Month: March 2011

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…

We are now running on WordPress 3.1, through the kind offices of our host here at Halibut World Domination and Light Agro-Industrial Holdings, Ltd. URL is the same; I don’t know how it will treat RSS feeds but I guess we’ll find out when people stop getting notices. In the meantime, enjoy what should hopefully be a faster and more spam-resistant environment; once you comment once the system should automatically approve you in future, so it ought to be a little easier to get feedback from the millions (AND MILLLLLLLIONS) of blog fans…

(cross-posted from Anchor of Gold)

Vanderbilt finishes the regular season 21-9, 9-7 in the conference, with the 11th loss in 12 season finales under Kevin Stallings.  The inability to close out the half all year is mirrored in sinister fashion by our inability to finish the year strong time and again.  (Come home, Shan Foster, all is forgiven.  What?  Eligibility?  Damn.)

It’s hard not to shake a creeping sense that this year’s team has radically underachived.  Everyone came into the year wondering if we could replace Beal and Ogilvy, but sure that Jeffery Taylor would make it happen.  Instead, we got the pleasant surprise of a potential SEC player of the year in John Jenkins and possibly the most improved player in college basketball in Festus Ezili.  But Taylor never consistently lived up to the preseason hype, and the team played most of the year without their top “glue guy” in Andre Walker – and while twenty-one wins are nothing to sneeze at, the number of leads blown, collapses down the stretch, and inexplicable halftime deficits suggest that this is a team that has never yet played up to its full potential.

So now what?  If you believe the Tennessean, the vultures are circling the Big Three, telling them they’re ready for the NBA.  I don’t see them all going – not after Festus Ezili is on record in Sports Illustrated saying that he has to have his degree first – but we have to acknowledge the possibility that while none of the notional nine-man rotation HAS to leave, we could find ourselves without one or more of Jenkins, Taylor, Ezili and Walker before practice starts up next October.  Next year also brings us two new guards and a couple of big bodies off the redshirt.  We are not necessarily in a full-blown “the future is now” situation the way we were in, say, 2008.  But unless this team digs down deep and finds it in themselves to maximize their potential in March, we’re going to spend yet another offseason wondering how the wheels came off at the end again.  Hell, we may actually be better off with a Thursday date in the SEC tournament, just for the sake of having an easy opponent that we might be able to use to work up some momentum and get back in the swing of things.  Whatever the circumstances, something’s got to give, because the way we’re playing right now isn’t going to get us very far.

On the bright side, we can count on one thing: at least we’ll be spared that accursed 4 seed in the Big Dance this time around.

 

Mike Huckabee isn’t running for President in 2012. Set aside the fact that he was not suspended-pending-dismissal by Fox the way Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum were – that bit of chicanery could always be finessed later. No, you can tell Huckabee’s not running because only a couple days after giving a show of fealty to the birther crowd, he has now taken a shot at Natalie Portman for being an unwed mother.

The reason I was telling everybody in 2007 to keep an eye out for Mike Huckabee was because he was not your bog-standard Southern Republican. He had an interesting personal story (his massive weight loss) and a hook into a policy issue (his interest in public health and nutrition). He played a mean bass (for a sitting governor). He was willing to stray from GOP orthodoxy in ways that worked nicely with populist interest (his unwillingness to kowtow to the Club for Growth). And he had a personality that made everyone who watched him think “You know, this is not an unreasonable guy. He seems like a pleasant enough fellow.”

That sort of thing goes away quickly when you’re on the radio discussing how the President “has an anti-colonial view” because he was “raised in Kenya” and “hates the British” and “gave back the bust of Winston Churchill.” Now, I could be wrong, but my understanding is that a) the bust of Churchill was moved to the residence, not given back, b) the President was actually born and raised in Hawaii by his grandparents, and c) the United States was formed as the result of AN ANTI-COLONIAL REBELLION AGAINST THE BRITISH. And this is how I know Mike Huckabee’s not going to run for President, because he’s pushed all his chips in on playing to the Stupids.

It’s the same reason Sarah Palin isn’t running. If you’re on TV, you can bank a couple million dollars a year to take cheap shots and never be obligated to offer a solution, let alone one that abides by reason and logic. Even with the raise, you could never make the money in elected office that you can stealing it from NewsCorp. So obviously Huckleberry is going to keep cashing Rupert Murdoch’s check – why wouldn’t you?

More to the point, the fact that so many potential candidates are on Fox – and that Fox is setting rules as to how long you can stick around before being kicked off if you’re not going to say one way or the other whether you’re running – is proof, if any more were necessary, that the actual GOP machinery is far less important than Fox News in the strategic operation of the Republican Party. Fox News sets the priorities, employs the players, pumps the memes into public circulation, and apparently now decides the timetable for declaring when/if you’re going to run for office. It’s not unreasonable to speculate that the two major parties at present are the Democrats and Fox, with “Republicans” as merely a faction of the Fox Party.

Which is an extraordinarily unhealthy thing, for one very obvious reason: the needs of a for-profit broadcaster are not the needs of a political party in the electorate – or in governance. Which is why we get what we have. No sane governing party would have blown the first couple of months in office on assorted culture-war issues. Hell, no sane governor would have opened his career by taking an enormous deuce on some of his key supporters for the sake of ideological purity – yet Walker up in Wisconsin has managed to make enemies of the teachers, the firemen, the police AND the Green Bay Packers. That’s bad arithmetic.

But the Fox Party isn’t about governance. It’s about maintaining the special world in which the viewers of Fox are simultaneously the martyred minority holding out against the forces of evil and the righteous majority who represent Real America. It’s about making sure that people tune in every day and every night to be told how right they are and how scary the rest of the world is. It’s about keeping the team fired up and racking up wins.

And right now, it’s making one hell of a mess.

Looks like the iPod Touch writ large – again. HD cameras for video with Facetime but none of the 5 MP still shooting. Which is fine, because I don’t really think the iPad (or indeed the tablet format generally) is really optimal for shooting pics or video. Thinner, presumably lighter, but my question is – 512 MB of RAM? Or more? If it’s still 256 that’s going to be a problem. No sign yet, though, that it’ll do Apple Remote Desktop or that the browser will support things like Remedy or ESPN3 (damn you Flash!) so my next device is still the 11″ MacBook Air until further notice…