She just looks too dead...

I like to think of myself as being the easygoing type of moralist, who limits his scolding to occasional shouting at or - more effective - brooding disappointment with, his children, for whom I own responsibility to at least try to propel them properwards. More reactive than proactive, if I'm honest - but that's where Mater Familias comes to the fore; and rather like Jack and Mrs Spratt, between the pair of us we lick the platter clean. And they haven't turned out badly.

I bet Granny Lieberman would think the same of himself; or Great Aunt Hatch; so take all that with whatever fistful of salt you feel like hurling over your shoulder.

When it comes to the world outside I prefer to hold my tongue and let it alone. Not counting The Authorities, of course, from whom I expect honesty, dilligence, fairness, lawfulness, amongst many other things - they're different, as they ought to be. But for the unempowered, well, I just avoid the ones I find offensive. Usually.

People I find particularly putrid are those who, by their deeds or protestations, manage to trivialize or belittle those who have suffered real harm. Phoney, faddish claims of "child abuse" because your father once looked at you crosswise when you were six, say. Or thoughtless stupidity like this:

Nigel: All the other girls managed to have some sort of spark even in this sort of morbid situation. I think I look at you in this picture, and you actually just look dead. One of the simplest things, like acting dead, can be the most challenging. The problem is that you didn't do anything. You just gave up and thought that that was being dead.

As satire it might be brilliant; but it isn't satire. Is it?

Have I just lost the place so badly that I can't spot an honest pisstake any more? I caught this one just a week or two ago, saw it for what it was. But am I losing it overall, do you think?

If I have, then what have you done to me, America, with your damnable earnestness? What have you dooooooone...?

Blogger Ate Your Comments

Wha???

Not as though I get a lot of comments - sob, sniff - but still, that's no reason for Blogger to disable them arbitrarily. It turned them off on its own, but I think I've re-enabled them.

So now, make a pot of tea, sit back with a smoke...

<crickets>
...
Tum-tim-tiddle-aye-poh...

Do something meantime, via Searchie:

You scored as Scientific Atheist. These guys rule. I'm not one of them myself, although I play one online. They know the rules of debate, the Laws of Thermodynamics, and can explain evolution in fifty words or less. More concerned with how things ARE than how they should be, these are the people who will bring us into the future. Scientific Atheist 92% Agnostic 92% Spiritual Atheist 67% Apathetic Atheist 58% Militant Atheist 50% Theist 50% Angry Atheist 8% What kind of atheist are you? created with QuizFarm.com

Of course, I might not be any kind of atheist at all. I prefer the term "counter-religionist".

Credit Where Due...

REDIT WHERE IT IS DUE: I have my PC back to life, and my drive, without loss, all thanks to the Windows XP "System Restore" tool, which actually worked as advertised. Who'd have thought?

It was hairy for a while, I admit. This machine, its pretty much a games machine nowadays - I don't really work from it any more - and reinstalling games, though tedious, would have been nothing more than inconvenient. But it still has some toolkits that are occasionally useful for work that I'd have to reconstruct; and I'd have lost a lot of passwords, too, buried somewhere in the rubble, and that would have been a bummer. But worse than all of that, this drive holds iTunes, and reinstalling iTunes is an evil bitch, a guarentee of hypertension. Our music libraries themselves - mine, the manifold kids' - those live on a different disk. But whenever you reinstall iTunes, and attempt to incorporate your existing music libraries, its snotbubble DRM smegware counts the transaction as One against the number of "copies" it permits you to make. Even though nothing is ever, you know, copied. I've already been through two drives, and I think the "copy" limit is five.

Have I mentioned how much I detest Apple?

There is, apparently, a cheat; a workaround. But why, when I have paid real money for every last byte of music in my library; why should I be forced to act like some criminal by my own damned computer?

All of which brings me, in roundabout way, to that video: the ripped "1984" commercial starring Hillary in the role of Big Sister - ooooh!.

Now: I am by no means any kind of fan, and I'd be the first to agree that the video captures the otherness and chill of the Senator perfectly, yada-yada; but... come On! In these days of permanent war, of torture and kangaroo courts, of King George and his unitary executive, of NSA and FBI spying on citizens, of loyalite play-or-pay Departments of Justice; in such days as these the face on the screen should be Hillary Clinton?

Somewhere a ceiling is missing a beam.

That it should be Clinton cast in that role is at least historically fitting. In the original commercial, remember, mighty Apple of the Bouncing Breasts threw her hammer at the dread face of IBM, and never even noticed Big Brother Bill, who subsequently broke her back and threw her out the ring for many, many years.

Wrong target then; wrong target now.

Coming of Age

Was in the middle of writing another boring post about my putrid PC, when I suddenly realized my boy would have been twenty-one today. Should have attained his majority, be taking his old man out for a drink about now.

He was a fighter, in his way, just by being. Lived three years; but three years longer than anyone said he would. The first six months were toughest, perhaps: in the beginning every new day was a deadline, in the worst possible way. We'd wake in dread, wonder if he was still with us. Then every day became every week, and every week became every month, until his doctors threw in the towel and stopped predicting anything. By the end, of course, we were thinking him invincible - he'd come through meningitis shining brighter than ever, after all. A stupid cold, it was; out of the blue, that one cold too many.

No consolation, of course, but I'm free to imagine what he would have been, today, on his twenty-first birthday. Free to imagine outside the constraints of time and reality, to imagine whatever magical future I choose.

Here's to ye wee mannie, wherever you are. Big boy now.

Why we have a Second Amendment

Like it wasn't bad enough that I was paying $3.31 for every scabby gallon of gas tonight; but the only place in reach, before the fumes I'd been running on exhausted, was a feching Shell station.

Now: I don't know about your neck of the woods, but way out here, where nary a second may be suffered to pass without a pitch, all the Shell pumps have been fitted with TV's; and from the instant you pull out the handle 'till you're pulling away in your car, you are assaulted with commercials. Audibly, and visually: you can't even turn away, because it reflects off your car window.

If you are really unfortunate, they'll throw in a snatch of NBC@the_pump "comedy", as though the smell of the gas was not emetic enough. Me? I have to swear, to curse it loudly and roundly. "Shut the f*ck up!", or "I don't f*ckin care - shut the f*ck up and die!" Words to that effect.

That the price of a gallon has jumped 50 cents this past week is hardly news - not here at least. It happens this time every year, some excuse or other. The favorites are "trouble at a refinery" or "problems changing to summer formula". This year's "trouble" is in Texas - some refinery in Texas - Texas - is closed for "unexpected" maintenance, so all the gas in California has to be sent there blah blah blah. Most years they have some kind of fire or explosion around this time - seriously - so I suppose some bugger losing their toolbox in Texas counts as an improvement. Sheesh - refinery accidents in Scotland are a huge deal, happen once in twenty years or so. Here it seems sometimes they're Best Practises.

Shitty day all told, and I'm crabbit as mince. Lost another disk drive last night - apparently the 120GB drive with Windows on it. I had taken the precaution of buying a data recovery package some time ago, against this possibility, but discovered today that the f*cking thing does not run on its own off CD, but needs f*cking Windows to be up and running first. And this from a program suite that promises to keep me safe from "catastrophic" system failure. Clearly they never looked the word up in a dictionary.

Kinda sorta have the system up again, but not really. It's running at about 1 instruction per second, as opposed to the 2.3 billion instructions per second it is supposed to run at; and those instructions it does run are crap ones. Haven't been able to repair the disk yet - though once Windows is up (via a Windows disk) it appears that everything is where it is supposed to be, not lost at all. But it won't boot on its own, and I've just HAD IT. A pox on all their plooks!

To think those smarm-fisted Apple-v-Windows commercials had almost succeeded in eliciting my sympathies for Microsoft-the-Underdog - something utterly unthinkable in this household - to think that smug-pussed little tit with his wooly-liberal pullover and so-cool designer jeans had made me cheer for the gormless suited creeps; to think I'd almost let that happen?

What a magnificent feat of advertising. Apple Computers: cool like Sprockets.

And while we're on the subject, I know I'm old and slow and always the last fart in the bell jar, so this is probably ancient history to the rest of you, but I noticed yesterday that those ubiquitous Flash commercials that magic pixies post on blogsites, if you hover and right-click, some of them offer to switch on your microphone and webcam for you and direct their output into the commercial. Just in case, you know, you want to say "Thanks" or something. The fact that they ask is irrelevant: for clearly they don't need to - they could just switch them on for you, on-the-fly, and just kind of spy. The EULA probably says this, too, but in words no english speaker would ever understand. It reminded me, rightly or wrongly, of a BBC adaptation of "1984" I watched as a kid; where the TV in your sitting room had its own Eye-of-Kit that scanned to-and-fro across the screen. Spooky, eh?

A pox and a plague and a pile of puss on all their putrid ponytails: I'm off to bed. No pictures for you!






[Now that I've said it out loud, I can't find any of those "spy"commercials. Bugger - but they were there. Promise!]

Night at the Flicks

UESDAY NIGHT is school night; or class night, since I'm only taking one. We've moved onto Baroque now, having rattled through proto-Renaissance; early Renaissance; 15th Century Northern European; High Renaissance; Mannerism, and Reformation / Counter-Reformation, which sounds like one of those intellectual chitterings they used to run on BBC2 of a Sunday evening, which always seemed to feature Malcom Muggeridge or some other smartypant Oxbridge mugger.

I've always had this niggling question, back of my mind, walking round museums, looking at the paintings, as to whether the ubiquitous religious images were a measure of piety, or of fear - especially the churchy ones: the portraits of bishops, cardinals, monks and priests; or popes, and rings being kissed? They could always be, other hand, entirely mercenary.

There's an extravagant gallery within the Boston Museum of Fine Art, a huge room, long, wide, and tall, whose four walls are lined all the way up and all the way down with religious paintings. They're literally stacked and packed - four, five, six paintings high, inch-pressed column after column - and I don't think I've ever visited a room quite like it anywhere else - except, perhaps, in the paintings of Pannini, which suggests a sly sense of humor somewhere. It was here, in this room with its poorly lit concentrate, that this whispy notion of fear of church crystallized. I'm sure this is not what the curators meant for me to walk away with.

I don't, as it happens, really believe it. I don't believe all those annunciations, visitations, adorations, flights into Egypt; callings of apostles, deliveries of Key, transfigurations, miracles, cleansings of temple; all those maniform Passions, suppers, betrayals, trials, pietas, depositions, lamentations, resurrections, ascensions and assumptions; or legion martyrdoms - I don't believe that they were all of them, or many of them even, writ in fear. But the sense of it was very real, and persists.



[Tip o' the Hat]


This one, for example: El Greco's "Burial of Count Orgaz", which I have not seen in life, for it hangs in a church in Toledo and I've never been to Spain, not even Torremolenos. Its a counter-Reformation piece: part of the Catholic church's propaganda drive to reel the restless proddies back to into the arms of the One True Faith. It contrasts a finely-detailed, perfectly-proportioned almost-photographic here with the billowy willowy illusionistic There!. The unspoken promise: "Stick with us, for we are the Way."

Now: I look at that painting, that image, and can't help asking: "He really had a choice?"

Or poor Botticelli - one of my favorite artists - who an age before fell under the spell of a malign but charismatic monk and threw his own paintings on the Bonfire of the Vanities.

Maybe it's just me? Quite happy to accept that this is all a reflection of my own prejudice, which shies away from organized religion, and runs away from zealotry. I can't escape the thought that it's all just waving sticks at trees, begging the sun to come back in the morning. That's just me. But for all that it's the aura of art; the meta of art - most notably music, but painting too - it's the mysterious resonance of art that compels this self-denying spirit yet to sing and prevents me from taking that final step of renunciation.

Dreaming in Code

Jumping Jehosephat - someone's written a book about it. You have no idea how disturbing it is to dream in code: a particularly stressful repetitive experience. Always, in my case at least, running through the coded statements of some pointless infinite loop, asking "what the heck is this doing?", unable to prevent its continued iteration. Language will vary depending on what you are working on - C, C++, assembler, microcode, hell-blasted SOUL for chrissakes, which none of you will have heard of (it isn't this one; it was dead before the web was invented) - as will the goal that you know it isn't realizing.

Surefire sign that you need a vacation; and a surefire sign that there's no damned way you can take one.

The blurb suggests the book is about the dark art of coding, rather than dreaming, per-se. And make no mistake - it is an art; an act of creation that no amount of schooling can imbue. Indeed, the very worst programmers I've dealt with have all had stellar Comp-Sci academic backgrounds. And the worst of their drivelings put my dreamscapades to shame.

Wormturn

AITING FOR THE AXE to fall. You work in a place for a while, things never quite pick up across the years, you just kind of know. Your e-mail tells you of boardroom coups thousands of miles away, your CEO leaves to spend more time with his portfolio, you know the experiment is over, that the black conglomerate heart is reasserting itself.

Do you put your name out now, to beat the rush? Or do you hold out for a package?

It will be a blessed release; but why is it, I ask myself, that I always seem to stay longest in companies I just don't like? Mainly because the companies I loved working for met the same end, but sooner. But also because, as the Fates would have it, I always seem to be trapped in unhappy jobs during recessions and downturns; companies that use the downturn to bludgeon takehome growth. Oddly correlated to "conservative" government. I blame Bush. My career at this place seems to have echoed, in its own forgettably trivial way, the trajectory of his presidency and his adventurism; lending new nuance to the profundity that "All politics is local."

A blessed relief it will be, when it comes, but I hate this part of the wait: when everyone knows what is coming but has to pretend otherwise. And so, next week, I have to make a forlorn trip to Ottawa, projecting All is well, emoting Hale and hearty!, but really, truly, deeply, cannae be arsed.

Still: with my green card now two and a half years old - come November I can apply for citizenship - with the shackles of H1-B long sawn away, it is really nobody's fault but my own. I couldda gotten out earlier; I shouldda gotten out earlier; I woulda gotten out earlier; but I didn't even try. Couldnae be arsed; and other reasons. Which is to say, none of this should in any way be construed as the whiny greetin' of an overpaid under-exercised lardass with entitlement issues, even if - face it Fatso - it may, in fact, be.

No: its all of it just my way of saying I may soon have the opportunity to "spend more time with my Blog." Which, now that they have well and truly discovered it, is equivalent to spending more time with my fambly.

In what is perhaps the least of several ironies, it wasn't until I'd pretty-much stopped writing it that they found the bloody thing. Oh, they knew it existed alright - and FRtm knew where to find it - but, bless them all from every direction, they considered my very public website to be Dad's private business.

The reviews have certainly been encouraging, along the lines of "Who'd have thought the old man had such words in him". The real Bearded, you see, is not at all the chatty-Cathy of the Xenoverse, but silent and reserved and totally tongue-tied, except when he's SHOUTING!!! The real Bearded finds it much, much more difficult to put a sentence in his head and speak it than he does to write it down. Extemporaneous is not his middle name; and, as he's said many times before, it takes him forever to write, too. The real Bearded, the historical Bearded, is one of those geeks you've read about, and thought perhaps a myth, who genuinely did "converse" with his colleagues across the workdesk using PHONE, or nowadays AIM. Furthermore, although he has worked on the comms code behind them for many, many years, the real Bearded wouldn't touch a real phone if his life depended on it. Hates them, he does.

But - Gawd's sake - let's get back to first person, shall we? For if there is one thing (One thing?) the real Bearded and his belovèd Goddess wife of the flashing eyes can not abide, it is people who speak of themselves in the Third.

So: where've I been? What've I been up to? Have I really been "too busy" to blog these past eighteen months? Well, Yes. Very much... but then again, not exactly, just... close. Truth is I have been busy with work - ridiculously busy, hideously busy even - but not so busy that I've had zero free time at all. I could surely have used some of that time to blether more inanities in this space, but I kinda sorta lost the will to do so. Things I might have written about before just sailed their way past without so much as a meh. The alter-Bearded acquired some attributes of the real.

One of the things I have achieved while marooned in the Doldrums is to augment my position as America's worst banjo player by becoming America's worst guitar player too. And, unlike my Banjo, for which I possessed the native wit to accomplish the feat on my own, I have been able to take lessons in dreadful guitarrin'. For this I blame Prajer, or Teachout, or Blowhards - whoever it was amongst them who wrote a post arguing that Art, true Art, makes you say to yourself "I want to do that!"

Well, I did.

If they'd heard the result, though, the consequence of their notion, they'd every one of them wish they'd kept their gobs shut. But it's too late now - the cat is out of the bag and just doesn't buy that it's dead. And the source of this triumph of unassailable schoolboy hope over a lifetime's experience? Arguably the most pretentious band in existence, whose writings and utterings and "philosophies" make me shudder in crimson embarassment. All that be damned: I love their music; it made me pick up guitar; and that's all that matters.

Another thing I've done, slightly less shameful, I've taken a course at the local Community College in "History of Art - Renaissance to Modern". We both of us love us our art, and our museums; we visit them wherever we go, and we go where we know we'll find art. But we don't really know diddly about it - fully paid-up members of the classic "Know nothing about Art, but knows what we likes" party. Just think what I'll be able to accomplish on my next visit to the Getty now that I'm armed with half-knowledge? Hah - I'll have to write about it too! It's an assignment: "Wot I did at the Museeyum", by FC Bearded, aged 44 and-a-half.

Buggery bollox though - I've already written about paintings and the Getty in here, many times past. So now I'll have to think of something new to say about it so I don't plagiarise myself (my other self). But... maybe not? A scan through my archives in fact reveals a paucity where I'd thought there a bounty! That means, dear reader, that all those Getty posts I did write were on my first blog - the original at-home Xenoverse that went up in smoke with its disk drive, the very event that threw me at Blogger, and this incarnation. Well, if I happen to repeat some of the things I wrote then, observations longtime lost to humanity, that won't be cheating. Will it? Thing is, my memory being the way it is, I wouldn't know it if I had. For the same reason that I'm able to laugh at Simpson's jokes hundredth-time-around as though they were fresh, pretty much guaranteed I'll notice the same things on my next visit that I have on all priors. I'll just have forgotten, and so be enchanted all over again! The upside of being possessed by a volatile memory is continuous revelation. I've probably written that before, too.

Finally, for today at least, my writin' hand now havin' tread the wheel just enough to call it exercise, I ought to report that FRtm has this week graduated, in his own trepidary way, to productive member of society status. He obtained a drivers license. So now he pays taxes and, far more importantly, taxis his younger siblings to and from school, or college, or the ice rink, or wherever; thereby alleviating his grateful parents of that dread obligation. We are so very happy for him that paying gas for the van does not trouble us at all. Score one for The Lunk.

Oh dear...

There are few things sadder in life than old socialists or young conservatives.