Are my eyes really blue?

This isn’t going well. It took a good three or four tries to fill in the subject line.

I set the iPad next to my bumper-equipped iPhone 4. If the iPad 2 is actually thinner than the unclad iPhone 4, that could be an absolute gamechanger in terms of ergonomics and weight. How it will type in the lap is open to speculation.

I notice that autocorrect seems to be a bit better – of course as soon as I type that it goes south. The next sentence is all uncorrected. Typing with my thumbs is not the best way to go and it’s a damn shame that the thing won’t spas out now that I’m trying to make it go bad. Siiiiiigh.

Anyway, there’s that. Keyboard test later.

It seems like my default mode in testing things is to chirp about mobility computing. So here I am at the train station, typing away on an iPad in the WordPress app, thinking about the device i’m using. My first thought is that I need to go take a look at the new iPad 2 tomorrow. If it’s actually thinner, lighter, more ergonomic, faster, and has the same battery, I should give it a spin.

My second thought is that an iPad – especially a thinner and lighter one – would be a plausible addition to a bag with my work laptop and be a suitable companion if I were to decide the laptop shouldn’t have personal material any longer. It doesn’t solve the ESPN3 problem, obviously, but if i can type like this, it might still be broadly feasible for blogging. Again, i don’t think 3G is necessary for most things, and I can get by on 16 GB since the ipad is unlikely to have media other than books and movies.

Next step is to attempt longer form blogging in WordPress on my iPhone with the keyboard and without. Again. Being in WordPress is enough of a switch to require another pass. (This app is a real drag in terms of keyboard response right now, so i don’t know if this is broadly feasible.) I do get the March Madness app, though, so i have all the streaming media I need for a while. ESPN3 won’t be a problem until this September…

Could be worse. Could be a LOT worse. Still, to all accounts, Richmond is better than a 12 – more fruit of what some are calling the worst field picking in the shot clock era – and so Vegas has this one as a draw, and once again Vandy is the fashionable pick to go down in the first round. I can’t really kick about that after last year. Or 2008. Like it or not, we have a reputation as choke artists in March, thanks to a sub-.500 record in the SEC tournament and 1-11 in season finales under Stallings – and two first-round exists in 3 years as a freakin’ 4 seed.

It’s down to four things: is Andre Walker healthy, is John Jenkins healthy, is John taking good shots, and does everybody show up. This has largely meant “Jeffrey Taylor” but his explosive performance in the SECT suggests that maybe he’s finally flipped the switch.

One thing’s for sure: unless we cut down the nets in Houston, I am going to wake up three weeks from tomorrow wishing it was Midnight Madness already.

NFLPA decertifies. Lockout imminent.

Basically, the players want to keep going as is. The owners basically want the players to give them a billion dollars – that is not a typo, a BILLION – for no other reason than they want it. The league is not in trouble, teams are not in trouble, income and viewership and attendance are at their highest levels ever, but the owners want some more money. In short, this is a shakedown job.

If you side with the owners in this, you’re basically siding with the notion that management can do what they like with your salary and benefits, and you can lump it, because you should be grateful to have a job at all.

So I have some loose money walking around, and I have a discount available to me through Thursday, and I’m contemplating buying a Timbuk2 bag to replace the one I lost i London (and I’m not bitter or anything, no not me). Herewith the thoughts associated with it:

* I can’t do a straight replica. They no longer do Cordura and waxed canvas will be less waterproof and almost $50 more. Scratch replica.

* If I’m not going to clone it exactly, why not do something custom colorful? Like maybe Vanderbilt black and old-gold?

* The closest thing to “old gold” is “mocha” which isn’t quite right.

* I don’t want to get a laptop messenger, because the laptop compartment and padding takes up ridic space and makes the bag less practical as an overnight bag (which is the main thing I have in mind for it to be honest).

* But the small bag won’t take a 15″ MacBook Pro, even by itself, so you wind up with a Medium, which is kind of huge.

* The real confounding factor is that Rickshaw, founded by the guy who started Timbuk2, also does a bag that is only slightly larger than the Timbuk2 Small and features a 15″ laptop sleeve which is removable. Only problem is it will cost me 50% more than what a small custom messenger from Timbuk2 would, with the discount that expires Thursday.

* Timbuk2’s custom bags are still made in SF. Rickshaw’s are only customized (the base bag without the flap is assembled and shipped to the US first). After my manufacturing rant yesterday, getting a 100% MADE IN SAN FRANCISCO bag is more important to me than previously.

* I don’t trust my Pythagoras enough to tell whether I might wedge a 15″ in the Timbuk2 Small sideways. (fiddles with calculator) Huh. If you take the bottom width of the small Timbuk2 and use that and the depth as the two axes, there is JUST room for a 15″ MBP to go in the bag on a precise diagonal and NO MORE. Obviously there would be some room around the top, but if this is meant to be the bag that carries my work laptop, that won’t fly.

* But why does it have to be the bag that carries my work laptop? I myself have a 15″ laptop sleeve of a thing with external pockets that does a pretty good job of being the work superleggera bag – the only problem is there’s no place to put anything else, e.g. drink bottles or wadded up shell jacket or Nerf gun (it’s that kind of department) or even my Kindle, unless you take it out of its nifty Project (RED) protective sleeve (thanks honey!).

* I do have a backpack for the times when I do need to carry all that other stuff – and since all that other stuff is heavy, it’s a good job it’s a backpack so I don’t screw up my shoulder(s) any worse. But it’s hell on wheels to tote in the summertime when it warms up and you’re hiking back and forth to the train and bus (esp. now that the bloody bus stop is a 10 minute walk from both offices).

* It would be nice to get to a point where I can leave more stuff in the various workplaces and not have to transport it, but with my current schedule, the laptop has to go back and forth every weekday. (I could leave it at work over the weekend, but it’s got all my S on it…) I do think it’s about time to stash a water bottle in the touchdown space on campus for day use…

* For overnighting purposes, I actually do have another backpack – a Timbuk2 roll-top model that’s basically just a huge sack with straps on it to cinch it down and save space. Which is a bit inconvenient to get stuff in and out of, but pretty damn good for weekend getaway trips.

* So what it’s coming down to at this point is that I kind of don’t actually *need* another bag at all, let alone have to decide between Timbuk2 or Rickshaw. At this point, the birthday money is burning a hole in my pocket at a time when there’s not really an obvious GIMMEH GIMMEH thing out there to spend it on. (I’m still not convinced of the necessity of an iPad, so saving up $500 for a FOURTH device is right out.)

* The thing to do at this point is to save my cash, ignore the $20 discount temptation by just not buying more Coke Zero at work for a week or so, and wait and see at what point the laptop case becomes untenable.

* The thing I just realized is that the problem is that the BACKPACK becomes untenable with a sufficiently heavy coat (it’s a non-starter for my peacoat, for instance, and highly unsuitable for a leather jacket and probably for any nicer sort of outerwear). So the problem, really, is having something to carry the laptop and/or extra materials in a time when I’m wearing a coat that a) I won’t be taking off outside and b) I won’t be stuffing in the bag.

* At this point, then, you’ve got to have it big enough for a 15″ MBP – which means either a Medium messenger (Timbuk2 just went up another $20 for the size and for the compression straps to cinch it up) or the Commute 2.0 (again). And the Commute 2.0 is longer on the bottom than even the Medium Timbuk2, although the depth is the same as the Timbuk2 Small.

SO…

All in all, this really looks like a decision I don’t need to make for a few months, now that the weather is turning again. This is something I could absolutely punt until, say, October – so long as I remember to stash a water bottle or two in the secret hideaway on campus and don’t routinely have to bring more stuff back and forth (might ought to leave another of the Nerf guns there too). A trip to the RIckshaw bagworks in Dogpatch wouldn’t be a bad idea either…

What’s happening in Wisconsin is becoming impressive. For over two weeks now, protests – and protests being driven by that holiest of grails to Washington political analysts, working-class white men. Including firemen, cops, and even a few Green Bay Packers. When the NFL lines up on one side of Wisconsin, best not to be on the other side.

The thumbnail version, as I understand it: new governor rides into town and puts the budget on tilt-a-whirl with a bunch of tax cuts. Gov now needs to balance the budget, because states can’t run a deficit like the Feds can. Gov insists on massive cuts in salary and benefits for public employees, along with the elimination of collective bargaining. Public employ unions concede givebacks on salary and benefits but balk at eliminating collective bargaining. Gov says not negotiable. Hilarity ensues.

One of the first things to get out of the way is the notion that government workers are smoking $100 bills and riding home on golden rickshaws being pulled by poor benighted entrepreneurs. As somebody who has taken Uncle Sam’s nickel before – however indirectly – and was raised on a pair of public-sector incomes, I can assure you that you’ll never have to worry about the AMT on a government salary. The benefits may be better in some cases, but that tends to manifest itself less in terms of “look at all this annual leave” and more in “look how secure I will be in my retirement.” That was the deal in Alabama, at least – much better to be a retired teacher than a working one, because you take less now in order to lay up treasures for the day when you’re out on the lake with a line in the water. (If you’re blessed to live that long. Which is not promised to you.)

The thing is, what public employee unions have now is what everyone used to have – 8 hour shifts, defined-benefit pensions, something approximating job security. They don’t have some sort of unique extra privilege – they’re just the last ones to get the shaft because the government doesn’t have to meet quarterly expectations of increased shareholder value. The public sector decided long ago that 9-to-5 would become 8-to-5, because they’re not paying you to eat, and instead of being responsible for a pension they’ll match some of what you choose to save yourself, and you can invest it and become a money manager on top of whatever else you do, and if it’s necessary to dump some jobs to make the books balance next quarter and “strategically re-engineer our optimal resource portfolio” well then let ’em rip. Two week notice not necessary, because somebody might come back with a shotgun. And the only reason this hasn’t long since happened to public employees is because governments had to play strictly by the black-letter law on employee organizing and collective bargaining, and as a result were faced with unions that wouldn’t allow their managers to balance the books on the backs of the rank-and-file.

Consider Alabama – no public employee unions there, no sir, just a very powerful lobbying group that gets called the “teacher’s union” to help rile up the voters when the time comes, because the old steelworkers and mineworkers just aren’t that numerous anymore. Non-union labor through and through, with payroll to match – and a persistent bottom-five ranking among states in the quality of education, egged on by a religious philosophy that encourages you not to lay up treasures in this world because you’re getting milk and honey and fried catfish in Heaven for all eternity. (Which is apparently not a good enough deal for the assorted Big Mules whose treasure on Earth accumulates yearly thanks to current-use property tax law, but that’s neither here nor there.)

When you get right down to it, part of the problem in the United States is that over the last thirty years our “skilled labor” field transitioned from manufacturing to services. And when the American worker took off his hard hat and sat down in front of a computer, he forgot he was labor, and the notion that people in offices wearing nice white button-up shirts would need a union was generally thought to be incorrect at best and risible at worst. And as the economy hollowed out more and more, people got wedged into either white-collar services or blue-collar work that was sufficiently undifferentiated that unionization was impractical. And now, unemployment is sitting at 9%, and you can pretty much do what you like with your employees, because it’s a buyer’s market for labor pretty much everywhere.

Globalization has kind of made a hell of a mess. All you have to do is look through the old clothes I’m sorting through as part of the wife’s spring cleaning surge. Old MLB caps made in America, old shirts made in Turkey, and all of them ten to fifteen years old – with their modern equivalents almost uniformly sourced from what is still technically a Communist rival. John McCain thinks iPhones and iPads are made in America – hell, the last place not called China that made any Apple product was itself in Cork, Ireland. This is something that a lot of people seem to just now be waking up to: we don’t make much of anything in America anymore.

Now: outsource your manufacturing to China, your programming to Hyderabad, and before long your X-Ray and MRI reading to Chennai, and pretty soon you see where things wind up: one big smear of economy across the entire world, differentiated only by real estate holdings, and you see that Neal Stephenson mostly nailed it twenty years ago – the only thing America does best are movies, music, programming, and high-speed pizza delivery. And even those aren’t a mortal lock for the future.

Which is why those folks are holed up in Wisconsin: they’re the last ones fighting the future. And I say good on ’em. Not all futures are bright.

* Anybody over the age of 50 should have to pass a test before the “Forward” button is enabled in their email client. I’m sorry, it sounds age-ist, but it’s just a fact.

* You can’t build a working IT organization around one person handling the phone.

* The SEC’s system for handling the tournament bracket breaks down when the divisions are wildly unbalanced in talent and performance.

* I can’t really come up with justification for a new messenger bag, much as I want to spend this money burning a hole in my pocket.

* There is a very real possibility I’ve spent the last few years using approximately three times as much coffee as I should for one-cup filter coffee.

* It’s important that I not talk about work too too much here.

* Although my employer had better keep up the free transit passes, because that gas is hitting $4 a gallon and that’s no joke.

* I think I’m going to like WordPress.

I don’t know what it is, but it cuts across multiple lines. A bizarre reading of the Bible in the 1870s becomes the anchor of “premillenial dispensationalism” and sends a whole denomination off the rails. The ravings of a 21st-century carnival geek become the revealed truth of a disturbingly large population. Dubious email with multicolored text and a whole string of “FW:” in the subject are accepted without question as truer than the sites that debunk them with citations and sources.

What the hell’s going on here? How did we get to a point where the bizarre, the esoteric, the kind of stuff that fifty years ago would have gotten you a nice padded room if you’d spoken it aloud – how did we reach the stage where this kind of nonsense is being held up as, literally, gospel truth?

Before they were crushed by the emerging Catholic church, the Gnostics were a collection of early Christian sects with some interesting ideas on the nature of God and man, largely based around information that was revealed in secret to the select few. Not everyone was privy to their particular revelations, and they made a point of keeping it close to the vest – but nevertheless, the idea remained that there was some sort of hidden wisdom that explained everything. (This is probably a gross oversimplification, but will do for what I’m driving at.)

Flash forward to 2010, where the Southern Baptists (among others) are wedded to an outlandish reading of the Bible in which, if you jump from this bit of Revelations to this bit of Daniel to this segment of Matthew to this bit of 1 Thessalonians, you can come up with something insane enough to get twelve volumes of badly-written “Bible-based” prophecy fiction. By this logic, I could tell stories about getting bombed at my first job with Mark and David and Michael and sell them as “Bible-based stories” because those are all names from the Gospels and Jesus turned water into wine at Cana. And yet, people buy into the notion that somehow this peculiar wisdom went entirely unnoticed for over eighteen centuries.

I’m not going to step too much more on that, because that’s Fred Clark’s beat and he does a bang-up job of it, but I will proceed from there to yet another spam forward (like I said, past a certain age you should have to pass a test before you’re allowed to forward email) which went into great detail about how basically everything we know about cancer treatment and prevention is actually wrong, and instead we should only eat out of glass and take all these supplements and avoid meat, because cancer cells have thick protein walls and if you don’t eat a lot of protein they’ll be weak, and…seriously, I’m losing IQ points just trying to remember this bullshit.

Yes, cancer is bad, and no, we don’t have a cure yet. And it’s understandable that in the face of such an implacable enemy, people will grasp for any straw of hope that might offer a solution. But this – along with all manner of other quack theories about supplements, additives, and what have you – would require you to believe that the medical-industrial complex, perhaps the most lucrative industry in the history of the United States, actually has some sort of miracle cancer treatment – and has made no effort to make money off it. Never has the principle of cui bono cut to the chase more quickly – Big Pharma would no sooner leave money on the table than a Scotch-Irish grad student would refuse a free pint of Guinness.

And this is before even getting into the high-conspiracy weeds that thrive on AM radio and certain television programs operated by drug-addled polygamy apologists. (You think a Vandy fan will ever pass up a cheap shot at the other side? We have a rep to uphold, son.) Long story short, there’s all the proof out there you could ask for that people will quickly and gladly throw reason, logic, verified research and peer-reviewed documentation over the side without hesitation. But why? Maybe they don’t like the answers they get from the scientific method. Maybe they don’t get answers from science at all, and have to have an answer badly enough that a made-up one will do just as well. And in some cases, there’s just cash in it – as Upton Sinclair said, it’s difficult to make a man understand something if his salary depends on him not understanding it.

The Gospels may not have a lot to say on government-run health care or gay marriage, but they are fairly uniform on the topic of earthly riches.

(Of which more later.)

It’s not a very long drive in the light rain, neon signs gleaming in the pavement reflections. The drizzle has stopped by the time the car’s parked in the oval, then a brief walk past arches and walkways of “patent artificial stone” a hundred years old.

The church is impressive. Even the most hardcore Commodore or Golden Bear would have to admit they’ve got nothing like this. Inside, most of the lights are off – only the choral balcony is illuminated, although most of it spills into the middle pews, but the side chapels are completely dark. Up front, a single candle lights each of twelve alcoves around the marble stage.

Nothing to indicate the service has started, obviously – just the first tones from the choir. The music tends toward the more arch strains of high-Anglican chorale, although about halfway through are the familiar tones of “Abide With Me.” I don’t know why they would be familiar – I do tend to drift into more Episcopalian services than most, but not with singing – but they are, and the candlelight gleams off the gold of the Byzantine decor, and the shadows flicker off the high domed ceiling and before long you can forget where you are. Or that you’re thirty-nine years old and your hair is going, or that you’ve got to go to the gym tomorrow, or that you have a project to manage and a bunch of insane relatives back east to cope with. You’re just…somewhere else.

Technically, I’m still a member of the old church back home, the last of my family still carried on the rolls – even though I haven’t darkened its door in over twelve years – but it was never good at anything but making you wish you were somewhere else. I don’t know exactly what this is, but it’s different…and, perhaps, centering.

The last note rings out, hangs in the air. Time passes. Nobody gets up. Then, finally, one or two people get up, and by twos and threes they drift out.

Back in the car, a soothing voice from eight hours in the future informs you that it’s just coming up on 5:38 GMT, and you’re listening to the BBC World Service.

I now have a fine pair of Merril mid-height light hiking boots. Waterproof, Vibram sole, the works. I think they are more intended for the one annual camping trip and the really wet days more than any actual hiking, although that may change – hiking is actually something I think I could enjoy as long as I didn’t have to run or carry anything heavier than money. Hell, I’ll walk all manner of ridiculous distances as long as I don’t have to run.

Next Sunday is gonna suuuuuuuuuuuck…