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clerihew epigram See: Wikipedia: Clerihew
T i m o W i r k m a n V i r k k a l a | June 1, 2006 | permalink |
My Mac crashed and at all my workas an excuse any more. It was almost as bad as when I replaced my 12-year-old Pontiac with my first brand-new car. All of a sudden, people expected me to show up at work on time and stuff. It was a verys stressful turn of events.
robot Roomba See: iRobot® Roomba® Red Vacuuming Robot
Buying a robot to clean one's floors may seem a performative confession of laziness. But so is hiring a maid. Truth is, when I get home, cleaning the floor is just about the last thing I want to do. So I bought iRobot's Roomba® Red.
The Red is the cheapest, least intelligent robot in the line, but it was on sale and I wanted to try it out before I bought a more expensive one, the kind that you can schedule to do the work late at night or while you are away, etc.
The company claims it is a vacuum cleaner, but much of the cleaning seems to be done by two sets of brushes, one set spinning sideways, and another, more normal set working to take up the big chunks. It works better than any carpet sweeper I've used. It neatly handles the kitchen floor, which is a hard surface. It expertly moves on to the indoor/outdoor carpeting of the foyer and dining room. And it even takes on the thicker pile of the living room carpet.
The Roomba Red is not programmable. It simply starts cleaning in a spiral, and as soon as it hits something it reacts. The pattern has a high random factor, so by the time it's cleaned a whole room it's gone over most of it many times.
The neatest thing about the Red is that it roombas right underneath some pieces of furniture, busies itself cleaning where I never even look, and then comes out to do the rest of the room. It's almost charming to watch it disappear underneath the loveseat, hum around underneath for a while, and then emerge, as if victorious. It could have been called Orpheus.
It has no trouble with most chairs in its way. It fits nicely underneath the old-fashioned kitchen chairs, for instance, getting what it can, and moving on. It's pretty thorough.
I've taken to moving some of the chairs around, when the dining room is being done. Sometimes the table and chairs in that room prevent enough of an obstacle course to prevent it from getting to every section.
I was surprised to see it easily navigate from the no-pile kitchen floor up to the low-pile dining room floor to the higher-pile living room floor, with no trouble. I gather that the higher-priced Roombas can be programmed to stick to one room at a time. That'd be nice. As it is, if I want to restrict it to one room, I place an object in the way. Pretty easy.
So does it take the place of a vacuum cleaner? Sorta. I prefer to think of it as the best carpet sweeper in existence. I note that the name "Roomba" may evoke "Room 'Bot" — but is more obviously an anagram for "A Broom."
The first time I ran it, it ran out of juice before it was done, exhausting itself on the higher-pile carpet of the living room. It also scared my cat.
It's easier than most vacuum cleaners to remove the dirt and dust it accumulates, and it's easy to plug into the wall. I have it set, nicely, underneath the old Victrola . . . as a contrast of technologies.
The local Sears store sold me its last model, a floor model (quite literally), for $75 plus tax and (yes) an insurance plan. The total bill came to about $92. It's arguably one of my better investments
in high tech.
T i m o W i r k m a n V i r k k a l a | June 4, 2006 | permalink
clerihew epigram See: Wikipedia: Clerihew
T i m o W i r k m a n V i r k k a l a | June 5, 2006 | permalink
clerihew epigram See: Wikipedia: Clerihew
T i m o W i r k m a n V i r k k a l a | June 6, 2006 | permalink
clerihew epigram See: Wikipedia: Clerihew
T i m o W i r k m a n V i r k k a l a | June 7, 2006 | permalink
penectomy Thailand See: Penis removal
Fortunately, the Wikipedia entry on penis removal is not a stub, including such fascinating material as this paragraph on Thailand:
In Thailand, penis attacks are reputedly more common than in any other country.[citation needed] In fact, in Thailand more penis reattachment surgeries are performed than in any other nation. In contrast to such battery in Western nations, the motivating factors in Eastern nations world vary and are not necessarily lovers' quarrels. For example, in November 2004 Manit Srithammathan cut off two teenage boys' penises and threw them in a canal. When the police questioned Srithammathan, he said he had cut off and disposed of their penises because the boys refused to confess to stealing $1,250 from his ATM account after they were shown videotape evidence of their theft. Typically also, the perpetrator's disposal of severed penises is unconventional. In 1997, a Thai wife had severed her husband's penis while he was asleep and attached it to helium balloons.
Lorena Bobbit is apparently not alone in the focus of her anger, but not nearly as creative as at least one Thai wife.
T i m o W i r k m a n V i r k k a l a | June 9, 2006 | permalink
rule of thumb epigram See: Walker's Corollary to Sturgeon's Law
T i m o W i r k m a n V i r k k a l a | June 11, 2006 | permalink
clerihew epigram See: Wikipedia: Clerihew
T i m o W i r k m a n V i r k k a l a | June 12, 2006 | permalink
egalitarianism ethics See: Instead of a Blog: Qualitarianism
Today I wrote a longish note on Instead of a Blog about equality. And did not once mention poverty.
And yet poverty is the biggest issue, though surely not the only one, that obsess most egalitarians.
Why would I ignore it? Well, I have some standing. Unlike most philosophical egalitarians, unlike most people obsessed that there exist other people who are poor, I actually know and am friends with many who are poor. And I see their struggles. Many of these struggles are against habit, some of them against outrageous fortune. Generally, from what I've seen in America, there are good reasons why so-and-so is poor. Few opportunities; yes . . . that is, fewer than I've had, and fewer than the rich have. But the opportunities they routinely throw away! And the levels upon levels of vice!
There are exceptions to this. But one reason for rampant poverty is that the poor have largely given up. They stay on their reservations, taking handouts or working at low-remuneration jobs, or both. The diseased and dying I feel more sorry for than most. But still . . .
I am not rich. I could be richer, if I wanted to be. Many of the poor could be, too.
This fact of reality must really vex egalitarians. Which is why they go to such great lengths to deny it.
I have no reason to deny it. I see it all the time. I know it from both inspection and introspection.
Still, much poverty in America is institutional. Many of the handouts given are also key parts in a velvet trap. And, further, many things done allegedly for the poor,
such as housing laws, conspire together to make it harder for the poor to get ahead. Arguably, obsessions with public education, and the credentialism it has spawned, have hurt the hardworking poor most of all, because it sorts humanity according to their ability to endure schooling, and excel on tests. Wow. What a system we have!
I've never been rich. But I've seen many avenues for advancement go by me. I've recognized them. And, usually, I've endorsed my non-use. One can get ahead in society by conforming to mass demand. That's fine. But my interest in pleasing lots of people is remarkably low. So, with this as an accepted standard, I accept my current limitations of income with some aplomb.
Most of those poorer than I have done the same, at least at some point. But most won't 'fess up to the reality of what they've done. Many aren't even aware. But perhaps a fleeting, subconscious awareness is what prevents the bulk of the poor from manning the barricades. They know they aren't really worth it.
Though some, glumly, may realize that they are worth more than they are getting, and don't know how to do anything about it.
Well, they have a point. The pointlessness of politics is something that turns even the greatest idealists glum, at least every now and then. Of course, when the rich are glum, we don't worry; they sob all the way to the bank. Who could complain, Richard Cory?
T i m o W i r k m a n V i r k k a l a | June 13, 2006 | permalink
libertarianism servility See: If Housepets Were Libertarians
I enjoy a good comic barb thrown in my direction. Some of my favorite forms of humor are self-deprecating, and, even more, deprecating of the groups I happen to fit into.
You'll often catch me making fun of Finns, for example, or libertarians.
Hey, I once said of my political kindred, When libertarians put their heads together, you can hear freedom ring.
I thought this a rather funny, and subtle, put-down. (I've gotta million of 'em, folks.)
So I like a good comic jest at libertarians' expense. John Gunnar Bergstrom's Libertarian Man
cartoons were occasionally even funny.
But this one, from Z?
It may be slightly amusing, but I have a hard time not feeling very sorry for the artist, as well as the editor who published it. The subtext of that cartoon is very simple: we are pets to the state. Subservient. Not free. Servile.
Of course the text states, basically, that libertarians are ungrateful of what has been given
them by the state, by government. This parallel is intended to be drawn by the reader, from the first panel: Can you name even one thing that politicians have ever done for me?
But the state is pretty much a package deal, and for every good thing we get, we get our money taken away, and our freedoms abridged. If someone doesn't like a bargain, we expect them to stop grousing about it and just not make the deal. A pet? Run away. But in politics, my bargain is your bargain, and running away often means running away to a new master. The only solution is getting rid of our masters. I'm with White Fang, folks, it may be time to go dingo.
From the second panel, we are told, by analogy, that libertarians deny the obvious functional supports of society. But libertarians rarely want to get rid of infrastructure; they want it run better, under a regime of voluntary contract and competitive bidding. The second panel is preciously close to a lie about the libertarian agenda.
The third panel is quite funny, and nicely directs against a few libertarians who have lavished off of family fortunes all their lives. But none of those I've known actually express such contempt for the poor sods elsewhere. I usually hear such contempt of the poor from libertarians who actually do work. And work hard. A few even work smart.
It may be that the responsible artist and responsible editor just thought the ideas of the 'toon funny. That they are deceitful, and express a worldview about the state that makes of human beings servile buffoons? Well, I've always known this about leftists. It's nice to see it backed up so succinctly.
The artist, Barry Deutsch, blogs under the self-deprecatingly titled blog, Alas, a blog.
For my taste, I still think that my Instead of a Blog
is the best of the self-deprecating quasi-blog/non-blog titles, referencing as it does a good book entitled Instead of a Book. This page says he's most interested in feminist and gender issues. So I'm even less interested than before ever to meet the man. I was a feminist once, in my teens, and grew out of that form of buncombe right quick.
Oh, and when it comes to gender? I prefer sex.
T i m o W i r k m a n V i r k k a l a | June 15, 2006 | permalink
From Freedom to Bondage<,/a>A Plea for Liberty, introduction
music serenity See: Paul Hindemith's compositions
Paul Hindemith's symphonies begin with the great Mathis der Maler Symphony, a 1934 symphonic suite based on his opera about the German painter Mathias Grünewald. The music is well-integrated, so it's more than just a suite
; it deserves the title Symphony. It also deserves more listeners. I heard it in concert 25 years ago, and have several recordings of it. I like it more every time I listen to it. I'm afraid to listen to it again before it usurps a place on my Five Favorite Symphonies list:
Hindemith's next full symphony (he wrote several sinfoniettas) came out in 1940, and is rarely played. I've a Leonard Bernstein performance on LP that I must listen to later today; it's probably been ten years since I last heard it. My memory has it that the Symphony in E-flat is a fine work, very Hindemithian,
if you know what I mean.
Trouble is, too many people don't know what I mean! Though his 1943 Symphonic Metamorphosis on Themes by Carl Maria von Weber is fairly popular, too often listeners either think Hindemith is too stodgy
or too wild,
depending on whether the listener is (a.) an aficionado of 20th century music, or (b.) the very opposite of that. Neither group recognizes his
I put up Symphonia Serena (1946) on my iPod last night, and have listened to it several times since. This has quickly become my second favorite, and most listened-to, of his symphonies. It is not just expertly crafted, it is fun. Full of orchestral play, soloistic, almost concerto-like writing, and invention. The melodies are great. And a few of the orchestral touches almost send shivers to the spine.
The Symphonie Die Harmonie der Welt
is nearly as good. It's a much tighter work, actually, in that the range of emotions and themes is much less varied. For some reason, the bountiful invention of the previous symphony is far better.
It seems that 1951 was a good year for Hindemith, for in addition to Die Harmonie der Welt
Symphony, he also composed the masterful Symphony in B flat for Concert Band. It's one of the best works in the medium.
Seven years later he completed the Pittsburgh Symphony. I've never heard it.
But the more I listen to Symphonia Serena, the more impressed I am. Serene
doesn't quite do it justice, though. The word conjures up an expectation of music without drama. But that's not this symphony. It's just that most of the drama is moderate in passion, though not in invention. The justification for the name would more likely come from Hindemith's biography. I have this suspicion that he, like Milhaud, was a serene man. Happy. Imperturbable. Cheerful.
Not bad qualities for music, either.
T i m o W i r k m a n V i r k k a l a | June 20, 2006 | permalink
From Freedom to Bondage<,/a>A Plea for Liberty, introduction
clerihew epigram See: Wikipedia: Clerihew
T i m o W i r k m a n V i r k k a l a | June 21, 2006 | permalink
hat cap See: Jaxon Wool Ascot
I've been wearing them for years, ever since I got my first pair of glasses. Hats. Particularly a specific style of cap. 
It is streamlined, like a first-generation iMac or the stylized swoosh of a racecar. It has a brim, so it keeps rain off my glasses — which is the reason I started wearing hats. It strikes me as one of the most practical and good-looking hats ever designed.
But I've never known what this particular style is called.
Until now.
It's the Ascot cap.
I went looking for it on the Internet, and found it. It's nice to know the name.
I don't know, yet, much about its history, though.
Amazon will gladly sell you some: http://www.amazon.com/gp/search//102-7566931-9322510?&node=1036682&keywords=ascot%20cap
T i m o W i r k m a n V i r k k a l a | June 22, 2006 | permalink
On Progress: Its Law and Cause
I've seen a few films this year. So far, Thank You For Smoking and The Matador are the only flawless, thoroughly riveting films I've seen, and Inside Man, for all its alleged problems, was good enough for me to watch it twice in the theaters. All others lacked something. Or truly sucked.
First, I admit: United 93 was a lot better than I expected. Why had my expectations been so low? Because the critics talked utter bilge both pro and con. Oh, well; it's a fine film, though regrettably shot entirely with shaky handhelds, a style I'm now thoroughly disgusted by (and one I thought "jumped the shark" with Husbands and Wives). Folks, please remember the SteadiCam!
This has been another year for animation, and my favorite so far has been Ice Age 2: The Meltdown. I was surprised by the negative reviews, for I thought it had a quest-oriented plot (find an escape!) and good, funny characters. Over the Hedge was also good, though marred by a frame story that was not so interesting, and bad drawing of the character spoken by Bruce Willis.
But far higher praise went to Cars, a film that I thought predictable, sophomoric, and in too many portions something of a yawner. When the best thing you can say about a film is the voice-over acting of Larry the Cable Guy, you know it's not that good. The pop music soundtrack, played loudly and in-your-face for quite a number of scenes, was atrocious. That being said, there were a lot of clever touches, including the casting of Paul Newman as an old hot rod.
The box-office success of Dark Waters last year, the utter brilliance of The Exorcism of Emily Rose, and my appreciation of Skeleton Key, had led me to expect a renaissance in horror film. And yet this year's Silent Hill was a mess. The first half hour was great. But then it got stupid. By the time zombies shimmied towards the lens and the light, I was laughing in my seat. By the end, I was almost on the floor. But it wasn't that bad so as to be good. The very ending was serious, and didn't fit with the over-the-top cultic hell we'd been put through before.
Wasn't this the year they did the Pink Panther remake? I'm already forgetting. It was better than I expected . . . though I have an idea for a sequel that would play better than this one played. Other films, such The Break-Up, were a tad less funny than I'd hoped. (Though it still wasn't half bad. One of the scenes with Jon Favreau was hilarious.)
But the worst film of the year that I've seen is X-Men: The Last Stand. This was so badly written, so badly conceived that no amount of special effects and no amount of first-rate acting could save it. And it didn't get first-rate acting from its first- and second-rate cast. Only the actor whom I think of as Jean-Luc Picard (sorry; his real name isn't as exotic, so I keep forgetting it) did a spell-binding job . . and yet his best moment is a voice-over at the end. (Yes, people who watch it must endure every moment of the end credits rolling. The only good scene in the film is at the very, very end. I suggest getting to the theater in time to sneak in for the ending, and then go to some other film.)
The most watched film so far has been The Da Vinci Code, which turned out a lot better than I expected, though still quite dumb in several of its plot points. The thing to like about the film is what many intelligent moviegoers dislike: it's plot is an anti-McGuffin; the focus of the plot, the thing sought or avoided, is not inconsequential: it makes the movie worth seeing. The thing to dislike about the film is the sheer idiocy of elements of the storyline, including the "surprises" at the end. As Jesse Walker pointed out, the whole mystery could have been solved by a call from Grandma. That's dumb. But much talked-about lines of dialogue, such as Tom Hanks's great line about needing to get to a library, are not inherently risible in the kind of film this is. Oh, well.
I am deeply ashamed to say I enjoyed portions of Poseidon, because it was a truly terrible film. And yet I got caught up in a few sections of it. Every now and then even a critical person lets his guard down. It was dreck, I know, I know; and I did leave the theater shaking my head. But still, the disaster film is made for a reason: it draws you in. Perhaps I just enjoy seeing characters played badly by second tier actors die horrible deaths.
Lucky Number Slevin was a thriller in the Pulp Fiction mode, but, though nicely convoluted, did not have enough of the QT in the dialogue to make the convolutions of plot and presentation quite justifiable. A near miss, but a guilty pleasure.
Last night I watched Brick, a film noir shot digitally and set in a River's Edge moral landscape, with a teen murder at the heart of the story. Very seriously made, with no winking at the camera as teenagers say very adult things. This is stylized, not realism. I'd say artful, though, and forgive a lot, were it not that the theater that showed this film neglected to keep the film in focus. What a terrible waste of a moviegoing experience.
Many of the previews that I've seen have turned me off of the movies I'm supposed to want to see, like The Lake House, which strikes me as offering a preposterous high concept for a love story. Nacho Libre is probably the most dreadful bit of deliberate nincompoopery I've contemplated in quite a while, while the latest rendition of the Fast and Furious franchise leaves me coughing in the carbon monoxide-filled exhaust.
A reviewer for Click used the word "heartfelt." Along with "uproarious," this is a movie-reviewer word that is more likely to turn my stomach than elicit interest in a film, so I will probably keep away from Click by many . . . clicks.
T i m o W i r k m a n V i r k k a l a | June 24, 2006 | permalink
opium War on Drugs See: Romancing Opiates: Pharmacological Lies and the Addiction Bureaucracy
Theodore Dalrymple was introduced on Booktv by Myron Magnet as one of the greatest cultural critics of our time. Hmmm. I'd never heard of the man before. His talk on the truth about opiates was quite enlightening, and I'm sorry I had not come across this retired doctor before. Very interesting.
His talk was valuable, however, not for the truths he said — I've known them as truths for some time, not being a gullible believer of our culture's systematic lying about drugs — but for the truths he avoided.
The truths he stated were simple enough. Opiate addiction is not that easy to start with; you really have to work at it. People who get addicted know, pretty much, what they are getting into. Opiate usage and addiction is thus a choice. It is also not nearly the trap that addicts and many therapists would have you believe: the physical withdrawal effects are, at worse, like a bad cold. Further, the bulk of the inmates he studied did not get into crime because of the drug, but got into the drug only after they were already criminals. The usual causal explanations of the drug abuse blight have it all backward.
This being the case, why not just give up on the war on drugs? Why not let drug addicts be drug addicts, and stop persecuting them and costing us billions in a war of suppression?
He was asked this several times in the Q&A that followed (first by Tom Wolfe), and each time he replied something like this: Well, I don't think that legalization would give us the great benefits that are promised.
Well, at no point did anyone in the audience suggest any great benefits. They merely suggested giving up on a pointless war. The benefits would be marginal, perhaps: less corruption of police, higher degrees of civil liberties, better quality drugs so fewer drug deaths, etc.
He obviously fears that there will be more drug addicts. I bet there would be, especially at first, as people react to lower costs of drugs. But that's their business, not ours.
His suggestion of cutting back on the welfare state was the most intelligent thing he offered about permanently attacking drug culture. As he put it, for lower class people, who have little hope, drugs are a refuge from the welfare state trap. Not a bad deal. (Note that he sees the welfare state largely in terms that others see opiates!) By cutting back on the welfare state and its dependence mentality and institutionalization of boredom, some incentives to the drug abuse life would go down. As it is, today, people addicted to living free of work, and finding in work no obvious way ahead, will of course tend to choose addiction to drugs, which provide a respite from the drudgery and the boredom of their pathetic lives.
Unfortunately for his obsession with the underclass, quite a few rich people also are drug abusers, and the questioners put the speaker through the paces on this.
As the conversation wrapped up, I concluded that Dalrymple was honest enough and smart enough to see through the biggest lies about drugs. But he is not smart enough — or, perhaps, he's just too much of a conservative at heart to grasp the complexities of the social world, preferring simplicity even where it doesn't exist (rather like a drug addict, that) — to distinguish between the essential and the contingent regarding drug-induced behavior. It has long been obvious to me that much drug addict behavior is conformity to cultural ritual, and changes as social conditions change. Dalrymple cannot see beyond the current social structure of addict life. Removing the war on drug use, for him, becomes largely a matter of merely changing supply in demand in one dimension, that of increasing or decreasing opiate use. But that's just not the case, as Jack Woodford's own observations on drug culture, based on his heroin use in the early part of the century, confirm . . . and as readers of Thomas Szasz's Ceremonial Chemistry would have every reason to expect. The world is more complex than conservatives like to believe. And yet they see through the simplistic numbkullery of today's therapeutics.
Still: a very entertaining bit of C-SPAN Booktv. I will probably read his new book later this summer. It looks quite good.
T i m o W i r k m a n V i r k k a l a | June 25, 2006 | permalink
Being and Nothingness
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