Cruisin' with Falafel Bill

When I think of Caribbean fun, I think of Bill O'Reilly.

That's why I'm really disappointed to discover that the Caribbean cruise with Bill O'Reilly has been cancelled for lack of bookings.

I can't imagine why. I mean, really, ask yourself: Who would you really rather be on a cruise boat with, than a loudmouth obnoxious control freak, boor and serial sexual harasser? It's like being stuck in an elevator with this guy, and he's yelling, "Shut up! Shut up! Shut UP!" Or else he's whispering in your ear, "once people get into that hot weather they shed their inhibitions, you know they drink during the day, they lay there and lazy [sic], they have dinner and then they come back and fool around..." For a week. And you're seasick.

Fun, huh?

The Thin Red-Blue Line

Apparently, it's called "median income".

One Million Losers

I saw this in the convenience store today:



"Lottery: It may change your life." (As in: it will make you poorer.)

Above the register, it says, "Chance of a Winfall: HIGH. Don't forget to play!"

Also helpfully posted near the register: "ATTENTION LOTTERY PLAYERS: Help is available for you or someone you know who has a gambling problem."

(I think anyone who believes they stand a "HIGH" chance of winning the lottery has a gambling problem. Or else they're high.)

I took a crack at writing my own lottery slogans.

"Baffled by MATH? Play the LOTTERY!"
Or
"The LOTTERY: The only place where a one-in-a-million chance is considered high!"
Or maybe:
"The LOTTERY: it takes one million losers to make one winner."

These Are The New Rules

The flood didn't stop while we were away from the house. When we returned from the hospital, my wife and I found a stuffed mailbox, and a significant proportion of that was made up of offers from credit card companies. We get offers addressed to me, we get offers addressed to her, and we get offers addressed to some person who has exactly the same first name, last name, address and credit history as my wife, but a different middle initial.

Now, I don't know about your house, but in ours, we have clearly defined gender roles, and that means I dispose of the credit card solicitations. (Here's a hint: we don't need any more credit cards. We're doing our best to get out of the debt we already have, as we're being eaten alive by interest charges.) I used to just tear the solicitation letters up and throw them away, but in our town, we have to pay for every bag of trash we put out to the curb. It doesn't seem fair to me that I should pay for the credit card companies to keep offering me something I don't want. Therefore, I have adopted the vastly more amusing tactic of cutting up the offer letter into tiny pieces, stuffing it into the postage-paid envelope, and mailing it back to them. Let them pay for postage and for someone to open it and process it; maybe someday they will take the hint! (Yes, I know, they can't very well figure out who it came from, so they can't take us off their lists by this criterion. I kind of like it that way.)

One of the offers in our latest batch, however, really caught my eye, just as I was about to put the scissors to it. This one was festooned with the United Airlines logo, and was offering a Visa card tied-in to United's frequent flyer program.

Wait a minute: Is that really United Airlines offering a credit card? United Airlines? What's going on here?

United Airlines, you may recall, was recently allowed to default on its pension fund under the terms of its bankruptcy. The pensioners will see their benefits cut by more than half, and those benefits won't even be paid by United. That will be done on the taxpayer's dime. In other words, you and I, the ordinary taxpaying public, are now assuming billions of dollars' worth of promises that United Airlines made. This will be the largest corporate-pension default in US history. (For now. Now that this smooth move has been given the green light, expect it from every mega-corporation saddled with a pension fund it would prefer to forget, starting with all the other airlines.) And yet, even though they need the court to shield them from their creditors, they have the wherewithal to plaster the country with credit card solicitations.

Isn't that great? United Airlines, filing for bankruptcy protection, gets to stiff a whole bunch of people it had promised to pay. At the same time, thanks to the noxious bankruptcy bill recently rammed through Congress, this is exactly what you and me and United's employees and retirees are now expressly forbidden to do, even when we get in over our heads and are forced to declare bankruptcy. A lot of United's retirees are going to be forced into bankruptcy themselves by this event, since many of them will no longer be able to afford their bills when their pensions are cut by 50% or more. Yet, these people will not have the option of going into any kind of meaningful bankruptcy protection. Hooray for Republican hegemony as they force-march us all into debt slavery!

As the bankruptcy bill was being pushed through a Congress bought and paid for by the banks and the credit card companies, its champions repeated the endless refrain: "people should pay their debts." Well, sure. That's just good old-fashioned common sense. We can all agree on that. People should pay their debts, and they shouldn't be able to discharge those debts except under extraordinary circumstances.

But if you aren't careful with how the Republicans use words, you might have only heard what they said, not what they meant. See, when they said, "people should pay their debts," you might have thought they meant that everyone, everywhere, in all circumstances, should honor the promises they make. And if that's what you heard, good for you: you are a very good, right-thinking American. And you're also wrong.

See, these are the new rules. When people make promises to large, well-connected corporations, those promises must be kept at all costs. On the other hand, when large, well-connected corporations make promises to ordinary people, those promises can be broken at will. If you don't think this will affect you ... just wait.

In the meantime, your friendly neighborhood Congress has some advice for you: don't get sick. Don't get laid off. Don't get divorced. Don't let anyone in your family get sick. Don't let your employer steal your pension. And on top of everything else, don't get behind on your monthly interest payments. The payments are more important than your food, your rent, your medical bills, or anything else. After all, there are a lot of K Street lobbyists who want that money. They are depending on you. And they're not about to let you let them down.




PS: Tired of the bullshit? Join the Plastic Revolution - http://www.plasticrevolution.org/

Twinkle Indeed

My wife was trying to calm down our infant daughter a few nights ago, and she was walking around with the baby, singing to her. She thought I was asleep, and she was singing:

Twinkle twinkle little star
How I wonder what you are.
Up above the world so high
Like a diamond in the sky
Twinkle twinkle little star
How I wonder what you are.

What a lame song, I thought, and I picked up the next verse, singing my own version of the song, surprising my wife.

We know you're a ball of gas
Held in tight by gravity,
Excited to incandescense by
Nuclear fusion in your core.

You are very far away,
And your light takes many years
To reach the people down on earth,
Where we watch you twinkling.

Which incidentally is caused
By turbulence up in our air,
Which differentially refracts
The light you're shining down on us.

Our Sun is a star like you
Which our earth is circling.
Lots of planets have been found
Orbiting stars just like you.
Twinkle twinkle little star
Now I know just what you are.

I think I'll keep cleaning this one up and adding to it in anticipation of teaching it to my daughter. In the meantime I'll settle for having made my wife laugh so hard she had to set the baby down.

Zoe

This is me and my brand-new daughter.

BillG: What, Me Worry?

"I played around with [Firefox] a bit, but it's just another browser, and [Microsoft's Internet Explorer] is better .... So much software gets downloaded all the time, but do people actually use it?"
     -- Bill Gates, quoted on the BBC

Google Ubiquity

How did this happen so fast?

I use a lot of different bits of software on a daily basis. The heavyweights in my software universe -- the companies that supply a hefty percentage of that software -- are Microsoft, Macromedia, Adobe, Palm, Mozilla, OpenOffice, and WordPerfect (Yes, WordPerfect). I run their applications every single day.

This lineup has a new member lately: Google. I have suddenly found myself in the position of using a lot of Google software, and doing so on a daily basis. Of course I've been using Google for search for a long time (who doesn't?), and I've been using Blogger for a couple of years; but it's only been in the past couple of months that I really incorporated Google into my daily routine, with a new Gmail account, Picasa and Google Desktop Search. I just never noticed until now that I'm running a lot of Google software.

Why shouldn't I run a lot of Google software? It's always high-quality, and it's usually free (although Gmail and Google Search are both laden with advertising). What has surprised me is the sudden ubiquity of Google in my life. Since I'm not a reflexive upgrader, I am usually behind the curve on these things. Based on that fact, I'm guessing that Google has achieved a similar ubiquity in a lot of other people's lives.

Another indicator that Google has grown up: Bill Gates is bothered by Google. He'd like to do to Google what Microsoft has done to countless other entities in the past. I mean, take a look at my list again (except for Microsoft): Macromedia, Adobe, Palm, Mozilla (standing in for Netscape), OpenOffice, and WordPerfect. It's a Microsoft hit list. They've all been beaten and bruised by Microsoft; some of them driven out of business by Microsoft. Most of them made technically superior products, but were routed because Microsoft could leverage its Windows monopoly against them and "cut off their oxygen". (The only reason Mozilla and OpenOffice are still around is that their products are offered for free.) Google, with its own free and web-based products, will be much harder for Microsoft to compete against. It will be interesting to see what happens as these two square off against each other.

I expect to keep using Google software for a long time to come. Whether this will be a good thing or a bad thing, I can't say just yet. In the meantime, it is great software.

I Hope We're Not Headed To War In Iraq

You said we're headed to war in Iraq -- I don't know why you say that. I hope we're not headed to war in Iraq. I'm the person who gets to decide,not you.
      -- George W. Bush, moral coward, Crawford, Texas, Dec. 31, 2002 (audio)

When he said these words, he'd long since decided to have a war in Iraq. More evidence of that surfaced on Sunday, when the Times of London revealed that Tony Blair had already pledged British support for the war in April 2002. For the Republicans and other math-challenged reading this, that's at least 8 months before Bush claimed that "I hope we're not headed to war in Iraq." He said that with a straight face, but I bet he was snickering on the inside, because he had been planning to invade Iraq since at least April 2002. Some people say the planning went back to January 2001.

In Britain, Tony Blair is in a little bit of trouble because the independent media over there are revealing that he was telling his public that he had no plans to attack Iraq, even though the decision had long since been made. In America, where there is no independent media to speak of, it's not even a story. So your president is a big fat liar? Yawn. That is so 2002. Nothing to see here, folks -- oh, look, runaway bride!



PS: Why is Bush a moral coward? It's not just that he's a liar. It's that he won't even tell the truth for policies he supports. Rather than stand up for the things he wants, and face the consequences, he prefers to let other people do that for him. See Josh Marshall's excellent analysis of this brand of cowardice.

Saving Throw Against Stupid Ad Copy



Dice has pretty much fixed their embarassingly bad ads for tech jobs. I can't find a whole lot wrong here, because they've finally quit trying to write an ad that's supposed to read like code. See: they're writing comments in the code instead! (Clearly, Dice has received the recent memo that Comments Are More Important Than Code. In any case, comments always compile.) And find_great_jobs() is a perfectly respectable function call. But ... isn't that an unbalanced brace at the end? Or is the matching brace just somewhere up beyond the top edge of the ad? I guess we'll never know...

The Retail Alphabet

The Retail Alphabet is a fun little diversion. Twenty-six letters are presented by each separate puzzle (there are four of them at the time of this writing). They are all lifted from various trademarks and logos you see every day. Your task is to identify the company or product associated with each. The letters are presented out of their familiar context, so it's a challenge.

It's all a bit of harmless fun, but while you're playing this, try to compare the number of corporate logos you can easily identify to the number of birds or leaves you can easily identify. What does that say about us?

For a related bit of fun, have a look at this bit of satire. (Satire, yes, but more true every day.)

The Iraq War in 30 Seconds

The Iraq War in 30 Seconds is a cool Flash movie giving a British perspective on the Iraq War. Sums it up pretty well, and it's entertaining, too!

Is the United States Winning in Iraq?

"Winning or losing is not the issue for 'we,' in my view, in the traditional conventional context of using the word winning and losing and of war."
        - Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.

Yes, he actually said that, and he said that in response to the simple question: "Is the United States winning in Iraq?"

See: they're just words. Words can mean whatever you want them to mean, you know? Whatever you define them to be.

(Has anyone sicced Cardinal Ratzinger on this guy? Cause he's sounding more and more like a relativist to me.)

Anyway, if Don Rumsfeld can play games with the meanings of words, so can I.

So if you define "the United States" to mean "the current administration in Washington";
and if you define "in Iraq" to mean "about the war in Iraq or its planning and execution";
and if you define "winning" to mean "lying";

...then YES! The United States is winning in Iraq!

Makes me proud to be an American.

How Do You Plan To Live Forever?

I don't want to achieve immortality through my work. I want to achieve it through not dying. -- Woody Allen

Everyone thinks about their mortality. Probably, everyone thinks about how to transcend it. There sure are plenty of ideas out there, as there have been for thousands of years (many of them have plenty of currency today). Of course I've been thinking about this because my wife and I are about to participate in the single most popular mode of achieving immortality, that is, we're about to have a child.

I don't want to get specific in this post, though, because I want to do something a little different with this post. I want to solicit your opinion this time out. Since everyone brings their own assumptions to the question, I don't want to prejudice your answers.

So: How do you plan to live forever?

Feel free to interpret the question as you like. Consider it as a spiritual problem, a philosophical problem, a metaphysical problem, or even a biological problem. Everybody has something to say about immortality, especially their own.

Post anonymously if you like, but please post. I will follow up in a later post, though I can't promise how much later, because baby is due any day now.

Just What Was Gannon/Guckert Doing?

It seems Jeff Gannon, aka James Guckert, aka Bulldog, aka "Only a top", was in and out of the White House a lot. And the Secret Service wasn't keeping very good track of his goings and comings. He seems to have been admitted to the White House on several occasions when there was no press briefing, which begs the question: just what was he doing there, and for whom?

I mean, let's not forget that the guy is a whore. Not figuratively. He is literally a prostitute who has sex with other men for money. He says that's all in his past, but you know, wouldn't anyone claim that? And given that he's been caught in an extensive net of lies, why should we believe him anyway?

So, once again, what was this "aggressive top" doing at the White House, with such sloppy record-keeping applied to him?

"On several of these visits, Guckert either entered or exited by a different entry/exit point than his usual one."

It's just sooooo easy to turn that into a cheap and gratuitous joke. Good thing I don't have to -- you thought of it yourself. You have a really filthy mind, don't you?

Anybody See A War Around Here?

You might have missed it, if you weren't looking. Another couple of servicemen were killed in Iraq this weekend.

Did you read that? See it on the news?

That's in addition to the 24 dead and 58 wounded after four car bombings in Baghdad and Tikrit. In general, the level of violence in Iraq seems to be back on the increase. And in other news, George W. Bush just got Congress to pony up another $80 billion (borrowed money, of course) to finance the war and occupation. Remember when he promised this occupation would fund itself? Oh, never mind. And so, the numbers just keep climbing: 1,571 killed and 11,888 wounded, and financial costs of approximately $300 billion. (I'm expecting the Congress to rubberstamp this request, just like it always does.)

Hey, did you hear? We're Still At War! In fact, we're kinda losing it!

Was this news on the front page of any newspaper? Did it lead any newscasts? It wasn't even easy to find on the Internet.

Did you catch those great "elections" in Iraq back in January? It's been three months since then. Let me ask you a few questions about those great elections. Who ran for office? Who won? Who were you rooting for? Do you even know? Do you even care?

And now, three months after these great elections, this Glorious Victory for Democracy, where's the government? The fact is, they still haven't formed a government -- three months after elections!

(If you're still keeping score at home, 127 American service members have been killed and 1,118 wounded while we've been waiting for the Iraqis to form a government.)

Who's driving this clown car? Oh, wait: I already know.

We're now two years into the Second Bush War. It's been two years since "Mission Accomplished," and we're still bleeding over Iraq, literally as well as figuratively, blood and red ink in alarming volumes, and I'm still sitting here wondering just what the fuck was the reason to get us into this mess again?

And while I'm wondering that, it seems like the Iraq War has disappeared from the national news. Why do you suppose that is?

Have we just become numb to the steady drip-drip-drip of American and Iraqi deaths? Or has the news been squelched by the media, reduced to the minimum volume necessary so that they can still say with a straight face, "we covered it -- now move along"?

Well, on the one hand, broadcasting quagmire and failure is bad politics: it reflects badly on the liar and fool who got us into this mess, who is well-known to be nasty and vindictive to those who are seen to disagree with him or his party. We have abundant evidence that the mainstream media are either on the Republicans' side already (e.g. Fox News) or have been effectively bullied into meek submission to the Republican agenda (e.g. CNN). On the other hand, quagmire and failure is a real bummer: it just doesn't sell advertising, a lot of which is incidentally bought by Republican companies.

And so, it makes all kinds of sense that we have a steady turn-down of the news from Iraq. Slowly it is scrubbed from the news, and the air minutes and the column inches are fed a different diet. Instead of hearing about anything which actually has any bearing on our lives, the newscasts are led by Scott Peterson, then Robert Blake, then Michael Jackson, then Terri Schiavo, then John Paul II, then Charles and Camilla, then Michael Jackson again, then Cardinal Ratzinger Pope Benedict XVI ... Who's next? Who cares, as long as the public is sufficiently distracted?

And on and on and on it goes, while somewhere, in a far-off land, another American lies bleeding to death in the street. While you're watching Fox News tonight, his body will be secretly conveyed under cover of darkness back to the United States, safely shielded from any media attention, and he will be quietly buried and forgotten. His government, so eager to get into this war and now with no fucking clue how to win it or otherwise disengage, is keen to just forget the whole thing, and hopes that you will want to just forget it as well.

I guess it's just the Patriotic Thing to Do.

Trapped Inside ... Something ...

Last week, I had a short play of mine performed in a festival in New York. The festival producers had asked me to supply a short bio for the program, and I sent them something which began like this:

Patrick M Brennan is a playwright trapped inside the body of a computer programmer...

I think that's a pretty good joke. At least it's a not-bad joke. All right, it's a joke!

Anyway, when I went to see a performance of the festival, this is what was written in the program:

Patrick M Brennan is trapped inside a computer programmer...

ummm... What?!? I'm trapped inside a computer programmer? What the fuck is that supposed to mean? They took my joke and they turned it into a confusing non-sequitur. Thank You! I'm sure that made a terrific impression on the audience!

See, I'm a writer. I think about the words I'm writing. Even when I write a bio, I'm careful about my words. Words are all I have. Screwing up an actor's bio would be bad, but not nearly as bad as screwing up a writer's bio.

Anyway, of course I know they didn't do it on purpose. Someone clearly typed my bio into the document for the program, and made an honest mistake.

Since I sent the bio to them over email, however, it kind of baffles me that Copy and Paste seems beyond their comprehension ...
(as does actual proofreading ...)

No, it's OK. I'm over it now. Really. I didn't even mention it to them. I only blogged it for the whole world to see!

No, really, it's OK. The medication will kick in any moment now ... really.

(mumbling to self:) "trapped inside a computer programmer." Oh, hey, that's a great joke. Yeah.

Adobe and Macromedia

That was a bolt out of the blue! Taking a train back to Boston from New York, I picked up a newspaper and learned that my two favorite companies have decided to get married! How exciting!

The past five years of my professional life have been dominated by Adobe and Macromedia. When I was working for Adobe, I was helping to build LiveMotion, and directly competing against Macromedia's Flash. I have spent the past three years with Convoq, developing a client application in Flash, and Adobe has been less of an issue in my life. I don't know how the merger will affect the direction of our product, but I've always considered Adobe to be a very well-run company, so I'm not really worried. Besides, with a baby on the way and another release of my own company's application to get out the door, I've got bigger fish to fry.

That doesn't mean I don't wish I'd bought some Macromedia stock, as I'm sure this guy did.

Top Ten Reasons Captain Kirk is Still Better Than Captain Picard

10. Kirk jostles better when the Enterprise is hit.

9. Kirk doesn't have some kind of foofy accent.

8. Kirk rips his shirt at the drop of a hat. Picard keeps pulling his shirt down, as it keeps riding up, and that really bothers him. (What is he hiding?)

7. Kirk : Screw the Prime Directive, let's kill something!

6. Picard delegates the landing parties to his first officer; Kirk insists on doing it himself.

5. Picard delegates the overacting to his first officer; Kirk insists on doing it himself.

4. Kirk drinks coffee ; Picard drinks tea. 'Nuff said.

3. Kirk makes sure to show all the alien babes the "Captain's Log".

2. Kirk: Red-blooded American. Picard: French? British? We're not really sure, but it's definitely suspicious.

1. Kirk: not afraid to wear a rug.

My Living Will

Boy, if there's anything we should learn from the Terri Schiavo case, it's that we should all make living wills. Believe me, I've learned my lesson, and I decided that the best way to make sure that my living will is honored is to post it on the web. (That way, there won't be any doubt as to its authenticity.) So here goes:

LIVING WILL
I, Patrick M Brennan, being of sound mind and body, do affirm and declare that this is my LIVING WILL, and reflects my decisions regarding my care in the event of a medical condition which renders me incapable of making informed decisions for myself. I make this declaration of my own free will, without any force or coercion whatsoever.

IF, in the judgment of my physician, I am suffering from an irreversible condition so that I cannot care for myself or make decisions for myself and am expected to die without life-sustaining treatment provided in accordance with prevailing standards of care:

(a) I would very much like my breathing yet mindless body, the bag of reflexes which I have become, to be reduced to being a political football, to be kicked around the media by the likes of Tom DeLay and Randall Terry in the pursuit of a cheap political stunt which ensures them a few days' worth of headlines;

(b) I definitely do not want my spouse to be making any decisions for me whatsoever; I think that's best left to my parents. After all, once upon a time, when I was capable of exercising my own free will, I chose of that selfsame free will to spend the rest of my life with my spouse, and I have only spent years sharing my home and my bed with her. Therefore, clearly, not only do I share none of my religious, moral, and ethical values with my spouse, but she also knows nothing about my religious, moral, and ethical values. My parents, on the other hand, who visited our home on holidays and weekends, and with whom we occasionally have spoken on the phone, know all about my values, which is why they wish to impose their values on my decision regarding how I control the end of my life. Therefore, they should have the final say, not my spouse.

(c) Speaking of my spouse, if I were somehow capable of receiving and integrating outside stimuli and understanding what was going on around me, it would please me immensely to watch on live television as my spouse's name is repeatedly dragged through the mud in the House of Representatives by crass and opportunistic politicians, simply for attempting to fulfill what she perceives to be my wishes and my best interest.

(d) I'd also like someone to explain to my spouse exactly what she's doing wrong. Apparently, she didn't realize that when the Republican Party claims to be the party of getting government off the backs of the people, they weren't talking about gravely personal decisions within a family. When it's an industrial plant, owned by Republican donors, belching tons of toxic filth into the air and water, that's a private matter, and the government should get off those donors' backs. When it's my family, struggling to come to terms with my basic wishes regarding the end of my life, that's where government belongs.

(e) And I'd really love it if somebody could make sure that there are boatloads of creepy anti-abortion protesters hanging around outside my hospital room, especially if they could harass my spouse as she is coming to visit me. That's because it's not bad enough that she's dealing with my illness and impending death -- she should be hounded by crazy fundies with their own agenda who claim to be "pro-life" but who literally couldn't care whether I live or die.

(f) I'd be particularly pleased if the astronomical costs of my care placed a horrible burden of debt on my spouse, and if, thanks to the very same Republicans in the Congress, she would be utterly denied the ability to get out from under it. It would make my afterlife a real joy to know that she would lose our house, our savings, and all our property, literally everything we have worked together to build; and she would be reduced to a life of poverty, working only to pay off what she could of her debt burden, and that without our savings, our daughter would be deprived of any chance to ever receive a decent education, and therefore a way back into the middle class, which is where we were before I had my accident.

(g) Speaking of costs, I wouldn't want any of the burden of my illness to fall on the government. That's why I support the Texas law that George W. Bush signed when he was governor, allowing hospitals to overrule even the decisions of the family, and finally remove my feeding tube once there isn't any more money left to pay for my care. You see, once my spouse is finally bled dry by the costs of maintaining my breathing, bedsore-ridden carcass in a state of living death, I know that the Republican-dominated Congress, which just gutted Medicare and Medicaid, has ensured that there will be no money left; and given the choice between honoring their commitment to "life" and their commitment to tax cuts for their corporate friends, well, you know -- the TV cameras won't be running forever. Once they've been turned off, so will my life support. Finally.

(h) And of course, nothing would please me more than to have the whole sad saga of my family's suffering splayed across FOX News and talk radio as some cheap maudlin moralistic circus, as a feeding frenzy for the kind of bottom-feeding media types who need my story to sell advertising, and who will be on to the next soap opera in another couple of weeks.

Signed on the 23rd day of March, 2005, by my hand and seal:

/s/
Patrick M Brennan

Bits in Boston and New York

What's the fastest, safest, cleanest, most efficient way to travel ever invented? And is it a good idea to buy one? That's the question Claude and Shannon are asking themselves, in my new ten-minute comedy Bits, which is having a performance in New York this April and a short run in Boston this May!

In New York, I'm very pleased to be returning to the American Globe Theater's 11th 15-Minute Play Festival, running April 18th-30th. (For information or ticket reservations call American Globe Theatre at 212-869-9809, or go to Theater Mania. Call early, they're always sold out!) I was at this festival two years ago, and it's one of the best venues I've ever played in. I'm pleased to note that Stacie Scaduto and Don Downie, the same actors who took Bits up in its last performance in New York, are performing at the American Globe.

In Boston, this will be my first time being part of the Devanaughn Theater's Dragonfly Festival, running May 5-22nd. (Go to Theater Mania for tickets.)

Each venue has a different cast and director, so I am particularly excited to see what different groups of people are able to find in this script. Besides that, these two festivals are absolutely worth the price of admission ($15 in both cases, I think).

The Basic Idea of Marriage Is to Raise Kids

The basic idea of marriage is to raise kids. So says Fox News's John Gibson, and I agree with him wholeheartedly. He's got it exactly right. Marriage is for raising kids. That's why we don't allow anyone who is infertile to get married, birth control and single parenthood are illegal, you have to prove you're not married before getting a vasectomy or a hysterectomy, and divorce is compulsory once your children have grown up (and strictly prohibited beforehand).

Can you believe this moron got paid to write this column?

How the hell can I get a job like that?

No, No, Dice!

Dice persists in posting bad code on their online ads!



Since their last ad, they've definitely improved, but good syntax doesn't mean their logic has gotten any better.

The ad still says, in plain English: "If you're salary isn't good, go to Dice.com. If your salary is good, suck it up."

What?

I thought "Suck it up" meant something like "endure pain bravely", or "be strong".

Maybe somebody knows an interpretation of "suck it up" that I'm not aware of. Maybe it means "good for you!" or "way to go!", or "guess you don't need Dice.com!"

I have a suggestion for their advertising folks:

if ((You.workFor("Dice.com") || You.haveAdClient("Dice.com"))&&(You.writeAdCopy()))
{
   You.stopTryingToWriteCode(please);
}

Why Graffiti 2 Sucks

I have had a CLIE NX-80V for a few weeks now, ever since my last CLIE died on me. (It turned out it was only playing dead -- but it didn't rise from the grave until after I had the new machine in my hand.) Even though I knew that the NX-80V was an excellent machine in nearly all respects, I had resisted upgrading for a couple of years anyway, since I knew the NX-80V used Graffiti 2, and I feared that Graffiti 2 would be a disaster. My initial fears have proven sadly true. Graffiti 2 sucks. I tried really hard to adjust, to unlearn eight years of Graffiti and relearn the new system, and although it doesn't suck as badly as I thought at first, it's still bad enough that I had to finally find an alternative.

I've been using Graffiti ever since 1997, and it only took me a couple of weeks to reach a plateau of proficiency at which it was really useful. For short pieces of information, i.e. phone numbers or email addresses, it was excellent; and in settings such as classes or business meetings, I could very nearly take decent notes with the thing. (I still prefer paper and pencil for free-form notes, because it's faster and less error-prone, plus it's less confining than ASCII text -- I can draw diagrams, for example. At the same time, it's always nice not to have to type up my notes -- because they're already typed.)

That was all with the original Graffiti. I find that with Graffiti 2, I can't achieve anywhere near the speed and low error rate I had with the original. The worse failure, however, is that with Graffiti 2, I am concentrating far less on the content I am entering, and far more on how to enter it, than I was used to.

Here are three examples of how much Graffiti 2 sucks:

Using Graffiti 2, it is common for me to attempt to enter a word ending in an L, followed by a space. Usually, this case ends up with a T at the end of my word. (Turning "the full effect", for example, into "the fulteffect".) This error is extremely common, occurring 90% of the time.

Graffiti 2 almost always (75%) renders my H's as N's.

I tried to enter someone's phone number, in which a group of digits began with a 1. What did I end up with? Not "999-999-1999"; I got "999-999+999".

These failures are representative, but they are only a subset of what I was seeing. Graffiti 2 is constantly frustrating. It sucks.

The original Graffiti isn't just single-stroke, it's stateless, meaning that when I'm making a stroke, I don't have to think about what my last stroke is. Each stroke uniquely maps to a character. If Graffiti 2 was stateless, if, for example, a left-to-right stroke was only ever the horizontal line on the T, then it would be OK. But sometimes, when I draw a vertical followed by horizontal, I mean "T", and sometimes I mean "L-space", and so I have to think more carefully about what I'm doing. I have to remind myself, "I just drew an L. Now I either have to wait a second before entering my space, or I have to draw my line down on the bottom of the Graffiti entry area". But I only want to be thinking about the text I'm entering, not how to enter it. With Graffiti, I didn't have to think about it. With Graffiti 2, I do. Therefore, Graffiti 2 sucks.

Why does Graffiti 2 suck so bad? Based on its name, you might expect that Graffiti 2 is the second revision of Graffiti, with improved functionality and more features. If that's what you thought, you'd be wrong. Graffiti 2 is a direct result not of any engineering or marketing decisions, but of a court decision that the original Graffiti infringed on a patented Xerox technology called Unistrokes. I don't know a lot about the lawsuit, but apparently the court decided that Graffiti infringed Unistrokes precisely because of its one-to-one correspondence between a single stroke and a character. Therefore, Graffiti 2 is pretty much a crippled Graffiti, crippled just enough that it doesn't infringe on Unistrokes.

(To be precise, Graffiti 2 is a slightly modified version of CIC's Jot, itself created to sidestep the Unistrokes patent. The effect is the same. Jot had been trying to supplant Graffiti for years without much success. Now they have succeeded.)

Now, I know Palm didn't want to foist this garbage on me intentionally, but they did try to put lipstick on this pig by claiming that Graffiti 2 is "easier to learn", "more natural and intuitive" than Graffiti, but that's baloney. If it was really easier to learn, I'd have achieved a similar level of proficiency with it by now. Instead, I'm far behind where I was at the same point in learning Graffiti.

Graffiti 2 isn't all bad. To be fair, its design has some good points. I like Graffiti 2's "a" and "e", for example, and using the middle of the writing area for capitals is a good idea. The trouble is that its good points don't go anywhere near outweighing its deficiencies. And the deficiencies are all in the state-bound nature of the system. It's like any other aspect of product design: good design gets out of your way and lets you concentrate on what you're trying to accomplish. Bad design forces you to think about details of how the machine works, details which are irrelevant to your task.

Fortunately, there are alternatives. For example, I could always switch to using one of the way-hot Xerox PDAs, using Unistrokes.

Oh, wait. There's no such thing as a Xerox PDA, with or without Unistrokes; and there never has been. (Clearly, Xerox loves to develop technology that it never sells; and then it gets mad when somebody else successfully brings something similar to market.)

Since I do have a Sony CLIE, I can use the built-in keyboard, or one of two (two!) on-screen keyboards.

Another alternative, built into the NX-80V, is a system called Decuma, which is definitely very cool. This is a good high-resolution handwriting recognition system which isn't as fast as Graffiti, but it is more fun to use. I use it occasionally, and I can see how someone might use it as their primary means of entering text. Check it out and try it.

For a really good solution to this problem, however, what I really needed was to be able to install the original Graffiti on my new handheld. Fortunately, a little desperate digging produced a procedure for accomplishing just that, provided I had a Palm handheld with Graffiti already installed; and fortunately, I had one at hand: my CLIE NX-70V, the rumors of whose demise had been exaggerated. The procedure was easily followed, and worked exactly as advertised.

Now, I have a late-model CLIE with the original Graffiti installed, and it's great. And that's the way I'm going to keep it, until Xerox sues me.

More Car Than You Know How to Drive

I've always had a problem with SUVs. They're too big, they're too expensive, and they get lousy gas mileage. Although there are lots of legitimate reasons to own a truck, most people who buy SUVs don't need them, and only buy them for their status value. "Look, I can afford this!" (Yeah, well probably you're overextended.) Plus, people don't seem to modify their driving habits when they buy SUVs, so behavior which is just dumb in a car becomes positively dangerous. People drive their SUVs too fast in all kinds of weather, they follow other cars way too closely, and they don't know how to maneuver their trucks in tight corners.

Of course, it's none of my business what anyone else drives. You know? I'm drive-and-let-drive. If you want to spend more money than you can really afford to buy more car than you know how to drive, hey, that's what you want to do. It's dumb, but it's none of my business.

But then you had to go and rear-end my pregnant wife's car with your giant gas-sucking monstrosity! I think that's when it becomes my business.

My wife was flung forward in the collision, crushing our unborn child between her and her steering wheel. She was rushed to an emergency room, where I met her, and we spent an anxious day in the hospital, getting tests done and monitoring the baby to ensure that she wasn't hurt ... though of course we won't know for sure until she's born. In the meantime, my wife began having serious contractions, and the doctors had to give her body a pharmacological reminder that baby's not ready yet. It was a difficult and stressful day for both of us. Needless to say, neither one of us made it into the office that day.

I feel very confident that right after you nearly killed my wife and my daughter, you got to your office only a little late. You probably resented the imposition of having to talk to the police.

You claimed that there was ice on the road. This was on the second clear and sunny morning after a light snowfall. I don't think there was any ice on the road; there wasn't any when I visited the site later that evening. So what does that say about you? Well, what does an SUV say about almost anyone? You just hit a pregnant woman, and what are you worried about? You're worried about whether someone's going to actually demand any accountability from you.

Look, I think you just weren't paying attention. That's not an evil thing in of itself, but for God's sake, how can you not be paying attention when you're driving a 3,000 pound Deathmobile? It's irresponsible, is what it is. You have more car than you know how to drive.

You could kill somebody with that thing! And you don't seem to care about that. Idiot!





PS: Here's a timely link about the false economics of owning an SUV. It's not (usually) a rational choice, but I'm not pretending people buy SUVs for rational reasons.

The Importance of Earnest Music

My wife and I went to the first day of childbirthing class this morning, where among other things, my wife is supposed to learn some techniques to help her relax. In order to put everyone in the proper frame of mind, the instructor had set up a CD player to play relaxing music for the expecting couples. Which by itself, I don't have a problem with. I like to relax. I like it when my wife relaxes. And she's going to have to get good at it by the time she goes into labor.

But you know what? We don't get relaxed by any chimey-ass New Age music. When we came into the classroom, the CD player was playing something consisting of harp accompanied by pan flute. You know, yoga music, or upmarket massage music. Or downmarket massage music, for all I know. The kind of music that is usually accompanied by incense, and although it was very, very earnest, it was not soothing. It was, in fact, a little irritating. Plus, as this was the beginning of the day, we were wondering just what we had wandered into. As the harp finished plinking out its intro, and the pan flute whistled out its first few notes, like a sad little Zamfir, my wife turned to me. And she asked, "What do you suppose the name of this song is?"

"The name of the song is: 'Pleeeeeeease'."

Stick Some Velcro on the Back of These And I'm Good To Go

This is my cell phone. It's a Handspring Treo 300 running PalmOS 3.5. It's fun and easy to use, and since it's also a PalmOS device, it's convenient in lots of other ways (I'm not worried about losing my address book if I lost the phone, for example). I use it as my main email client when I'm traveling. I've noticed lately that I tend to use the speakerphone feature on this thing a lot, and I hold the phone in front of me as I speak. Then, when I'm done, I flip the cool lid down with a nice satisfying click.

This is my PDA. It's a Sony CLIE NX-80V running PalmOS 5.0. I've found it to be enormously useful in organizing my life. I keep my address book, my calendar, my to-do list, a calculator, a sketch pad, a web browser, another email client, and a notebook for writing. A lot of my work began life as a couple of paragraphs jotted down in the Palm Memo Pad. I haven't written a whole play on this thing yet, but I could if I needed to.

The coolest thing about this PDA, though, is that it's more than just a PDA. It's also a still photo camera, a movie recorder, and a voice recorder. Imagine that: it records three things...

I don't know if anyone's planning to come out with a phaser that runs PalmOS, but I'm pretty sure it'd be a very popular device, and I'd be right in line to get one if I could. I guess once I've started down that road, it's only a matter of time before I started wearing form-fitting shirts in bright primary colors and high-heeled black leather boots, so probably it's all for the best that no such product exists.

I don't think it's an accident that these things look like Star Trek gear. Or maybe the prop guys on Star Trek were just pretty good industrial designers. Either way, I can't open that Treo without wanting to ask Scotty to beam me up, and I can't open the CLIE without wanting to scan for lifeforms. If I had the PalmOS phaser, I guess I'd be looking for Klingons or malevolent computers to shoot, so again, it's probably all for the best that no such product exists.

"Temporarily Out of Service"

At what point does it become more trouble than it's worth to own a computer? Or several? This is the question I've been asking myself after a rather hellish string of failures. In the space of a single week, my main computer checked out, my Sony CLIE fizzled, and my office Thinkpad came down with a bad case of Adware. In the process of restoring from these failures, I came dangerously close to the point of fundamentally questioning whether the investment of money, time and energy I put into these machines is really paying a worthwhile dividend.

Now consider. I have been a computer enthusiast for as long as I can remember. I have programmed computers for my entire adult life and my whole professional career. Not only do I have a lot of knowledge and experience regarding how to work around computer difficulties, I have also gained a certain level of immunity from computer frustration. Plus, I am fanatical about keeping my data backed up (and so far this week, I haven't lost any data), so I don't have any anxiety and frustration around that. But even with these provisions in place, the past week has been really trying. What do ordinary people do when they're faced with these issues?

I'm starting to think they just grin and bear it, until they can't take it anymore, and then they just bail. My father was so frustrated by the internet, for example, that he permanently disconnected from it, deciding that email and the web weren't worth the hassle of spam, viruses and pop-ups. He hasn't bailed on computers entirely, but I know that he is constantly experiencing inexplicable failures and weird behavior with his applications. He asks me about them –- a lot -– but he uses obscure programs which I am not familiar with (like Serif), and I rarely get a chance to sit down with him at his computer to see the behavior, so I can't help him much.

Another couple of friends of mine, after valiantly trying to make do in the Windows world, have decided to bail into the Macintosh world. Macs seem to cost more upfront, but apparently they are happier and less frustrated now. That's not really an option for me, not yet, but who knows? A couple more weeks like this one, and I might be tempted.

I thought my friends and my father were just outliers. I'm beginning to wonder about that now.

So what was my week like?

First to fail, naturally, was my main computer, the one I do most of my work at home with. I have a real love/hate relationship with this laptop, which I bought back in August 2004. When it works, it works great. It's fast, it's powerful, and it's very pretty. The trouble is that in the six months I've owned this machine, I have brought it back to the shop to be serviced four times, and it's been in the shop for a total of about a full month. The last time I brought it in, it was because I had plugged a USB device into the computer, only to watch it turn off like a light bulb. (No blue screen, no restarts, just –- pffft! -- dead.) It took the manufacturer a month to decide it wasn't worth repairing the motherboard, so they just sent me a new machine. This time, I plugged a USB device –- not the same device! -- into the computer, and promptly lost the use of all my USB ports. Granted, that's better, and less panic-inducing, than simply checking out, so that's an improvement. But it still puts a crimp in my ability to use the computer, because now I can't print, I can't use my mouse, I can't Hotsync. I couldn't even use the built-in flash card readers, because they're USB devices internally. So now, for the fourth time, I brought this computer down to the service department (which is an hour's drive from my home), to be fixed or replaced by, oh who knows? Let's just say, at some unknown date in the future. Maybe in another couple of weeks. When I complained to the service manager about the level of reliability of this machine, this is what he actually said:

"If you were to come into the store today, I would refuse sale of this machine to you. This machine is pressing the envelope of what's really possible in a laptop. You're the sort of customer that falls in love with the specs, and you don't have a realistic expectation of how reliable these machines really are."

See? I'm just being unrealistic. It's clearly unreasonable of me to pay $2500 for a computer and expect better than 80% uptime. It's just absurd of me to expect that when I plug a USB device into my computer, the machine continues to run. Who ever heard of such a thing?

It will probably take another two, or possibly three or four weeks for this machine to be replaced. They were nice enough to remove the main drive and put it into a nice USB drive enclosure for me, so I'm able to keep working. In the meantime, I've renamed this machine to "Hangar Queen". Fortunately, it's still under warranty, so it's only costing me a boatload of my time, and I have the last laptop I bought from these people, which is still running like a champ. (Ironically, I bought the new machine because I'd had such a good experience with this last computer.)

A couple of days after this failure, I put my handheld (a CLIE NX-70V) into its cradle to Hotsync with my work computer. Now this is something I have literally done about 500 times before without any trouble at all. This time, my CLIE decided to check out. In a fashion eerily similar to the experience I had with the laptop, this machine's screen went black, and it simply stopped working. It wouldn't react to a hard reset or any other action I could think of.

Well, I can make do without my laptop, especially since we have other computers in the house, but I was really put out by losing my handheld. I've had a Palm of some type ever since 1996, and I've got practically my entire life encoded on the thing. (Ever since my car got jacked in '95, with my Day-Timer in the trunk, I knew I needed a way to keep my data safe, and the original Palm Pilot fit the bill. Since then, I was hooked.) I didn't lose my Address Book, my Calendar, or my legendary To-Do List: I've got it all backed up Nine Ways To Tuesday. But I couldn't carry it with me without the CLIE.

I don't know if it was because of my computer dying earlier in the week, or because Sony has discontinued their whole PDA line, but I kind of panicked. Since they're no longer available in stores, I got on to eBay and immediately bought a replacement CLIE. This was the NX-70's big brother, the CLIE NX-80V, but I wasn't going to have it for another few days. Like I said, I was in a bit of a panic. I went down to the local Staples and I bought a brand-new Palm Tungsten T5.

"You did what?" said my wife. "We're about to have a baby, and I've been working hard for the past six months to save money on all the baby gear we have to buy, and you go and blow almost a grand on two new PDAs? I'm OK with you getting one to replace the one that broke. I know how much you rely on that thing. But two? No. You have to return one of them – and get the money back."

Well, that's what my wife would say if we were living in TV Land.

In real life, where my wife's understanding and patience are truly astounding, she said she would really, really like it if I would return one of the two units and get the money back. I told her that I would take a few days, try them both out, and let her know. So I spent about five hours laboriously reconstructing my life on the Tungsten, restoring files and settings from my backups, reinstalling software, and ensuring that everything was safe (It's about a 20-step process. I know that because I'm thorough. But it wasn't conceptually hard, just tedious). Then I spent a couple of days living my life out of the Tungsten, to see if I liked it. And so, when the CLIE arrived, I wasn't sure I wanted to try it. Suppose it was better than the Tungsten? Then I'd have wasted my time, and I'd have to go through the exercise of migrating my data all over again.

In the end, of course, that's what I did. I found a lot to like about the Tungsten, but in the end, I had to bring it back. It's a marvelous machine, but there's not much it does better than the CLIE, and the CLIE does quite a few things better than the Tungsten. Like, it has a camera. And a voice recorder. And Wi-Fi. And it's faster, even though it's running a "slower" processor. And I had all these CLIE peripherals around already. And I could put the CLIE into a real cradle. One thing the Tungsten had over the CLIE was that the newer OS5 apps were more polished, and did a few minor things better than the CLIE's versions. In the end, this didn't outweigh the value of the CLIE.

So now I had one new live CLIE, and I had one old dead CLIE, and I had just returned the Tungsten, and I was searching on the net for any information about CLIEs dying the way mine had a week ago. And just by accident, I found an article which recommended a procedure I hadn't tried before; in fact, I had never heard of it before: an "In-Cradle Reset". Since I had nothing to lose, I tried it on my old CLIE, and what do you know? It came up just fine. After all that time and money...

Finally, this past weekend. After all my computer woes, I was looking forward to a nice quiet weekend without any major failures. That's when my wife said:

"Honey? Can I surf the web using your work laptop?"

Isn't there a joke that starts this way?

I didn't think twice about it. What could go wrong? My wife is not a novice computer user. She knows her way around a machine and around the net. She reads the news and her favorite blogs.

So why, after only a few minutes of my wife's surfing, was my work machine crawling with popups, adware, and spyware?

When she asked me about it, I was surprised. I wasn't getting any pop-ups or spyware before my wife started surfing. "What did you do?" I asked her, perhaps with a little bit too much of an accusatory tone to my voice.

"Nothing! I was just surfing."

"With what browser?"

"Internet Explorer."

That told me pretty much everything I needed to know. See, I don't use IE on my work machine, except to access a few inhouse applications. For general web surfing on my work machine, I only use Firefox, and I manage the security on Firefox pretty well. Unfortunately, because I only use IE inside a well-protected network firewall, I don't manage the security there so well, and apparently it only takes a few minutes of surfing before malicious programs take advantage of a poorly-secured instance of IE, and my machine was badly infected. The adware had burrowed deep into the guts of Windows, and IE pop-ups were appearing even when I used Firefox to browse to a site!

The infestation proved to be very hardy and difficult to remove. When I used Spybot – Search and Destroy to clean out the infections, they managed to reinstall themselves by the next reboot. They were hardy little devils. When I used msconfig to disable Startup items which might be reinstalling these applications, I noticed that they were adding themselves back to the startup list! ("Who writes these things?" my wife asked. It's a good question.) A little bit of detective work actually yielded two Spyware items which had installed themselves just like normal applications, with their own folders, their own start menu entries, even their own uninstallers. One had a text file explaining itself:

"You downloaded Preview AdService from a Website that is able to offer its content for free because it shows the Preview AdService ActiveX popup. The Preview AdService program is installed only once the user has agreed on it by clicking on 'yes'. Through the ActiveX, the user can review the license terms and privacy policy before installing the software. Each and every distributor is carefully reviewed to make sure that their distribution techniques abide by a strict code of conduct."

See, that's total bullshit.

"I never downloaded anything or clicked on any license agreement," my wife told me, and I believe her. It's my work machine -– she wouldn't download anything on it. "All I did was surf to some sites and read."

It took me a while longer to finish fixing the problems with the pop-ups. In the end, I had to manually delete files from the Windows\System32 directory, which I do not recommend for the faint of heart. I kind of think I overdid it, in fact, because now I seem to be unable to connect to my company's VPN from home. However, otherwise, my work computer seems to be fine, which is a good thing, and the pop-ups have not afflicted it since. Total cost to me: practically the whole weekend. And I still wish I understood what I was doing better.

All three of these little tales of computer woe, different as they are, have a few things in common. In each case, a very large failure occurs for poorly understood reasons, each failure is followed by a tedious restoration to the status quo, and in each case, there is no good reason to expect that it won't happen again -- without warning.

People do not get a kick out of maintaining their computers. They do not derive enjoyment and life value from backing up, troubleshooting, and restoring their computers. They derive enjoyment and value from having access to their applications and data. When a computer fails, it often marks a profound downward shift in the value it represents to the owner. When the owner is someone like me, who has the time, patience, knowledge, experience, and cash to solve the problems, that's one thing. I'm just put out by my computers. But I think computers have gotten both so complex and so fragile, in such a short period of time, that nonspecialists have no good recourse when their machines fail. They either replace the machines –- if they can afford to -– or they simply stop using the machines. In either case, they usually lose whatever data they had on their machines.

A machine which is not reliable and unobtrusive, which calls attention to itself, which requires undue amounts of bother and care just to stay stable, is not a machine which is creating value. When snarky technicians claim that I'm being unreasonable for demanding an entirely appropriate level of service, they're not helping the problem.

I'm not sure what it is about my computers I fear more: their unreliability or their opacity. If I could count on my computers more, I wouldn't care so that they're black boxes. On the other hand, if I could understand my computer better, I wouldn't fear their failures so much. But I doubt I'm going to get either wish. The way we build computers, and the software that runs them, seems only to head in the direction of increased complexity, meaning increasingly unstable and insecure systems, exposing fewer clues about their inner state to the user. I wonder whether this will reach a point where it starts to turn off ordinary users, and whether they will turn away from what they view –- correctly, in my judgement -- as a hostile technology. I wonder whether that's already occurring. It almost happened to me this past week.

AARP: Hates the Troops, Loves the Queers



This ad was created by a group called USA Next, giving the Bush White House absolutely airtight deniability that they have anything to do it. The campaign is being mounted to discredit AARP for its traitorous opposition to the Dear Leader's Social Security phase-out plan, and it's very well-funded. Obviously, this is a completely independent group of civic-minded individuals... the same individuals who gave us the spectacle of the Swift Boat Liars for Bush. Which also, by pure coincidence, happened to benefit Bush politically.

Honestly, I wasn't buying USA Next's line. But then I went to the AARP's web site, to get their side of the story, and what do you know? The AARP does hate our troops! I found article after article after article detailing the AARP's treasonous and virulent hatred of the American military.

I also found ... well, I didn't find anything at all on their site about gay marriage. (Obviously, they're hiding their real agenda from us real Americans!)

Yes, it's clear, isn't it? The AARP isn't an organization "dedicated to enhancing quality of life for all as we age"; it's an organization dedicated to the destruction of the US military and the advancement of the radical homosexual agenda!!

I mean, WOW! Who knew?! And to think, my parents are members! I'd better tell them right now!







... oh, hey. Can somebody tell me what the fuck this all has to do with Social Security?

Of Budgets, Great and Small

My wife and I just went through the thoroughly unpleasant exercise of figuring out our household budget. We're expecting a new member of the family in the next few months, a baby is rumored to be very expensive upfront, and the new mom will be taking some unpaid leave to get the baby off to a good start. So we needed to take a look at what was coming into the house, and what was going out, and we needed to make some decisions about how to reconcile these numbers with our desire to somehow stay solvent, save for our retirement and our baby's education, pay our immediate expenses and pay down our debt -- all at the same time!

My wife and I are very lucky people: we've been pretty frugal, we've made some good decisions, we both have good jobs, we are in good health, and we're not deeply in debt. So, fortunately, the decisions weren't hard. Even so, the process was a little rough, because there's a lot of detail involved, and it literally entails generating and then analyzing several sheets covered in numbers, and not just any numbers, at that. These are numbers which have strong emotional resonance. Who wants to do that? Imagine how much harder it would have been if we had a number phobia, or if we knew we had a real money problem and didn't want to face up to it. In the end, though, we did the responsible thing. We balanced our budget, and now we're financially prepared for the baby's arrival. We think.

At the same time that my wife and I are wrestling with our budget, our town is also facing an issue with its own. The town is currently projecting a shortfall of between $1-2 million this year, and nobody seems to have a good idea around that uncomfortable fact. Cutting the budget will entail real pain: the biggest single line item in the budget is the school system, which would necessarily have to bear the brunt of any cuts. The town has been covering its shortfall with its savings, but this has been a stopgap and is clearly not a long-term option.

The town can ask us to pass a property-tax override, enabling them to raise our property taxes over the 2.5% per year maximum increase allowed under Massachusetts Proposition 2 1/2. Predictably, when word of this possibility spread around, the signs sprouted on the larger lawns in town: "NO OVERRIDE." No decision has been reached on whether to hold a vote on an override, though, so it might not happen. My wife and I aren't sure yet how we feel about the town budget. We don't mind paying our fair share of taxes, but we certainly want to make sure we're getting our money's worth for what we spend, especially since our daughter is going to be going to school here. (...or maybe not.)

Regardless of whether we're talking about our own household budget or that of the town, however, we're talking about operating under the same set of rules. No budget, no matter how large or small, must operate according to these rules: Income must be equal to or greater than expenses. The numbers must add up correctly. Nothing must be left out of the budget. (This was the sticking point in developing our household budget. Gathering all the receipts, adding them all together, categorizing them -- does this one go under "Groceries" or "Baby Supplies"? -- and ensuring that we hadn't forgotten whole categories of spending, was probably the hardest part.) And most critically, no matter how we feel about it, the numbers are the numbers. We must make the choices that make the numbers balance. The budget must be honest. Otherwise, it's worthless.

With those simple rules in mind, it's useful to take a look at the US Federal Government budget which has just been proposed by George W. Bush. This document is one of the most breathtakingly dishonest documents to ever come out of an already amazingly dishonest government.

The claim that caught my eye in this part of the document was that this budget actually contributes to reducing the budget deficit. Supposedly, by 2010, the deficit -- the annual amount that the government borrows, not the total debt, which is still spiraling out of control -- is to be cut in half. In order to get there, however, the budget also assumes that none of the three signature George W. Bush policies -- the War, the Permanent Tax Cuts, and Social Security Privatization -- exist or are enacted, even though they are Bush's own priorities in his second term.

The federal budget makes no provision -- none whatsoever -- for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Not even a guess! These wars are officially budgeted at zero! See, instead of putting them in the real budget, they ask Congress for the money in "supplemental" requests (like this one); and they claim that since they don't know how much, exactly, the wars are going to cost, they can't put even an estimate in the budget. While the real cost of these wars is already about $300 billion, the official estimate of the cost is ZERO.

The budget assumes that Bush's signature tax cuts expire, as they are currently set to. It's really impossible to balance the US Budget with these tax cuts in place, so even though Bush is committed to making them permanent, his budget magically wishes them away, so that he can claim to be cutting the deficit.

Finally, the budget assumes that there is no Social Security privatization, even though, once again, Bush is committed to enacting his cherished private accounts this term. Here's the rub: in order to set up Bush's private accounts, the government will have to borrow enormous sums of money -- somewhere between $750 billion and $2 trillion. Clearly, there is no way to reduce the deficit by half, let alone balance the budget, and enact Bush's private accounts scheme, so it's not in the budget.

How easy would my life be if we could run our household budget by W Rules?

"Honey? We're doing great! All I have to do is take the mortgage payment out of our budget, and look! We're running a big surplus! While we're at it, let's borrow a whole bunch of money and go on a spending spree. And, yes, I am buying an SUV, but since I don't know whether I'm buying a Hummer or a Bad Boy, I'm estimating the cost as ... zero. But I promise -- ", with my fingers crossed behind my back, "-- I promise that in five years, we'll borrow less than we're borrowing this year. Wheeeeee!"

Well, you know how that ends. Sooner or later, a banker (Republican, naturally) will come around and take possession of my house, my car, and anything else I have of value. We would end up in a homeless shelter, assuming those were still being funded (they're being cut back, of course).

Because government budgets contain such enormous numbers and are difficult to read, and -- frankly -- because they're being lied to, people think that governments operate under different budget rules from their households, but it's just not true. Even the federal budget, with its dizzying heights of debt and its byzantine depth of detail, operates according to the same rules as our little household budget or our town budget: the numbers must add up, and the budget must be honest. (The biggest difference is the amount of say you get. I mean, hey, at home, I get one of two votes. In the federal budget, well, since I am not on the Bush Pioneer list of big-money donors, the Republicans let me have exactly zero votes.)

When it comes to government budgets, like our town's, there are only two choices. Either taxes must be raised, or expenses must be cut. (Our town doesn't sell T-Bills, and I'm betting yours doesn't, either.) Those are the only two choices, and neither one is easy. It takes honest and brave people to face up to these problems. By borrowing madly, shifting the burden of currenly liabilities on to future generations, and by pretending that other major liabilities simply don't exist, Bush is only demonstrating his dishonesty and his moral cowardice.

It is true that the US government has a better credit rating than you or I do, but that's because the government can always squeeze people for more money to pay off its debt. And believe me, it will. Bush is busy piling on a mountain of debt right now, and -- I'm assuming you're not a billionaire Republican friend of W here -- sooner or later, the government is going to come looking for you and me to pay it back, because whatever else a government can do, it can't borrow its way out of debt.

(By the way, remember back when balanced budgets were a Conservative issue? Now I'm a hippie for pointing out that you can't borrow forever. Proof that God has a sense of humor.)

"Freedom," wrote George Orwell, "is the freedom to say that two plus two equals four." This week, as we ponder the glorious steaming fetid lie that Bush will truck up to Congress and call his Budget Plan, that phrase resonates on more than one level.

Your Social Security Scorecard

Want to find out how you'll do under George Dubya's Social Security privatization scam? Pay a visit to this Social Security Calculator. It's pretty easy to use and very informative. Want to check the assumptions? You can 'View Source', which makes this page a lot more transparent than anything coming from the Republicans.

Jeff Gannon, White House Ho

Did you hear the one about the right-wing media whore who got into the White House under a false name and turned out to be a real whore?

It sounds like a bad joke, but "Jeff Gannon", allegedly a "reporter" for a flyweight outfit calling itself "Talon News", was a regular presence in White House press briefings. He got called on by Bush a lot, too, so he could lob Winger-friendly softball "questions" like this:

"[Democratic leaders] say that Social Security is rock solid and there's no crisis there. How are you going to work -- you've said you are going to reach out to these people -- how are you going to work with people who seem to have divorced themselves from reality?"

(More examples here)

"Gannon's" "news stories" were usually just copied and pasted from Republican talking points and White House press releases. It's obvious that "Gannon" was no journalist, he was just another White House shill who plays one on TV.

Looking into "Gannon's" background, a group of journalists and bloggers have unearthed a trove of material about the guy.

First of all, Gannon's name isn't Gannon. His real name is James Guckert. He's been getting a White House pass for months on his false name, but they claim they knew his real name (or maybe not: the story seems to have changed. Sometimes they knew his name, sometimes they didn't). They furthermore claim that they never heard of the guy who set up the "Talon News" site, even though he's a major Republican donor. How likely do you suppose that is? Here's a nobody from a rinky-dink web site, applying for White House credentials, getting the credentials only a few days after the web site goes live, and getting called on by Bush all the time at press conferences. You really suppose they don't know who he is?

If you're still unconvinced that they know him, consider this. He's one of the guys who got the Plame leak! That's right -- when someone in the Bush White House wanted to punish Joe Wilson, the ambassador who exposed Bush's yellowcake lie in the State of the Union address, they did it by leaking the identity of Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame -- who was working for the CIA -- to a select few "journalists", including Judith Miller of the New York Times, Robert Novak (the only one who published the information), and ... "Jeff Gannon". I guess they know who he is, all right.

Here's where the story starts to get bizarre. An investigation into Guckert's background reveals that he has been running an escort service on the web. But he's not just the pimp -- he's selling his own services! The web sites (you really have to see them to believe it) are military-themed, with names like "US Male Corps.com"; Guckert appears to have served in the Marine Corps, and is now applying a military theme to his "services", for guys who are turned on by that kind of thing.

How much stranger can this story get?

In situations like this, I like to apply the "Shoe on the other foot" test. Imagine for a moment that the Clinton Administration had planted a friendly shill in the White House press corps, and allowed him to get credentialed under a false name. Assume, furthermore, that this friendly shill had been given access, in strict violation of the law, to classified information exposing the identity of an undercover CIA operative. Assume, furthermore!, that this friendly shill turned out to have served in the US military as a gay man, and then used his association with the military to further a career as a gay prostitute!

Can you imagine the Right-Wing Shitstorm that would ensue? There would be such a hue and cry from the Wingnut blogosphere and the "mainstream media." It would make Monica tame by comparison! It would be everything we'd hear about every time we turn on the radio or watch television. It would be grist for endless hours of O'Reilly, Russert, and Limbaugh. Congress would demand investigations. Articles of Impeachment would be introduced.

Oh, but I forgot. "Jeff Gannon" ... is a Republican. So the "mainstream media," owned and operated by the Right Wing of the Republican Party, yawns a collective yawn. Nothing to see here, folks. Move along, no story here. And I guess I can't really blame them, after all, since, really, how unusual is a Republican who will do or say anything for money and power?

I guess it just goes to show you: A Ho is a Ho is a Ho.



A few more links, because I can't really do this story justice:
A man called Jeff
Why Gannon matters
'Jeff Gannon' Signs Off: Tells E&P He'll No Longer Talk to Press
Gonna Party Like It's 1998
"Jeff Gannon's" secret life
McClellan Tells 'E&P' He Didn't Know Guckert Used Fake Name for Nearly Two Years
Jeff Gannon owes back taxes
Jeff Gannon / James Guckert: a gay prostitute