Adaptive Curmudgeon

This is the third year of a new Festivus Christmas tradition.  We gather around the warm glow of the laptop and watch A Very Zombie Holiday.  It’s a heartwarming classic!

David Sedaris can get a little preachy at times but the guy is a master storyteller.  This one hits it out of the park.  Apparently everything I’ve ever known (in America) about Santa is turned on it’s head by the Dutch  interpretation of Christmas.

Hat tip to Fire Mission: Hippies In The Open for this obscure gem.

I’ve been on the road and busy to boot.  Combined with a Curmudgeonly personality and a history of TV avoidance I can find myself downright disconnected… which is just how I like it.

Unfortunately something evil went down Friday and I couldn’t avoid it.  I heard the news when I made the mistake of switching on the radio.  (I’d been happily listening to my MP3 player.)  I was looking for a weather report and instead found out that some sick bastard shot his mother, a bunch of kids, and some adults.  It cast a pall over the formerly cheerful truck cab.  Asshole!  I’d only reconnected with the news for ten minutes and was faced with this…  this… abomination?  I flipped the radio back off.

Tragedy.  No kid deserves to be shot.  Even as I wrapped my mind around it I knew that political gamesmanship would commence soon.  (Nothing is too ugly to become a political tool anymore.)  As usual, I’d be on the shit end of it.  I like my gun rights.  Invariably this horror would be used to hammer me and my ilk.

Surely there would first be a period of mourning?  Nobody is such a monster that they’d jump on it right away.  Also I really needed a weather report.  The road conditions were looking dicey.  I turned on the radio again.  Two minutes had passed since I’d heard the news.

No weather report.  Instead some airhead was blathering about the need to eliminate guns.  Imagine that!  Hours after the incident and two minutes after I’d first heard about it.

Like the tide follows the moon there is always someone who’ll exploit misery.  “In light of this horrible tragedy it is obvious that all Americans must submit to precisely what I’ve always wanted.”

I flipped the radio off again.  It was too much.  Capitalizing on the death of innocents more or less immediately.  Who thinks like that?

I never got the weather report.  I just kept driving.

The next day, Saturday, got even creepier.  Every station on the radio was playing with it like death was a theme park.  They even interviewed the coroner and discussed the autopsy.  Someone, presumably a grown adult who should know better, asked “What did it feel like?”  To get shot to death?  Who asks a question like that?

Worse yet, I was driving through Chicago.  Chicago is the home planet of gun control and various other forms of political control.  Chicago also has terrible traffic.  I inched along while a herd of talking heads paraded through my speakers with the unanimous theory that ignorant rednecks and their guns were clearly the cause of all misery.  I myself have never shot anybody and I like owning guns.  There is no room for me in Chicago.  I wished I was home with my family.

By Sunday I’d given up on even the merest hint of the radio.  My MP3 player is earning it’s keep.

By Monday I picked up the free newspaper at the hotel room lobby.  The headline said “Gun control nearing tipping point”.  It took less than 72 hours to go from a tragedy to that headline.

I suppose I’m not surprised but I’m saddened.  Not all tragedies are lessons.  Not all evil is a chance to start a crusade.  There is a time when one might do well to pause and reflect before starting the next political battle.  (Both parties should know this.)  Our nation is getting pretty darned good at turning on each other; an unwise reaction to sorrow.

I have been suspicious of Utopian plans to drop technology in impoverished hellholes.  One such program is One Laptop Per Child.  I’ve long harbored the concern that folks are prone to focusing on toys instead of learning.  (Notice I said “learning” and not “education”?)  I even see it in my child’s massively (overly?) funded school.  Bureaucrats and teachers alike get orgasmic over wads of Apple products when the kids would fare just as well (if not better) with boring traditional materials like books and pencils.  Here’s a hint; people have learned to read and write since literacy was invented, a $50,000 tech lab isn’t the key ingredient.

On the other hand I have long thought that it’s sad to deny any human access to the Internet.  Everyone (and I mean everyone; illiterate pig farmers and tribal goatherders included) can, if they wish, benefit from information.

Information is power.  It allows us to be more.  I endlessly appreciate the information I can dredge from the Internet!  Mine is the last generation of Americans (one would hope) that remembers how difficult even the simplest of endeavors was before the Internet.  (Try this test; turn off your Internet connection and then determine the proper spark plug gap for a Buick, who won the Sheriff’s election in Munsee, the distance to Bangalore, and the proper climactic zone to plant rhubarb.  Now do it with a cheap laptop.)  A reasonably bright citizen in 2012 (with the Internet and a cheap laptop) is like an intellectual God from 1950.

Back to the Utopians; if only the technology could be supplied without a heaping helping of condescension on the hands of whatever yahoo provides the e-toys.  So sad…

What’s this?  Just such an experiment happened.  Huzzah!  The result is pure awesome!

Rather than give out laptops (they’re actually Motorola Zoom tablets plus solar chargers running custom software) to kids in schools with teachers, the OLPC Project decided to try something completely different: it delivered some boxes of tablets to two villages in Ethiopia, taped shut, with no instructions whatsoever. Just like, “hey kids, here’s this box, you can open it if you want, see ya!”

Brilliant!  OLPC founder Nicholas Negroponte at MIT Technology Review’s EmTech conference describes what happened next:

“We left the boxes in the village. Closed. Taped shut. No instruction, no human being. I thought, the kids will play with the boxes! Within four minutes, one kid not only opened the box, but found the on/off switch. He’d never seen an on/off switch. He powered it up. Within five days, they were using 47 apps per child per day. Within two weeks, they were singing ABC songs [in English] in the village. And within five months, they had hacked Android. Some idiot in our organization or in the Media Lab had disabled the camera! And they figured out it had a camera, and they hacked Android.”

Isn’t that beautiful?

It gets better.  There’s a tie in (however far removed) with Science Fiction:

“If this all reminds you of a certain science fiction book by a certain well-known author, it’s not a coincidence: Nell’s Primer in Neal Stephenson’s The Diamond Age was a direct inspiration for much of the OLPC teaching software, which itself is named Nell.”

Those of you who’ve read The Diamond Age know that the subtitle is “A Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer” and it goes into detail about a high tech “book” providing the intellectual underpinnings for a top notch (if fanciful) education.  Those of you who have not read The Diamond Age should drop everything and read it now.

Hat tip to Aretae for the link.

A.C.

P.S.  If you buy The Diamond Age I don’t get a red cent.  This blog is totally for my own amusement and I recommend the book because it’s a damn fine tome.  (Though not as good as Cryptonomicon.)  Also, why the hell haven’t you read it yet?

This is exactly what cable news sounds like to me:

The N Word And The M Word takes apart the hopeless and pathetic idea that a designated victim group can declare certain words (or images) cannot be uttered by the rest of us.  Well done sir!  Here’s the money quote:

“When words, letters, pictures, even, are verboten, we are fucking Eloi.”

It starts with blacks who’ve beaten us white “oppressors” so much that even I, a blogger with the diplomatic skills of a weasel, refer to “the N word”.  (You know, the word that is in every third Rap song.) How did they do that?  I love inappropriate language and would swear in front of the Pope!  They even got to me!

After that he goes after Muslims who’ll get their panties in a bundle over a cartoon but happily plant bombs that kill Muslims in droves.  Yeah, I’d noticed that too.

P.S.  I linked Eloi for those of you who have been remiss in your reading of Science Fiction from 1895.

P.S.  In a related vein I’d like to mention Rattail Bastard.  He points out that “Piss Christ”, which infuriates Christians, is back on display in New York.  Christians aren’t likely to resort to bombs or beheadings because their religion has outgrown that shit.  Good point!

Finally, some good news from Detroit.  A carjacker decided to mess with a trained boxer and got his ass handed to him.  It’s pure delight:

“I grabbed his arm and threw him to the ground,” Turner said, adding that he was able to grip Hardman’s trigger finger and force him to discharge the gun.

“After I shot the gun off until it was empty, I grabbed it from him,” Turner said.

But that’s not the best part!  The best part is when an already beaten robber tries to play Perrty Mason to get his piece back.

“He got up and said, ‘Give me my gun back; I got a CCW.’ Then I hit him with the gun.“

Yes yes yes!  When someone who’s tried to rob you wants his weapon back… you smack him with it.  Huzzah!

Read the whole thing.

Hat tip to Bayou Renaissance Man.

P.S. I haven’t followed up to find out if the carjacker really had a CCW but I doubt it.  Even if he did have a CCW (which I just can’t imagine) he doesn’t now and never will again.   Here’s a hint for future criminals; when you pick the wrong victim and he beats the crap out of you and takes your gun… you can either cringe or try to run but don’t ever try paperwork.  CCWs are for law abiding people and not swine.  Duh!

As I mentioned before I’d seen an actual non-theoretical Volt in the parking lot of an actual non-theoretical restaurant. Could I pick the owner from the customers inside?

I was looking for a professional (because Volts are expensive), who was urbane (because you don’t haul pigs in a Volt), politically active (because you buy a Volt over a Civic only for political reasons), and female (because I expect no man more macho than Woody Allen or Al Gore to own a Volt). Mrs. Curmudgeon mentioned the Volt was driven by a male last time we sighted it. I waved this off on the presumption that he was imprisoned in his wife’s car. (Gentlemen…how many of you drive/own mini-vans for that reason?)

I scanned an unlikely crowd and settled on a well dressed professional looking woman in perhaps her late 30’s. She was the Volt owner. I was sure of it.

She was lunching with another professional looking woman. Which one was the owner? They were so identical I couldn’t decide. For some reason all the likely choices were eating in pairs with a demographic clone of themselves. Mrs. Curmudgeon was the only one stuck having lunch in the company of a clueless hairy male who plays stupid games like “Volt hunter”. The men ate in groups, alone, or in pairs with no pattern. I have no idea what that means but it’s what I saw.

(Warning: Paranoid observation follows)

Curiously all the women had smart phones laying face up on their respective tables. I’ve seen this elsewhere too. Is it socially required to have the phone prominently displayed? What is the phone doing? Is it checking facebook? Calculating stock valuations? Playing porn? Is it there in case it rings once and it’s too hard to get it out of a pocket in time? Are they expecting an important call? From who? Their boss? Their dealer? What’s up with the phone?!?

In my eyes the prominent face up phone made it look disturbingly like they were carefully yet openly recording their conversations. (This whole line of thinking made my tinfoil hat vibrate.) Obviously that’s not true but check it out yourself next time you eat lunch somewhere. Check out the phone and where it’s placed. They looked like cops taping a suspect’s questioning or reporters recording an interview. In contrast, the men (who probably have iDevices too) universally keep them out of sight… as God intended. Am I the first person to notice the “phones on the table” effect?

(End paranoid observation)

Mrs. Curmudgeon hesitantly agreed with my “Volt owner” guess. Fifteen minutes later the women left in two generic econobox cars. Prediction failure!

I scanned again and settled on the only other likely people in the restaurant. They looked like two nurses. They had the requisite iDevices tracking their conversations. A nurse in an impractical $40,000 car seemed odd but that was my best call.

Mrs. Curmudgeon picked a couple of guys. Perhaps they’re really nice fellows that like to discuss poetry but the rough appearance was two muscle heads taking a break from powerlifting at the gym and possibly crushing cement with their bare hands. Jocks in a Volt? Impossible! If that’s true I’d expect to see vegan poets driving dump trucks.

You know where this is going right?

Sure enough the two fellows got up and drove away in the Volt. Both men were wearing identical gym shorts in 40 degree weather. Both looked strong enough to break my spine if I insulted their car.

Mrs. Curmudgeon was right and I was wrong! She was not humble about her accomplishment. She refrained from tap dancing on my head in joy but I can tell it was hard. I promised to blog about my inglorious failed prognostication and her superior intellect. I suck and she rocks. What else can I say?

Based on this new observation I’ve changed my demographic profile of Volt owners.

• Wrong demographic: A wealthy politically active white collar woman who is taking her friend on a break from their job at a non-profit community organizing charity to eat a light lunch of leafy greens.

• Right demographic: Matching pairs of short stocky body builders wearing gym clothes and taking a break from their mixed martial arts training regimen to wolf down a pound of meat before another two hours of hammering the heavy bag.

I have learned much today.