'm not trying to suggest that there is anything wrong with this group of people -- indeed, I'm a character of sorts myself -- but it's going to make for an interesting 10 weeks of class. Curiously there are no Chaldeans in the class, which strikes me as strange considering their large presence in the city and the interest I would presume they have in how their community is policed. The only person of color is the immigrant mentioned above, and really, he doesn't strike me as being of Arabic descent despite my reference to nations of the world ending in -stan. So it's a bunch of older white guys and some middle-aged women with the oddball youngster such as myself in for good measure. In contrast with the guys that showed up for the Fire academy program, suffice it to say most of these folks are not the sort that should be climbing ladders.

One final point before I close: the tour of the jail, which is where we spent most of our time, put the words "Scared Straight" into mind. The Sterling Heights Police Department jail is the *last* place anyone in their right mind would ever want to end up. It is the definition of dreary; the place is probably best described as a rat-infested shithole minus the rats. The drunk tank, with its yellow, easy hose-off rubberized surfaces probably epitomizes the I'm sure sordid experience of one's first contact with the criminal justice system. I'm sure that everyone that comes through there ends up needing a good hosing down themselves after the experience is over. I don't go to bars much. After seeing that place, I've got all the more reason to stay home.

Model A ride

2007-09-17T09:39:00.000-04:00

I have a neighbor, Jim Ventimiglia, with two 1930 Model A Fords. One is a two door hard top coupe, the other is a two door hard top with a rumble seat.

The coupe was up on jacks one day a couple of years ago when I walked by with my dog, and I stopped in, introduced myself, and then gave him a hand adjusting the cable brakes. The rumble seat car is a restoration in progress; just the other day I helped Jim put it up on a trailer and drag it over to the body shop for some frame tweaks. He's about 70 years old -- same as the car -- and a retired Chrysler worker. I believe he was a machinist.

Well, this evening about 10PM I was just getting back from walking Leo and Jim pulled up, on his way to get gas, and asked if I wanted a ride!

Some of the old timers have probably ridden in these. For me, before I started occasionally helping him out I'd never even touched one--they've always been somebody's prized possession, and you learn early that you are to look but not touch. So when I hopped into the front seat I had no idea what to expect.

You sit up high on a softly sprung, bouncy seat, and you've got a great, SUV-like view of the road. There are no seat belts of course, no dashboard padding, no safety glass (as far as I know) -- all of the glass surfaces reflect a lot of light inside the car because they're flat panes. The headlamp switch is a lever located in the center of the steering wheel.

They're really quite narrow cars, and the seat back doesn't quite come up to your shoulder blades. I'm not sure the seats are adjustable fore and aft, but my feet were right up against the firewall.

The four cylinder engine is noisy, as is the drivetrain. There is a cloth headliner and a rubber floor mat, but no sound insulation. There are distinct gear whines from both the transmission and the rear end, both of which employ straight-cut gears. The dashboard has an instrument panel right in the center illuminated by an incandescent bulb. The speedometer swings wildly back and forth in this car; Jim say's he's not sure how accurate it is, but he thinks the fastest he's ever gone is 55MPH on the freeway.

The thing took on about 7 gallons of very carefully dispensed fuel. It was odd only pulling up to the pump roughly even with the windshield; the fuel tank is in the firewall!

He was nice enough to take me for about a 4 mile ride after we fueled it up.
The pace was gentle, but somehow it was pretty thrilling anyway!

Book: No Speed Limit--The Highs and Lows of Meth

2007-09-10T22:44:00.000-04:00

In No Speed Limit: The Highs and Lows of Meth, author Frank Owen takes on the media frenzy that has accompanied the recent uptick in crystal methamphetamine usage in America. Along the way, he demonstrates to us that the road to hell is indeed paved with good intentions, and there's nothing new under the sun.

Beginning with a prologue in which he describes his own meth use in the 1980s, Owen describes the effects of the drug in detail: the difference in the "high" from more traditional recreational drugs. As the author puts it, the drug turns the user into a machine: more alert, more capable, inexhaustible, sexually potent, emotionally stronger. His own experience with the drug then segues into its origins in the early 1900s as a substance that when at first isolated was thought to be of little use. He then covers its rise to near ubiquity throughout the first half of the 20th Century as a prescription medication thought by the medical establishment to be a cure-all, a performance enhancer given to soldiers on both sides of World War II, and finally, as a substance that was recognized to be harmful and ultimately banned by federal law.

During this discussion, he chronicles the rise of several cultural phenomena such as Uncle Fester, the author of how-to-cook-meth books who in reality is a chemist living in Green Bay, WI with whom he visits and interviews extensively. He tells the story of the Hell's Angels biker gang who gave the drug it's nickname "crank" through their practice of smuggling the drug in the hollow crankshafts of their motorcycles and were among the first to synthesize the drug after it was banned. He also details the effect the drug has on the least fortunate of America's children, trapped in homes where the parents place a higher premium on meth manufacture than on clean diapers and food.

A very telling part of the book is his treatment of the rise of so-called "Nazi meth" in America, and it's wildfire-like spread across the midwest where meth labs popped up by the thousands, leading the DEA to take countermeasures designed to cut off the manufacture of the drug by limiting the source materials. Owen's conclusion? The feds' good intentions had the unforeseen consequence of essentially exporting U.S. meth production to Mexican drug lords who were unencumbered by our laws against procurement of large amounts of pseudoephedrine! As he puts it, "just as Prohibition consolidated the hold of organized crime over the alcohol industry, so precursor laws helped the Mexican cartels increase their market share by stifling domestic competition."

This book is at once a compelling, entertaining read as well as a nearly hype-free detailing of what meth is, what it does, and how American society has responded to it. The author appears to be imbued with a level of honesty and clarity on the topic that can only come from his unique perspective as a trained journalist, former meth user, and British expatriate. If you're looking for a reasoned perspective on crystal meth, along with a highly unusual and clear view on American drug culture in general, I highly recommend this book.

****
No Speed Limit -- The Highs and Lows of Meth ISBN 0-312-35616-1; St. Martin's Press, 2007. Hardcover, 244 pages including bibliography. $24.95

No Country For Old Men -- It's Coming!! :-)

2007-07-23T14:21:00.000-04:00

My boys Joel and Ethan Coen are hard at work filming No Country for Old Men. Here's a teaser trailer snagged off of YouTube!

Book: Truck (A Love Story)

2007-04-15T23:04:00.000-04:00

In Truck - A Love Story, author Michael Perry describes a chunk of his life in rural Wisconsin during the year or so that he spent resurrecting his 1951 International L-120 with a lot of help from his brother-in-law. During that same period of time, he coincidentally fell in love with a woman after living 38 years as a bachelor, and proposed marriage.

The two stories happening in parallel, along with a number of other anecdotes, make for a pleasant walk through the life of a man not unlike many of us, with the exception that he's more observant than most. He's got family and friends to contend with, a set of avocations he's moderately successful in, a job (as a self-employed author) that takes up too much of his time, a love life to struggle with, and a need to share part of himself with the rest of the world in writing. That all of this is taking place just on the other side of Lake Michigan from here just underscores the fact that we all walk a similar path, and like Mr. Perry seems to be saying in between the lines, life is what you make of it. This is down-home country goodness for upper midwesterners. Recommended.

****
Truck: A Love Story ISBN 0-06-057117-9; HarperCollins 2006. Hardcover, 281 pages including postscript. $24.95

Book: Applebee's America

2007-04-15T22:08:00.000-04:00

Applebee's America: How Successful Political, Business and Religious Leaders Connect with the New American Community promises to share with the reader the secrets for successful marketing campaigns gleaned from President Bush's two electoral victories, the Clinton White House, Applebee's restaurants, "mega churches" and several other examples. Written by Douglas B. Sosnik, Clinton White House Strategist, Matthew J. Dowd, Bush campaign strategist, and Ron Fournier, a political journalist, the authors do a credible job of explaining their philosophy that Americans rely on emotional triggers to make important decisions such as who to vote for, or where to live, and have come to trust those who can connect with them on an emotional level.

The authors explain that people have gradually come to distrust the media, and instead rely upon local "experts" that they term "Navigators". Navigators are personal friends or colleagues who have developed some expertise in key subject areas. For example, the authors describe a fellow living in suburban Chicago who is often sought after for advice by people contemplating a new computer purchase. Their claim? People who know this guy won't buy a computer unless he signs off on it. The authors go on to say that these "Navigators" are among all of us, and successful marketing campaigns identify who they are and target their message towards them. The trickle-down effect takes care of the rest.

There are several other tactics that get substantial coverage in the book. The claim is that people can be exploited by the marketing campaigns that enable them to feel like they're part of something larger than themselves. That's the secret behind the rise of "mega churches" and organizations like MoveOn.org. People are looking for a sense of community, especially white middle-class Americans who have relocated to the exurbs, having uprooted themselves from their friends and families in the process. Give them the opportunity to feel as part of a group, and they'll become loyal customers, as Applebee's restaurant chain has discovered.

Other topics discussed include so-called "Gut Values" connections, the change in the American landscape that was brought about by 9/11, and a strategy called "Life Targeting:" tailoring your message in such a way as to make it compatible with peoples' lifestyles.

All of these observations are well and good, and it's difficult to find fault with any of them, since the examples they cite are, not surprisingly, chosen carefully to illustrate their point. Such is the way a contemporary business book gets written; it's a revision of the old case studies idea that was promoted in business classes back in the 1980s when I was in college. Will following the concepts presented in this book guarantee that your own marketing campaign will succeed? It seems to me that marketing depends on being able to deliver on what you promise as much as connecting with people in the first place, although that first connection is certainly important.

Is it possible to exploit social trends to make your message resonate? Can a politician really tailor his message to comfort us and make us feel like they're going to take care of our needs? It certainly seems possible, and this book gives you a pretty good idea of the direction you need to go in to do so. To me, this seems almost a bit frightening: are we really little more than sheep, waiting to be led by somebody who seems at least credible on the surface?

My recommendation is to read this book if this last question interests you: the favorable advance praise for the book that was written by Hillary Clinton on the back of the dust jacket ought to give you pause.

*****
Applebee's America: ISBN 0-7432-8718-5, Simon and Schuster, 2006. Hardcover, 260 pages including appendices and index. $26.00

Book: Indefensible

2007-04-11T09:31:00.000-04:00

In Indefensible, author David Feige recounts his activities as a pro-bono attorney working in the New York City court system.

The book is a work of non-fiction, yet it reads like a fictional piece. It is difficult to believe the apparent frequent miscarriages of justice that take place in the courtrooms: the lackadaisical prosecutors, the judges with agendas, the indigent accused are all embroiled in a dance whose ultimate goal seems to be the perpetuation of the system, rather than the arrival of justice. There are numerous cases, for example, of domestic disputes being dramatically overblown by the police and prosecutors, and the accused finding themselves incarcerated for weeks or months awaiting trial all the while their spouses are pleading for their release. There are the minor drug offenders locked up for months awaiting trial -- in many cases for longer than their sentences would have been had they simply plead guilty.

The book is entertaining yet frightening at the same time. Feige does an excellent job of describing the plight of the indigent when they fail to avoid prosecution for the most minor of offenses; one can see that the police and the courts in NYC have a good racket going. The message is clear: you don't want to become involved in the system if you can help it.

Excellent reading for those who still believe in the system of American justice.

Book: Oil on the Brain

2007-02-22T09:37:00.000-05:00

In Oil on the Brain, author Lisa Margonelli recounts her experiences between the years of 2003 to 2006, wherein she followed the path that oil takes to American consumers, working backward from the gas pump all the way to the oil fields in places like Nigeria, Iran, and Venezuela.

This is a remarkable book; it is the Blue Highways of our times. Ms. Margonelli literally sat in the gas station and learned of our purchasing habits, rode with the tanker truck driver that delivers the fuel, toured the refinery, and joined a drilling operation seeking natural gas in Texas. She travelled to the countries mentioned above as well as China, where she learned how the Chinese are adjusting to their new status as a mobile nation. As a descriptive work, it is simply marvelous. The writing is vivid, and there are many things to learn from what she has seen.

But.

Margonelli doesn't come right out and say so in the book (she does on her website), but she is a liberal Democrat, and consequently the latter half of the book gently bashes on the United States for its dependency on foreign oil. I got the impression that the second half of the book is, as much as it is a descriptive work, also an exhortation for Americans to change their ways.

Your reaction to this subtle change in the direction of the book will probably vary according to your personal politics and world view. Is she being sneaky in her attempt to persuade you that you bear part of the responsibility for the conditions in Nigeria by your choice of an S.U.V. instead of a Prius? Does the world need yet another book telling the United States that it lives too large, pollutes too much, and pisses off the rest of the world?

To be honest, I was mildly disappointed by this turn of events. Frankly, the descriptive part of the book was just too damn good to destroy it with subjective politics, and I wish Margonelli had managed to restrain herself and let the reader come to his own conclusions. Nowhere else in one place will you find a description of how a gas station makes its profit alongside the story of the people who bring the oil to you. Why on Earth would Margonelli choose to do this to her book?

One of the other things I found disturbing was the fact that Canada — America's single largest supplier of crude — is mentioned nowhere in the book. Even though Canada's exports to the United States are featured prominently on Margonelli's website, it doesn't even rate a mention in the book. One has to wonder why this is the case. Could it be because Canada's good relationship with the United States does little to augment Margonelli's argument that our usage of imported oil causes America more problems than it's worth? If the book didn't have a political slant, I might never have thought to question this. Under the circumstances, however, questions like this seem fair to me.

Whatever her motivations, you cannot discount the powerful descriptive work she has done in explaining how the gas gets to the pump. It's something we all take very much for granted, and something we all should know more about. On the balance, I have to recommend the book because you aren't going to get this information anywhere else, and it is truly well done. Caveat emptor, however, the book is not without a political side.

Oil on the Brain by Lisa Margonelli, ISBN 978-0-385-51145-2, Doubleday, 310 pages excluding index, hardcover, $26.00 list.

Book: America Alone

2007-01-16T10:25:00.000-05:00

In America Alone - The End of the World As We Know It, author and political commentator Mark Steyn details the creeping death of western civilization by demographics: Europe will, in the space of two generations, almost surely become Eurabia as the Anglo birthrate falls well below the replacement rate and the Muslim birthrate exceeds it by a factor of two.

Steyn's argument is essentially that western Anglo Judeo-Christian women, long coddled by the socialist state and turned self-indulgent by the decline of Christianity in favor of atheism, have for various reasons lost interest in reproduction on the scale seen early in the twentieth century. On average, Steyn explains, the average European woman delays motherhood until her late thirties, and then opts to only have one so-called "designer" baby, resulting in a Anglo birthrate somewhere in the neighborhood of 1.2 children per female. Since the replacement rate is 2.1 children per female, Anglo populations will surely decline. Muslims, on the other hand, are showing birthrates in the neighborhood of 4-5 children per female, meaning that their population is burgeoning. What is the expected outcome? The collapse of the European Union and Japan due to Muslim indifference, the end of the socialist democracies, and the almost inevitable move towards Islamic supremacy and Sharia.

Interestingly, the United States' Anglo Judeo-Christian birthrate is right at the replacement rate of 2.1 children per female. This fact, combined with the Christian immigration from Mexico, is in Steyn's analysis American democracy's saving grace. Steyn warns ominously that European-style atheism is establishing a foothold here in the United States, thus endangering our culture and political system as well, however the timing is such that the Muslim birthrate will likely begin to drop before the worst of the potential effects can become a possibility here in the U.S.

Much has been made in recent times about how the Muslims are poised to come into prominence in the second half of the 21st Century. Unabashedly anti-Islamic, Steyn's book fills in the rest of the picture: the world will become Muslim dominated with the notable exception of the United States within the span of the next 50 years. Long before 50 years goes by, however, the changes on the maps will become blatantly obvious. Major effects are expected within the next 10-15 years. Japan will be the first to experience dramatic effects as their society has aged tremendously in the past 50 years. The French and Germans have almost uncontainable problems with Muslim youths even today. Steyn predicts bloody revolutions and perhaps even genocide as last-ditch attempts are made to reverse the effects of the demographic change.

The question one has to ask oneself of such a doomsday piece is, can this really be believed? Is it possible that all of the factors Mr. Steyn assumes will be in play will actually come to be? Is European atheism the society's downfall? Could we lose the Italians, the Dutch, the French, the British, the Canadians and the Japanese as distinct ethnic groups? Will the world enter a new dark ages as it comes within the grasp of Islamic law? Will scientific progress stop? Will America truly be alone in the world as the last outpost of freedom and democracy?

Having only read one book on the subject, I cannot really judge Steyn's argument objectively. What I can say is that the writing is convincing, the demographic facts appear to be well-researched, and the potential outcome is a nightmare scenario. Even though the Y2K-doomsday predictors ultimately turned out to be wrong, the response they engendered was a necessary one in the final analysis. Could this be a similar case? Unfortunately, only time will tell. Recommended reading.

America Alone by Mark Steyn, ISBN 0-89526-078-6, Regnery Books, 214 pages excluding index, hardcover, $27.95

Book: Unto the Breach

2007-01-16T10:02:00.000-05:00

In Unto The Breach, author John Ringo brings us another installment in the tale of Mike Harmon, ex-Navy Seal, Georgian Warlord, harem-keeper, multimillionaire, anti-Islamist, and all-around troubled good guy. This time, Mike's been asked by the President of the United States to clean up a little matter involving a kidnapped Russian micro-biologist and a stolen strain of pathogen so virulent that the President has authorized the use of nuclear weapons to destroy it should Mike fail to retrieve it.

Ringo breaks little new ground in this book, however the story of the Keldara remains as entertaining as it did starting back in book two. Casualties pile up in this episode, the ongoing sexual escapades continue (although they've been muted down to a very quiet dull roar compared to book number one) and the reader is entertained by the military hardware Mike continues to acquire. Two new characters are introduced in the persons of ex-military female helicopter pilots, and Mike suffers a personal tragedy that bodes ill for the Rite of the Kardane. Can the next book be very far behind? I'll be pre-ordering on Amazon yet again.

Unto the Breach by John Ringo: ISBN 1-4165-0940-2, Baen Books, hardcover, 610 pages, $26.00

Book: Rewriting History

2006-11-25T09:48:00.000-05:00

Note: I've probably read half a dozen books in the past month and a half, and the "homework" aspect -- writing about my impressions -- has been weighing me down. It turns out I'd rather read for enjoyment than to have something to "turn in" every time. Sorry about that; I will attempt to pick back up where I left off. A couple of books, however, are going to go unremarked upon....but this one certainly merits discussion.

***
In Rewriting History, author Dick Morris argues that Hillary Clinton is really a different person from "Hillary, the brand". Morris draws upon his years of experience in working with the Clintons, starting from Bill's run for governor in Arkansas to describe Hillary's transformation from the ambitious, activist governor's wife to the Senator Clinton of today.

If one were to draw an inference from what Morris has to say, it would be that Hillary Clinton is a disingenuous, power and wealth hungry woman who has a decent shot at becoming the President of the United States in 2008. He details such things as her susceptibility to influence by "gurus", her failed attempts as first lady to influence the course of the nation's politics, her abject greed in courting gifts from wealthy supporters of Bill Clinton, and her continual attempts to remake her public image in such a way as to display herself in the best possible light.

To be frank, this sort of writing comes with an enormous responsibility on the part of the reader to judge what is said critically. Morris describes the point at which his attitude towards the Clinton family changed for the worse, and obviously this book is the product of that failed relationship. He, unfortunately, calls his own credibility into question when he admits that he has told a different version of the same events in earlier books; one wonders why we're supposed to believe him now? On the other hand, much of what is said is independently verifiable, and meshes well with the general impression I've had of Hillary since the early 1990s. Is it really fair of me to expect the unvarnished truth from such a "tell-all" book? I'm not sure it is. However, I think it bears mention that about 20% of the book seems like hyperbole to me. Perhaps Morris is guilty of trying to overstate his case.

What is interesting, however, is the length Morris goes to in challenging the assertions that Hillary has made in her own books. Some of the "facts" directly contradict what she's saying, and given the accusation made against her -- that she's a bold-faced liar, given to misrepresentations in the name of supporting her "brand" -- the contrast is eye-opening to say the least. If Hillary were not a public figure, this book would almost certainly result in a lawsuit for defamation of character. Given that she's a politician with clear aims toward the Oval Office, she becomes fair game. The question I have is whether or not Morris' writings will change the opinion anyone has of her, especially when you consider that it was published in 2004, before the most recent presidential election. Will it still be part of the public discourse in 2008? Only time will tell.

The book is sometimes gentle with Hillary, sometimes harsh. I think at times Morris was trying to play the part of the iron fist in the velvet glove in his treatment of his subject. Make no mistake, however, the net effect is strongly negative and anti-Hillary.

As far as my impression of the read: this was not a 'fun' book to read -- it was more like work. I read it because I was made aware of it inadvertently, and it seemed like an important piece of work that would help me understand one of the most potent political figures of these times. I would not recommend it for enjoyment reading, but I still encourage you to pick it up and think carefully about what it says. It seems worthwhile, given the current political climate.

Rewriting History: ISBN 0-06-073668-2, Regan Books, hardcover, 303 pages (including index and citations) $24.95

A lesson in respect during these Democrat-led times

2006-11-08T13:54:00.000-05:00

Since the party of Conservatism has just been handed its collective ass at the polls, it's time to review your own conduct in order to better fall in line with the rest of the thinking in America. Here are a few helpful suggestions to help you show the proper respect to the powers that be.

Respect the mainstream media. They have proven they still are responsible for framing the debate in America over important issues such as the war in Iraq, economic performance, and immigration. When they lie to us or cheat by manufacturing documents, it is for the betterment of all, and we should accept this as the benevolent action it is. After all, they only want what's good for us, and to end the suffering that war brings. Treating CBS with disdain is no longer politik, comrade.

Respect our immigrants. After all, they are coming here to pursue the American dream, not to take our jobs or threaten us with potential acts of terror. If they come here illegally, remember that we all violate laws every day for minor things, like speeding and reporting our income to the IRS. You have to remember they're only human, so they might need a hand up once they get here. We should be magnanimous and be willing to extend that hand. Oh, and everyone needs to learn to speak Spanish while they're at it; learning a second language is good for you!

Respect socialism. Most modern industrialized nations have adopted socialism to take care of the needs of their people. For example, it is far better that everyone have free, unfettered access to health care than wastefully using our resources to advance medical research, especially when the research that's desired conflicts with the morals of a large percentage of the populace. It's time for America to catch up with nations like Germany and Sweden, and become a really great place to live, even if you don't have a large income or want to work. Obviously a majority of your fellow citizens already feel this way, witness the election results. Don't fight it; you can't win anyway.

Respect diversity. Diversity is good. Diversity is an end in itself. Diversity will soothe your conscience over past wrongs dealt to Native Americans, Blacks, Orientals, Mexicans, Muslims and even Canadians promulgated by America's evil white founders. Trumpet the cause of diversity whenever possible and watch as we reap the benefits as a society. Remember, diversity is good. Just don't ask us why, because questioning diversity would mean you are a racist.

Respect Islam. Christianity has been the dominant force in America's religious makeup for many centuries, but we have to remember there are alternative viewpoints, even if they seem somewhat incompatible with our own and some elements of those other viewpoints are best expressed with violence. It is time for Christianity to step aside and make up for the wrongs it perpetrated on other faiths during the Crusades. We have to remember that Jihadists are just responding to the hopelessness of the economic conditions in the Middle East, caused largely by American Imperialism. We need to let them have their say. Venting is good for the soul.

Respect the United Nations. They have the best shot at achieving consensus among world leaders such as Vladimir Putin, Kim Jong Il, Bashar Al-Assad and Hillary Clinton. What could be better for the world than the democratic process of the U.N. and U.N. peacekeeper troops sent to world trouble spots? Surely we cannot expect the United States to act as the world's police force without having the blessing of the United Nations to legitimize it. It is far more important that there first be consensus rather than rash acts taken by the world's most powerful nation in its own interest. And if it seems to be taking a long time to reach that consensus, remember that all viewpoints must carefully be considered and given equal weight, regardless of who is espousing them.

Respect the goals and agendas of America's educators. The best people to set the political agenda in America are the learned folks in places such as the University of Michigan or the California university system. Pay special attention to the east-coast Ivy-league schools such as Harvard. Remember that if you were as smart as these people were, you'd be signing your name with a doctoral prefix. Leave the thinking to these people; they've conclusively proven to themselves that they're the best at it.

Respect the environment. It's time to realize that the best way to go forward is to give something back to Mother Earth. Let us not risk the life of another sea creature by drilling for oil in places where we haven't already. Remember, oil drilling leads to the burning of fossil fuels, which is the single largest man-made contribution to climate change on Earth, perhaps even a measurable fraction of other forces like variance in the sun's output and global weather cycles that have existed for millions of years.

Respect Hollywood. The men and women who entertain us on television each night have a unique perspective on the problems we face as a nation, and they are among the few of us who are wealthy enough and conscientious enough to bring matters such as stem cell research to light. We should encourage them to testify before Congress more frequently; after all, it is experts like Susan Sarandon who are best qualified to explain to our legislators why the situation in the Middle East is so grave and deserves our dollars, rather than our bullets. Remember, if violence worked to resolve problems, then Israel would be at peace today.

Respect yourself. Remember, it is not what you can give to the country, rather it is what you can do to make sure that the wealthy give to the country. You are just a working person putting your time in on the job, you should be able to come home after a hard day and relax. Have respect for your own need for downtime, and don't stress yourself out worrying about global issues out of your control. Why concern yourself when it is so clear that the real experts are now in charge? Just sit back, relax and have a Budweiser, my friend, while our elected leaders in Congress work hard to make America the working class mecca it should be, and punish those who would profit unfairly by your efforts.

I hope this clears up for you the matter of how the majority of your fellow citizens feel you should be living. Take these lessons to heart; we're likely to be led by Democrats for the next decade at least.

Book: The Darkest Place

2006-11-02T20:19:00.000-05:00

In The Darkest Place, author Daniel Judson tells the story of a writer-turned-college professor who finds himself tangled in web of mysterious murders, an attractive prostitute, another lover who is a married woman, and a couple of private investigators who try to save him from himself. The story is set on eastern Long Island, in the seedy part of the Hamptons, during a record cold snap where the temperature hardly ever exceeds 0F.

This story was extremely well constructed. Judson has layered all of the elements together in such a way as to make the story extremely compelling, yet he manages to do so without revealing the true source of the protagonist's troubles until the last pages of the book. This is a book that deserves to become a movie. I could see the setting very clearly in my mind's eye; the descriptive prose was very powerful and crystal clear. The private investigators in the story are characters developed well enough that they deserve a book of their own; somehow they're like famous actors playing in a minor movie role: they're capable of much more than they do here.

If the crime fiction genre appeals to you, this is one of the best I've seen.

The Darkest Place: ISBN 0-312-35253-0, St. Martin's Minotaur, hardcover, 310 pages, $23.95

Hubble will be spared after all

2006-11-01T15:26:00.000-05:00

According to the latest news, the Hubble Space Telescope will get a necessary repair mission to extend its life beyond 2008.

Originally, the Space Shuttle was deemed too dangerous after the second accident in 2003, and NASA determined that outside of its primary mission of completing the build of the International Space Station, it would sit idle, despite the fact that Hubble was going to have to be decommissioned.

Now, after an apparently extensive review, the most important space observatory in history will be preserved.

This is an important thing for humanity, and I believe it will go far to enhance our understanding of the Universe in which we find ourselves. Although I sometimes struggle with the use of taxpayer dollars to support the space program, the fact of the matter is that private enterprise is not yet ready to take the baton from Uncle Sam. Rather than lose Hubble, we're going to get 18 or 19 more years out of it, by which time hopefully it will be replaced with something (or several things) even better.

Good news on the space front, if you ask me!

Fixing up an old watch

2006-10-30T20:16:00.000-05:00

I like watches, and the type I typically go for are the relatively inexpensive, "high-feature" type. I've got a Casio Wave Ceptor as my main wristwatch right now; I've had Timexes with the built-in electronic compass, and a host of other ones.

Trouble is, the plastic crystals don't hold up well to my wrenching lifestyle. I'm always forgetting to take the watch off, then squeezing my arm into some tight spot in the car, and invariably I scratch the bejeezus out of the crystal. After a year or so, the watch looks like it was attacked by a herd of tiny cats.

Of course, these are inexpensive (<$100) watches, so my remedy in the past has been to get a new one once they start looking crummy. But I really really LIKE my Wave Ceptor, and so I started wondering if I might be able to fix it up somehow. It was very scratched up, and getting hard to read.

Well, I've come up with the answer: sand the crystal. I started out with 3M Wet-Or-Dry 600 grit sandpaper to take down all the scratches. After a little sanding under a steady stream of cold water, I then moved up (down?) to 3M Wet-Or-Dry 800 grit. I polished some more like that, and then finally hit it with 3M Wet-Or-Dry 1200 grit. This will bring you close to the final finish you're looking for. Remember to keep the stream of water flowing across the crystal while you sand, and use an orbital sanding motion -- try to keep the pattern as random as possible.

Finally, finish it up with a jeweler's rouge cloth. Use the red (rouge) side first, then polish it up with the yellow side.

I tried it on an old watch first to see what would happen, then took the plunge and polished up the Wave Ceptor. It worked great! It remains to be seen if I've taken off any layer(s) of anti-scratch coating -- it might scratch right back up even more quickly -- but for now, the crystal looks almost as good as a new watch's.

The Space Elevator Concept

2006-10-24T09:06:00.000-04:00

A couple of years ago I recall reading in Popular Mechanics about a proposed new means of getting stuff into orbit: the Space Elevator. Essentially, the space elevator would consist of a semi-permanent Earth-based ground station, a satellite in "beyond-geosynchronous" orbit, and a cable of some kind running between the two. The orbital velocity of the satellite would exert a force through the cable to the ground station, keeping the cable taut. Then devices called 'climbers' would use electric motors to run a payload out into space! Cool, huh?

Well, it turns out that this has gone from being just a gee-whiz idea in a magazine (actually, the concept dates back to the 1960s) to being a project sponsored in part by NASA called Project 2010. Project 2010's aim is to use carbon nanotube technology as the basis for an engineering project that will solve all of the major remaining tech problems of such an elevator by 2010. The hope is to have a working elevator by 2020, a mere 14 years from now.

Putting people and stuff on top of a rocket and blasting them into space is an enormously expensive, dangerous proposition. The design of the elevator would give it the capability to put one payload per day into geosynchronous orbit at a far lower cost than the equivalent rocket launch (about $100/pound). The thinking is that the elevator can be designed and built for $10 billion, also a relative bargain. The question is, can we overcome the enormous inertia the current space industry has in the direction of rocketry?

I think this is a question that has pretty well answered itself with the loss of two Space Shuttles. We always knew that people were going to die in the quest to explore the cosmos. I don't think we were prepared to accept the fact that this would be because of faulty equipment. Although I'm sure a lot can be done to improve the safety of launch vehicles, I suspect the paradigm of using rocket power is inherently flawed and fraught with the potential for disaster.

Hopefully, the Space Elevator, or a concept like it, will enhance the safety of space travel, while making it less expensive.

Movie: The Departed

2006-10-21T10:06:00.000-04:00

In The Departed, Jack Nicholson, Leonardo DiCaprio and Matt Damon star in a crime thriller set in modern-day Boston. Nicholson plays an Irish mafia don running drugs and a series of seedy businesses. DiCaprio is the undercover cop who has infiltrated his organization and is working with the Massachusetts State Police to bring him down. Damon plays DiCaprio's counterpart: one of Nicholson's operatives within the State Police who helps to keep him out of the reach of the law. Things get rough when the cops and the crooks both realize they've been infiltrated, and the main action in the film centers around the effort to find each respective mole.

It's been quite some time indeed since I've seen a movie as gripping as this one. The relative dearth of good product coming out of Hollywood has left local video rental store owners here prominently featuring TV series DVDs instead of feature-length films. This one on the other hand is a winner, a movie we'll all be watching on late-night television 20 years from now.

Nicholson is his usual brilliant self; he portrays criminals probably as well as any actor that has come before him, and he makes guys like me wonder if there really are people that evil in the world.

The surprise for me was DiCaprio's performance. The only work I've seen him in previously was Titanic, where he played an engaging character, however not necessarily masterfully so. In this film he has clearly moved his performance up to the next level, and the direct side-by-side comparison of his performance with Damon's is interesting. Somehow he manages to make Damon's performance seem fairly one-dimensional -- which is not to say that Damon is incompetent. I think I'd like to see these two guys working together more often -- perhaps this is the Generation X equivalent of Lemmon/Matthau.

In short: if you're looking for a violent gangster film, this one's your ticket to ride for a two-and-a-half hour adventure that will have you talking about it the next day. Worthwhile, amid a sea of dreck.

Book: The Road

2006-10-03T15:55:00.000-04:00

Cormac McCarthy's The Road is the story of a father and son during their last days together on a post-apocalyptic earth.

It is chapterless, one long read from start to finish; gray, depressing and final. The journey they take on the road is as pointless as existence itself, the highs relative only to the lowest of lows, the darkness absolute, the light faint. The age of the son is undetermined; he's merely younger than he is old. Of the father one can only say that death becomes him.

McCarthy's command of the language might be only somewhat less striking than his command of the subject matter itself. This is the proverbial heart of darkness, the mastery of which can only come from a tormented soul. I find myself concerned for the author. The story is nothing less than a 241-page nightmare.

The library only gave me a week to read it (it's new). I did it in 4 hours.

The Road: ISBN 0-307-26543-9, Knopf, hardcover, 241 pages, $24.95

Playing Firefighter

2006-09-22T13:51:00.000-04:00

For the past few weeks, I've been participating in the Sterling Heights Fire Department's Citizen Fire Academy, which has started meeting on Thursday evenings for three hours on September 7. The whole thing wraps up on October 5, and I'm sure it will be too soon.

Week 1 was a basic introduction. Training Chief Mike Deprez explained the divisions of the fire department, management structure, and took us on a tour of Fire Station #5, which is the second largest in the city. We saw the living quarters, the garage, of course, and administrative areas. On that day we also got fitted for our protective gear: the turnouts (pants and boots) jackets, gloves and helmets. The department uses outdated equipment for these classes, and it's well worn, however it's enough like the current stuff to give you the real idea. We also tried on the Self Contained Breathing Apparatus (SCBA) on that night.

Last week, Week 2, we started to sink our teeth into some of a firefighter's real work. Fire Engine Operator Jeff Cline had the reserve ladder truck pulled out in front of the station next to one of the hydrants there, and we hooked up a 5" line to the hydrant, as well as an auxiliary gate, which he explained was put there in case a second alarm was called out and another engine company needed to hook up -- they'd be able to do so with no loss in water pressure to the first engine. I actually hooked up the line to the hydrant; it's harder than it looks and it took quite a bit of fiddling to get it on there. It was also interesting to note that opening a hydrant's valve takes a *lot* of turns; about 18 if I remember right. I think they said that typically it's the diameter of the hydrant times two, minus two = number of turns.

Then we got out the hose. Oh, boy.

We had a 2.5" line charged with 100PSI. There were seven of us, and we attempted to work as a team in such a way that the man on the front holding the nozzle didn't have to exert much effort to move the hose around. At first, it was a comedy of errors -- guys going too fast or too slow, one guy falling over, as we went up a steep berm on our knees while spraying. I was busting ass just trying to handle the thing; I had thoroughly soaked my tee-shirt with sweat by the time I was done. By the time everyone had cycled through, however, you could tell we were starting to get the hang of it. Next, Jeff asked if there were volunteers who wanted to try two to a hose; I and one other guy went and had a go. It's hard, hard work, even standing upright! I've got a new respect for the men who do this every day. As for the 5" supply line: fuhgeddaboutit. It took all 7 of us to even move the damn thing to try to clear a kink when it was first charged up. Apparently the water pressure in Sterling Heights is about 80PSI at the hydrants, which is said to be very good. In a 5" line, it's an awesome force. It took two of us to move it after we disconnected it from the hydrant (using the auxiliary gate to drop the pressure!) so it would drain down the hill.

Next, we tried out climbing on extension and roof ladders. I've been painting the trim on the house recently, so I was more relaxed about climbing the ladder than some of the other guys were, but I did learn something: how to make sure the ladder is at the proper 70-degree angle. You stand with your toes at the butt end of the ladder on the ground and extend your arms straight out from the shoulders in front of you. If the angle is right, your hands will just touch, otherwise you have to make an adjustment. Guess I've been doing it wrong all along! Brigadier Captain Ron McClain and Lt. Bonnie DeMeyere assisted us in the ladder portion of our academy. Bonnie is one of two female firefighters on the Sterling Heights Department; both her and Ron were great to work with. They also showed us how to "lock in" on the ladder by hooking one leg around a step and then placing the top of that foot around the step below. Suddenly, you're able to lean waaaay over safely.

Next, we had a ventilation demonstration. They had the training tower behind the station filled with synthetic smoke, and Firefighter Jason Nelson instructed us to start up the ventilation fan and point it at the door once he made his way up the tower and opened a window. It was amazing to see how quickly the place cleared of smoke once a little positive air pressure was applied. He described it in real life as being a night-and-day difference--one minute you're inside the burning building in pitch blackness, the next, you can see, spot the fire, and go to work. He says sometimes it spoils the fun; he likes the adrenaline rush he gets in a hot, smoke-filled building. Jason's a big guy, is really enthusiastic about being a firefighter, and seemed like he was having as much fun as we were. We also worked on using a chainsaw and a gasoline-powered circular saw with Training Officer Brandon Flynn. Sadly, we only got to hack at a few logs, but it was fun nonetheless.

Yesterday, for Week 3, we had a demonstration of vehicle extrication and also search and rescue. This was probably the single most fun thing we did so far: hacking apart a 1971 Lincoln Mark III Continental. I got to use a halligan to pop a tire after we supported the vehicle on blocks, then busted out the windshield with a Glas-Master. I also got to use the so-called "Jaws of Life" -- really a portable hydraulic spreader, as well as hydraulic shears to clip the roof off. I also used a Sawzall to cut through one of the A-pillars, which is a lot harder work than it would seem. Captain Kevin Conlan and EMS Coordinator Dan Media were our instructors for this part.

Search and Rescue involved donning the SCBA and going into the smoke-filled tower to search for victims under the supervision of Lt. DeMeyere and Firefighter Rob Duke. In between sessions, I made a pit stop in the restroom and one of the guys from the other group which had gone through the tower first said we were in for a real awakening, and he was right! It's hard to describe the claustrophobic feeling you get while crawling on your hands and knees, blinded by the smoke, searching a room with a partner for victims. Part of my problem was that I can't have my glasses on under the SCBA's mask. Even though the firefighters all assured me that you can't see in a fire anyway, it's a big psychological thing for me to not have my "eyes". The other problem was that I apparently had the mask on incorrectly -- it was airtight, but it also was forcing my lower jaw shut. As a result, I had a real moment of panic in the room, and thought I wasn't going to be able to continue. Mind you, all of the activities are strictly voluntary, and I could've sat out -- but I decided when I signed up for this course that I was doing it to get some new and different experiences, and I was going to do EVERYTHING they let me do. So Rob managed to calm me down while I was in there, and I made it through the entire demonstration.

Next, we went back up into the same smoke-filled room with the thermal imaging camera while another amateur team went through the same search we had just done. The thermal imaging camera is nothing short of a modern miracle; you can see stuff in the room as if the smoke just wasn't there. It's a black and white image, of course, but still, compared to not being able to see at all -- it's an enormous difference. Chief Deprez told us that they now have available helmet-mounted versions of this camera; they're still expensive, but the price is coming down. I hope all of our firefighters get this technology just as soon as it becomes possible for them to do so.

Finally, I had to make sure I had conquered that moment of panic. In a team of seven, one woman named Cathy was the odd one out: somebody would have to go in a second time for her to get a chance, since they use the two in, two out principle. So I volunteered to go in there with her. It was just as dark this time, but I had the advantage of experience and having seen the room with the thermal imaging camera, so it was a piece of cake the second time. Cathy had to pull out about halfway through the search, the claustrophobia got to her. I don't blame her one bit, this is not a job for everyone. As Rob helped her out of the room, I was left alone briefly, and I proved to myself I could find my way back out alone by keeping a hand on the wall as I crawled out. Again, I have new admiration for the men and women who can do this in a real fire.

Next week we'll be working on EMS overview, and will be getting CPR/Obstructed Airway training, since, as Chief Deprez says, it's important for everyone to know it. During the final session, we'll be putting real fires out with extinguishers, which ought to be a hoot!

I doubt I'll ever forget some of these experiences. To anyone reading this, if you get the chance to take a course like this, JUMP on it!

Book: Choosers of the Slain

2006-09-20T08:51:00.000-04:00

In the third installment of the Ghost series, author John Ringo delivers a continuation of the Mike Harmon-as-Kildar story, wherein he performs some black ops for a member of Congress.

There's a fairly heavy treatment of the Albanian sexual slavery scene in this story, and in addition to the usual sexual content of the books (which is still really toned down compared to the first book) Mike finds it in his heart to rescue a bunch of the poor lasses he finds there. The Keldara are playing a larger role in this story; much of the story line takes place outside the Georgian valley they call home, and clearly Ringo is experimenting with developing some of their characters more completely.

As the series continues to mature, I'm finding it a more and more enjoyable read, although I will confess that I put this one down about halfway through for a month while I tended to other matters. I didn't read any other books in the meantime; I was just busy with summertime chores and didn't take the time out for reading. That this one wasn't compelling enough to make me finish it before I took a break is not necessarily a condemnation of the storytelling; it just wasn't the sort of page-turner that had me up until 4AM to finish it.

The next book in the series will be "Unto the Breech" due out in December, 2006. After that, according to Ringo's website, is one entitled "A Deeper Blue," due out sometime next year.

Yes, I'll probably be pre-ordering.

Choosers of the Slain: ISBN 1-4165-2070-8, Baen, hardcover, 427 pages, $24.95

Book: Kingdom Come

2006-06-12T08:54:00.000-04:00

Tim Green, author of Kingdom Come, is lauded in the typical dust-jacket hyperbole as being a 'master' of the thriller genre. Perhaps the master was having an off week when he wrote this one.

There's not a single likeable character in the entire book. The book relies upon a font change to separate the part of the story where the main character is talking with his shrink from the actual telling of the story. Some of the characters are completely unbelieveable. The main character's wife Jessica, for instance, is either a bad stab at evil incarnate or the product of a horrible, incompetent character sketch, who nevertheless is apparently controlling the main character's behavior -- inciting him to three murders, no less -- while herself deteriorating into a drug addict.

I'm afraid to say that about the best part of the book is that all of the main characters apparently get what's coming to them. Other than that, the only thing I'll recommend about this book is that you leave it on the shelf where you find it.

Garbage, plain and simple.

Kingdom Come, ISBN 0-446-57742-1, Warner Books, hardcover, 306 pages $24.95

Book: Kildar

2006-05-11T21:07:00.000-04:00

In Kildar, author John Ringo picks up Mike Harmon's story where he left off in Ghost: finding himself in the remote wilderness of the country of Georgia. There is a surprising change of direction in the story line, however.

In this book, Mike Harmon decides to settle in Georgia, buy a 1000 hectacre tract of land, establish a harem, and train the natives to defend themselves against Chechen rebels, who routinely use farming communities such as theirs as punching bags.

I've decided that the genre that applies to this book is not even remotely science fiction: it's male fantasy, pure and simple. The author clearly has fun spending a good chunk of Harmon's $30 million on farming equipment, armaments, installing a dam for hydroelectric power, and bringing in trainers from his group of special forces buddies to train the natives. He discovers that his mansion is set up to house a harem, which he happens to procure almost by accident, and toward the end of the book starts building a microbrewery.

Short of the harem, these are things most of us might do with the money, if given the opportunity and creativity. It's a fun thing to read about.

On the other hand, the book is noticeably shorter on action than the first installment of the series was. This is not necessarily a bad thing, but clearly a shift in pace. And although Mike is blessed with a harem, the detail of his sexual exploits is but a small fraction of the first novel's. Where the first book went on for over 100 pages of kinky bondage sex scenes, this book only sporadically focuses on the sex, maybe a total of ten or fifteen pages. Although there is definitely a sexual undercurrent in the book, it doesn't rise to prominence.

I look at this book as the author starting to find his comfort zone with the character and his stride with the audience. While there were some suspenseful passages, it wasn't the oh-jesus-he's-got-a-nuke sort of thing in the first book. Clearly the author is fantasizing about having that kind of money to play with, and he does so deliciously. And if the action is toned down a bit in this book, the scene has been set for things to pick back up in a subsequent novel.

Consider me a fan of the series now.

Kildar, ISBN 1416520643, Baen, 390 pages, hardcover, $26.00

Books: Bellows Falls & St. Albans Fire

2006-04-17T10:44:00.000-04:00

Archer Mayor is the author behind the series of "Joe Gunther" mystery books which center on police work in rural Vermont. I read two of these in quick succession over the past two weeks or so; the first was St. Albans Fire, a case concerning the investigation of a homicide in connection with arson, and Bellows Falls, a case concerning a homicide in connection with a reputed drug dealer in the town by that name.

I want to like these books more than I do. I read Bellows Falls to make sure I was giving the author a fair shake after reading St. Albans Fire, and I have now confirmed my feelings about the series: they're reasonably competent mystery stories, but they wouldn't be the sort of work you'd want to see in a movie. Much of the work centers around the main character's interaction among his peers in the course of conducting police work; there's the inter-agency and inter-office politics, quite a bit of detail about police procedure. In short, reading these stories is a lot more like I would imagine going on a police 'ride along' is than experiencing a gripping, thrilling adventure of a lifetime.

This isn't all bad; not everything one reads has to be an emotional roller coaster. Some stories are inherently less suspenseful than others. As I imagine happens in real police work, the crime scene is described in a lot of detail, the investigators theorize on possible culprits and motives, and then focus in on what they feel is their best guess at what happened. Mayor's writing captures this process fairly well -- although there are some twists and turns, the stories center around how Gunther runs down the people he thinks did the crime and attempts to prove his theory. There aren't a lot of whoppers coming in out of left field; the story telling is pretty well mapped out, and conceptually pretty cut and dry.

Quote from the back cover of St. Alban's Fire:

"Archer Mayor is producing what is consistently the best police-procedural series being written in America."

—The Chicago Tribune

The problem with this almost clinical approach is that you have a hard time believing the action sequences, or at least taking them with the appropriate heightening of intensity that the reader normally imparts on what he's reading when the action turns exciting. Towards the end of Bellows Falls, Gunther nearly dies taking a plunge over a waterfall. As I sat there reading what happened to him, I felt curiously detached, thinking, gee, this man is in a lot of trouble, but somehow I don't feel it... Then, we find out that Gunther is okay, but is admitted to the hospital overnight for observation. And I thought, well, that's just about as exciting as reading about him going over the falls in the first place.

Kind of anticlimatic, if you catch my drift.

The other sense I get from these two books is that the Gunther character represents a regular paycheck for Archer Mayor. He's not going to kill him off, have him lose a limb, or totally destroy his personal life to make the story more interesting. You see, he's gotta be in good shape for the next book, because there's a mortgage to be paid! It's a really careful approach to fiction writing that (to bring this book up in comparison again) is the polar opposite to John Ringo's Ghost, where the protagonist almost buys the farm three or four times, and we're not really sure if we want him to live anyway.

Will I read another Archer Mayor/Joe Gunther mystery book? I won't rule it out, but as I said about a previous book, there's a lot of other good stuff out there, and probably most of it is a hell of a lot more compelling.

Bellows Falls: ISBN 0-89296-637-8, Mysterious Press, 240 pages, hardcover, $22.00
St. Alban's Fire: ISBN 0-89296-8168, Mysterious Press, 320 pages, hardcover, $24.95

Book: Cinnamon Kiss

2006-03-31T23:40:00.000-05:00

"Living my life, I've come to realize that everybody has different jobs to do. There's your wage job, your responsibility to your children, your sexual urges, and then there are the special duties that every man and woman takes on. Some people are artists or have political interests, some are obsessed with collecting seashells or pictures of movie stars. One of my special duties was to keep Raymond Alexander from falling into a dark humor. Because whenever he lost interest in having a good time someone, somewhere was likely to die."

In Cinnamon Kiss, author Walter Mosley takes us to Los Angeles in 1966, just after the Watts riots. A black Private Investigator named Easy Rawlins has been given a mysterious case by another PI named Robert Lee because Easy is the best there is in Watts for finding out where somebody is when they don't want to be found.

The descriptive prose in this book is unstoppable, marvelous, earthy, sensational. Mosley made me feel like I was a black PI operating in a city I've never seen in a time two years before my own birth. I can't recommend it more highly except to say that I read it in five hours flat without taking a break. Stunningly good.

Cinnamon Kiss: ISBN 0-316-073023-4, Little, Brown and Company, 312 pages, hardcover, $24.95

Book: Running with the Dead

2006-03-31T11:59:00.000-05:00

Running with the Dead is a "legal thriller" from author Jay Brandon's series concerning District Attorney Chris Sinclair. This is the first book I've read from the series; evidently it's the newest one available.

This is quite a change of gears for me after reading Ghost and perhaps that was what made me feel that it was getting off to kind of a slow start. The storyline itself is interesting enough to hold my attention, but it wasn't the gripping, "sit down and read it until you're done" sort of read some of my other recent books have been. I also get the sense that the author sort of expects you to have read the previous works; there is some character development that's missing from two of the main characters: Anne, Chris' girlfriend, and Malachai Reese, Chris' nemesis.

I like stories concerning the legal system, which accounts for the one TV show that I'll typically bother to watch, Law & Order. The various Law & Order series center more around police work (with the exception of the newest series, of which I've only seen one episode) and have more of an immediacy to their plotlines than this story did. In this story, there is an element of suspense, but frankly I've seen suspense done much better.

I'm not so sure I'm compelled to seek out the other works by this author. There's a lot of good stuff to read out there, and since this one didn't just plain WOW me, I think I'll look around to other authors.

Running With The Dead: ISBN 0-765-30893-2, Forge Books, 364 pages, hardcover, $24.95

Book: Ghost

2006-03-28T14:18:00.000-05:00

Ghost by John Ringo promises to be a suspense-filled sci-fi thriller about an ex-Navy Seal who's gotten back into action at the behest of the federal government. It's all that, but it's something else, too.

The book is divided up into three sub-books; part one is exactly as advertised: a real page-turning action/adventure story with fast-moving action. The protagonist character, Mike Harmon, is good at heart but has a dark side to him. The villains are Al Qaeda terrorists, and many, many of them end up dead, most killed single-handedly by Harmon himself.

Book One is kick-ass. It's everything a neo-con could hope for: unleash the special forces, put the weight of the presidency behind them, and let them do what they do best: kill the bad guys. Osama bin Laden even buys the farm in Book One.

Just when you're wondering where the story can go from there, you arrive at the start of book two. Book Two, is, uh, a bit different than Book One.

Book Two is a hard-core pornographic novel.

Harmon, fresh from his recovery (he gets all shot up in Book One) spends some of his $25 million reward on a ocean-going pleasure yacht. He picks up two college babes on the beach one day, and then proceeds to spend the next few weeks screwing them in every way imaginable. The details are extremely explicit; it reads like Penthouse Letters. And it goes on for well over 100 pages.

Needless to say, I wasn't prepared for that. It almost made me put the book down and walk away. Although the writing is good, and the details are titillating, I was kind of hanging on by my thumbs for awhile there, wondering how long it would go on for. The book seems almost schizophrenic, as if the author couldn't decide if he wanted to write action or porn, so he did both. Indeed, in the accompanying CD-ROM included with the book, an author's note warned that the sex was 'explosive' and the novel 'politically incorrect'. I'll say.

Let me put this another way: you might recall your first viewing of a movie such as Pulp Fiction, wherein director Quentin Tarantino seems to delight in making his audience pucker its collective ass for as long as possible with all the shocking twists and turns the story takes. Well, this is the equivalent in book form, folks. It's a good book, but a hellish ride at the same time; kind of like one of the giant roller coasters at Ohio's Cedar Point, you come out of it uncertain you'd ever want to return.

Book Three returns to the more conventional action/adventure stuff of Book One, although it is not devoid of some disturbing sexual content for which the author almost seems apologetic. And, as the book's dust jacket screams, Book Three leaves open the possibility of a series of sequels to come. The next book in the series is called 'Kildar'.

I suppose morbid curiosity will cause me to look around for it.

Ghost, ISBN 1416509054, Baen, 405 pages, $25.00

Digital TV and the poor

2006-03-23T09:31:00.000-05:00

Well, it's nearly official: sometime on February 17, 2009, the switchover from analog to digital over-the-air TV signals will be complete. Already the news is filling up with stories about how the poor and disadvantaged will see their sets go dark on that date.

The FCC is set to auction off the analog spectrum starting sometime in 2007, and it will presumably be used for things like high-speed Internet access and other commercial communications. (I guess the aliens in outer space that up 'till now have been watching Amos 'n Andy will have to figure out we made the switch, otherwise they're going to see the advertising go from laundry detergent to penis size enhancement. But I digress.)

In the meantime, the liberals are already stirring the pot. We're told that 7% of us still won't be able to afford to subscribe to cable TV in 2009. Their claim is that these poor slobs will rise up and revolt when their sets go dark on that date. The liberal solution? Give out free vouchers for the $50 set-top boxes that convert analog TVs to digital TVs.

I say, let 'em revolt. Let 'em figure out that if you don't do a little advance planning in life you're doomed to a darkened TV set sometime in the winter of 2009.

I've got an alternative suggestion. Instead of subsidizing sloth, let's take all the money we're going to piss away on free set-top-boxes and do something a little more constructive. Let's have the federal government buy advertising. Gobs of it. Slate it to run during Judge Judy, re-runs of The Simpsons, and episodes of Jerry Springer. The message? You've got three years to save fifty bucks so you can buy this electronic gizmo, otherwise you're gonna have to find something to do other than watch the boob tube in February 2007.

Oh, how heartless! How inhumane! To actually expect the poor to save up $50 of their own money so as to continue receiving something for free? Why, they might have to give up some of their cigarettes! Bypass the opportunity on a few 'forties' of Schlitz! What about the latest Eminem CD? How can we be so uncharitable as to deny welfare rats and elderly grayhead grannies their daily dose of 'Good Morning, America?!'

I'm quite sure that I'm going to lose more than $50 in dropped coins between now and February, 2009. Saving $50 over a period of three years is so easily done, it's not even worth discussing. It's 32¢ a week. Here in Michigan I could find four discarded returnable soda cans a week (worth 10¢ each) without even really spending much time looking around. Why can't we ask the poor to do the same?

I'll tell you why. The poor remain poor because we expect them to. We don't send out the message that poverty is a temporary condition that can be remedied with effort. We figure it's just too difficult to struggle up into a lower-middle-class existence for the majority of the impoverished. So we try to give them everything they need. Free breakfast and lunch for their kids in school. Subsidized transportation via busses and trains. Subsidized housing. Free money in their welfare checks.

In short, they've got no incentive to fix the problems they face on their own.

Well, the free ride stops before you get to Judge Joe Brown's show, as far as I'm concerned. I don't want to see one red cent of my money go to give the "disadvantaged" free television. Since when is TV an entitlement? Should we have the fire departments across the land bring in a 27" color TV with every smoke detector?

Book: School Days

2006-02-10T20:58:00.000-05:00

In School Days, author Robert B. Parker serves up the prototypical hard-boiled private eye: the guy's as tough as nails, can whip (and kill) gangbangers without batting an eyelash, is possessed of a wit that makes him difficult for his opponents to completely hate, and remains cool at all times.

Y'know, kind of like Magnum, P.I., or Jim Rockford.

In this case, two kids have shot up a school, and one of them has a doting grandma with lots of money who hires Mr. Spenser to prove the kid didn't do it.

Only the kid did do it...sort of. Our Mr. Spenser, seeking justice, chases down the real truth of the story even after rich Gramma stops floating his retainer. Just because he's that kind of guy.

The book drips with sexual references, "action scenes", witty banter with cops, a decent villain or three, and an interesting plot. There is an untied loose end: why does Spenser have an apartment while his wife owns a home? It's never explained. Perhaps this is something that the reader is expected to know from other books in the series. (Apparently there are a few of these out there.)

I was thinking about how to describe this book carefully before I sat down to write this. It's a "popcorn novel." I sat down to read it after lunch today, and finished the whole thing in about 3 hours total. It, like popcorn, was reasonably entertaining to consume, but wasn't terribly filling. The prose is extremely spartan; the pages of the book have a great deal of whitespace. If it were a paperback novel, I bet they could have fit it into 120 pages, instead of the 300 pages the hardcover version has.

Entertainment...but I'm sure glad the library paid for it and not me.

School Days: ISBN 0-399-15323-3, G.P. Putnam's Sons, 295 pages, hardcover, $24.95

Book: The Garden of Eden

2006-02-08T23:36:00.000-05:00

In the Garden of Eden, author "Eve Adams" (a pseudonym, according to the dust jacket, for NY Times best selling author, who turns out to be Steven Koontz) writes about a small town somewhere in America, and the terrific mess that people can make out of their lives and yet still recover.

The book is as humorous as it is true and serious, and is populated with some pretty vivid characters: the gorgeous twins who dupe the freshly minted state trooper into believing he's making love to one of them when it's really the other; the frustrated, recluse author who finds himself in the middle of a love triangle when he'd really rather be left alone; the prosecuting attorney who unexpectedly finds himself with two wives; the good ol' boy with a golden heart and a propensity for finding himself dragged into criminal adventures by a mischevious buddy.

This book was oddly reminiscent of "The Big Garage on Clearshot", written by Tom Bodett, perhaps more famous for his "We'll leave the light on for ya" motel chain radio ads: small town, lively characters, an entertaining story, no great literary importance, and a fun read.

Whoever Eve Adams is, they did their job pretty well, I think.

The Garden of Eden: ISBN: 0-312-32363-8, St. Martin's Press, 338 pages, hardcover, $24.95

Book: Walking Money

2006-01-27T13:59:00.000-05:00

In Walking Money, author James O. Born gives us the story of the theft of $1.5 million in cash, the innocent cop who gets framed with the theft, and all the other players chasing each other around Miami trying to get their hands on the loot and leave town.

Written by a cop, and from a cop's perspective, the view on the Miami street scene is almost melancholic: everybody is out for themselves, and is trying desperately to outwit everyone else. Surprisingly realistic, yet at the same time suspenseful and exciting, the book was an excellent work of fiction: hard to put down, and the end left me wanting for more.

Walking Money: ISBN 0-399-15169-9, G.P. Putnam's Sons, hardcover, 262 pages, $23.95

Phone sex for nerds

2005-11-10T08:44:00.000-05:00

Book: No Country For Old Men

2005-11-03T18:47:00.000-05:00

In No Country For Old Men, author Cormac McCarthy tells the story of a Texan out hunting who encounters the aftermath of an international drug deal gone bad: all that's left are the bodies, the drugs, and $2.3 million dollars in cash. The man, who we find out later in the book is a welder in addition to being an outdoorsman, contemplates what he has found carefully, and then makes a couple of life-altering decisions which form the basis for the rest of the book.

There are few written descriptions I have found of pure evil that are more potent than the one contained in this book. There is a segment of our society that makes Freddy Krueger look like somebody you'd have over for a soda in the afternoon, and the story describes one of these individuals with a lavish detail, yet manages to do so without any fancy language. Indeed, the book is entirely devoid of fancy language, and is yet another where the author seems to have dispensed with the normal rules of grammar and punctuation as taught to me in grade school, yet done so to good effect. There is a three-way contrast drawn in this work between a psychopath, an everyman, and a straight-arrow lawman that is a thing of beauty in and of itself.

I found the book intensely interesting, gripping, mesmerizing. I read the whole thing in two sittings, one night right after the next.

If I have any complaints, it is that the book is vivid to the point of being somewhat disturbing, but given the subject matter, this is acceptable. It's more like happening upon the scene of an accident in person rather than reading about it in the newspaper the day afterward. Mr. McCarthy has a powerful command of descriptive speech, and I shall be looking for more of his work to read immediately.

Incidently, this book was one I came across quite by accident in a display at the Sterling Heights Public Library. I've had such good luck with this, it makes me think that somebody over there must be right on my personal wavelength in making the selections of titles to highlight.

No Country For Old Men: ISBN 0-375-40677-8, Alfred A. Knopf, hardcover, 309 pages, $24.95

****
10-APR-2006: Update! The Coen Bros. are set to do the film version!

The Mexican Border

2005-10-24T09:41:00.001-04:00

I've decided to write Michigan's senators and President Bush on the
Mexican border issue. I thought I'd send you copies of the letter,
but be aware I've tailored them according to who they're written to.
If you happen to think the same way I do about this, feel free to cut
and paste, or send your own words.

president@whitehouse.gov
http://stabenow.senate.gov/email.htm
http://levin.senate.gov/contact/index.cfm

For you Ohioans:
http://dewine.senate.gov/
senator_voinovich@voinovich.senate.gov

***

Letter to President Bush:

Dear Mr. President,

I read with interest the transcription of your most recent radio
address, where you describe your plan to fortify our southern border
with Mexico.

Mr. President, with all due respect, it's not enough. 1,000 new border
patrol agents will serve only to slow the rising tide of illegal
immigration across the Mexican Border. What is needed is a
large-scale deployment of the National Guard to seal the border off to
all except legal immigration and commerce.

I look to my government for only two things: ensuring the rule of law,
and protection from intrusion by foreign powers. The current
situation is untenable, and highlights the failure of the federal
government on both counts. The next 9/11 will almost surely start
with an act of illegal immigration, and logically this will take place
across the Mexican border, since one only needs to walk across to gain
entry. The Minuteman volunteers have clearly illustrated how porous
our border is, and how ineffective the federal government's response
to the problem has been to date.

Mr. President, please authorize a more effective program of securing
our border with Mexico, even if it becomes necessary to increase the
size of the National Guard to do so.

Sincerely,
Geoff Gariepy

*****

Letter to Debbie Stabenow:

Senator Stabenow,

I'm disappointed to see that among your list of issues you are
apparently ignoring the single greatest Homeland Security issue our
nation faces: illegal immigration across our nation's southern border
with Mexico.

The Minuteman volunteers have illustrated quite plainly just how
porous our border is, how willing our neighbors to the south in Mexico
are to flout our laws and enter our country illegally, and how
terribly under-staffed and ill-prepared the Border Patrol is to deal
with the problem.

Senator Stabenow, I call upon you as my representative to give this
issue the attention and visibility it deserves. The next 9/11 will
almost surely begin with people entering our country illegally, and
the easiest place for them to do so is via the Mexican border, where
they merely need to walk across.

Your co-representative from Michigan, Senator Levin, at least pays lip
service to the idea of Homeland Security in his list of issues on his
website. Your website conspicuously ignores the issue. Senator
Stabenow, you're not doing nearly enough to help protect our nation
from terrorism and economic plunder. Your lack of effort in this area
is most disappointing, and will be remembered at election time if it
is not corrected. I depend on my federal government for only two
things: ensuring the rule of law, and defending the nation from
foreign intrusion. You are failing on both counts.

Please consider taking a stand on this most important issue.

Sincerely,

Geoff Gariepy

***

Letter to Carl Levin:

Senator Levin,

Senator Levin, I call upon you as my representative to give this issue
the attention and visibility it deserves. The next 9/11 will almost
surely begin with people entering our country illegally, and the
easiest place for them to do so is via the Mexican border, where they
merely need to walk across.

Although I share your concern regarding the northern border, we here
in Michigan are protected by large bodies of water that serve as a
natural buffer to illegal immigration. We need to put federal
resources where the problem is the largest and most dangerous.

Please consider taking a stand on this most important issue.

Sincerely,
Geoff Gariepy

Book: Eventide

2005-08-30T08:09:00.000-04:00

With the title defined on one of the flyleaf pages as "the time of evening; evening," Eventide's author Kent Haruf picks up the story and characters where he left off in Plainsong. In this case, I found name of the book to be especially revealing: this is nearly "book noir."

Film noir, of course, is a film shot mostly at night, and typically deals with depressing themes, anxiety, deception, and the darker side of human nature. It would not be unfair to say that these are major plot devices in Eventide; shortly after the beginning of the story, one of the main characters dies in a horrible accident, and the major plot line of the book concerns how those close to the character recover in his absence. There are other subplots, as with Plainsong, which also deal with characters moving through dark periods in their lives, and how they recover, if they manage to do so.

Perhaps I'm more comfortable with Haruf's writing style this time through, or perhaps as the hyperbolic promotional text on the jacket of the book exclaims, this work is more "masterful" than Plainsong. I found the dialog, although still without the normal quoting convention, easier to follow and comprehend. The plot lines are clearer, too, and the characters significantly better-developed.

I found the book to be a quick, yet entertaining read. I won't hesitate to pick up another Kent Haruf novel, should the series be extended by another volume.

Eventide: ISBN 0-375-41158-5, Alfred A. Knopf, hardcover,300 pages, $24.95

Book: Plainsong

2005-08-25T18:25:00.000-04:00

In Plainsong, author Kent Haruf reanimates the fictional town of Holt, Colorado and tells a story which might be summarized as a "slice of life" -- there are three main plot lines, and a few secondary ones which combine to tell an overall tale.

I found some things about Plainsong a little underwhelming. For one thing, Haruf by and large disposes with the convention of quoting dialog between the characters, instead blending it in with the general description of their actions towards one another. For example, two characters will be interacting, and one will say something to the other, yet his words are not set aside from the fact that he's flicking a cigarette as he speaks. I think Haruf's intent was to try to make the story flow more naturally than it otherwise might, and to emphasize the informal nature of the interactions between most of the characters, perhaps due to the culture of semi-rural Colorado. The problem with this is that it's damn difficult to tell who's saying what sometimes, and I found myself having to go back and re-read certain passages because I would realize that I was out of sync with what was going on.

The other thing about Plainsong is that it is three separate main plots, as I stated above. No one character is our protagonist, at least not for certain, and so the story is about the experiences of several main people: Virginia Roubideaux, a pregnant teenager, Tom Guthrie, a father and teacher who has recently separated from his wife, and Ike and Bobby, his two young sons. Although these characters interact with each other during the course of the story, they are almost bewilderingly not directly involved with each other's lives, or at least, not aren't all with in the same major plotline. This is not as confusing as it might seem, however it is definitely a departure from the earlier work of Haruf's I've read, Where You Once Belonged, which was told in a much more conventional fashion.

With this much carping on my part about the structural elements of the book, you might almost think I didn't like it, but that wouldn't be true. The story itself, once you wade through the oddity of how it is told, is pretty compelling stuff. I had this story "up in my head" for the entire several days I spent reading this book -- there was much to contemplate. I found myself putting the book down briefly between chapters just to sit there and think about what was going on; each chapter was profound it its own way. Judged strictly on the quality of the story itself, the book is very successful, and I gather it garnered a lot of attention when it came out. CBS made a television movie out of the book.

This book was written nearly ten years after Where You Once Belonged, and the change in style between the two is palpable, although the characters themselves are oddly familiar in a sense. I didn't expect it to be a continuation of the earlier work -- it isn't fair to call it a sequel -- but the author has clearly changed his storytelling approach. Curiously, he recycled one extremely minor character from Where You Once Belonged, a sheriff by the name of Bud Sealy, and gave him a tiny, inconsequential role in this story as well. It makes me wonder if Sealy's character isn't a proxy for Haruf himself, who after all is the master of the story's domain in the same way that the sheriff in a small town is sort of the master of that domain as well.

Bottom line on this one is that the author's next book, Eventide, is in fact a sequel to Plainsong: I'll be looking for that one at the library momentarily.

Plainsong: ISBN 0-375-70585-6, Vintage Contemporaries, paperback, 301 pages, $13.00

New watch!

2005-08-18T15:46:00.000-04:00

While I'm posting pictures from stuff that happened yesterday -- Angela and I had our ninth wedding anniversary -- I'd like to show you the new watch she gave me.

It's a Casio wave ceptor, which means that it automatically corrects itself to the time signal from WWWV, the radio time signal powered by a big atomic clock in Colorado.

It's a sweetheart of a watch, and it looks substantial on the wrist -- this is a man's watch and it's sized as such. Unlike the Timex watches I've had, the analog clock is synchronized directly to the lcd digital display; when the seconds click over to 00, there's a perceptible and definitive movement of the minute hand as well. It's set up to move 1/3rd of the way between the minutes every 20 seconds.

Notice there's no crown on this watch. You set it by setting the digital display with the buttons, and then the clock motor runs the hands around until they're synchronized with the display. Very cool!

You can see the little symbol in the round portion of the LCD display -- it's shaped like a satellite dish, if you look closely. That's a signal strength indicator showing how well you're receiving the radio signal if you should happen to call for a manual update. The little icon disappears in four different segments as the signal strength decreases. Here in Sterling Heights, I seem to be getting a full-strength signal, so all is well. The watch automatically syncs up three times a day, at 1AM, 2AM and 3AM, so it's got multiple opportunities to pull the signal in if there's RFI in the environment. You can then access a display mode to see when the last successful sync was -- time and date included. It also figures out when daylight savings time begins and ends as well.

There's four alarms, one including a snooze feature, plus the watch has the world time for ~30 cities, plus Greenwich Mean Time, which naturally as a data programmer is the one I've picked.
Thank you, Angela, for the very cool anniversary gift!

Movie: The Dukes of Hazzard

2005-08-18T12:46:00.000-04:00

I really couldn't pass this one up, being that the star of the show is a much-abused Dodge Charger, although I didn't walk in with high expectations.

The good: Yee-haw! It isn't a serious movie, it's a fun movie. Jessica Simpson. The fella blowing up safes in his underwear.

The bad: Well, they could've had a crazy chick blowing up safes in her underwear. Would've been much more visually appealing!

The ugly: the outtakes of all the Chargers being wrecked during the jumps. It's too bad they can't CGI that stuff efficiently yet.

Would I go pay $9 a head to see it in the theater a second time? No, but I might be interested in getting the DVD! It was a good time.

Book: Sky of Stone

2005-08-17T12:18:00.000-04:00

In Sky of Stone, author Homer Hickam completes the trilogy of books written about his growing up in Coalwood, West Virginia, a coal mining town run by his father.

Hickam, as you might recall, was one of the "rocket boys" about which the movie October Sky was made in the late 90s. As I said, the previous books, October Sky and The Coalwood Way were excellent, and I couldn't wait to read the final installment.

I'm happy to report that the final book is every bit as good as the first two, and it might be even more refined. This is factual material that reads like a first-rate novel. Hickam's story-telling craft is extremely well-refined and very enjoyable. In this story, Hickam's Dad's reputation is at stake: a man has died in a mining accident, and the available evidence points to him as being responsible for the death. Hickam spends the summer working in the coal mine, and along the way helps justice to be done.

I've enjoyed all three books a great deal. You won't want to read just one of them.

Sky of Stone: ISBN 0-440-24092-1, Dell Books, paperback, 409 pages. $7.99

Book: A Different Drummer - My Thirty Years With Ronald Reagan

2005-08-12T10:36:00.000-04:00

In A Different Drummer - My Thirty Years With Ronald Reagan, Michael Deaver, Reagan's former Deputy Chief of Staff and good friend, writes of his experiences working with President Reagan, starting out in the 1960s during the campaign for the governorship of California.

This one was a page-turner for me. Reagan had a fascinating life, and his approach to governance was a reflection of the man's character. He always tried to do the best he could given the circumstances handed to him, and he also tried to positively influence things going on around him. Deaver's book is largely a homage to his friend, and I was saddened by his account of how his friendship with the Reagans was ravaged by his addiction to alcohol. In addition, his telling of the story of his last meeting with the former president was poignant. Reagan couldn't remember who he was, and at the time Deaver came to see him, the former president was reading a children's book about horses.

I don't mean to make the book sound depressing; it's an account of a professional relationship with a dynamic man, and the story-telling sparkles. However, we all know how Reagan ended up suffering from Alzheimer's, and spent the last ten years of his life in seclusion, and this inescapable fact does color the last part of the book.

I was originally looking for another book about Reagan I had browsed through on an earlier occasion, and I was mistaken about this one not being what I thought it was. Still, I wasn't disappointed with this book, which I guess is a recommendation if you're looking for a book on the subject.

A Different Drummer - My Thirty Years with Ronald Reagan: ISBN 0-06-001232-3, Harper-Collins Books, paperback, 360 pages, $7.99

Channel 101: cool Internet find

2005-08-11T08:55:00.000-04:00

Channel 101 bills itself as "the unavoidable future of Entertainment," as if that's a perjorative! I'm jazzed about Channel 101; it's the best damn TV I've ever seen!

Channel 101 is amateur television. The concept limits the creators to a 5-minute show, which is previewed in front of a live audience of enthusiasts in Los Angeles, who then vote on what they've seen. Stuff gets awarded "prime time" status -- the primo status to have -- when it's really, really cool, and then sequels to the pilot episode are made, one at a time. Stuff gets cancelled when the creators blink and turn out a so-so episode. Submissions are encouraged; you do what you want, and nothing is off-limits as long as it's entertaining. Drew Carey got caught up in the concept, and ended up directing a show called Call Me Cobra that was cancelled after the second episode because it was too large and expensive of a production, and it descended into chaos before the third episode. It was really well done, however, as are all of the "best" submissions. The cartoons are very high-grade animation; the live sequences are fairly comparable to what you might find on Fox.

I won't kid you, though, this is potty humor, and it makes no pretensions of rising above that anytime soon. Still, it's wonderfully creative, and enormously entertaining and captivating. I spent half a working day recently geeking out on House of Cosbys, a cartoon show where a guy clones dozens of Bill Cosby look-alikes, every tenth one having super powers! (Cosby's lawyers put an end to it after episode #4.)

It's a good thing regular TV isn't this good, otherwise there'd be a real danger of my becoming a serious couch potato!

Book: Where You Once Belonged

2005-08-10T12:28:00.000-04:00

In Where You Once Belonged, author Kent Haruf tells the story of Jack Burdette, a man who dominates the conversation in a small town in Colorado from the point he begins as a high-school football hero to the point he ends as a fugitive from the law.

As a work of fiction, the story is very entertaining, if a bit spartan in its prose. The ending is dramatic, and leaves you wanting for more. The author is done with the subject matter however; in the two books that followed this one, neither is a sequel.

I happened across this one quite by accident one day while browing through Costco. I was later surprised to find out that the book came out in 1990, and has been reprinted a number of times. The book and other works by the same author are available in my local library. Worth a read, if you're up for some fiction.

Where You Once Belonged: ISBN 0-375-70870-7, Vintage Contemporaries, paperback, 176 pages, $12.95

Book: The Coalwood Way

2005-06-21T23:28:00.000-04:00

Homer Hickam, the author of Rocket Boys: A Memoir, which was the inspiration for the movie October Sky, wrote two sequels to his orginal work. The Coalwood Way (ISBN: 0-440-23716-5, Island Books, paperback, $6.99) is the second one in the series.

It amazes me how well Hickam tells his own story. It reads like a work of fiction: gripping, exciting, exhilarating -- yet it's a true story. There's a certain craft to telling a story well, no matter the subject material, and Hickam seems to have the knack.

I've already ordered the third book in the series, Sky of Stone, just moments after finishing this one. It's that good.

The Coalwood Way: ISBN 0440237165, Island Books, 400 pages, paperback

Book: Charles Kuralt's America

2005-06-05T16:51:00.000-04:00

Charles Kuralt's America is the narrative of Mr. Kuralt's travels during his first year of retirement from CBS News. Kuralt decided what he'd most like to do with his first year is revisit some of the places he had been during his career, and do so at times of the year which showcase each particular place in its best light. Thus, the book is divided into twelve chapters, one for each month of the year, plus a foreword that clues the reader in to the nature of the project.

I have not seen much, if any at all, of Kuralt's TV stuff. After reading this book, I've begun to think that perhaps I've missed something special. Kuralt writes about himself and his own perspective, and highlights a few people he knows or meets along the way, but somehow he manages to avoid becoming stuffy or boring. The writing is rich with descriptive prose, and one can picture the places he visits with clarity. One of the few books I've read this year, it easily is a standout.

I'm a fan of the travelling author genre, having been introduced to it by William Least Heat Moon's Blue Highways. I'd say this one stands a little taller than Moon's work, which is to say it is very, very good.

Charles Kuralt's America ISBN: 0-385-48510-7 Anchor Books, $14.95 paperback

2nd Generation LH cars: Water Pump Warning

2005-05-24T21:34:00.000-04:00

I've learned an important lesson the hard way, and I thought I'd share it briefly with y'all here.

Last November, as my Intrepid approached the 105,000 mile mark, it was time for the timing belt to be replaced. I ordered a fresh timing belt, water pump, and tensioner pulley from discountautoparts.com. I ordered some radiator hoses and a thermostat while I was at it, too, and decided to make a day of it.

It wasn't until Christmastime that I had the chance to do the work, but everything went together more or less easily. I had some trouble reassembling the thermostat/water outlet but figured out how to use strategically placed baling wire as a temporary means to hold things together until I got the bolts started. Worked out, eventually. Had some trouble with damage to the transmission cooler, too, but I got past that with an aftermarket unit.

About two months and 1500 miles later, the car broke down on the side of the freeway, after sounding for a short time like it had lost its muffler. To make a long story short, the replacement water pump had failed; the pulley separated from the shaft, and it made a mess out of the timing belt. The loud exhaust was a result of the engine gradually slipping more and more out of time as the timing belt itselfdisintegrated.

This was the Oh Sh*t problem I had hoped to avoid by doing the preventative maintenance in the first place. Little more than shredded fluff was left of the timing belt. The tensioner pulley was extremely suspect. The water pump pulley fell out and hit the floor when I removed the timing cover. The cam position sensor was destroyed in the process as well.

Hoping against hope, I reassembled the timing drive, only to discover the engine had two dead cylinders.

I had six bent valves, so I had to tear down the top half of the engine and have the cylinder heads machined, the valve seats lapped, and the bent valves replaced. That alone cost me $220, parts not included. All together, the parts and machine shop service were just slightly over $900, not counting the original outlay for the parts back in November. The car was down for a month between this and that, while I accumulated the parts, waited for the machine shop, and tended to the never ending emergencies that come up with small kids in the house. Fortunately I'm able to work from home, and we have another reliable vehicle.

So, after I knew the full extent of the cost to repair this, I submitted my warranty claim, first going through discountautoparts.com, but ultimately going to the water pump manufacturer, Eastern Industries of Panama City, FL, asking for compensation for parts and labor. A couple of months went by after I sent a fully documented explanation of what happened, including every receipt, pictures of the damage, etc. I shipped the defective pump to the manufacturer at their request. Then later, upon their further request, I shipped the timing belt tensioner pulley as well. They wanted me to ship the timing belt tensioner, too, but I balked at this, since the original one was good, and back in service on the repaired engine.

Today, after hours of letter writing, over a dozen phone calls, a ton of emails, and other red tape, I got let in on something so incredibly unbelievable, I'm still stunned by it: despite the fact that I had ordered the correct pump for a 1998 Intrepid with the 3.2L engine, I was actually shipped a pump for a 1997 Intrepid with the 3.5L. The Eastern Industries part numbers are only one digit apart. The pumps look identical, and they will mount in each other's place with ease.

But they're NOT identical. Apparently something about the pulley is different between the two, perhaps the metallurgy. The difference, in this application, is that using the wrong, but apparently identical, pump can cause the pulley to fail in my application.

I've sold auto parts in the past, and I never saw this coming. I've never seen two so apparently identical parts with this sort of make or break difference between the two. I'm absolutely aghast. The box the replacement pump came in has long since become part of the local landfill, so I'll never know if the wrong pump was put into the box labeled with the part number I ordered, or if I just didn't catch the difference in the one digit that's different between the two part number labels.

It remains to be seen what, if anything, becomes of my warranty claim, but I've learned something I won't soon forget: DON'T BUY YOUR PARTS ONLINE TO SAVE A BUCK!

The people who sold this part to me are hundreds of miles away. The manufacturer? Over a thousand miles away. If I had stuck with the local guy down at the NAPA, I might've brought in the old pump to match it up with the new, and POSSIBLY have caught the difference. I don't know. But one thing's for certain: if these guys don't decide to treat me right, it's going to be very, very difficult for me to put up a fight about it at this distance. Between all of the miscommunication, avoided and unreturned phone calls, and sheer indifference I've gotten from everyone concerned, I'd just as soon have spent the extra 75 or 80 bucks to get the stuff locally, and have had the opportunity to look the parts counterman who screwed up in the eye and demand he do something about it.

Now, I've spent a little time in junkyards recently, and I've noted the similarity between the 3.5L and the 3.2L as far as the front part of the engine is concerned. I used to think, up until today, that if I found myself in a jam, I might be able to salvage parts off of a 1st generation 3.5L, they look that similar. Believe me, looks are deceiving. Don't mix parts between the two!

A Critical Look at Detroit

2005-03-16T10:06:00.000-05:00

According to the Free Press, a new film comes out this Friday regarding Detroit's unnatural urban decay.

Hopefully, through exposure, this topic will itch at enough people to engender some real interest in fixing the situation. One of the editors from the Detroit News opined last Sunday that perhaps the best route for Detroit is to throw in the towel and convert the abandoned properties back into farmland. It's an intriguing idea, and perhaps it has some merit: instead of trying to get back the unobtainable (a vibrant, 2,000,000-citizen city), maybe it's time to face reality and make good use of the space.

Whatever ends up happening, I doubt we can rely upon the current administration and city leaders to make any significant advances in the situation. Right now they're busying themselves covering up Kwame Kilpatrick's shenannigans, and whitewashing the downtown district that will be on-camera for the 2006 SuperBowl. Meanwhile, MDOT is spending $18 million on a fancy freeway adornment along I-94 between the airport and downtown--in Dearborn.

I barely remember Detroit before the mass exodus. I was born shortly before the last big push began and all the white folks moved out of town. At one time, my grandmother would walk down 7 Mile daily to pick up her groceries and other items. Now she'd be a mugging target; an easy mark. At 37 years of age, I doubt I'll see Detroit rebound in my lifetime.

It's official: the HP/Compaq merger was a mistake

2005-02-12T10:12:00.000-05:00

It's official, the HP/Compaq merger was a mistake. It has now cost Carly Fiorina her job.

As well it should.

Frankly, as an HP employee, I'm more than a little pissed about the way all of this went. In the long run, the merger poisoned the company I worked for: regular layoffs, a loss of vacation time, lousy profit sharing bonuses, a sudden emphasis on offshoring jobs to cheap overseas labor, stagnant wages...the list goes on and on. Fortune Magazine just did a cover story (requires subscription) immediately prior to the announcement detailing how the merger has missed virtually every financial target it was promised to hit.

And what does Carly get out of it? Another $20 million or so. $20 million that could've paid bonuses...or raised wages...or saved a few employees on the firing line.

It's completely unconscionable, and I'm deeply offended.

But in the end: good riddance to bad trash.

On the occasion of my birthday

2005-01-27T10:54:00.000-05:00

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Geoff
Date: Thu, 27 Jan 2005 10:53:13 -0500
Subject: On the occasion of my birthday
To: Margaret Gariepy

Mom,
It was 37 years ago today that you and I had a little date with destiny.

I just want to tell you thank you.

I have lived a wonderful life so far. It's had its ups and downs, it
hasn't been perfect. But it has been complete, and I've learned to
appreciate it for what it is: a chance to be. That chance is not
something that just anyone can give. It has to come from somebody
willing to become a mother. You were.

I know now what being a "Mommy" is, from watching Angela and Savannah
and Joshua. It's never an easy task. In some ways, the amount of
commitment goes so far beyond that of fatherhood, it's nearly
impossible to describe. It is a beautiful thing to watch. You were
my mommy, and I have many, many fond memories of it...the sound of you
mixing chocolate milk heard through an open window from the
outside...cuddling with you in the old, wooden rocking chair...getting
to ride in the front seat of your Pontiac...being taken care of when I
was sick...having you dress me to go outside and play in the
snow...following a string through a house to a new bicycle in
Grandma's basement on my birthday...going to see Grandma Lothamer at
her house and seeing the room you grew up in upstairs...riding to the
hospital with a scalp full of stones after falling on my head...eating
grilled cheese watching Soupy Sales on a black and white TV...holding
a rabbit at the back door...getting to help "take care" of Lizzie by
holding her bottle for her in her crib in the dining room...eating
'other fruit'...animating Mr. Bear and Fuzzy...it goes on and on and
on.

You might not realize it, but you are the standard by which I've
always judged all mothers I've come across. You stayed home with us.
You kept our family together during some very difficult times. You
protected me. You never let us go hungry, or sick, or unclothed. You
never whacked us one unless we needed it. You encouraged us. You
helped me grow up into somebody who could begin to learn how to be a
parent himself.

I don't know if you think of yourself as a success as a mother.
Sometimes, I suspect you don't. But I have a very different view on
this. I don't think you give yourself enough credit.

So I just wanted to say 'hi', and 'happy birthday'...and thanks.

Love,
--Geoff

Amen on the dream minivan!

2005-01-24T11:06:00.000-05:00

Jerry Flint, a columnist from TheCarConnection.com, wrote recently that the NAIAS show being over, it was time for the automakers to take a long, hard look at what they're spending their time and energy on. In particular, he took DCX to task for spending the money they did on developing the Firepower, when current sales of the Viper are in the <2,000 unit range, saying that instead of sports cars, DCX ought to spend their time developing a next-generation minivan that puts the competition in the weeds. He said something similar to Ford: can it with the Shelby sports cars and figure out how to keep the Exploder...uh, Explorer, on top of the heap.

I responded to him thusly:

Jerry,

I've got to tell you, you've hit the nail on the head with this.
NAIAS has become a showcase for engineering boy-racer dreams, and
Detroit has forgotten about its bread and butter. I've been almost
every year since 1989, and for the past few years I've wondered why
I've bothered going.

Re: DCX and Ford: GM isn't exempt, by the way. The Kappa-platformed
vehicles...can the marketplace support *both* a Solstice and the Sky?
What are they thinking? Saturn, you need to refresh your identity,
but a sports car won't do it.

Question: Was I the only one searching NAIAS in vain for a GM concept
that didn't have more to do with the hybrid motor than the body style?
Chevy...um...didn't seem to have anything. Speaking of hybrids:
okay, I know that 10% of sales is an important focal point. But what
about the remaining 90% of us who won't buy a more expensive, more
complicated, typically lower-performing hybrid vehicle (Accord
notwithstanding)? As for diesel, what happens when the perceived
"fuel economy advantage" disappears when the law of supply and demand
finally catches up? And don't even get me started on this hydrogen
stuff. It's unworkable.

The future of successful auto manufacture looks a lot like...its past:
Competent, inexpensive vehicles with a choice of drivetrains. Body
styles that emphasize interior space and flexible configurability.
Traditional cars and station wagons rather than SUVs. Gasoline
engines, mostly. Safety features as appropriate, but not as the
primary feature of the vehicle. Decent performance. Longevity and
reliability. Did I mention inexpensive?

I think that the auto maker who can build an inexpensive (not
necessarily *cheap*), large sedan with V8 power and decent fuel
economy that's *not* styled like a police car will run away with all
the sales titles.

***
My *hope* is that the Charger is an indication that DCX is starting to catch on. GM remains a lost cause, just propelled forward by sheer momentum. Ford seems to slip on every banana peel it encounters -- witness the 500 -- but it still has a fighting chance.

Fingers crossed, boys.

'06 Charger Pics

2005-01-18T09:15:00.000-05:00

Here are some pics of the '06 Charger, currently being shown at the Detroit auto show. I tried to get some of the details of the design that haven't already been splashed all over every car magazine's cover. Unfortunately, the interior pics I took were blurry, so I only have one shot of the driver's area taken from outside, and one of the interior as seen through the rear window.

The car is roomy inside. The driver's seat was set all the way rearward, and I saw two six-foot guys sitting in it, one behind the other. The guy in the back seat still had 2-3" of room in front of his knees. I'm just a tad under six feet myself; when I sat in that thing with the seat pushed all the way back I had a hard time reaching the pedals. Overall, the interior space is about the same as my '98 Intrepid.

I didn't get a look into the trunk, and they wouldn't let me raise the hood to have a look at the engine compartment, either. What I can tell you is that the underhood area in the Magnum with the V8 is tight, and it doesn't look like it will be a pleasant car to work on. Assuming the Charger isn't much different under the hood, I would expect the same to be true with that one as well.

About the styling: Many people standing around who were seeing the car for the first time were saying things like "it looks like the 300!" My friends who were with me (not really big Mopar guys, but car lovers in general) seemed to think that the name was a mistake; they should've called it almost anything else other than Charger, but they understood it was named this way to generate sales. Personally, I think it's a fantastic automobile. I see the family resemblance to the 300 in the greenhouse, but the rest of the car looks original and fresh. It's no raving beauty of a car, but it misses being either bland or ugly at the same time. I'd love to have one to replace my Intrepid, as soon as they start appearing on the used car lots in a year or two. Is it a Charger? Well the "real" Charger -- round taillights = 1968? -- they had downstairs in the Mopar Performance Parts area quickly dispelled that idea. Put side by side, one is obviously a Charger, and one obviously isn't. But the people who are stamping them out get to name them, and the meaning of "Charger" is inevitably going to evolve into what this car is. Sometimes things change.

One thing I can tell you for certain is the "real Charger vs. fake Charger" debate didn't seem to dampen the enthusiasm of folks waiting in line to sit in one. I had a hard time getting the pics I ended up with, mostly because I had to wait for people to get out of the way long enough to take the pictures. This car is a bet-the-farm proposition for Dodge; here's hoping this was a positive sign.

Here's the pics:

'06 Charger rear 3/4 view

'06 Charger nose side view

'06 Charger nose head-on view

'06 Charger headlamp detail

'06 Charger wheel detail

'06 Charger R/T emblem

'06 Charger rear view

'06 Charger interior-front

'06 Charger underside view - rear

'06 Charger hood cutline detail

'06 Charger trunk cutline detail

'06 Charger interior - rear view. Note the DVD player screen in the center console.

Viper GTS pics

2005-01-18T09:05:00.000-05:00

This is the new Viper hardtop Dodge was showing at this year's NAIAS. I like it even better than the old-style GTS, which is saying something since I really was in love with it. I caught these pics as it rotated on the turntable. I know this is production; I'm not sure if it's a 2005 or 2006.

Viper GTS nose head-on view

Viper GTS nose

Viper GTS rear 3/4

FirePower pics

2005-01-17T19:37:00.000-05:00

This is the Chrysler Hemi-powered Viper. Overall, it was a really appealing design; I especially liked the large 'Firepower' badging on the fenders, and the headlamp detail. If you know what you're looking at, you can easily see the Viper influence on the overall design. The proportions are all roughly the same.

Compared to the ME Four Twelve, which was, um, a bit strange, this is more definitely a Chrysler product, rather than something that should be wearing a three-pointed star.

Firepower concept headlamp detail

Firepower concept - fender badging

Firepower concept rear view

Firepower concept - rear 3/4

Movie: Day After Tomorrow

2004-11-22T08:57:00.000-05:00

In 'Day After Tomorrow', Dennis Quaid plays a government climatologist who makes a comparison between current climate patterns and the ones that lead to the previous Ice Age. He then uses this comparison to predict the coming of the next ice age several decades hence.

He and the world are then caught by surprise when (boing!) a new ice
age sets in only weeks after he makes his prediction to a skeptical
(presumably Republican) Vice President, who argues that looking after
the economy is more important than reducing the greenhouse gas
emissions said to be bringing ecological and climactic disaster upon
us.

I guess I shouldn't really have been surprised to see the overt politics in this election-year movie: the casting of a Cheney look-alike saying he was wrong to not put the environment first; the junk science enviro-weenie global warming bleating; the prominent featuring of a Honda gas-electric hybrid vehicle in the plot.

And I guess I should've expected the ridiculous: a 1,000-foot freighter drifting unattended through the streets of Manhattan after New York is flooded with several dozen feet of water (only to serve as a location for a wolf attack on the lead characters!), helicopters being frozen out of the sky, snow up to the neck of Lady Liberty, the Mexican border being closed to evacuees until the U.S. government "forgives all Latin American debt."

But what I was hoping for was a Tommy Lee Jones-Volcano (1997) type of
performance: an intrepid character faces impossible odds to defeat the
forces of Mother Nature having a bitchy day. A film that puts all of the implausible science and crummy politics aside and uses special effects to augment the talents of the show's leading man.

Suffice it to say that Dennis Quaid didn't pull it off, although the special effects were pretty good. (My favorite was the tornado ripping the Hollywood sign off the hillside.)

Not a film I can recommend, unless you were a Kerry voter.

Beardless update

2004-11-12T01:29:00.000-05:00

Well, it's been a month since I took my whiskers off. I'm still clean-shaven, and I'm finally used to what I see in the mirror every morning. Honestly, I wonder why I didn't do this sooner; I'm really just not in any hurry to grow the beard back. As a matter of fact, I've already started to forget what I looked like with the beard. Funny how our memories work, isn't it?

It's also strange. People aren't quite sure who I am. I walked past our neighbor, Chuck, in Home Depot tonight. I said 'hi'--but he just looked at me oddly; he didn't recognize me. People at work are still doing double-takes; Moddy hasn't seen me this way yet.

Will I remain beardless for a long time? Maybe. At this point, I've got no compelling reason to grow it back, and I doubt I will. Shaving's a bit of a pain, but after all, it's just a minor thing. Meanwhile, I'm not missing the gray hairs.

...so that's how it goes, I guess...

Wiring woes

2004-11-11T23:43:00.000-05:00

A few months back, I helped Diber add network wiring to his not-yet-fully constructed house. It was a piece of cake: shoot holes through sill plate into floor, slap up wall boxes, and leave cable hanging in the basement waiting for the run to the termination point. Wiring the whole house took a couple of hours; most of that was spent convincing Rob that yes, he really did want a network drop in his kitchen (oh my God, why wouldn't you!?!)

Well, I've been working from home quite a bit lately. Moddy blessed the idea a few months ago, and started picking up a portion of the Cable Internet bill, so I've been availing myself of the opportunity to get work done on the minivan, watch the kids for Angela, and so forth. It's been good, but the experience has been marred by the fact that I've had to set up a card table in the front room, literally in front of the regular computer desk, and run a cable to the router tucked inside a compartment there. Needless to say, it's a struggle to keep Joshua, um, unintrigued by my presence. Clearly, if I'm going to make every snowy day a work-from-home day this winter as I intend to (traffic sucks!), I will be needing a workspace that's separated from him. The fourth bedroom came immediately to mind.

But how to connect? I've got grave reservations about using a wireless solution. For one thing, being right alongside 15 Mile, and just down the street from a 7-11 and other commercial places, it's a cinch some war driver will pick up the signal and hack my LAN. Plus, I've already got a perfectly good 100baseT Linksys router that I bought from Bryan Spondike at work for $10 a couple years back; no sense in tossing it out. So I resolved to run a 100baseT cable up to the fourth bedroom.

Well, easier said than done, of course. First of all, running cable up through the walls from first floor to second floor is a nightmare proposition, to say the least. I could conceivably use the cold air return ducts, but I know from hard experience that the sheetmetal doesn't always go along nicely with attempts to open it up. So I decided to mimic the cable TV installer guys. I was up on the roof last weekend to clean the gutters out anyway; I just made a few extra trips up and down the ladder to get my drill and poke a hole into the attic from the outside. Oh, I had to be careful not to tangle with the power lines which were, rather inconveniently, right next to where the cable had to run. But I drilled my hole, stuffed a bunch of cable into it, and ran the wire down to ground level, securing it along the way best I could. I left the rest of the run sitting there in the wire spool box behind the house for another day.

Today, after tangling with a recalcitrant Internet connection all morning, I broke off from work early and started finishing my cable project. I moved all the stuff out of the upstairs bedroom closet and climbed up into the attic, pulled the cable, and stuffed it down the same hole the cable TV run in the spare bedroom uses. So far, so good.

I stopped work for awhile to go pick up the minivan from the shop and get some dinner, and after a major Joshua temper tantrum, resumed activity around 8:30PM. I got the cable pulled down to wall-outlet level, went out and picked up a nice Leviton wall jack with snap-in connections for RJ-45 and cable TV, and punched it down. Then I went outside.

Well, wouldn't you know it, the damn cable in the reel box was screwed up. I pulled out about 20 feet, and encountered a snag. Tug-tug-tug...nothing. Peer into the hole in the box with flashlight...hmm, nothing apparently wrong. Tug-tug-tug..still nothing. Put the box on the ground, brace it with my foot...YANK!...oh, shit. The cable's insulation is all torn up.

Whether I did that myself, or I just ran across a problem that was already there, I'll never know. What I did know was that I had all this time and energy into running this damn cable...and it's broken. What to do?

Well, I rolled the dice, cut the cable at the break point, and commenced stuffing it into the hole in the house I planned for it to share with the cable TV run to get it into the basement. Wait a minute...I can't get the wire to go into the hole...now what? So I did what any red-blooded American do-it-yourselfer would do...I got my cordless drill out. and widened that hole!

So I got the network cable stuffed through the hole, and pulled the length of it into the basement. I yanked all the remaining cable out of the reel box, and took it downstairs, along with my soldering iron. I then set about joining the two pieces of cable together with solder joints!

Now mind you, I really did NOT expect this to work. This was a last-ditch, keep me from having to go back up on the roof, Hail Mary type of effort. But I did eight end-to-end union solder joints, wrapped each one individually, then finished the job by wrapping the whole thing together with more electrical tape, and hoped for the best. Now to start pulling the cable up into the front room where the router is.

I go into the front room, and just on a lark, go to fire up Internet Explorer. Hmm...seems a little slow...wait a minute! The cable light is out on the cable modem.. Oh, shit!

Sure enough, I had damaged the coax when I widened the hole it passed through to add the network cable run from the outside of the house into the basement. I first went upstairs and verified the cable modem worked there...then I went outside and gave the coax a good yank. It came apart in my hand. Damn!

Now where does this stuff lead to?....Well, it went directly into the cable box a mere foot away. I, um, opened that sucker up with extreme disregard to ownership, and found that there was a three-way splitter inside. Now I needed some coax! And it was 9:50pm. Lowes and Home Depot both close at 10.

Didja know a 3.3L Chrysler minivan can burn rubber? It will.

I made it to Lowes at 16 and Dequindre at 9:56PM. The entrance was locked! Shit!

So I pounded on the glass. Somebody appeared. I shouted, hey! It's not 10:00PM yet!

Bless him, he let me in.

I literally ran for the section of the electrical department where the coax was. Somebody, sensing I meant business, practically threw the coax, crimpers, and connectors at me.

I was home by 10:07PM. Not bad.

To make a long story short, (as if!) everything went smoothly. Fortunately, I bought an extra pair of coax connectors, and I ended up using them, since I misjudged twice and ruined two of them. I had guesstimated the amount of coax I needed perfectly, and had about 20 feet left over. And whaddya know, that Internet connection is allowing me to type all of this right now. It worked.

But the moment of truth....would I manage to get the upstairs connection working?

Did I mention there were two possible wiring sequences for the wall jack? I chose "B" -- on a hunch.

Oh--I also needed a refresher course on the RJ45-crimp connector wiring sequence...

But bottom line was...It all worked!

Tomorrow, I work upstairs! Yay!

The Kerry Nightmare

2004-10-20T10:13:00.000-04:00

This article is from the American Spectator.

http://www.spectator.org/dsp_article.asp?art_id=7267

--Geoff

The Kerry Nightmare
By William Tucker
Published 10/19/2004 12:09:28 AM

Last night I had the strangest dream. I guess it was a nightmare,
really. I remember most of it, except how it ended.

First I dreamed Kerry won the election. That wasn't so bad in itself.
He seemed Presidential enough for the job. He had a dignified bearing,
spoke well, didn't mangle his phrases. People were weary after four
years of uncertainty under George Bush and ready to try something new.

Kerry started off well. On January 22, in a burst of world optimism,
he went to the U.N. and laid down his mea culpa. America had gone it
alone too long, he said. We were ready to cooperate with the rest of
the world. The General Assembly gave him a 15-minute standing ovation.
His speech was cheered wildly in cities from Paris to Berlin to
Peshawar. A new day had dawned. Peace was at hand.

The only concrete result that came out of his U.N. visit, however, was
that Poland decided to accelerate its troop withdrawal, already
scheduled for 2005. Other allies said that since Kerry was throwing in
the towel, they were going to leave sooner than later as well.
Everyone but Great Britain packed up and headed home. Meanwhile, Kerry
visited France and Germany to hold long talks with President Chirac
and Chancellor Schroeder. The main outcome, however, was that they
told him Iraq was his problem and wished him well. Meanwhile,
terrorists in Iraq stepped up their operations

By the time President Kerry got back from Europe, things had taken a
turn for the worse. Both Sunni and Shi'ite leaders announced that,
despite the January election of Prime Minister Iyad Allawi, both now
regarded his victory as illegitimate. Democracy was a foreign system
that America was trying to impose on the Muslim world. Both
recommended a return to the Ummah, with religious leaders at the helm.
Since each sect claimed to the rightful heirs of Mohammed, each
claimed the right to the position.

The opposition became bolder. Several suicide bombers penetrated the
Green Zone and American casualties started to rise. With our allies
pulling out, our soldiers were also required to take over key
positions in the South. Suddenly we found ourselves stretched way too
thin. Rioting broke out in several cities of the Sunni Triangle.

All the pretty plans of the campaign were evaporating and President
Kerry now found himself facing the basic contradiction of his
position. Was Iraq the wrong war at the wrong place and the wrong
time? Or were we actually undermanned? For two long weeks, Kerry
mulled the problem while fierce debate was waged in Congress. Half of
Kerry's constituency called for a pullout and peace demonstrations
took place in New York and Washington. Many Democrats in Congress said
our troops were endangered, however, and call for a draft.

Kerry solved the problem by going to the United Nations. A high level
conference was arranged in Baghdad with all sides attending. A truce
was called and for three weeks an international panel debated the
issue. Finally, it was decided that 140,000 American troops would be
given safe passage out of the country. They would leave in an orderly
fashion and then Iraqis would continue to meet under U.N. supervision
to decide how they would govern themselves.

Like the Indians watching the British march out of Fort William Henry,
however, once the terrorists saw their enemies defeated they could not
restrain themselves. Before the American soldiers had even begun to
pack their bags, they were under daily attack. General fighting broke
out in several cities, even as the U.N. panel continued to meet. Then
a suicide bomber rammed the home of Prime Minister Allawi and killed
him. The elected government collapsed. Civil war broke out between
Sunni and Shi'ite militias, both claiming religious authority, while
the Kurds withdrew completely, declaring their own state..

Like so many a President before him, John Kerry found himself at the
mercy of events. All the pretty plans of his election campaign -- the
diplomacy, the conferences with our allies -- were forgotten. Suddenly
he was a commander-in-chief trying to rescue a stranded army.

Events didn't wait. Now convinced that America was abandoning the
Middle East and no longer content to watch Iran develop a nuclear
weapon that in two years would be able to hit Jerusalem, the Israelis
sent a fleet of F-16s to drop bunker-busting weapons on three nuclear
complexes at Bushehr, Natanz, and Arak. Rioting broke out in every
Middle Eastern capital. Terrorists streamed into Baghdad from every
direction. Syrian and Egyptian armies prepared for a retaliatory
attack against Israel.

That's when I woke up.

I've been walking around in a cold sweat all day thinking about these
things. But that's silly, I suppose. After all, it was only a dream.
The American people couldn't possibly elect John Kerry President,
could they?

William Tucker is a frequent contributor to The American Spectator and
a contributing writer to the American Enterprise.

Bush is back on track--wins third debate

2004-10-14T08:40:00.000-04:00

If you didn't watch last night's debate and all you know about it is
the slanted coverage it's getting this morning on CBS Radio News, take
it from me: Bush won.

Bush was alive last night. His wits were about him and his answers
were right at his fingertips. He spoke clearly, smoothly, and gave
powerful answers. Right out of the gate, in response to question
number one, he dealt Kerry his very best.

Kerry, quite by contrast, struggled. He was placed on the defensive
early in the debate, and took nearly three quarters of the remainder
of it to begin to show signs of recovery. He didn't look well, he
clearly was reaching for some of his answers, and in general showed a
pretty stark contrast to his performance during the first debate. In
fact, I was expecting to turn on the radio this morning to hear
excuses about how Kerry was battling a cold or the flu and hadn't been
on top of his game.

Kerry inflamed the electorate last night. He made a reference to Vice
President Cheney's daughter's homosexuality in response to a question
about gay marriage that was a cheap, gratuitous swipe: "SEN. KERRY:
We're all God's children, Bob. And I think if you were to talk to Dick
Cheney's daughter, who is a lesbian, she would tell you that she's
being who she was, she's being who she was born as. I think if you
talked to anybody, it's not choice." Kerry also made yet another
attempt to blame the President for a net job loss during his
administration, when everyone knows that the bulk of it was caused by
9/11, and the remainder by the recession Bush inherited from the
Clinton administration. Bush very adeptly pointed this out by
responding, "People need to remember, six months prior to my arrival
the stock market started to go down, and it was one of the largest
declines in our history. And then we had a recession, and we got
attacked, which cost us 1 million jobs."

Bush even worked in a decent slam on CBS and ABC's blatant
partisanship this election season, when he responded to Kerry's
allegation that "two leading national news networks have both said the
president's characterization of my health care plan is incorrect".
Bush came back with "In all due respect, I'm not so sure it's credible
to quote leading news organizations about -- never mind. (Laughs.)" --
clearly saying that major news organizations in this country can't be
trusted on these topics.

But you wouldn't know any of this from what the press was saying this morning.

According to CBS Radio News, their reaction polling shows a net win
for Kerry during the debate. Little or no mention was made of Bush's
comeback performance, and according to them, Kerry "achieved his
objectives".

This analysis is simply not correct. The people I've talked to this
morning who actually watched agreed: Kerry laid an egg. The question
is, how much of the electorate was in a mood like I was last night:
expecting only a mediocre performance from Bush, having had our
expectations lowered by the first debate? How many of them decided to
watch the baseball playoffs instead? Will CBS get away with picking
only the best Kerry sound clips and pushing the results of their
polls?

The best way to counter this is with information. You can read a transcript of the debate at NPR's website, or listen to the audio over the Internet. Listen and you'll hear for yourself how well the President performed in contrast to Kerry. You'll miss out on the visual impact -- you won't be able to see how energized the President was and how drained and flaccid Kerry was -- but you'll get the information the major networks seem determined to deny you.

I think you'll agree: Bush is back on track.

Beardless

2004-10-11T09:26:00.000-04:00

After nearly seven years of wearing a beard, it all came off yesterday.

I did it for half a dozen reasons, not the least of which was I
wondered what I looked like under the whiskers. (A younger looking
but more fully-faced me emerged.) Maybe the gray that was starting to
become more prominent pushed me into it. Maybe it was that the kids
are finally both old enough to understand that Daddy might look
different, but he's still the same guy.

Maybe I just was tired of feeling like I had to keep looking the same,
and it was time for a change.

I won't make any promises as to remaining beardless for any length of
time. This could last a week, a month, or a decade.

I don't think, however, that if I grow it back it will remain exactly
the same for so long. It's a man's perogative to change his
beardedness, and I didn't do that enough.

I'm not going to make the same mistake again.

Unless, of course, I want to.

An Open Letter to George Soros

2004-10-07T21:32:00.000-04:00

I decided to check out 'factcheck.com' -- the site which Vice President Cheney mistakenly cited during last Tuesday evening's debate. As I expected, I was redirected to Democrat billionaire George Soros' website, and read his plea to America to elect John Kerry.

Mr. Soros offers visitors to his website the opportunity to write him a personal letter offering comments on his political views. Herewith is my submission:

---

Mr. Soros,

I must respectfully disagree with your stance on the war in Iraq and your assessment of President Bush. Mr. Bush is exactly the leader we need.

Mr. Soros, I'd like to remind you that our alliances in Iraq greatly outnumber the alliances we had for the second part of World War II. During that great and necessary war, we liberated millions of Jews from an evil tyrant. Mr. Hussein's story resembles that of Hitler's in many ways. Mr. Hussein is a modern-day Hitler, or at least he was.

Iraq possessed numerous weapons of mass destruction that were used against his own people prior to the Persian Gulf War in a genocidal attack. He bombed Israel with Scud missiles during the prosecution of that war. He then denied the U.N. inspectors the freedom demanded by 16 U.N. resolutions to fully inspect and verify his compliance with the agreement that led to the end of that war, leaving the civilized world to worry about his potential to rise up again after the sanctions were lifted. One U.N. resolution ought to have been enough.

Instead of cooperation, Saddam Hussein offered obfuscation and deceit. Mr. Soros, your faith may be with the United Nations, but America's isn't. Sanction after sanction, resolution after resolution, the U.N. was pursuing a defeatist policy towards Iraq. The Clinton administration, ideologically aligned with the U.N., took a similar path.

In the meantime, it has now become known that a significant number of our historical allies were pursuing clandestine deals with Saddam Hussein which personally enriched officials from the governments of France, Germany and Russia enormously. This had the effect of negating the imposition the sanctions were supposed to create upon Mr. Hussein. Mr. Soros, how many more corrupt U.N signatories were we supposed to wait for as they were similarly enriched before the U.N. would get serious with Saddam Hussein?

After his election, George W. Bush stood up and did what he had to do: he enforced the resolutions that the U.N. wouldn't. And in his darkest hour, having been in receipt of America's gravest warning, Saddam Hussein decided to not cooperate, even though he knew full well what would become of him. The bravado and swagger you assign to President Bush should more rightly be assigned to Saddam Hussein.

Mr. Hussein and Iraq got what they asked for, Mr. Soros. America knows this. I submit to you, sir, that John Kerry and John Edwards know this as well. They voted for the resolution giving the President the authorization to prosecute the war on terror as he saw fit, knowing fully well that this meant that Mr. Bush would pursue the illegal and dangerous regime in Iraq.

I further submit to you, sir, that America is *indeed* safer today than it was before America took decisive and necessary action in Iraq. Yes, we see angry people on television beheading innocent westerners. The difference between this and what might have been otherwise is this: the beheadings and terrorist attacks are happening in Iraq, not America.

Frankly sir, I find you and your organization and the candidate it supports to be dangerous and irresponsible. I find your distortions of the facts to be reprehensible. I find your campaign ads to be nauseatingly untrue and unfair. And sir, I find your complicity in misleading the millions of Americans who were led to your website by Vice President Cheney's understandable and innocent mistake this past Tuesday evening during the debate to be indicative of the sort of dishonesty you and your ilk find acceptable.

Real Americans don't deceive others to make their point, Mr. Soros. Real Americans aren't afraid to have the courage of their convictions and stand behind their President. Real Americans are unafraid of the terrorists that align themselves against us.

You *are* afraid, sir, and that is the chief motivation behind your outrageous effort to deceive America. I find your cowardice disgusting, and your attempt to exploit fear for the furtherance of a political objective to be equal to that of the terrorists. It is my sincerest hope that you see proof that America doesn't share in your fear on election night when it re-elects George W. Bush. Perhaps when that happens you will seek the professional help I suspect you need, and your billions can be put towards a more useful and honest objective in the future.

Sincerely,
...

Movie: The Big Bounce

2004-10-06T21:04:00.000-04:00

In The Big Bounce, Owen Wilson and Morgan Freeman star in an adaptation of an Elmore Leonard novel which details a seemingly simple yet really involved conspiracy to steal $200K from a corrupt businessman. Owen Wilson plays Jack Ryan, a drifter and ne'er-do-well who's just gotten out of jail after clocking his construction foreman in the head with a baseball bat. Morgan Freeman plays Walter Crewes, the judge who befriends Ryan and invites him to spend some time working at his small Hawaiian resort as a handyman. Sara Foster plays Nancy Hayes, the beautiful yet deeply flawed mistress of the corrupt businessman, who finds herself as Ryan's co-conspirator and love interest.

This movie is very entertaining. I'm very impressed with the work of Wilson; he also starred in Starsky and Hutch, and I can see from viewing these two films recently that he's well on his way to becoming a star of the same magnitude as Chevy Chase. He and Morgan Freeman essentially steal the show; Freeman's Crewes is a dark, mysterious character, who at one point rather cryptically tells Ryan "sometimes, things are exactly as they seem." The audience is left with this odd bit of foreshadowing, quite uncertain as to what it means, yet knowing that it portends a significant change from the expected.

As an Elmore Leonard story, the movie predictably has its twists and turns, and the final outcome of the film is quite surprising and a bit confusing. Don't let the murkiness of the plot dissuade you from seeing the film; it really all does make sense, it just takes a moment to get what has really taken place at the end.

Like I said about Starsky and Hutch: this is not the pinnacle of artful filmmaking, this is bread-and-butter Hollywood entertainment. I enjoyed it.

Portable Atomic Clocks

2004-10-06T20:47:00.000-04:00

It seems that a marvelous advance in miniaturization has yielded an Atomic clock that can be packaged in a space the size of a grain of rice. With supporting circuitry, an entire atomic clock will fit in the space of a standard computer chip.

It will soon be possible to have a clock with you that is accurate to 25 microseconds per day, which translates to a second gained or lost once every 126 years. Power consumption is 73 milliwatts, which makes it comparable to the quartz crystal oscillators in common use in wristwatches today.

The researchers are working on an even more accurate version that would gain or lose a second once every 3,171 years, and have only 30 mW of power consumption. Most commercial atomic clocks are 50 times this size, and consume 100 times the power. This version will be about 1,000 times more accurate than a quartz crystal oscillator.

The atomic clock that the government relies upon for the national time standard is the size of a room and is accurate to 1 second lost in 30,000,000 years. As you can see, the more accurate your time needs are, the more sophisticated and expensive your atomic clock must become. But one second in 3,000 years is extremely accurate; far more so than what we typically have to work with.

Before this advance, the smallest atomic clock was approximately 1cc in size (not including supporting circuitry) and consumed several watts of power. This size and power requirement makes it impractical for inexpensive instruments. With the recent advances, GPS units and other consumer-grade items could sport clocks with enormous accuracy, which enables them to more precisely determine the user's location. One could also imagine high-end wristwatches that never need to be set, or computers with no clock drift.

It's hard to imagine the benefit this sort of thing offers until you take a careful look at the clocks in your life. The clock in my car, for example, drifts about a minute or two per week, depending on ambient temperature. In my VCR, it's off by two or three minutes per month. The PC is off by at least 20 seconds per day, necessitating frequent synchronizations via the Internet. My wristwatches -- inexpensive Timex units -- are off by about 15 seconds per month. Having a cheap, reliable time source makes data transfers more accurate, consumer devices more reliable, and enables you to be certain about the time in ways we find hard to imagine. There are four clocks in my kitchen. They only agree for about a week after I synchronize them. After this technology becomes widespread, we may never have to set a clock again!

On Dick Cheney and Halliburton

2004-10-06T07:53:00.000-04:00

During last night's Vice Presidential debate, mention was made of Dick Cheney's tenure with Halliburton, and John Edwards accused Cheney of profiting personally via Halliburton by granting them no-bid contracts in Iraq. John Kerry has run an attack ad accusing Cheney of receiving paychecks from Halliburton during his tenure as Vice President to the tune of two million bucks.

First, Cheney does not continue on Halliburton's payroll. According to factcheck.org, the idea that Cheney is on Halliburton's payroll is an enormous distortion. Dick Cheney signed a deferred compensation agreement in 1998, which means that he decided to spread his paychecks out over a number of years for tax purposes. Not only is deferred compensation legal and ethical, it is very commonplace. Halliburton *has* to pay him; it's money Cheney earned before he left the company. Second, the $2 million figure given in the Kerry attack ad is significantly incorrect; his actual deferred compensation totals $1.6 million, a difference of $400,000. Maybe $400K is a trivial matter to a billionaire like John Kerry, but it's not to me.

Second, we've been told that Cheney will benefit from Halliburton's profits in the Iraq war via stock options. This is also untrue. The same factcheck.org article above details the Cheneys' decision to irrevocably assign the proceeds of their stock options to three charities. They will not profit by the options under this arrangement, and they cannot change this decision at any point in the future. Essentially, the Cheneys sacrificed a potential profit of around $8 million to charity in order to avoid any appearance of impropriety. Pretty classy, if you ask me.

Finally, the idea that Halliburton could conceivably go bankrupt if the administration didn't give them preferred treatment has led some to conclude that Mr. Cheney's deferred compensation might be at risk if this were to happen. This has turned into another opportunity for the Kerry campaign to accuse him of a conflict of interest. In fact, Mr. Cheney has paid nearly $15,000 for an insurance policy on his deferred income; no matter what happens to Halliburton, the Cheneys will receive the compensation. This neatly absolves Mr. Cheney of any potential conflict, and inflicts mortal injury on any Democrat claim that Cheney is placing Halliburton's interest ahead of the nation's.

Frankly, the Cheney/Halliburton charges made by the Democrats piss me off. The Democrats are attempting to take advantage of the American public by exploiting its ignorance using these distortions. Mr. Cheney's prudence in his own personal finance, and his extreme generosity to charitable organizations has been twisted around by John Kerry and Terry McAuliffe. Not that the Democrats lying about something should come as a big surprise, but it is amazing at how publicly they appear to be willing to do so.

Surfer gets a lift when his wave turns into whale

2004-10-02T22:45:00.000-04:00

Here's a fascinating one: a surfer who inadvertentaly gets a ride on a whale! To hear an NPR interview with him, click here.

Talk about the ride of a lifetime!

Debate #1, Bush vs. Kerry: A Draw

2004-10-01T08:32:00.000-04:00

I watched last evening's first Presidential debate from start to
finish. As you know, I predicted a slam dunk victory for Mr. Bush a
few days ago. Neither candidate emerged the clear victor.

Bush had the facts on his side, Kerry had the more eloquent delivery
of his position. Bush clearly struggled for words at times, and
seemed to be under quite a bit of pressure in a format that he's
clearly not his best in. Kerry, on the other hand, although smoother
and more articulate, displayed an enormous breadth of knowledge on
foreign policy matters, but almost no depth.

The exchange between the two that will be most repeated in the
broadcast media will be the one in which Bush accused Kerry of sending
mixed messages to the troops and voting against the $87 billion war
supplemental, while saying that "he said he actually voted for it,
before he voted against it." Kerry's retort was that he "made a
mistake in talking about the war. President Bush made a mistake in
invading Iraq." While it was certainly Mr. Kerry's most shining
moment in the debate, his delivery on other topics was less than
convincing.

Bush's explanation of U.S. policy on North Korea was clearly well
thought out, and revealed the true difference between the candidates:
Bush's superior command of the demands of the Presidency due to his
experience in the job. Mr. Kerry's answer to problems in foreign
policy seems to be to convene meetings of foreign leaders and attempt
to resolve things as directly as possible. Mr. Bush's different
approach -- that sometimes direct talks (in the case of North Korea)
can do more harm than good -- resonated well.

It's no secret that I'm strongly biased towards Mr. Bush in this
election, yet I have the same unease with him that I had back during
the elections of 2000: for all of his excellent leadership
capabilities, his struggle to form his ideas into words is extremely
frustrating. It's quite hard to watch; I found myself trying to tell
him what to say through the T.V. set. Mr. Bush clearly has a better
case for continuing as President than Mr. Kerry does for unseating
him, but he has troubles where the rubber meets the road as far as
making the case is concerned. Frankly, I am still surprised that Mr.
Bush overcame this handicap and ascended to the Oval Office four years
ago. Although the pre-debate polls seem quite promising for Bush, it
is my feeling that the debates can only hurt him, not help him.
Conversely, Mr. Kerry is counting on the debates to propel him past
Mr. Bush on November 2.

Fox News's Bill Kristol probably said it best last night: Mr. Bush had
the opportunity to knock Mr. Kerry out of the race in this debate, and
he didn't make it happen. Is that a victory for Mr. Kerry?

Only time will tell.

Why George Bush Will Win the Debate with Kerry

2004-09-29T10:36:00.000-04:00

Suddenly I'm feeling very confident about how the first Presidential debate is going to go for Mr. Bush. If you have a look at the facts that the President has at his disposal, and consider that Mr. Kerry is not going to be given the benefit of a friendly press during this extremely public, live event, I think that Mr. Kerry is going to come up far short of Mr. Bush, as long as Bush manages to keep his wits about him.

I'm confident he will. What will happen is the President will show 70 million people what a real president looks like, and what a pretender to the throne John Kerry really is.

I'm going to take a spin of the roulette wheel and predict this will be a situation where Mr. Bush rises to the occasion. I'll go further and say this is going to be a slam-dunk.

I've seen people in the chattering classes say Mr. Bush's performance will be little more than a reformatted version of his campaign stump speech, that he's going to stick with the tried and true, and that his style is going to plainly contrast Mr. Kerry's. So the talk goes, Mr. Bush is a plain spoken man, whose hope for victory turns on making the most of the opportunity to trip John Kerry up in 'nuance' and wordiness. The implied assertion here is that Bush's intellect is inferior to Kerry's, and he can't beat him in a fair debate, so he's going to have to trick him. We keep hearing about how America should have 'lowered expectations' for the debate, and the President in particular.

I think, upon some reflection, that this is a load of crap.

What is going to happen is the President is going to convict Mr. Kerry as a charlatan based on a preponderance of the evidence, and do so quite decisively. He need not rely upon accusations of 'flip-flopping' to accomplish this, either. He can point to a multi-year (!) process of trying to get Saddam Hussein to comply with the various and sundry U.N. resolutions before making the decision to go to a very much justified war. He can point to the end of Hussein's reign in Iraq, and the forthcoming elections in January. He can point to the fact that our country's economy is in a state of rebound. He can point to the fact that the vast majority of al-Qaeda's senior-level operatives have been captured or killed since 9/11. He can point to regime change in Afghanistan. He can point to a lower level of unemployment than Bill Clinton had to campaign on in 1996. He can point to the successful creation of a Department of Homeland Security, Medicare reforms, tax cuts, a stock market that has been relatively strong, home ownership at an all-time high, low interest rates, low inflation, the change of heart in Libya, the cooperation of Pakistan, Iran, Yemen, and Saudi Arabia in finding and prosecuting terrorists despite the popular opinion held by their citizenry, the successful attempt to portray Islamic Americans as non-combatants in the war, and dozens of other things as being part of his success story.

He can also point to the fact that there hasn't been a repeat of 9/11 in three years and counting, or a terrorist attack of any kind in the United States. That, in and of itself, ought to be enough to win the debate.

But most of all, he will be able to portray himself as a leader who has a firm grasp of the issues of the day who is responsible for a long string of successes. He will be able to demonstrate his ability to protect the country to the extent that is possible, and he's going to convince people he'll do a better job than John Kerry would. And he'll be able to do so in January, 2005, when a Kerry administration would be trying to figure out how to get its liberal nominees confirmed by a Republican Congress.

But most of all, Mr. Bush's liveliness, his pervasive, infectious optimism, conviction, and intestinal fortitude is going to stand in sharp contrast to John Kerry, who seems to have his very own little black rain cloud overhead at every public moment. Mr. Bush needs only to be himself, and John Kerry needs to overcome his dour persona, his wide-ranging pessimism, and his constantly changing public pronouncements on things that matter.

Yeah, it's going to be a slam-dunk.

Hanging out in Usenet with the Lefties

2004-09-28T09:50:00.000-04:00

Sometimes, putting up with the lefties on Usenet is more than I can bear. It's an endless stream of anti-American, socialist, Europe-is-better propaganda, and it pushes my buttons. Finally today, I unloaded this angst by replying to a conservative poster who intimated that the Montreal Expos are moving to Washington, D.C. as an indirect result of Canada's refusal to support the U.S. in Iraq. Here's what I had to say.

"You see, Dan'L, being an American in this forum is discouraged. Being an American who leans somewhat conservative is verboten. Being a proud American who leans somewhat conservative results in your being treated with the same disdain usually reserved for a dead, half-eaten squirrel on one's front porch.

You're not supposed to represent us as the defenders of Democracy, or as the world's lone benevolent super power. Socialism is good. American capitulation is even better. We Americans would be better off if we just learned to love the world the way it is, and stop being such a bunch of show-offs with our tremendous economy and health care system that is the standard against which all others are measured. We should give away more for free -- it's not fair that we have so much, while the rest have so little. Didja know we ride on the backs of the poor, impoverished western Euro-peons, and then repay them by dragging them along into conflicts over oil? I betcha didn't know that all their roads are better over there, too, and nobody ever dies in a car in Europe. Here in the U.S., of course, we've got government agents flying in black helicopters with handguns practically *falling out of the aircraft* so that said agents can selectively kill those Americans who *should* have died in the rampant car accidents, but didn't. (We're such a violent society. I'm kinda ashamed. How about you?) Maybe we should contract out the positions on the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff to the U.N., and forget about this stars-and-stripes nonsense. I'm sure they can take care of that for us after they're finished monitoring our upcoming election. Sovereignity is so twentieth-century, don'tcha know?

I bet the Maple Leafs could find a spot that would take 'em south of the border as well. After they move out, there will be more room for reasonable leftist Americans to move to Canada, an altogether more sensible place. "

I know it's a rant, but dammit, it felt good!

Book: The Science of Good and Evil

2004-09-23T21:44:00.000-04:00

In The Science of Good and Evil : Why People Cheat, Gossip, Care, Share, and Follow the Golden Rule, author Michael Shermer makes the argument that morality and ethics are the product of tens of thousands of years of human evolution, and the direct result of human societies expanding from small groups of a few dozen individuals to vast empires of millions of individuals.

Shermer makes no bones about it: he's a self-described 'non-theist', which is to say he attempts to find the middle ground between 'theism' and 'atheism' -- essentially you can consider him a confirmed agnostic. As such, he searches for the roots of morality without operating under the assumption that they derive from God. In so doing, he makes, in my opinion, a rather compelling argument for these human ways of quantifying behavior as having descended from a long ancestry. At the same time, he acknowledges that his religious viewpoint, or rather the lack of it, isn't for everyone who will read the book, and allows that, if you like, you can just assume that a deity used the mechanism he describes to arrive at the current human condition.

Shermer argues that the purpose religion serves in a society is twofold: one is to offer some explanation for how the human race came into being (an origination story is found in every human culture, he claims) and to guarantee a certain basic level of human decency and altruistic behavior. He defines altruism as being a derivative of the 'you scratch my back and I'll scratch yours' arrangement people typically find themselves in. He then goes on to detail how religion has slowly but surely found itself less and less relevant as society continues to evolve; scientific discovery has done away with much of the need for religious origination stories and the secular rule of law has taken care of the needs of managing our complex society. With this in mind, he details a theory of moral evolution, along the way giving very specific detail and evidence from anthropological studies of current and past human societies, as well as studies of primate behavior.

I'll not kid you and pretend that one read through this rather weighty tome is enough for a typical reader to come away with a complete understanding of Mr. Shermer's theory. His argument is carefully researched, thickly annotated, and written in language that is best described as exacting and precise. His use of anthropology to bolster his case assumes an educated reader. It was a serious challenge to understand some of the concepts he proffered. At the same time, it was an extremely enlightening and worthwhile read, especially if you have an interest in human society. You don't have to be a scientist to get a large portion of the value offered here.

If I were to offer a criticism of this book, it is to say that Shermer doesn't manage to completely escape without letting the careful reader know that his politics are decidely left-leaning. He manages to not make an enormous point of it, but nevertheless, one can detect a small amount of political influence in the work. Another minor quibble will be a somewhat emotionally-wrought plea for humanity to "progress" in its moral evolution; again, his preaching is limited and not enough to detract from the bulk of the text. A different editor, I suppose, might have deleted it entirely and the work wouldn't have suffered.

Highly recommended.

The Science of Good and Evil: ISBN 0805077693, Owl Books, paperback, 368 pages, $16.00

Movie: Starsky and Hutch

2004-09-23T21:10:00.000-04:00

Ok, one of the first things you have to know going into this movie is that it's pure, unadulterated formulaic Hollywood crap: take a typical 1970s action TV series, plug in contemporary actors into the leading roles, and let the joke writers go nuts. Oh, and a car chase or two with some vintage Detroit iron keeps things moving, right?

Well, almost.

Starsky and Hutch does succeed as inexpensive entertainment, provided you didn't pony up $8.50 to go see it in a theater. As a DVD rental, it's decent, if not entirely convincing eye candy. The plot? Well, the plot seems to be to get Snoop Dogg onscreen in 70s pimp threads as often as possible, and if Carmen Electra can be persuaded to jiggle her way across the screen a few times, even better. Two nights after watching it, I'm not quite sure I remember what the two lead characters were supposed to be chasing around as police officers, although they did seem to chase around quite a bit. If I recall correctly, Central Casting served up a typical wealthy 70s drug lord to serve as a foil.

The movie probably cast a 1975 Ford Gran Torino in the best light it has ever been seen; I'm not a Ford guy, but it hurt to see how many of those cars they wrecked. On one particular jump scene towards the end of the film, the front end of the car clearly separated at the firewall. I don't know why they didn't edit it out, but maybe the supply of those old tanks is pretty short and they didn't have another one to re-shoot.

As far as the DVD extras package is concerned: there wasn't anything memorable about it. Overall, this is a good movie to watch if you've popped for the "all you can eat for $20/month" package down at the local Blockbuster, and they're out of Kill Bill 2. Otherwise, I wouldn't bother.

The Intrepid hits 100K

2004-09-23T20:50:00.000-04:00

This past Tuesday, our '98 Intrepid ES flipped over 100,000 miles on the way home from work. The fateful moment occurred just as I was coasting down the exit ramp from I-75 northbound onto 14 Mile.

This car has been reasonably reliable so far; it is much more confidence-inspiring than either of the two Caravans were when they hit 100K. It's probably in better shape than the Duster was, although that car was pretty badly neglected and abused. The other Intrepid was sold off when it hit 65K miles; it might have made a good, lasting car if I had been willing to put the $1200 steering rack it needed into it, but it was at a break-even point, so I let it go.

The only major repairs to date have been a loose power steering rack and pinion (needed a new rack) and the automatic temperature control unit fritzing out. Of course, it was rear-ended a couple of years ago and needed over $3K in repairs, but you can't really count that.

Right now, the front end seems a little loose and noisy, the brakes are a bit noisy, and it could probably use a fresh set of tires. It's also due to have its coolant replaced, along with the timing belt, and since my luck runs poorly, I'm going to have to get the timing belt replacement done probably before winter sets in, otherwise the thing will probably let go when I'm turning about 5,000 RPM and grenade the motor. It could use a new battery, too -- not that this one is bad, but it is the original factory unit, and it's probably time.

But aside from some minor maintenance needs, it's still quite reliable and seems ready for another 100K. The motor's still quite strong, the transmission shifts well, and the body has absolutely no rust anywhere I have looked. So far, the interior has held up alright as well. I'm not terribly confident the stereo will last the winter, but this is minor. Aside from some stone chips and a few parkinglot dings, it's about as straight and clean as any used car I've owned at any mileage, let alone a six-year-old 100K car.

I'd really like to have a Hemi-powered Magnum, or possibly a Charger, when and if that vehicle becomes a reality. But I'm not going to be in a position to sign up for payments on a $30K car anytime soon, so that means, realistically, I'm going to have to wait one to two years for them to start finding their way onto the used car market. If something happens to this Intrepid in the meantime, and I've got anything coming in the way of a useful insurance settlement, I guess I'd go for another 'trep, possibly an SXT with the H.O. 3.5L engine. But, if all goes well, this car should easily last another couple of years...and after all, it's paid for!

Movie: The Ladykillers

2004-09-15T23:37:00.000-04:00

Of course, by now we've become accustomed to the oddness that is a typical Coen Brothers film: the misanthropic characters, the strange, yet somehow oddly balanced plot lines, the bizarre outlook. Usually the acting is first rate, and the cinematography a nuanced work of art.

The only real question is: what topic did the boys decide to pursue this time?

In The Ladykillers, the Coen Brothers seek to answer the question: does crime pay?

Tom Hanks delivers a decent-if-not-superb performance in the lead role as Professor D.H. Dorr, a loquacious PhD of 'dead languages' who plans to use his sabbatical to rob a local casino by tunnelling in from his landlady's basement. He brings along with him a cast of characters that is the canonical motley bunch: we have the stereotypical young black hip-hop-flava miscreant (the 'inside man'), the 60's relic liberal social activist (as the munitions expert!), an Asian donut shop operator (the martial arts expert), and a college football goon (the muscle).

And whoa, what a whopper of a landlady: a church-going elderly southern Black, who in her moments away from the Lord's house tends to her knitting and talks to a portrait of her long-deceased husband. She takes it upon herself as her mission to provide moral clarity for the town she lives in.

Suffice it to say the heist is pulled off, but not without some difficulty. The movie starts out typical Coen Brothers confusing, as each character and important place in the movie get their own disjointed introduction. We learn that there are weekend group retreats for sufferers of I.B.S. We learn gas masks can be harmful to our four-legged friends, that Jews sometimes wander into the strangest places and sometimes a hearse really is an appropriate mode of transport for a musical group. And finally, we learn what it takes to kill an old lady when five men with a gun decide it has become necessary to do so.

If you're a fan of the Coen Brothers, this film won't disappoint. It doesn't have the same wide appeal Fargo or O Brother did, although the soundtrack is similarly excellent (but for different reasons, it being almost exclusively Gospel and hip hop). On the other side of the coin, it isn't Hudsucker Proxy or Barton Fink weird, either. If you wander into this film not knowing what to expect, however, you'll be left wondering just what the hell happened.

Recommended (if you dare.)

The CBS Brouhaha

2004-09-13T21:39:00.000-04:00

Today I read Stanley Kurtz's rather fascinating analysis of the media situation, with special regard paid to the current brouhaha over at CBS over the alleged documents written by 1st Lt Bush's superior officer. Kurtz posits that there is one reason why CBS is standing its ground: its customers demand it.

As time has gone by, so Kurtz's argument goes, CBS has become increasingly more and more liberal in their worldview, and their coverage has come to reflect this. The result is that their more conservative viewers have tuned them out,and their audience is trending more and more liberal all the time. As such, CBS's insistance on maintaining their stand on the"document-gate" is a direct result of one thing: their customers (the viewers) wanted a story like this!

This is a striking departure from the conservative view on the media. The conservatives hold that the media is liberal because they have an agenda, and this may well be true. Their motivations for this, however, are not quite the mysterious conspiracy that conservatives might be lead to believe. Rather, the 'mainstream' media is just playing to the audience they know how to serve best, and have forsaken the conservative viewers to other media outlets. Simple capitalism at work: make what people want to buy, literally or figuratively.

It's unfortunate that it has come to this, but it's an argument that makes enormous sense to me. Back in the days before Cronkite, members of the media made an effort to be even-handed on political stories. With little or no competition, they could afford to be; there were only three companies divvying up an enormous pie. Obviously, even the one that came in last in that race managed to survive. Now, with the proliferation of cable TV, the redefinition of the AM radio band as the haven for conservative talk, and the polarization that started, oddly enough, around the time John Kerry was giving his testimony before Congress (okay, maybe it goes back even further to the McCarthyism days) the traditional media outlets are under serious, and increasing, competitive pressure.

They've got to do their best to retain their audience. So they tilt left. It sells.

The unfortunate part of this is that the 'undecideds' still primarily rely upon the traditional media to get their news. This means that the conservatives have an uphill battle each election season to get their vote: they've got to be bigger and louder than broadcast channels 2 through 13. In the inner-city, I imagine, where poverty is more widespread and cable TV is less common, this is probably a real obstacle.

The other problem, as I see it, is that liberalism comes with the cachet that it's the political philosophy of the educated. It is very seductive to many to want to associate themselves with the political party of the educated elite. Of course, it's no big secret that journalism majors are usually minted by the same higher-education machine that produces so many other liberals. So it becomes a self-feeding cycle of liberalism-education-media affirmation, which begets more liberals.

Ain't it sinister?

Book: Bush Country

2004-09-12T20:59:00.000-04:00

In Bush Country : How Duby Became A Great President While Driving Liberals Insane, author John Podhoretz covers the first three years-and-change of George W. Bush's administration from the standpoint of a conservative. Mr. Podhoretz is unabashed in his praise for Mr. Bush, offering little, if any, criticism of his Presidency.

Essentially, this is a rehash of the President's actions since 9/11/01, however, there are enough details of his earlier life -- deciding to quit drinking, for example -- to make the book seem well-rounded. Inside are probably the clearest articulations of Bush's policies I've read; the Pre-Emption Doctrine is given here with supreme clarity. Mr. Podhoretz, evidently playing to a conservative audience, never fails to take a few swipes at the American left in each chapter. The narrative ends in the earliest months of 2004, so we're only treated to the briefest of commentary on the 2004 election season, but John Kerry does receive a mention.

If you're a conservative, or at least plan to vote Republican, this book is a good way to see, all in one place, the Bush Presidency cast in it's most positive light. If you're a liberal, you'll likely react to this book in the same way Republicans do to Michael Moore. Recommended.

Bush Country -- How Dubya Became A Great President While Driving Liberals Insane
By John Podhoretz
ISBN 0-312-32472-3
St Martin's Press, New York
© 2004

Military strength increase under Bush

2004-09-02T11:38:00.000-04:00

One of the Klingons emailed with a plea for help in demonstrating that the military is getting stronger under the Bush administration. Apparently he's embroiled in an argument with a liberal co-worker.

I came up with the following:

One measure of the strength of our military is in the total number of
people it employs. The DOD provides these figures annually at the end
of September. They're freely and widely available on the Internet.

The story these numbers tell is very clear:

Source: DOD Workforce Overview: Total military numbers.

http://web1.whs.osd.mil/ (you'll have to view the individual .pdfs hosted here)

All numbers as of September 30 of each year:

Year	Total Personnel	Change	Note
2003	1,434,377	(+22K)
2002	1,411,634	(+26K)
2001	1,385,116	(+778)	Bush Presidency begins
2000	1,384,338	(-1K)
1999	1,385,703	(-21K)
1998	1,406,830	(-30K)
1997	1,438,562	(-30K)
1996	1,471,722	(-40K)
1995	1,518,224	(-92K)
1994	1,610,490	(0)	First year of data

As you can see, the Clinton administration steadily reduced the
overall number of military personnel during their tenure. The Bush
administration began to reverse the trend in their first year, and is
steadily building us back up. It will take awhile at current rates to
get us back to where we were before Clinton hacked and slashed the
military, but there it is, my friend: hard numbers.

Bear in mind that military technology has continued to evolve
dramatically in the past 10 years. (Fortunately, because of the
Internet explosion, the technologists were able to do more with less,
since Clinton routinely cut the budget.) The upshot is that *more* is
being done with fewer people, yet the number of people is rising.
This, surely, points to a military that is getting even more
dramatically stronger than the increase in numbers would suggest.

Article: Two new rocky 'super Earths' found

2004-09-01T09:37:00.000-04:00

It would seem that we're quickly improving our ability to detect new planets revolving around distant stars. Previously, we were only able to find Jupiter-sized gas giants, because our detection involves being able to see the host star's 'wobble' induced by the gravitational effects of their enormous satellites. Apparently this technique is undergoing a process of continual refinement, and we're seeing smaller planets as a result.

The most recent discoveries detailed in this article are of Neptune-sized planets. Neptune is approximately seventeen times Earth's mass, and about three times Earth's diameter (contrasted with Jupiter, which is approximately 318 times Earth's mass and roughly 11 times the diameter).

These newest planets, which orbit very, very close to their host stars (closer, in fact, than does Mercury to our own sun) may have liquid oceans, or atmospheres of dense steam.

The bottom line appears to be this: as our ability to detect progressively smaller planets improves, the number of planets we will find will increase dramatically, since it is thought that the majority of alien planets are Earth-sized or smaller. Since life as we know it exists in Earth-sized gravity, lower planetary mass is helpful if you hope to detect alien civilizations. Jupiter's gravity is about 2.5 times Earth's with an escape velocity about 5X. Neptune's gravity is 1.14 times Earth's with an escape velocity of just slightly over 2X. As you can see, this means that we're getting *much* closer to "seeing" Earth-sized planets.

We may just phone E.T. before he gets the chance to drop in on us first!

Savannah Begins 1st Grade

2004-08-31T07:31:00.000-04:00

Today's the day that Savannah begins the first grade.

She's absolutely fearless about it. At last night's 'Meet the Teacher' gathering, the first thing she did was run right up to Miss Palmeri and give her a hug. The girl just doesn't have a whole lot of anxiety about teachers.

I will be watching with great interest to see how she does. Academically, I've got no concerns. She can already read all of the spelling test words that have been decided upon for the entire year...she will need to work on spelling them (her spelling is largely phonetic at this point), but I don't expect that first grade will be a huge challenge to her in this respect.

What does concern me a bit is the fact she's the youngest kid in the entire class, by as much as a year in some cases. This is an accident due to the time of year she was born. Most first graders are apparently six-going-on-seven; Savannah's five-going-on-six. I've been the youngest kid in a grade school classroom and it wasn't fun. Undoubtedly her experience will be different, since the circumstances are quite different, but I'm concerned she'll be too far behind the other kids developmentally. Time will tell, I guess.