So yeah, I actually fired up a Twitter account a few weeks back. Most times that I have anything to say I’m likely to get a head of steam going, but the small handful of times I’ve bothered to update, it has failed. In all but two cases. Wow. Micro-blogging with micro-reliability.
Anyhow, chalk can induce NERDRAGE. That’s really all I was looking to broadcast tonight.
By all account I’m no true Star Trek fan. I couldn’t tell you what shipyard the Enterprise C was built at. I can’t even remember the name of Khan’s wife. I enjoyed watching reruns of the original series when I was a kid. I enjoyed The Next Generation when it was new. I watched the first couple seasons of Deep Space Nine. I saw most of the movies. I watched most of the first season of Enterprise. That’s about all I’ve got in Trekkie cred, but I know bad news when I see it.
The new Star Trek trailer disturbs the heck out of me. It’s gone sweaty. Spock looks metrosexual (I take it the Vulcans have extra-logical exfoliation techniques). Was that supposed to be Scotty? Please God, don’t let the dude that played Harold appear as Sulu. I suspect this will be even more offensive than… Well, I’m just not sure, but I fear that the new Star Trek flick is going to be horrible on so many levels it’d make Christopher Pike blow out his “no” button.
Got to see the first returns come in while having dinner at Old Ebbitt, a bar and grill across the street from the Treasury building. After dessert we went back to the Hotel Harrington (more on that later). it had been a long day. We’d buried my Nana at Arlington in the morning and gone to Maryland for a party at her nephew’s house. My sister was bumming a bed from us for the night before heading back to California, and we were all just about ready to get some sleep. I was the last holdout, leaving the television on to wait for the west coast returns. The moment the polls closed back home, CNN called the election for Barack Obama (it was certainly no surprise at that point).
Moments later we heard cheers from eleven floors down. The crowd at Harry’s got the word and were out on the sidewalk celebrating. Car horns erupted up and down the street. Rebecca, Sharon, and I got up, put on some street clothes, and headed down to check it out. The streets of Washington, DC are pretty mellow at night. Not many people out and about. We saw small groups of people, maybe three or four walking together, jubilant. We were tempted to head back up, then we heard some commotion down E street, towards the White House. Let’s check it out, why not?
As we walked, we passed by dozens of people who would pump their hands in the air and shout “Obama!” or “Yes, we can!” and an occasional “President of the United States!” I can only assume the McCain supporters were just not interested in staying up or going out for a defeat. Everybody we saw was ecstatic until we got to a group of nicely-dressed people exiting a hotel to their valet parking. Never found out who they were.
The next not-terribly-happy group we ran into were the White House security people on Executive Avenue. Apparently they were a bit edgy. The sidewalk nearest the southern end of the White House, which had been open to the public the night before, was off-limits. We had to cross the street to follow some college-age kids that were hooting and hollering. Once we got around to Lafayette Square and saw the stream of young people coming in from George Washington University to celebrate the election results, I understood why.
Everybody was positive, but nearly everybody was young, partisan, and energetic. It was invigorating to see people smiling and laughing and singing and chanting (and even dancing in the streets a bit). But get that many excited young people in the same place at the same time, and you start looking for you nearest exit. Everything was positive. Everybody was well-behaved. There were no problems. But that didn’t mean I needed my pregnant wife on hand if anybody did something stupid and brought the Feds down on us.
We cheered along for a bit, never quite going to the center of the action, and headed back to our room. On the way, we stopped off at the Elephant & Castle to listen to the President Elect’s acceptance speech and tip back a drink just before last call. The yelling and honking continued into the night, keeping us up off and on till three in the morning. I should probably ask one of the locals if this happens every time a new president in selected. I bet our waiter at Old Ebbitt knows; his mother is an undersecretary at the State Department.
Neat town.
The National Novel Writing Month starts tonight at midnight. Fifty thousand words, thirty days. I’ll be toting my laptop along on a trip to Washington DC, and hope to be able to make good use of time spent in airport terminals. My main priority for being in the nation’s capitol on election day is simple: don’t get arrested. Whatever happens on Tuesday or Wednesday, I need to not put myself in a position to get arrested. Secondary priority: don’t get physically beaten by anybody of any persuasion. Tertiary priority: have a great time with my wife away from the kid. That leaves the NaNoWriMo at an unfortunate quarternary priority.
This year I’m hoping to more aggressively embrace the format of the challenge. I don’t want to unduly limit myself with self-editing, pressing myself to write the story in the order in which it would be read. This time there will be some skipping around, maybe some derailing, and some character exposition that won’t necessarily fit where I’m putting it as I’m writing it. One of the big tips that past winners give is to not edit yourself as you go along; you can fix the typos and the poorly-crafted sentences later, in December, maybe January.
Looks like Chunkbot, Daniel, and Jase are all participating this year. Break a keyboard, boys!
Damned commies and their communism…
Don’t ask me silly questions
I won’t play silly games
I’m just a simple choo choo train
I’ll always be the same
I only want to race along
Beneath the bright blue sky
And be a happy choo choo train
Until the day I die
–Blaine the Train
On November 4th, the people of Marin and Sonoma will get another shot at getting the funding for the Sonoma-Marin Area Rail Transit (SMART) up and running. This failed very narrowly two years ago when gas was about a dollar a gallon less around here, so there is a good chance that the curmudgeons that squeezed out just enough votes to deny the needed 2/3 majority will be on the losing side of economic momentum this time around. This is Measure Q, and I’ve already marked it “yes” on my absentee ballot. Hope you did the same.
All of California will also get a chance to weigh in on Proposition 1a, a high-speed rail bond intended to provide bullet-train service along a largely pre-existing right-of-way corridor all the way from the Sacramento, through the Bay Area, and down to Los Angeles. It isn’t cheap, but it is a massive infrastructure improvement that should help ease the crowding at some of our busiest airports, and take some burden of long-haul corridors like I-5 and Hwy 99, which see a lot of pass-through traffic. Unlike most of the recent bond measures, which I habitually vote against, this is a proper use of bonded debt: to build infrastructure that will help reduce future costs to the people and state, encourage economic development, and produce something that will be in use long after the bond is repaid. Prop 1a gets a thumbs-up from me as well.
In the interest of full disclosure, I must admit that I have a (nearly) three-year-old son and would love to buy him two big choo-choo sets to play with. Also, I’d much rather kick back and read a book than drive for eight hours to visit my nephews and niece down in Long Beach.
A lot of people are going to vote in ten days. Many already have, either at early-voting precincts or by absentee ballot. Some people aren’t going to. Many because they do not consider their choices appealing enough. Some because they do not feel their votes will account for much. Some unknown number will, however, show up to the polls and not actually vote. Vote suppression, caging, registration purges, broken polling equipment, and uncounted provisional ballots may yet steal the franchise of thousands of citizens this year, just like in 2004. This is essentially the last remaining path to victory for the John McCain campaign, which is trying desperately to put up a fight in Pennsylvania, Colorado, and Virginia.
If they do it again, if Ohio voters in predominantly minority and urban areas have to queue up for hours in the rain, if thousands of registered voters are turned away at the polls due to a typo in some database, if contested voters are forced to use provisional ballots in Colorado, Indiana, and Florida that will then be re-contested after the voter has left, and the election is stolen, what happens next? Some pretty broad-scale election fraud is already under way, so what do we do about it?
Keep an eye on the news November 4th. Election fraud is a hard story for the nightly news to cover, as it involved actually getting reporters out on the streets to interview poll workers, voters, and election officials. It takes more than two seconds to explain what “caging” means, so the producers on the 24-hour news networks are reluctant to tie up air time with it.
Get your buddies together and plan yourself a party. A celebration of freedom, democracy, and the rule of the people. Don’t have it at your house, have it at your town square. Have it on the lawn in front of your city hall. Bake some pies, bring some drinks. Invite everybody. Plan on having a grand old time, like 4th of July on the 5th of November. See if you can get the local campaign HQ of your presidential candidate of choice in on the act. Make up lemonade for their campaign volunteers and have a big shindig. If things go sour on election day, you may be able to have a few hundred people already set to hit the streets.
tl;dr – the power to govern comes from the consent of the people, even by way of apathy. Don’t give it and they don’t have it.
It draws near. Thirty days of nonstop wordcraft. Thousands of would-be novelists descend upon their notepads and keyboards, pouring ideas into fresh works of fiction. The goal is clear: 50,000 words of fiction in thirty days. Start on November 1st, finish before December 1st. The prize is the intrinsic satisfaction of having written a novel.
Last year I gave it a shot. I can fabricate all manner of excuses, but frankly I ran out of steam, got dissatisfied with my premise, and couldn’t gut through the second half of the work. I came away with a greater respect for those who have gone before, the wordsmiths that put pen to paper and bore through it. In theory it looks simple, start telling a story and keep going. In practice I found it was quite difficult. I could have told the story I had in my head in 10,000 words or less, it turns out. Clearly I’ll need to take a different approach this time around, pace myself and my plot, and avoid getting to the goodies too early.
As an extra hurdle this time, I’m spending much of the first week of November in Washington DC. I expect to be kept thoroughly occupied. I invite any brave souls out there to join in the struggle. Check out http://NaNoWriMo.org/ and keep your powder dry till the 1st!
Everybody knows the burrowowl lives in a hole. In the ground. Why the hell do you think they call it a burrowowl, anyway?
— The Dead Milkmen, Stuart
I’ve been around on the Internets for a while. I was using this hunk of junk before they were pluralized. Back when we all thought it was a big truck we could just pile things on. Back when NCSA Mosaic was new and mysterious, and tools like Gopher and Archie were the rule of the day. I remember the rise of WWIV bulletin boards here in Sonoma County and thinking that 9600 baud was a bit excessive. And a bowl of soup was a nickle. Anyway.
There are some things I’m just too old and crotchety to quite understand. It’s a pretty long list, so I won’t get into everything. Instead I’d like to just comment openly on web forums and friend lists. I participate in a couple of web forums (fora for you guys that took a semester of Latin) where I have been a reasonably-frequent contributor. Heck, I’ve made nearly 4,000 posts on the Privateer Press site. I was comfortable that in the twenty-two years I’ve participated in bulletin boards and their more recent analogs were open books to me. You acquire an account by whatever means the sysops make available to you, you operate under an alias, you have to live with the fact that the sysops and mods have absolute editorial control should they choose to exercise it, et cetera. I’ve even (reluctantly) become fairly fluent in BBcode.
What I can’t for the life of me understand is why people I don’t know, that I’ve never met, that I don’t actively exchange private messages with, sometimes whose screen names I do not recognize, will add me to their friend lists. When I get a message that says “somedude has successfully added you to their friends list,” my immediate reaction is negative. Who the hell is somedude? Since when did somebody get to unilaterally make friends with me? What kind of horrible standards does this site have for determining a baseline of friendship? Did the word “friend” change on me, did I miss that memo?
When my kid shares a plastic dump truck at the park, he’s made a friend. It’s a shallow ad-hoc friendship that doesn’t even necessitate the exchange of names. Two little kids being nice to each other at the same time are friends. The older you get, the more involved and stringent your requirements for friendship become. You start sorting people out into categories of “classmates” and “teammates” and “acquaintance,” and save the term “friend” to apply only to people towards whom you extend a measure of genuine trust and concern and camaraderie. The natural development of social caution and skepticism contracts your willingness to recognize friendship in strangers.
This doesn’t jive with some anonymous assclown suddenly sticking a label on your web persona. Not even at its loosest, most innocent, pure form of toddler playgroup friendship sees this, where even a hint of reciprocity need not apply.
I have standards. If you only know me as Burrowowl, I am not your friend. If I posted an encouraging comment on your weblog, that is not an exception. I agreed with you at the moment about that very narrow topic of discussion. Reading the “About” page and seeing my full name doesn’t earn you special consideration. To me you are whatever paper-thin mask you hold up in front of your screen as your online persona.
The Republican Party here in the US has fallen on some hard times. The party of personal responsibility has prominent factotums refusing to honor congressional subpoenas. The party of high moral standards has been hit with a series of embarrassing corruption and inappropriate-sex scandals. The party of fiscal conservatism ran the federal government’s budget into the dirt and pushed for a $850 billion bailout for a financial market they are widely perceived as having failed to regulate for the past seven years. Their presidential candidate has hung his hat on a maverick persona that relies heavily on his reputation for opposing pork-barrel spending; but he pushed for, lobbied for, and voted for the $850 billion bailout laden with pork. Their vice presidential candidate… Well, I don’t think there’s a lot that needs to be said there.
I’m kinda feeling sorry for them at this point.