And?

I do not know why so many conservatives were surprised by what happened.  A rigged trial produced a rigged result. Isn't that the point of rigging the trial in the first place?

Science news you can use

Quantum mechanics are in the news these days and not at all for the usual reason.  They are not going on strike, an announcement that comes as a surprise to anyone who has watched the airline’s troubled labor history and as a relief to anyone planning an antipodean vacation this year.  Odd as it may seem, you will not find the news about quantum mechanics in any of the places you would usually expect to find such news. No indeed. Quantum mechanics, if you can believe it, have made the headlines on the science page of every newspaper that can still afford to have a science page not dedicated to fad diets and miraculous cures for cancer.  Scientists working for an organization whose name is eluding me at the moment have determined that a key proponent of quantum mechanics, that reality does not exist until an independent entity attempts to measure it, is, in fact, true. Now, I am not sure how this can be, to be honest with you. If there is nothing until something tries to measure it, how can the something doing the measuring exist without something else trying to measure it? There’s a bit of a paradox here that brings to mind a universe of frustrated tailors packed into a small room trying to measure each other for a nice three piece suit and an extra pair of pants thrown in for half price (shoes, socks, and belts not included. Order now and avoid the Christmas rush!)  But who am I to argue with scientists?  No one.  A man who still has trouble doing long division is not a man who can argue with quantum mechanics, although I can tell when they’re padding the bill whenever I bring in my water cycle for inspection. Despite what you may have heard from certain biased sources—yes, Mom, I mean you—I do know when those guys are gouging me.

Still, the fact that reality does not exist until someone tries to measure it is, I think, one of the great discoveries of the twenty-first century. For generations, dieters have fought the unwelcome tyranny of the weight scale, trying one new diet after another in a pathetic and usually futile attempt to halt and turn back the inexorable and ever upward advance of the scale. And what has been the result of all of this effort?  Depression, self-loathing, and an ever shrinking sense of self-esteem. But now, modern science finally offers the overwhelmed dieter a way off the never-ending cycle of weight loss and then more weight gain entirely. If reality does not exist until one attempts to measure it, then what could be simple than not weighing yourself and telling everyone who asks that you’ve lost weight?  Reality, after all, does not exist until you step onto the weight scale. So don’t step on it. This will make you much happier than worrying about calorie counts and weekly weight checks will, and quantum mechanics is all about making you a happier person, isn’t it?

There will be a great deal of pushback against these findings, of course. The diet industry is a billion dollar business in this country and they will not surrender those profits without a fight. The American public can expect to see the full weight of the advertising and public relations industries brought to bear in order to deny the science. Before too many more months pass, we can expect to see the full page spreads in all the major newspapers and magazines, the tendentious public service advertisements running in prime time, and the phony “scientists” operating out of allegedly independent research institutes telling credulous journalists that quantum mechanics is not really settled science, that quantum mechanics don’t allow black people to join their union, and that Werner Heisenberg, the original quantum mechanic, was a not very nice person who did not support gay marriage and liked to kick cute little puppies out of second story windows when they weren’t looking.  The journalists, whose employers will not want to upset such important advertisers, will not bother to research the claims of these “scientists” and so the public will not find out until much later that the diet industry funds these “independent research institutes.”  The fear that the diet industry will use its economic clout to harm the media is nothing for anyone to sneer at.  It is important for the true believer in quantum mechanics to know that the dieting industry, like hell and tyranny, is not easily overcome; the fight against these science deniers will be long and hard. As I mentioned above, there’s simply too much money involved to think that the dieting industry will go gently into that good night willingly.  We must educate the public that they do have choices, that the dieting industry is trying to deny established science, and that the public does not have to live with the abuse heaped upon them by these corporate bloodsuckers.

But all will come right in the end.  The richly deserved economic oblivion that awaits the dieting industry will mean the end of fat shaming in our society and the attendant psychological bullying that goes with it.  Science will move us all forward into a bright new day and quantum mechanics will go back to doing what they do best: disassemble the transmission on your water cycle and tell you that it will cost you two thousand dollars to repair the thing. You’ve noticed, no doubt, that quantum mechanics will tell you that reality doesn’t exist until someone tries to measure it, but they get to charge you an arm and a leg just to do noting but look at your transmission.  Reality and unreality run into real money, folks, whether or not you own a weight scale or a tape measure, which I find vaguely surreal, but, as in all things mechanical, that could just be me.

Just my opinion, and no, this is not one of the pieces I've been working on

Doctors like modern architecture. Well, most of them do, anyway, if medical buildings here in our happy little burg are anything to go by.  I do not know why this should be, unless the doctors inside the very modern medical building want to convey a sense of being on the cutting edge of modern medicine. This would not be the first nor will it be the last time that someone used a building as a sort of freestanding advertisement for his or her own self-image.  I should point out that I have nothing against this sort of thing—if you have this kind of money and you want to make this sort of architectural statement, then have at it and more power to you, I say. There are worse ways to waste money.  What is interesting to me in all of this, however, is that while doctors are willing to spend all this money putting up fancy medical buildings, they almost inevitably try to save money on the parking lot. Actually, I should not say that I find this economizing interesting, because it is not; it is annoying as hell.

I would guess that most people have had this experience: you have an eleven o’clock appointment to see your doctor at his (or her) fancy medical building and while you have arrived at the doctor’s office on time, you have to spend the first fifteen minutes out in the parking lot circling like a damn vulture over the rotting corpse of a wildebeest because there isn’t enough parking to go around.  Now, I will grant you that missing the first fifteen minutes of a doctor’s appointment is no great loss for anyone. Everyone knows that time slows down in doctors’ offices and so your eleven o’clock appointment is more apt to be an 11:45 appointment in real time, but it is the principle of the thing that counts: you want to be on time, even if the doctor is not (and probably never will be).  I do not know why this is so—after all, no one goes to the movies at the show time listed in the newspaper; that way you can skip the trailers for movies that you have no intention of seeing and the stern warnings about turning off your cell phones that you have no intention of obeying—but hope springs eternal in the human heart, I suppose. 

Excuses, excuses

Yes, you think, excuses, excuses, and more excuses for not writing, Akaky has a million and one excuses for not parking his fat backside down and getting to work. Well, you'll be happy to know that there is something on the griddle and that I anticipate that it will be done shortly. At least, I hope it is done shortly, because, as you know, things come up suddenly, the lawn has to be mowed, and the Commies are coming out of the woodwork. But I will, as the Chief says in The Outlaw Josey Wales, endeavor to perservere and have this new bit out here just as soon as I can, And thank you again for your continued support!

My way or the highway

This remark from the former junior senator from Illinois intrigues me. He made it the day after his party suffered a wallopingly bad defeat at the polls: “To everyone who voted, I hear you. To the two-thirds of voters who chose not to participate in the process yesterday, I hear you too.”  Now, as a proud scion of the Cook County Democratic machine, our prairie solon is familiar with the idea of representing people who are not really there. After all, dying in Cook County presents the deceased with the choice between heaven, hell, and purgatory—this last does not apply if you are not Roman Catholic—and mandatory induction into the Democratic Party; you may avoid two out of the three previous fates, although you can get to heaven from purgatory eventually, but that last one, I fear, is unavoidable.   The dead are a solidly Democratic voting bloc. 

So it is with this in mind that the Seigneur de Bourbon made his announcement. Since the two-thirds that didn’t vote clearly outnumber the one-third that did, he must champion the causes of the majority non-voters as opposed to the minority voters, who are clearly too stupid to understand what is good for them.  In short, his fingers are in his ears and he’s not listening to anything he don’t wanna listen to and you can’t make him, even if you go home and tell your mother. So there, take that, you Republican racist snotwads!

Just my opinion, you understand

This is about the time I usually start apologizing for not posting more often, and I would, except that this time it’s not really my fault. It’s my lumbar number five disc and its insistence on putting pressing on my sciatic nerve.  I don’t know why it’s putting pressure on the sciatic nerve; that nerve has no bad habits that I am aware of, so why anyone would want to pressure it is beyond me, but apparently lumbar number five has an entirely different view of the matter and so the pressure continues, with more than the usual number of sudden and very painful flares.  Annoying, but true, I fear.

In other news, I see that the Bloomberg Business News’ headline for the week is, Am I really such a jerk, or something to that effect.  That is an interesting question, I think, and one I’m sure that we’ve all asked ourselves at one time or another, but it does occur to me that if you have to ask yourself this question in a business setting, then yes, in all probability you really are such a jerk, and the people whom you are asking will probably be more than happy to tell you so to your face, unless this is the boss doing the asking, in which case you should lie until you are blue in the face. Getting another job in this economy is only slightly more difficult than pulling a woodpecker’s wisdom teeth, and while your unemployment benefits will continue for as long as China is willing to loan us the money, watching daytime television for any length of time will cause large portions of your prefrontal cortex to develop dry rot and lead you to drooling great buckets of spit on your nice clean shirt in a public place, which is cute when you’re six months old but not when you are in your forties.  Given the dreadful alternative, lying to protect your livelihood seems the lesser of the two evils. That’s what I think, anyway; your mileage may vary.

Upstate, or Concerto Grosso in A Flat, not by George Frederick Handel

Upstate. What is Upstate? Why is Upstate such an important concept for those of us who live here in the Vampire State? And, most importantly, where is Upstate?  This last is a very important question, as many people in the Vampire State would rather have a body part removed without the benefit of anesthesia then have anyone they know think that they live or know anyone Upstate, and there are others who think wistfully that maybe they would be better off if somehow or other they could just get out of the New York City rat race and move Upstate, where the grass is always greener and the picket fences are always whiter and life is just easier somehow.  Sometimes, the same person can have both of these ideas about Upstate on the same day, but not usually at the same time. An event that cognitively dissonant will often cause apoplexy in laboratory rats, although whether it would have the same result with New Yorkers is unknown. Ingesting large amounts of caffeine is supposed to protect against such things, and if there is anything New Yorkers do better than almost anyone else is ingest caffeine. All right, maybe people in Seattle ingest more caffeine on a per capita basis, but there is no Upstate in Washington, so they’re not probably not the best people to ask about something like this.

Before we start defining Upstate, let’s define what Upstate isn’t.  The people in Buffalo, for example, do not consider themselves Upstaters; they live in Western New York, thank you very much, and they will have nothing to do with a faux geographical controversy that takes time away from them stuffing their pie-holes with spicy chicken wings at every opportunity. Similarly, the people of the Southern Tier don’t really consider themselves Upstaters either, given that they aren’t upstate from anything; you can’t really be an Upstater if the downstate involved is Pennsylvania. On the other hand, the people in Malone do consider themselves Upstaters, a choice forced on them by geography; you can’t go any further upstate than Malone without actually being in Canada.  People who live in Lawn Guyland are definitely not Upstaters and whether or not Westchester County is Upstate seems to be a matter of some debate, especially if you live in New York City; for Upstaters, on the other hand, Westchester and most of Rockland County are Downstate. Given that no one seems to know just where Upstate is, what is this upstate place that you hear New Yorkers go on and on about?

First, you must remember that Upstate is a state of mind. If you live in Greenwich Village, then everything above Fourteenth Street is Upstate. If you live on 125^th Street, then the Bronx is probably Upstate, even if your cousin Rosie lives there. Your cousin Rosie, of course, will argue that no way does she live Upstate and the people on the Upper West Side would probably agree with her; living in the Bronx makes you one of the bridge and tunnel crowd, which is the New York equivalent of the flyover people the coastal elites in this country don’t like to think about. Your cousin will think that the people in Westchester are upstate, largely because they don’t live in New York City, an entity that includes all of the five boroughs, as opposed to The City, which everyone knows means Manhattan. If you don’t know that The City means Manhattan, then very clearly you are from somewhere not only west of the Hudson River, but west of New Jersey as well, if such a thing is possible. But your cousin Rosie would be wrong about Westchester. The people there consider themselves Downstaters; Westchester and most of Rockland County are the city’s suburbs, filled with people who come from New York City and / or work in New York City and therefore cannot believe that they could be Upstaters themselves, not after spending their lives hearing that the people Upstate routinely hunt deer and rub deer dung on themselves to make it easier for them to hunt deer. They are commuters, after all, and not at all the sort of people who would gun down Bambi without so much as a second thought, even if Bambi is eating their hedges and their flower gardens and defecating all over their front lawns while knocking over their garbage cans. You know you’re an Upstater when you regard Bambi and his friends as a bunch of oversized hoofed rats and you have the will and the means [i.e. at least two hunting rifles, one for you and the other for the missus, or one carbon fiber hunting bow] of turning Bambi and his friends into venison meatballs, which are delicious with your spaghetti and a nice home-made tomato sauce. Yes they are.

After many a long year trying to figure this stuff out, the consensus of opinion among moderate people of all races and creeds hereabouts is that Upstate either begins north of Interstate 84 or north of Poughkeepsie and that we should all learn to live together despite where we believe Upstate begins. Unfortunately, the debate between the fanatical adherents of each point of view tends to be loud and vicious in the extreme, with the Dutchess County Sheriff’s Office and the New York State Police often called in to quell the violence with truncheons, water cannon, and tear gas. The conflict arises because Poughkeepsie and the other towns along the river have many people who work in The City and so don’t really think of themselves as Upstaters, whereas almost everyone who doesn’t work in The City thinks of themselves as Upstaters. This is a very tricky situation for our local political class; they don’t want to alienate the commuter vote, who tend to have some money in their pockets, but on the other hand do not want to alienate the non-commuter population because they know that no Upstate politician has ever lost an election by running against The City. This is because all true Upstaters believe, in their heart of hearts, that New York State would be a much better place if someone in Albany could just figure out how to get rid of The City altogether.  This is economic nonsense, of course; the state would collapse completely without The City to prop up its finances; but many people believe economic nonsense; how do you explain the persistence of Marxism otherwise?

For my part, I think Upstate starts north of Poughkeepsie. I believe this for a number of reasons, none of which makes sense to the I-84 believers. First, the people in southern Dutchess County watch the New York City television stations. We are familiar with what goes on in The City whether we want to be or not. Second, Poughkeepsie is the northernmost station on the Hudson Line; if you want to go further north than Poughkeepsie, you have to take Amtrak. Third, the increasing suburbanization of southern Dutchess tells me that this area will be as firmly Downstate as Rockland County in a few years and we all may as well face that reality now. The idea will stick in the collective craw for a long while, no two ways about it, but some things, like death and sweaty underwear, are inevitable whether you like them or not. And so it goes.

The Rhinoceros, a meditation on theft and the modern world

I do not wish to complain here, a statement which, if you have been following these screeds for any appreciable length of time, you know to be an untruth somewhat larger than the dog ate my homework and a bit smaller than a campaign promise, but I do believe that petty thievery is a nuisance as well as a misdemeanor and that someone should do something about it forthwith. I am referring to my missing copy of the National Geographic, specifically the October 2012 issue, which a certain someone who shall remain nameless [yes, if you’re reading this, I mean you, smartass] lifted from my bathroom not too long ago. For those of you unfamiliar with the issue, the cover story reported on the plight of the rhinoceros in our modern world. The rhinoceros is a homely beast, as Ogden Nash quite rightly pointed out many years ago, and for human eyes he is not a feast, but as long as our prepoceros rhinoceros retains his horn, poachers will overlook the beast’s homely visage in the same way a down on his luck gigolo will overlook the girth of a three hundred pound heiress with a falsetto voice and a diamond-studded wart on her nose. 

The rhinoceros has fallen afoul of Adam Smith, yes it has, and now the poachers’ inexorable need for specie is threatening the species’ existence.  There is a huge demand for rhino horn in Asia, where people believe that ground up rhino horn will cure just about any disease you care to use the stuff to cure, and in the Arabian Peninsula, where guys think that rhino horn knife scabbards are chick magnets.  That a rhino’s horn is nothing more than a really stiff bit of hair does not affect anyone’s belief in the medicinal value of the thing, although I suspect when the poachers run out of rhinos to send along, the buyers in Asia will start buying up the sweepings off the floors of Chinese barbershops and selling that as rhino horn.  Hair is hair, after all, and if a rhino’s horn can cure your colon cancer faster than a speeding surgeon then why can’t your own hair do the same thing at half the price?  I also suspect that until the fashion changes, the guys in Yemen and other wild places will not give up their scabbards, and waiting for men’s fashions to change is like watching Bill Clinton give a speech; you know it must come to an end eventually, but you also know that the continents are slowly drifting towards one another and that North America will smack into Asia before Bill finally says the words, in conclusion, with any degree of veracity.  Fashion rules the world, people, and don’t you ever forget it; the Yemenis will give up their rhino horn scabbards when fashionable American women give up their Manolo Blahniks and not before. 

But I know that our Artful Dodger [and yes, I know who you are, smartass, don’t play innocent with me] did not purloin the October 2012 issue of the National Geographic so that he learn of the plight of the endangered rhinoceros, or if he did, he is a much more sensitive young man than his behavior; he thinks passing gas should be an Olympic event and routinely practices for the event at every opportunity; would otherwise suggest. I think, however, that we can skip this possibility; it does strain my credulity more than you can imagine; and go straight to the heart of the matter: Rio de Janeiro.  Along with the other articles in that now-vanished issue, there was a long essay on modern Rio, and as with any long essay on modern Rio, there were any number of photos of very attractive young women at the beach wearing bikinis.  For many another city, the prevalence of photographs of very attractive young women wearing bikinis might seem a shameless attempt to use sex as a municipal marketing tool—one can hardly imagine such a strategy working for Boise, for example, or for Des Moines, although it might work for any ski town in the Grand Tetons, especially if you’re French—but Rio is a tropical beach city and so the presence of photos of very attractive young women in bikinis is not only in keeping with the subject matter, but a necessity if the National Geographic is to portray life in the Brazilian metropolis accurately.  An accurate portrayal of life in modern Rio de Janeiro is not, however, why this junior league Jesse James, this flatulent little Billy the Kid wannabe from down the street swiped my copy of the October 2012 issue of the National Geographic, no, it isn’t.  He wants to look at the pictures. 

I don’t want to sound unduly harsh here, which is another whopper like the one I started this jeremiad with, but the boy’s parents are devout Roman Catholics, very devout Roman Catholics, which is why they get on so well with my mother.  They tolerate me because I’ve been helping the kids with their history homework for free and it makes no difference what deity you worship or what language you speak, getting something for nothing sounds good in all of them, a fact that explains the ongoing popularity of socialism despite that philosophy’s never-ending record of failure in every country that has tried to implement it.  Now, the parents are devoted to their kids, even the gassy goniff, for reasons that I am not sure I fathom, and they want them to do well in school.  But while the boy does well in math and science, getting him to remember what happened on 7 December 1941 is a bit of a struggle; he knows that someone attacked someone on that date, but he isn’t sure whether that was the day our German allies attacked China or if that was the day the South won the Civil War at the Battle of the Little Big Horn.  It was something like that, you know, and it was all so long ago, you know, what difference does it make [actual sentence, folks, straight from the kid’s mouth. Sort of makes you wonder what the hell his history teacher is doing to earn his/her/its salary, doesn’t it]?  So the kid was in my house just after Thanksgiving trying to get my help explaining the effect of the Third Treaty of San Ildefonso on Napoleon’s decision to sell the Louisiana Territory to the United States for chump change [the answer, in case you’re interested, is none; Napoleon couldn’t have cared less about any promises he gave the Spanish in that treaty. He needed the money].  I’m not sure how or when the kid made his move; it may have been when I was in the bathroom, or when I was on the phone to my alma mater, explaining why I was not going to send them a donation this year; but whenever it was, at some point when I wasn’t looking, he made his move. 

I’m pretty sure I know why he took it; when I was his age, and I know that nothing causes the eyes of the young to glaze over more quickly than someone prefacing their remarks with the phrase, when I was his age, I’d steal copies of Playboy from mailboxes in the apartment complex over the hill from us. The sap was starting to rise and I wanted to ponder the reason why the sap was doing anything at all; I was very interested in science at the time. And then there are his parents, who would probably chastise him heavily if they caught him with a copy of Playboy in his room. The parents are very nice people, don’t get me wrong here, but I’ve been to their house and it is a bit like going back to the Catholicism of my youth. The place looks like a Catholic tchotchke shop, what with rosaries and candles and portraits of the Blessed Mother draped all over everything.  There’s no Internet in that house, and no magazines that show too much skin, nor blasphemous books nor books with four letter words beginning with f in them; there’s just righteousness, godliness, and Roman Catholicism in copious amounts from the cellar to the attic and everywhere in between.  And while righteousness and godliness are good things, no two ways about it, there’s only so much of the Good Book you can read before you want to read a Bad Book, which leads directly to the theft of my copy of the October 2012 issue of the National Geographic. If you can’t find a Bad Book, you have to make do until you can find one. 

I suppose I should be amused by the 1951 of it all; in an age where thousands of young women routinely negate any chance they may have had of achieving high elective office here in this our Great Republic by appearing in Internet porn, there is something curiously retro about someone stealing a National Geographic just to look at pretty girls wearing bikinis. And yes, I suppose I should be amused by the curious workings of postal karma, in which I, a magazine thief in my youth, am now victimized in the same way that I victimized others forty years ago, completing the cycle of yin and yang, an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, so on and so forth ad infinitum.  I suppose I should be, but I’m not, so here’s the deal, you pimply faced farting machine: bring the damn magazine back or I will tell your mother that you’ve got it, at which point I will enjoy watching your mother kicking your flatulent adolescent rump into low space orbit. I am not kidding, buddy boy; cough it up or else!