Author: Stagger Lee

There must be something worse than flying at the holidays, but I can’t imagine what right now.

As always, reverting to the usual site for any postings while in the field.

Otherwise, Merry Christmas to all, and to y’all a good night…

…is the title of my favorite new Christmas song – it was last year’s holiday track from the Killers. Their first, “A Great Big Sled,” was another solid hit; their second, “Don’t Shoot Me Santa” was…less so. But this one was oddly affecting.

Well your eyes just haven’t been the same, Joseph

Will you do what’s right? The position is yours…

Think about this. You’re just this guy, a carpenter, making a living for yourself in a Roman-occupied Judea where you’re probably lucky just to be hanging onto upper-working-class. Engaged to be married, good decent life ahead of you, and then – out of a clear blue sky – she’s pregnant. And it sure as hell wasn’t you, and you don’t want to make a fuss, but come on – what else are you going to do?

And then, the angel of the Lord shows up, and he’s got a message. Yes, she’s pregnant, and her baby’s daddy is God. You know – Jehovah. YHWH. “I AM THAT I AM.” Yeah. And you have to marry her, you have to have the baby, you have to raise the baby as your own, and to cap it all off – proof that the angel of the Lord went to Notre Dame – you can’t tell anybody why you’re doing it. You have to be the stepfather to the Son of God.

Not just somebody’s dad

We have no idea what happened to Joseph. We know he stepped up, married his fiancee, was there at the Temple after eight days, to all accounts brought up his son the best way he knew how. And then…nothing. No mention of him down the home stretch. Not a word about when, or how, he died. Just disappears – not really germane to the story anymore.

I think that irrespective of your faith – or lack thereof – there’s a lesson here. There are things we have to do in this life that we probably don’t want to, things that drop out of the sky at the worst possible minute, and there’s no door number two, no plan B, just this thing that you have to deal with. Whether it’s a natural disaster taking your home out from under you, or a parent you never thought of losing suddenly gone, or a pink slip the second week of December, or a phone call from the police at 3 AM, or the doctor walking in and closing the door and sitting down – you just have to swallow hard, accept that this is your life, and face it as best you can.

Joseph is the patron saint of the local parish, and (obviously) of the nearest big city. If the lives of the saints are meant to be exemplars of how we live our lives, you could do worse – get on with it, do the best you can, and don’t be a horse’s ass about it.

Oh yeah, the song also features Elton John and Neil Tennant. You think that’s not an instant classic, well, you’re entitled to your wrong opinion. =)

The Italianate coffeehouse beloved of Facebook employees in days past now has a location in the 40’s Streamline Moderne edifice that is the Palo Alto Caltrain station. It’s a fabulous location – so much of the original decor and furniture is still there that it feels like commuting through a movie. All you need is steam, fog, and Bogart with a revolver in his raincoat.

(INT. TELEVISION STUDIO, DAY. PROBABLY MORNING.)

DEMOCRAT: What the plan calls for is an individual mandate – everyone has to buy insurance. If you get this through your job, or if you’re in Medicare or Medicaid, nothing changes. If you are currently buying your own insurance, or don’t have insurance, you will be able to choose from among several plans in a health exchange, which will have millions of customers and will be able to get the kind of rates that big companies get. If you can’t afford to buy insurance, we will have financial support available. And to make sure that the insurance companies don’t take advantage of a captive audience to just jack up rates, we will have the opportunity to buy into the same insurance program that members of Congress have, a non-profit program, which will help keep the insurance companies honest and prevent them being able to just gouge you for more money. And just to keep everything on the straight and narrow, insurance companies will no longer be able to deny you for pre-existing conditions or drop you because they don’t want to cover your illness. They will also have to cover preventive care and health maintenance issues, so you can take care of yourself before you get sick. And with no more wasting money on using the ER for primary care, and the benefits of catching disease and illness before it gets out of hand, everyone will end up saving money in the long run.

REPUBLICAN: DEATH PANELS! GOVERNMENT CONTROL! SOCIALISM! AAAAAAAUGH!!!!

MATT LAUER: Thank you both, we’ll be right back with more on Tiger Woods and a missing white girl.

(EXEUNT.)

This is the problem: there is no quick and easy way to explain the health care reform plan beyond the words I put in the mouth of the Democrat above. And the sort of people who broadcast news in this country are simply not bright enough to explain it. They are also unwilling to actually analyze the claims made by either side, whether through stupidity or malice. And honestly, pretty much every television journalist in the country is pussy-whipped by forty years of conservatives screaming “LIBERAL MEDIA” at everyone to the right of Pat Buchannan and terrified of being accused of bias. Consequently, absolute horseshit lies are passed off as an equivalent point of view, because any attempt to delve into the matter and determine the truth makes you some sort of filthy hippie liberal advocate. And since they’re too fucking stupid to understand what’s actually happening, your media presents the whole thing purely in terms of a horse race: who’s up, who’s down, who’s winning – completely oblivious to the practical reality at hand.

You want to know why Obama’s approval rating is 49%? It’s because liars, racists, and outright mental defectives are treated by our press as a legitimate part of the discourse, and the slackjawed yokels of the American public go right along with it. Call me an elitist, because I am, and I’ll own it proudly – the biggest problem with this country is that we treat stupid people like they’re worth taking seriously.

…this is how it works. You don’t get to just sail into town and get whatever you want. People who point to the Bush tax cuts and say “why can’t we do that” miss the point: it’s always easier to destroy than create, and even then they went through reconciliation instead of the normal process (which is why they’re going to sunset and spare us the trouble of having to legislate a huge tax hike to keep the deficit from going supernova). The Democrats made a decision long ago: play it straight, play it big-tent, and you know what? If they hadn’t, you’d still be looking at less than 60 votes.

This is how it works. You grind these things out like Johnny Cash: one piece at a time. You bleed and sweat and suffer, and frequently pass things by one vote (ask Al Gore, and Chelsea’s future mother-in-law, about the 1993 budget a.k.a. the “Clinton Landslide”) and you don’t get everything you want. The point is, you pound away at the coal face to get what you can, and then? You come back the next day and do it again. And again. You don’t ever get to declare victory and go home in triumph, but that’s not how it works.

Grow up, kids. Politics is the art of the possible. If you want to dream, go be a theater major.

For whatever reason, ecto is no longer playing nice with Moveable Type on my host. I don’t know what the deal is, and for the time being, I have chosen to Reggie Roby ecto and go with MarsEdit – it’s a lot more raw-HTML, but it posts reliably (even if it isn’t keeping a log of all posts).

(It’s particularly galling that I have to run a freakin’ SCRIPT to put paragraph breaks in there.)

In 2010, my goal is to either get a cleaned-up Moveable Type 4 install under the hood (complete with the neat new templates) or shift to WordPress at long last. I’m not moving – having my own reliably secure service, for free, which is not being leveraged to sell me stuff, is EXTREMELY important to me. But at some point, I just have to knuckle down and learn how to make this stuff work.

Along similar lines, I am giving serious thought to pooling any Christmas money I get and splashing out on a Dell Mini10v. Now, this is not just gadget glee at work here. It will be a straight-up PC, portable, small enough that I can back the whole thing up on a thumb drive, and suitable for all manner of experiments, including but not limited to:

* Hackintosh

* The limits of Windows 7 Starter

* Sugar

* Ubuntu Netbook Remix

* Chrome

* Xubuntu

* An attempt to live purely in the Google ecosystem for a couple weeks

* An attempt to live outside the Apple ecosystem for a couple weeks (read: doubleTwist to the max)

* An attempt to live entirely without Google/Apple/Microsoft just to see if I can

* The final determination of whether a $300 Atom-processor machine really is “good enough”

I did a hell of a good job living up to my resolutions this year – I think most of them will get a check when I do the rundown the last week of the year. So now comes 2010 – and one of the things I want to do is get back to learning things. I want to plunge back into Windows and Unix and Perl and make myself technical outside the Mac realm again. And if it takes the total immersion approach to do it? So be it.

Remarkably, in the span of one year, Google has managed to become both Microsoft and Apple. Microsoft, in that they have your computing experience by the nuts, and Apple, in that mainstream non-tech press now goes nuts for literally everything they announce.

Dial it back a bit and look at what actually happened Friday. A bunch of Google employees were given the latest version of an HTC handset. Not that big a deal – they all got a G1 two years ago, and Apple gave all its employees iPhones on the eve of the release in 2007. The phone itself is an HTC Passion, something that’s been kicking around the rumorsphere for some time – and it was inevitable that Android 2-based hardware would show up for GSM eventually. And while rumors are flying about Google selling the phone directly, nobody – NOBODY – in the United States has had success selling unlocked and unsubsidized phones to the general public. Apple came closest, when they sold the phone unsubsidized and allowed for at-home activation, and that experiment went by the boards in under a year. Unless Google is prepared to take a bath on every handset for the purpose of shipping them into as many hands as possible, they won’t have any more success than anybody else pushing a $500 handset with no service.

And yet – people are losing their minds. First they lost it for Android generally (and the Droid in particular) which sort of made sense. They lost it for Wave, which so far has turned out to be a big pile of WTF. And now they’re losing it for what is essentially a developer preview device that’s only been handed out to employees, not even third party developers let alone the broader public.

Ah well. I’m still not prepared to throw my hands in the air and say “I for one welcome our new Google overlords,” but having looked at the balance of my services, I’m more or less OK with the current state of affairs – some Google, some Apple, some self-provided (well, brother-in-law provided) service, and a smattering of other stuff from Yahoo or Evernote or Skype or Mozilla. To be honest, the notion of an 11″ netbook running Ubuntu is becoming increasingly attractive…

This is Joe Lieberman, advocating Medicare buy-in as an alternative to a public option, only three months ago.

Key quote: “As to how 47 million uninsured will afford coverage, Lieberman said only 12 million don’t have insurance because they cannot afford it. By allowing citizens who are not eligible for Medicare or Medicaid to buy in for a rate below the private market, the government can extend coverage to more of those who are currently uninsured, he said.”

There are only two explanations: Lieberman has lost his mind, or he is specifically out to undermine the Democrats at every turn – and sandbag the signature initiative of someone who specifically came to Connecticut to campaign for him over Ned Lamont in the primary in 2006. Either way, it should now be obvious to anyone that Harry Reid’s failure to shitcan Lieberman before the new Congress even opened is proof that he is not fit to lead – the Democrats don’t have 60 votes, they never did, and letting Lieberman create that charade, however briefly, has done far more harm than good.

…for not telling me there was a new version of ecto back in February. Now I have to pay for an upgrade. Maybe. We’ll see.

That was a strange year. I wasn’t really a kid anymore – I don’t remember if I was still getting toys or not that Christmas, but I definitely wasn’t by the next year. I was pretty much over my Star Wars fandom but hadn’t gotten into comic books in a big way yet, and for the first time, I was contemplating writing things that weren’t assigned in class.

I remember going to Cullman to go to JC Penney, because it was no further than driving to the other side of Birmingham for the same thing. I remember an obsession with orange Tic Tacs, eating an entire box at one go whenever I could get to it. I remember a whole slew of Christmas songs on four cassettes from Reader’s Digest, which was the first time I started to get the sense that our cultural memory of Christmas depends on Victorian England and wartime America in the 1940s in roughly equal measure.

Mainly I remember it being cold and quiet, and feeling like I was in some sort of limbo between phases of my life. I guess that’s why I drift back to it this time of year – that was one of those pivot points where I could change the direction of my life. Not a critical one, certainly not a patch on what came later, but the beginning of growing up.