From House of Eratosthenes this is just beautiful:
Delightful mayhem from Dead Man Dance:
*Around 1:30 I thought “I’d never let my chainsaw get that sticky”. I’m just sayin’.
I was recently listening to a hand wringing airhead fret about the incivility of bookstores. “Since when is it OK to have food in a book store?” She sniffed. My only thought was; “There is indeed a lot of stupid in popular fiction, perhaps I can place the blame on sparkly vampires?”
Then my attention drifted because I’d forgotten book stores still exist. How many are left? Are they located between soda fountains and livery stables? Are they sharing rental space with Blockbusters and the telegraph office?
I miss small private bookstores; they were magic. But they were hunted to extinction sometime during the great cultural revolution during which iDevices with games involving hurled birds supplanted rotary dial phones.
The first to go were the small private bookstore. You know the ones I’m talking about? The little book nooks were owned by earnest hippies, staffed with underemployed (?) English majors, and invariably host to at least one very contented cat.
Faceless corporate monstrosities beat them like a rented mule. Yes, yes, I know. Someone will point out that there’s a bookstore on the corner of Fifth and Main in the village of Riblet Notch located in Corn County, Iowa. Thus proving that small bookstores are no more extinct than the Coelacanth. Since it’s been decades since I’ve seen a good bookstore (or a Coelacanth) I’m sticking with the theory that both are exceptionally rare.
I hated to see little stores go but competition is what it is. Sometimes your favorite team loses big. The chains were devoid of magic but at least they were stocked with books.
Then, oh let’s say fifteen years ago… bookstores devolved into Starbucks with a few books arrayed for scenery. (The books were often outnumbered by archaic circular devices called CDs. These are found only in museums and my garage stereo. By the way; in this brave new world of leased music* are there still “record stores”? Am I dating myself just by asking?) In the chain stores I sought literature but got tired of fending off $4 lattes and limited titles which seemed unusually interested in calendars of kittens and sparkly vampires. Also there was the disturbing matter of a strange national obsession with feeding chicken soup to ones’ soul. WTF?
They self-immolated with the most tragically inept management humanly possible. I’d piss on their grave but the market did it for me.
Then came the last… oh I’ll guess decade… when my favorite bookstore has been a package delivered from the Internet. The selection was excellent and prices were fair. The only drawback was shipping. We all knew the time would come when on-demand books ironed out the last speedbump.
Finally this Christmas the modern world arrived at our archaic house. I’d held back as long as I could but the time had come. We crossed the Rubicon. I allowed a Kindle into the house.
There is no going back. Kindles are crack.
Our household is ripe for Kindle invasion because we’re aggressively dangerously unforgivably literate. All through the house, words are disassembled, deconstructed, folded, spindled, mutilated, adored, trashed, preserved, deleted, savored, swigged, passed around like a joint in Phish concert, consumed like beer at a kegger, and inhaled in a way Bill Clinton denied. Scrabble is a contact sport. We alliterate even when the drapes aren’t drawn. Similes and metaphors are bounced off walls like free radicals in Ron Paul’s brain. Words are mixed in good ways and bad and (in my case) foreign ones are mispronounced with wild abandon. All words are welcome in our house. (I’m the only one who swears but I don’t fucking care if you disapprove.) Further, as you’ve no doubt noticed from reading my blog, I’m willing to walk around in public without using spell check.
E-books haven’t eliminated printed material but they’re trying. As for brick and mortar book stores; e-books have drawn and quartered them and salted the earth where they grew. Driving to a store and buying a book in the age of the Kindle seems as stupid as putting on shoes and walking to New Jersey in the age of the automobile.
We would have been the core customer of a mom and pop bookstore. We would have been the cow milked by a bookstore chain. But the world has shifted. Now that a Kindle has bored into the household, our bookstore is henceforth bandwidth.
A Kindle is said to hold 4,000 books (and that’s to say nothing of the hard drives roaming around the living room). I’ll damn well fill the sucker and buy another when I do. I’m enamored with the magic of having every book all the time.
I’m always reading a Kindle. Except, that is, when some other member of the household has it. In which case I’ll seek the backup axillary Kindle. Which usually leads to everyone in the house (save the one parked in front of the fire with the main Kindle and the cat) racing to claim it. There have been no fisticuffs… yet. A limited resource in literature is anathema to a household that expects the Library of Congress in its hands at all times.
Sometimes I wind up sans Kindle while everyone else reads. I know it’s only a matter of time before we’ve got Kindles stacked like paperbacks in every room of the house. (And yes, there are still books in every room in the house. Usually in neat stacks unless the cat has knocked them over. Cats, because they are evil, don’t like books. Books, because they are heavy, are suitable for throwing at cats.)
Kindles (and other variants of the idea) are the new Gutenberg press. It’s a good time to be alive.
A.C.
* Some folks will disagree with me calling iTunes ditties “leased”. YMMV. I’ve been begging for over a decade to get a couple Johnny Cash tunes off my wife’s iPod so I can play it in my truck and I’m slowly realizing that I’ll die before it happens. A transaction that would take six seconds with a CD has dragged on through three presidents with an iPod. Steve Jobs has Johnny Cash in a damn stranglehold! Now that I think of it, he’s got Ted Nugent in one too. The madman of motorcity is locked in a database! Anyone know how to jailbreak my wife’s entire iPod onto something cheap that will never ever send a dime to Apple?
** You may note that I loathe iDevices yet refer to Kindles like they’re pets. Rest assured that I have no brand loyalty. Any e-book reader (such as my bargain basement Linux laptop) is as good as a Kindle to me. I also make darned sure I can move e-books around. There will be no Folsom Prison for literature!
I had the radio on while I was… forgive me John Galt… working my ass off. To my dismay the hippie banjo folk music I’d been grooving on gave way to hand wringing “news/tainment”. Damn it! Someday I’ll get decent shortwave and listen to music interrupted only by some language I can’t understand and therefore won’t piss me off. Stupid pronouncements in Finnish would likely spare me the mental strain of endless politically correct horseshit.
Within minutes the stupid hit the fan and a steaming heap of elitist tripe oozed through the speakers. Somebody was arguing for further government intervention. (For some folks, such thoughts are almost an involuntary reflex.)
The malady du jour was the ever growing waistline of Americans. (For this “crisis” I’ve coined the word “obesityism”. I like it so much I’m going to trademark it.)
The talking head cluttering up my airwaves explaining that it’s a bitch to avoid obesity. Why? Because we’re in an environment where food is ubiquitous. To her credit, this is true. On the other hand, is this news to anyone?
Her idea was that the government (who else?) should keep food out of places where it ought not be. Did you notice the implicit assumption in her idea? She presumes that people who agree with her would (and should) be making the rules that ignorant peons meekly accept for our own good. What she didn’t recognize is that Americans have already made their decision. Free people and free markets want cheap food everywhere all the time! We think food ought to be cheap and stashed in every available location from minivan cupholders to sidewalk vending machines. We have molded the world to our desires and she’s not happy to see her envisioned Utopia of arugula and Brie aggressively ignored.
“Since when is it ok to have food in a book store?” She sniffed. (I’m paraphrasing.) I pondered her point; do Americans really need a Snickers bar to pick out fiction? Briefly I drifted off in a revere about bookstores.
Then she moved on to complain about convenience stores which… and this is a surprise if you happen to be a nomadic Bedouin or perhaps live on Jupiter… have lots of food. I thought that’s what made them… what’s the word? Oh yeah, “convenient”. We have a word for convenience stores with no junk food; “gas stations”. Her money quote was:
“There is food everywhere.”
I did a double take and yelled at the radio. (It’s ok to yell at radios…they don’t mind.)
“And that is a bad thing?”
The radio didn’t respond so I shouted again:
“Would it be good if food was nowhere?”
All this did was make the dog nervous.
Folks, it sucks being fat and I sometimes veer dangerously close to lard ass territory, so I sympathize…but only to a point. I’m an adult. Therefore the responsibility for healthy diet rests squarely on my shoulders.
It’s not rocket science. Eat good things and you’ll be healthy. Eat things extruded onto a conveyor belt and you’ll eventually look like Jabba the Hut. How hard is that?
I try to keep reasonably healthy with my patented “mostly eat stuff I have personally killed” diet. I also get plenty of exercise. It only makes sense to lever my hefty American frame out of the LayZBoy to chop wood or climb a mountain or wrestle Sasquatch or do whatever else sounds like fun at the time.
Exercise is good. Junk food is bad. Act accordingly and you’ll improve your odds of someday being old. It’s a simple truth that’s available to anyone. Which is why I refuse to accept the impossibly condescending idea that it’s bad to live where food is everywhere.
You know what’s bad? Living where food is not everywhere! Only someone who’s gone very deep into their own circular logic lets glazed donuts overshadow the very important and timeless truth that starvation is really extra special bad and it has happened with tragic results all though man’s existence. I intend to stay as far away from that rat hole as humanly possible…even if it means I’ve got to man up and walk past a Twix bar in the checkout line.
Cue today’s Curmudgeonly Gem Of Insight:
“Cheap plentiful food is good. Always! Even if it’s junk.”
Those who would hinder cheap food are arrogant and bossy. They could just buy expensive good stuff and leave us alone. Sadly, that won’t calm their inner need to boss people around. They fall prey to an inflated power trip attitude to which a needle should be applied lest they create the hell on earth they think they want.
Anyone who wants to jeopardize our miraculously plentiful food is a menace. Let them realize their dream. Air drop them in a socialist paradise of managed caloric limits. A couple years in North Korea (where there isn’t a pop tart in the same time zone) should suffice.
In the meantime I’m scanning the airwaves for more hippie banjos and it’s making me hungry. Maybe I should go to a bookstore?
Let’s see if I can sum up today’s news:
It’s time for….drumroll please….misdirection!
How about making Catholics pay for birth control despite deep moral reservations?
If she thinks a $20 prescription is a big deal, wait until she figures out her share of the national debt is over $50,000.00. Or are Georgetown law students unschooled in comparative math?
What? That one’s over already? How about Romney putting a dog on the roof?
You tied a dog to your car dumbass. That’s going to totally hose your presidential bid in a couple of decades… well unless you’re running against a guy who ate one; but what are the odds of that?
Oh good grief. He really ate one? So much for that line of attack. OK fine. Let’s turn to the classics. Can’t we just tie the Republicans to a lunatic?
The urgent issue of the day: rock stars occasionally shoot their mouth off.
What? People aren’t particularly shocked when a rocker nicknamed “the motor city madman” says things that are modestly unusual? Really?
Wait! I’ve got it. Gay sex!
Fiscal issues? Forget about that! Look at this! Everyone just look at this thing here which is totally a big deal and far more important than any other pressing matters.
Yes, a really important emergency announcement of a personal opinion on gay marriage is just what this nation needs. Because nothing addresses $138,000 in debt per taxpayer like defining social policy! Yeah!
So there you have it. After two years of “evolution” in thinking the president came up with this really earth shattering important thing to do which has nothing to do with that tiny irrelevant issue of a mere $15,000,000,000,000.00 in debt. He also asked his kids what they thought because nothing says “ability to make tough decisions” like consulting your 13 year old daughter about social policy.
Vladimir Putin does not consult the opinion of youths in the matter of gay sex.
Brace yourself folks. The misdirection is only starting. We’re going to live in a torrent of irrelevancy from now until November.
From 2012 Cassandra Report III: Predictions 21 – 34
- The oil based socialist utopia of Venezuela will continue it’s slide into oblivion.
It looks to me like Chavez has beaten his country like a rented mule and his time is just about up. His 13 year socialist reign has been, for want of a better word, “craptacular” for his people. He trashed a nation in less time than most of us take to wear out a Honda Civic. It was a safe prediction. Who didn’t see it coming?
I consider it a done deal because I see the three biggies; “oppression”, “economic disaster”, and “instability”:
Hugo Chavez urges Venezuela’s exit from OAS rights body.
“In a televised speech, Mr Chavez said the Inter-American Human Rights Commission (IACHR) was ‘a tool the US uses against us’.”
Insight: Post-election hangover looms for Venezuela economy.
“Chavez’s cash-driven push ahead of the vote in October will come with a heavy post-election hangover for the OPEC nation’s economy. Inflation could hit 35 percent, the debt burden looks set to rise, and a third currency devaluation in as many years is looking inevitable.”
Chavez’s surgery raises question about succession.
“With a tight reelection race brewing for the president, analysts said Wednesday that Venezuela could be thrown into turmoil because Chavez has resisted grooming a successor during his 13 years in power.
The result is a power vacuum that his camp will be hard-pressed to fill, especially if he is unable to campaign for the Oct. 7 elections or wins and then becomes physically incapable of governing.
‘Venezuela is living with the unsettling effects of prolonged, one-man rule,’ said Michael Shifter, president of the Washington-based Inter-American Dialogue think tank. ‘Anything can happen.’
Shifter said ‘a fierce power struggle and jockeying for position’ is nearly inevitable for Chavez’s ruling Socialist Party of Venezuela.”
Note: some readers might consider this case still unproven. After all the “oppression” is mostly bitching about America (and who doesn’t do that?) and the economic disaster isn’t much different from Yankees and their Obama rainbows. Still, a mere five months into 2012 I’m calling it. I’m not expecting a turnaround. Nobody else does either. Unless he makes gold from straw before the cancer kills him and it’s followed by an inexplicable outbreak of peace and democracy during his wake…he’s caused a mess right through to the end.
Busybodies obsessively monitor people. Control freaks use the information that busybodies collect for their own nefarious ends. They all gravitate toward regulation. None care about you.
Consider Senate Bill 1813; The Moving Ahead for Progress in the 21st Century Act. (I love sanctimonious names! Could a name get any more condescending?)
I downloaded the bill and it clocked in at 1,676 pages! After carefully reading all 1,676 pages I can say that every page was clearly crafted by honest, humble, well meaning people who want only what’s best and… Bwa ha ha ha… I just can’t continue the sentence.
S.B.1813 is the usual bureaucratic regulatory morass that we’ve come to expect. The kind of big-brother hokum that only an echo chamber of control freaks with their finger in every pie could produce. Things like this seem to arise roughly bi-annually. I hate them all for the following reason:
“The best measure of government power is the degree to which it stays out of my business. A 1,676 page bill is not a good example of leaving me alone.”
Part #1: Ostensibly this is a bill about denying a passport to people flagged by the IRS. I call bullshit. I have a passport because I’m an American citizen. The IRS can man up and haul my ass to court where they’ll either win or lose. If they’re not willing to go to the mat with me they can piss off. Halfway “sorta’ prosecuted” semantic doublespeak is for people who want a prosecution they can’t earn.
I retain my citizenship in any instance short of incarceration. When I whip out my tattered little blue passport the discussion is over. Nobody on planet earth can deny that I am an America Citizen. Nobody! Not Harry Reid, not that moron at the McDonalds drive through, not my nosy neighbor, not the President himself, not my mother, and not the Pope. That’s what a passport is…it’s the proof. It matters. A man with a passport is a free citizen, a man denied a passport is a subject who can never leave his nation of birth. S.B. 1813 is a shot at allowing the IRS to do what the pope, my mother, and the president can’t; reduce me from free man to leashed pet.
Interesting logic they’ve got too. Suppose they do take my passport. Then what? Am I not an American Citizen? What am I? Am I a lesser citizen? Possibly a beta Citizen? A “retroactive minor”? (A pretty damn old one at that!) I propose the phrase for this new subset of sub-citizen be called “non incarcerated un-citizen who can’t do everything a citizen can do and is really just lackey/serf/drone who we tolerate only so he can pay taxes and vote for me“. Some of the folks who wrote the bill would already apply that label to me right now…but not during election season.
It smells of corruption and fails the “Jews In The Attic Test” incredibly badly. Right now I can leave America any time I want. So can you. This is a big deal. If you can’t leave the country any given Tuesday you are not a free man. That’s all there is to it. (Note: I’m not saying you’ve got to run your muscle car screaming across the border with trunkload of guns, a pound of weed, and a hitchiker who’s name you don’t know. Nor am I saying you’re a miserable serf if you’d prefer to stay home and read a good book instead. It’s just that a free Citizen is by definition not barred from leaving.)
S.B. 1813 intends to take that right away. That matters! I grew up fearing nations that did not allow their citizens to leave. Soviet Russia, East Germany, Iran, North Korea, Cuba… these were bad scary places where serfs cowered and guys in uniform barked “your papers are not in order”. There are still nations that use machine gun nests and concertina wire to keep people from leaving. America never ever fell into that crowd and that’s what makes us and other advanced democracies… better. We are better than them because we are free. Free = better. Barbra Boxer (who’s involved with this mess) should be dropped in North Korea to see what it feels like to be in a country that’s not free and therefore… worse.
Messing with passports isn’t subtle and the threat isn’t theoretical. The difference between a seized passport and concertina wire is in method, not goal.
Time for a Curmudgeonly Gem Of Insight:
“I grew up in a nation that allowed all citizens to travel freely (and that includes leaving whenever you feel like it). I intend to die in one. I’d like them to be the same nation.”
Part #2: Frankly “drop the right of a free citizen to leave his country down a rabbit hole” is a pretty ballsy idea but they decided to pile on. Why annoy just a few Americans (travellers with tax issues) when you can annoy a whole lot of them (everyone who owns a modern car)? Buried in the 1,676 pages is another provision requiring black box event recorders on all cars. Right now most new cars have event recorders but it’s a new thing and they’re there only voluntarily. I can rip that mother out of the machine any time I want. I keep an eye out and if I see amoral lawyers start running amok with black boxes mine will be gone faster than you can say “redneck with pliers”. S.B. 1813 would make such an action illegal.
Here’s the rub; I can’t see any way gathering all this information (mandated by law!) could benefit me personally. I can easily imagine a thousand scenarios where it could hose me royally. Time for another Curmudgeonly Gem Of Insight:
“If any information could be reasonably misused (either now or in the future) and it’s unlikely to benefit me, improve my freedom, or defend my privacy, then it’s wise to keep that data from being collected.”
Of course this is nothing new. There’s always a new idea and set of laws that will track me in ways that can’t benefit me. I’ve already got to provide ID to buy hay fever medicine. They’ve already tracked my keg fridge. They’ll fondle your nutsack and run your daughter through the perv scan at the airport. A few years ago they wanted tracking chips in my chickens. (I’m not making that up.) Not long ago my cell phone sprouted a GPS. This year they’d like to track my car and illegally seize the occasional passport. Next year it’ll be something else.
Never give an inch.
From 2012 Cassandra Report I: Predictions 1 – 12
- Newt Gingrich will never, under any circumstances up to and including the zombie apocalypse, become president. There, I’ve said it. We can all quit pretending. Newt could cure cancer on live TV and still lose. If I am wrong you may ridicule me in the future.
USA TODAY interview: Gingrich ready to support Romney
Was all that really necessary? Did anyone not named Newt really buy it?
I was told by several people that I should drop this whole subject. They were wise. I am ignoring their counsel.
Consider two tellings of the same story:
1. “My kid’s dentist did a good job and she was a nice person but her service didn’t work with my job schedule. I switched to another dentist. I did this because whenever I pay my money I’m the boss. An hour later I forgot about it.”
2. “My kid’s dentist did a good job and she was a nice person but her service didn’t work with my job schedule. I switched to another dentist. My actions make me an idiot. It was my job to work around her schedule. I inconvenienced her. I failed her. I was a terrible customer who acted like the center of the universe by refusing to figure out my schedule so the dentist could be happy. It was elitist because I thoughtlessly underestimated her services and devalued my dentist’s choices. My assumption that reaching into my wallet to pay for dentistry made me the boss is wrong. She doesn’t work for me. She works for herself. I delivered a rotten lesson that the man who actually punches a time clock is the one who society respects as really working.”
Wow! Same story but a completely different interpretation. Oddly, both themes exist on the same planet.
This all came from a recent post. Almost as an afterthought I told a story about a day care provider. She was a nice person who meant well but couldn’t quite grok the customer’s (my) needs in terms of a work schedule. We were one of two families that had hired her. After a few months I switched to a different service. Her other customer followed suit. That was the end of it. Her foray into the world of work for pay didn’t last a year.
I meant it to be a silly little story of “world of work encounters not-world of work”. To me it was a harmless story. To a few commenters it was a tragedy and I’d acted somewhere between clueless and monstrous. I used dentist in the stories above just to generalise the story from one profession to all.
I believe I stubbed my toe on an iceberg of discontent!
When I pay for something I believe I am the boss. In my mind this applies to the entire known universe. I act accordingly. When something serves me well I’ll pay top dollar. When it’s the opposite I close my wallet and walk out the door.
Examples of occupations where the person who is paying cash is the boss:
Some folks disagree. They suggest that customers are not the boss. Either being ensconced in a large organization or “working for yourself” mean the customer assumes responsibility and obligation to pay regardless of their needs or opinion. Refusal to do so makes me an elitist idiot who has failed to do the right thing. Examples in the comments were barbers, phone companies, and day care providers. As in; barbers, phone companies, and day care providers don’t work for you dummy.
I don’t think there’s common ground here. I do know that I’ve been put on notice that day care is a “third rail” occupation. I doubt anyone would get wound up about me switching dentists or drug dealers in the same way. Switching a day care provider is somehow different? I had no idea! As such I am creating the following list.
Occupations that believe they are immune to customer’s needs:
I encourage my readers to submit their entries to either list. Who knows what other third rails lurk out there.
The problem with prognostication is not the risk of being wrong, it’s the frustration if you’re right but still have to sit through the train wreck. However, it is universal law that you must put your words on the record before shit and fan collide lest you be accused of jumping the bandwagon later. I made several predictions in January and have been posting them whenever I can’t think of something better to write it seems appropriate. Here is the next batch of unsolicited prognostication:
Economics (The Dismal Science)
Miscellaneous
Protesters And Other Things That Clog The Streets
I could be wrong… wouldn’t that be great!
Here’s the link to Cassandra Report I.
Here’s the link to Cassandra Report II.
Here’s the link to Cassandra Report III.
