Author: Stagger Lee

January and February 2000 were when we discovered the Irish.

It all started when we went for after-work drinks with some of our Y2K contractors, one of whom was off the boat from Kildare and who recommended a place in Cleveland Park.  It was, of course, Ireland’s Four Provinces, and after-work drinks turned into closing the place at 2 AM…and coming back the next night at 6 and staying until 2 again.

In between, on that Saturday morning, I remember driving to Tyson’s for a new pair of Docs, my second. These were proper brown 1460 8-eyelets, the sort I’d probably never have now because they’re not black or red or cap-toed or whatever, but at the time, they were appropriate to post-blizzard DC.  The roads were clear but the white stuff was still a foot deep in all directions, and there were two-foot walls of ice down the sidewalks with cuts to dodge in and out.

I didn’t have the cigar shop at this point.  I mean, I’m sure I’d been by at least once, but for the most part, skulking around for something to smoke generally meant either Georgetown Tobacco in Tyson’s or a place whose name I can’t remember over in McLean – one that stands out in my mind because they had unfinished pipes.  No varnish, no paint, no nothing – just raw wood that had been carved and sanded (mostly) and which you had to stain yourself through use and handling (and in my case, as often as not, filling with Maker’s Mark and allowing to sit overnight before first smoking).  I guess that’s the point in my life by which I had genuinely become A Smoker, albeit a pipe smoker – which meant carrying a pipe, a lighter, a pouch of tobacco, something to scrape the pipe out with and as often as not a couple or three pipe cleaners.  (A lot, when you don’t have a bag or a jacket, and I was grateful when Dockers produced their pants with the concealed zip pockets on the side.)

And on the drive to make my tobacco run, I was playing the tape – because of course we bought the McTeggarts’ cassettes the first night. All three. To this day, there’s one chord of their “Whiskey in the Jar” that puts me right back there, surrounded by the snow.  There would be other music, of course – we’d see Ronan Kavanaugh and buy both his albums, buy every Fenians disc imaginable, and that co-worker loaned a tape of old rebel songs that we damn near wore out until we knew all the words to (some version of) “The Man From Mullingar” and “The Men Behind The Wire”…and, of course, the sad tale of Roddy McCorley cited earlier.

That, I think, is when things really clicked.  We’d been the EUS for a long time before that – through the first great shedding of contractors, the 9-day backlog of support tickets, the crash project to replace Token Ring with Ethernet, and of course the massive Y2K cleanup – and we already had some small rituals in our past, like the Thursday prime rib at Sign of the Whale or the fledgeling softball team playing out on the Mall.  But it was when we got the 4Ps, when we started singing along, when we got that third space outside work to just have fun together – that’s what stands out in memory.  That’s the thing I wish we could go back for – and when I did go back in 2010 and 2012, it wasn’t to run tickets, it was to belt out the old songs and stagger out at closing time.

Even if it’s non-smoking now.

O see the fleet-foot host of men, who march with faces drawn

From farmstead and from fishers’ cot, along the banks of Ban

They come with vengeance in their eyes – Too late! Too late are they

For young Roddy McCorley goes to die on the bridge of Toome today

The important thing about this tale isn’t that they were too late. The important thing is – they were coming.

There is ex-NGS. There is no ex-EUS.

Ten years ago last week, Colin Powell stood up before the United Nations and fed his reputation, his credibility and his honor into a chipper-shredder. The good soldier to the last, he took the flimsy tissue of the Bush case for war with Iraq to sell to a dubious world – and an utterly credulous American media.

People forget. The Dixie Chicks were damn near crucified for telling a foreign audience they were embarrassed that the President was from Texas – again, the cult of Texas supremacy even in its most liberal adherents, what are the fucking odds – while “eventheliberal” MSNBC cancelled its highest rated program and fired its host, because Phil Donohue had expressed ambivalence about the case for war. People who had the slightest doubt about the parade of security theater in this country were shouted down as insufficiently serious about the threat of Terror – and didn’t die of irony overdose. And then, with malice aforethought and a complete lack of reason and logic, we went forth into Iraq and shat the bed.

Thousands of Americans dead. Tens if not hundreds of thousands of Iraqis. A client state established for Iran. Osama bin Laden left alive another eight years. Afghanistan neglected to fester into violence.

No accounting. No accountability. The GOP had its ass royally handed to it in three of the five subsequent national elections, with Bush’s 2004 election drowned by both of Obama’s wins, but the GOP never changed course, never expressed regret or remorse or doubt, and indeed, has since made a virtual rerun against Iran the necessary touchstone of its foreign policy (that is, the foreign policy that hasn’t already been outsourced to apartheid-minded Likudniks in Jerusalem).

Being part of Conservative, Inc means never having to say you’re sorry. Or worse yet, that you were wrong.

This comes to mind because of another situation. One that has left me exhausted and physically depleted in a way I can’t remember work doing for a long time. One that has evoked frustrations and exasperations and rage that sent me out the door at previous employers. A situation brought about by a similar lack of understanding basic facts, failure to prepare, failure to plan, and an insistence on rushing in on a wave of panic with eyes tight shut. And once again, there’s going to be a price to pay and it will be paid over a very long time frame. It’s fried me and it’s frazzled me in ways I’m not particularly proud of, and it’s leached into my life outside work, which is a huge huge no-no these last five or six years.

I’m not particularly interested in wrecking myself for other people’s fuck-ups at this point in my life. And I am absolutely not willing to do so in a customer-facing position. And let’s be honest, given the current state of technology, mine is a job with maybe ten years of life in it. Unless you know of corporate IT positions in the field of “smartphone and web browser support.”

The world has moved on and it’s time I started thinking hard about what that means for me. Of which, catchphrase, more later.

“You ain’t got no problem Jules. I’m on the motherfucker.  Go back in there, cool them n****z out and wait for the Wolf, which is coming directly.”

 

“The world is coming apart at the seams.” “Well then, thank God you sent for me.”

 

“I. Am. Bulletproof.  Next time, you best bring kryptonite.”

A 50-year-old design, the Levi’s trucker jacket – an American classic, an essential component of the Canadian tuxedo, a critical part of the wardrobe of any 80s cute girl, a symbol sufficiently semiotically fraught that one became an important MacGuffin in William Gibson’s Zero History.  And as of December 25, damn near the only piece of outerwear in circulation for my wardrobe.

Start with the jacket itself: the same basic style for decades, but this one is made from Filson’s 12-oz Tin Cloth: heavy waxed cotton rather than denim, black oilcloth that eats light with a sheen that suggests leather from a distance. On a man of a certain age and race, of similar build, the look might suggest the Black Panther Party. As it is, on a pale Appalachian, the fashion statement is more like “Hello, I’m Johnny Cash.” 

From a fashion standpoint, the critical thing is the color. Because it’s not blue denim, it can be worn with jeans, which means it can basically go with any casual clothing I have. But because it’s oilcloth, the breathability isn’t so great, which is the tradeoff for the water-resistance and that little bit of extra warmth. Spill a whole glass of Dr Pepper on it and it’ll wipe clean – well, clean-ish, but with a jacket like this that’s sort of the point, isn’t it?

Because that’s the whole point of this: timeless, classic American workwear. Simple and timeless, and utterly flexible in its look – put the blue mirror-shades on and it’s cyberpunk, put the Wayfarers on and it’s rockabilly, slap a woolen stoker’s cap up top and it gives the feel of an old gaffer leaned into the bar of some working-man’s club in Newcastle or York or Kildare.  It can be all you – whatever you happen to be at the time.

Right now, though, it’s dead solid perfect for what I need.  In temps that go from mid-40s to mid-50s, possibly showers, at a time when I legitimately need the memento mori of the best techs that ever walked the earth so I can ride on their memory and propel myself through the daily shit-hurricane that echoes the struggles of ten years ago…  I may not be wearing the exact clothing of 2003 – or 1998 – but I’m definitely wearing the same armor.

Responsible gun owners, this is why you are losing the public.

The guy had a note in his pocket expressing his intent to exercise his rights.  Why a note in his pocket?  Why would you bother with a note when you could just say something?  Because he expected to get shot.

There is no reason any law-abiding person needs an assault rifle in the grocery store. None. Maybe in Switzerland, where guys are popping by for milk as they walk home from militia assembly, but I rather doubt that the kind of person with an assault rifle is taking public transit to Kroger.  So why isn’t the rifle locked up in (one presumes) the pickup truck?  I grew up in Ala-fucking-bama, my family drove around with guns all the time, and not once, not on one single solitary occasion in the first twenty-five years of my live, did we ever find it necessary to go strapped into the goddamned Piggly Wiggly.  Al-Qaeda is not lurking in the produce cooler, and the odds are effectively 100% that a firefight is not breaking out in the frozen foods.

Take it, Susan Faludi. From Wikipedia’s entry re: her 1999 book “Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man”:

 “The common theme that runs through the book is that men have attempted to live up to the expectations of masculinity established in post-World War II America, only to find society not living up to its end of the bargain as globalization, downsizing and other economic pressures have made it difficult for men to live up to their expected roles as providers. At the same time she applies a feminist critique to these expectations, while noting that the feminist critique of the rise of an ornamental culture applies to men as much as women: As the culture has shifted toward an ornamental one in which awards, popular culture symbols of ideal masculinity, and economic bottom lines have become the societal norms of success, ordinary men are losing self-esteem and a sense of purpose. In particular she links the problems of many men today with abusive or absent fathers when growing up, and is critical of the rise of a corporate “organization man” culture in the 1950s and 1960s, which led to absent fathers failing to provide a positive, nurturing environment to their children, and then to failed expectations as companies laid off longtime loyal employees during the 1980s and 1990s.”

There’s a very legitimate case that the modern world is at odds with our traditional ideas of what manhood means.  We are no longer a rural pioneer society, where one has to go hunt for dinner and protect the family home against predatory beasts or marauding humans.  We no longer have the postwar social contract, where you can graduate high school and get on with an employer that will pay you a living wage that can support your wife the homemaker and your children plus offer a sufficient pension in retirement.  Never mind college; I know plenty of law school graduates who are looking for work in other fields so they can find a job, any job.  Somebody in an exurban service economy, somebody whose job can be sent off to China or India, somebody whose job can be done off the books for single digits an hour by a desperate undocumented migrant worker? Those poor bastards are living on the edge of a knife, and it stands to reason that Ed Earl Brown feels powerless to control his own destiny more often than not.

But.

In the immortal words of Chris Rock: “if you got a gun, you don’t need to work out.”  I can strap on my M4gery and swagger through the cereal aisle and everybody will cower before my might, because there’s no law that says I can’t do it so NYAH NYAH LOOK AT ME I’M NOT TOUCHING YOU.  And looking at the demographic patterns of gun ownership – as more and more firearms accumulate with the same people, who as a cohort are ever older and white-male-er – it’s hard not to see a fundamental connection.  Not to put too fine a point on it – the problems of guns, and the people who want to need the guns, can in large part be reduced to the question “How shall we then man up?”

In so many ways, it goes back to W.J. Cash, as it always does, and his characterization of the essential Southern quality: “that no man living could cross him and get away with it.”  I don’t have to go along to get along. I don’t have to listen to some pointy-headed bureaucrat. I don’t have to stand behind the yellow line. I’ll just roll through that stop sign. I’ll put my cigarette out when I feel like it.

It’s not just Southern anymore. It’s not even just gun-suckers anymore.  Call it fascism, call it socialism, call it political correctness, or just call it fucking manners if you like.  But until our concept of citizenship in a polite society rises above the level of a sugar-shocked 8 year old in the back seat on a road trip, don’t expect a lot of progress on things like assholes meandering their guns through the grocery.

So let’s say that I was dropped into 2013 bare-assed, sent forward in time from 1993 to start my life anew.  Never owned a computer, a cell phone, so much as a pager – my personal technology consists of a boom box and a Walkman, plus a handheld tape recorder bought in a Twin Peaks frenzy and untouched for a couple of years.  How then shall we set up this prior regeneration with the necessities of life?

This thought experiment began when we were staying at a friend’s place in San Francisco – we clocked the better part of a couple of weeks in there over the last few months, and began thinking about whether we could live there.  It’s a one bedroom condo in a high-rise with a breathtaking view of downtown, perfectly located for transit access, just a dream of a pied a terre…so could we make it work?  And the first casualty was bookcases, because we have half a dozen sagging under the weight of thirty years’ worth of books…and my first thought was Kindle.

So that’s the beginning: the books have to be digital.  Which in turn means all the media needs to be digital.  The obvious solution at this point is the one I have: Kindle for books and Apple for music and video, both conveyed via AppleTV to the big screen.  The only thing is, this sort of ties you into Amazon and Apple’s respective ecosystems.  It’s less a problem for music as most of the Apple stuff is .m4a now and you can still acquire and use other unlocked media forms (.mp3) with iDevices (and even have them synced with iTunes Match), and it’s less a problem for books as the Kindle format has apps for every major platform in addition to its own devices.

But streaming is an issue.  I can’t have my media reliant on streaming – Spotify or Pandora, for instance, are right out – because mobile data is expensive and streaming will kill battery life.  And as far as I can tell, for movies, anything I want to buy and keep locally is going to mean Apple, unless I want to piece together some combination of Amazon Instant Video and Netflix.  Which I can probably sort out…eventually.  But if I want that copy of Avengers, it looks like the simplest route is still iTunes.  So yeah, ultimately, that’s the choice: all in on the Apple system.

Now, what to do for actual devices?  The first question for me is: laptop vs desktop?  If you assume the Mac mini will be connected to the TV for the few times it will be used, it’s no contest – the tricked-out high-speed Mac mini with 8 GB of RAM and a 1 TB internal drive is $900, whereas the higher-end 11″ MacBook Air bumped up to 8 GB RAM and a 256 GB drive is $1500. Bad arithmetic, when the Mac is meant to serve as the central media repository as much as an actual working computer.  That $600 difference will let you buy a 16 GB retina-display iPad with LTE built in…and just enough left over for a low-end Kindle, suitable for carrying and reading.

Because in the end, there’s no getting around an iPhone. In 2013, the one thing I can’t work around is portable audio – not just music but podcasts.  Getting podcasts on the run rules out the iPod, and portable audio rules out even the smallest iPad.  The iPhone has to be there to split the difference and serve as the all-everything portable device, with the Kindle in reserve for ease of reading (and as the focus of magazine subscriptions).  And once you have the iPhone, it doesn’t make as much sense to buy an iPad mini as the sole portable device, not yet anyway: the screen’s not retina yet, and the input isn’t substantially better than a phone.  If you’re actually typing on glass, you need the full-sized iPad.

So there it is: iPhone, Kindle, full-size iPad with LTE, and a Mac mini at home to drive it all.  Amazingly, this is exactly what I have and use right now…well, and the work laptop.  Technically if you want to take everything of work’s away, my loadout is the Mac mini, the iPad, the Kindle, and the MOTOFONE F3.  Which begs the question of whether you could get by if you could somehow get a phone that only functioned to make calls and serve LTE wirelessly to your tablet…but that’s another story.

So the Library of Congress has apparently decided there’s enough cellphone competition, and therefore unlocking your phone yourself is now going to be against the law again.  This is possible because of some insane DMCA interpretation that happens every three years, and allowed for olly-olly-oxen-free unlocking before because locking was held to create a sort of competitive imbalance.

Which it still does.  If I have a brand-new unlocked iPhone, I can take it to AT&T or T-Mobile.  If I have an AT&T or Verizon (or maybe Sprint) iPhone and I unlock it, I can take it to…AT&T or T-Mobile.  You can’t move a phone between Sprint and Verizon without the carrier’s participation; it’s not as simple as buy-a-SIM-and-pop-it-in.

The principle of the thing is, of course, outrageous – if you’re under contract with a subsidized phone, that’s one thing, but there is absolutely no justification for preventing the unlocking of any phone once the user is out of contract.  Then again, of the carriers that you can freely move between, only T-Mobile appears willing to charge you less for bringing an unsubsidized phone of your own.  And T-Mobile’s network has of late been suspect, not least because they insisted on pitching HSPA+ as “4G”.  Now, they may have LTE rolling out and they may not, but by and large…

You know, it’s hardly worth ranting about at this point.  We have settled into the every-two-years model with carriers and phones, and the FCC and FTC have essentially given the AT&T-Verizon duopoly the whip hand.  And that’s just how it’s going to be, absent a major uprising.

My solution was to give up my personal phone and let work pick up the tab for the Verizon iPhone 5. (And not a minute too soon, as my cellular data usage has basically trebled in the three months since I took possession.)  Once I need a new phone on my own…well, we can burn that bridge when we get to it.

Looks like a two-pronged approach:

1) Executive-order action to tighten up and improve flexibility on security and mental health with existing law.  Which is what the gun-suckers are always clamoring for anyway.

2) Reinstatement of Brady Bill-style assault rifle restrictions and other measures that more or less bring us back to 1994-95 law.

3) The closure of the loopholes for gun show and person-to-person sales, thus putting a kink in straw-man purchasing and under-the-table acquisition of firearms (which, for all the butthurt from the gun-suckers, is a big part of how guns are criminally obtained).

In the grand scheme of things, this isn’t much.  Hell, a majority of gun owners want to close the gun-show loophole. The country didn’t collapse into some sort of socialist fascist tyranny in the 1990s for want of superior civilian firepower, not even after Oklahoma City (when Republicans whined that anti-terrorism law would make a terrorist of any kid plugging a stop sign with a .22…an instructive contrast to the post-9/11 era).  Under the circumstances, this is as modest an effort at curtailing gun violence as one can imagine. And right on cue, here come the gun-suckers, screaming for impeachment, screaming about tyranny, and already losing their shit.

 See, the NRA is all about the people who want to need the guns.  And that’s not suburbia. Suburbia hates guns.  Suburbia doesn’t want to need guns. And the GOP willingly gave up the white middle-class suburban vote outside the South, and in doing so lost any sway over national Democrats.  They took their best shot in 2012, they went all-in against a president who didn’t lift a finger against the proliferation of guns for four years, they insisted that he was the vanguard of Article 21 United Nations One World Zionist Occupation Government Tyranny…and they got beat.

The NRA has to be pissing themselves, because the House is the only thing keeping them from the full brunt of their efforts over the last 20 years to put an AR-15 in every pot.  They have the Confederacy, and they have the rural turf, and they have the old white men – and that’s it. And consequently their numbers are dwindling.  They were resoundingly clobbered in 2012, and now they’re paying the price for the Great Sorting that began in the 1990s.  The South, the rurals, and the old white people are fully absorbed into the GOP.  As long as there were still rural and/or Southern Democrats, there was still a modicum of bipartisanship in the gun crowd, and the NRA could have some pull with Democratic politicians – but the NRA went all in on the GOP and lost.  And now the Democrats aren’t afraid of them anymore.

One step closer.  The Civil Cold War gets warmer.  The gun-suckers get more and more irate, and the GOP has to decide who it wants to go with.  In the meantime, we wait to see just how far down the rabbit hole people are willing to go, and in a world where people are arguing that the Sandy Hook shootings were a hoax and a false-flag operation, that hole is pretty goddamned deep.

 

ETA: and right on cue, here come politicians from Tennessee and Mississippi arguing that they can somehow…what’s the word…nullify federal law. You remember how this finished last time.

Here’s the thing: on the merits, Facebook’s new Graph Search isn’t a bad idea.  In fact, it’s sort of the holy grail of search: instead of relying on the tender mercies of SEO and Google’s algorithms and spam- and bot-riddled screen-scraping sites, why not ask all your friends whether the iPhone or the Nexus 4 is a better choice?  Or where there’s decent Indian food in Arlington, Virginia? (Hint: keep looking.) What Facebook proposes to provide is a rich data-mining tool for getting at the hidden information patterns and valued knowledge buried in the avalanche of information created and curated by your Facebook friends.

Two big problems here, of a piece with one another.

The first is that it requires you to put all this information into Facebook and make it accessible.  Even if that wasn’t a colossal pain in the ass – must click “Like” on some page for more or less everything in your life, fill in location check-ins, etc etc – Facebook is about the last company on Earth worth entrusting anything important to.  And for this to function optimally, you have to have everyone putting in all their information and leaving it largely public or at the very least broadly available.

The second is that you’re not the only one who gets this tool.  So does every stalker, spammer and advertiser on Facebook.  There isn’t an obvious solution for how you put all this information together and share it with your friends without also sharing it with anyone else – especially if some of your friends are data-sluts and put EVERYTHING on Facebook in the clear.  And Zuck already said today that they haven’t looked at how to monetize this yet.

But let’s be real, we know how this went down before: Facebook was once a walled garden, a place where you could use your real name – had to use your real name – and then, in the biggest Internet bait and switch ever, they pulled down the walls and went fully public with a huge stash of verified personal information.  Now, they’re asking you to feed even more information into their gaping maw, with the promise that their privacy controls will be as effective as ever…while also acknowledging that they haven’t yet determined how to cash in on it.  Remember, Facebook is a publicly traded company now, so job one is improving shareholder value.  And the way to do that is to make money, and the way to do that is advertising – now more targeted and personal than ever.

We are slowly coming to a reckoning in the Internet economy.  The prospect of value for money only seems to hold with some iOS applications – anything else, any web service, people expect to be free.  Facebook, Twitter, SBNation, Evernote, Dropbox, Google, all of it: free.  Well, if it’s free, how do they keep the lights on and the service running?  And in most cases, that boils down to advertising, and that advertising is only valuable if they can tune it as finely as possible to appeal to the target market. In a way, we may almost have to start giving in, because the choice could well come down to either a) some finely-targeted high-value advertising OR b) huge great whopping torrents of generalized advertising, because they don’t know how to target it any more precisely and the only alternative is the blunderbuss.

There are plenty of services out there I’d pay for rather than consent to personal data-mining in the name of “free-at-point-of-use.” Twitter, quite frankly, and I sort of do that already with app.net…which hasn’t seen much growth because it costs to get on board.  Everybody has decided that the model is “start free and then use advertising to make money,” and cash-on-the-barrelhead-up-front just doesn’t seem to get traction.  Like it or not, we’re voting with our closed wallets, and since we’re not the buyer, we have to go about determining how we want to be the product.