What's the treatment for the treatment?

Well, the good news is that I got released from Karmanos on Chrismas Day. And according to them, I'm doing fine.

Hmmm. Actually, on my own self-devised outcomes measurement scheme (which uses common household pets to symbolize the patient's well-being), I'm at the "cat" level (sleeping 18 hours a day, eating almost nothing, and feeling like hacking up hair balls all the time.) My goal is to reach "dog" by next week (which is identical to "cat" except without the picky appetite and hairballs part.)

Being in the hospital for 12 days was not fun, especially with the effects of one of the nastier chemo drugs manifesting themselves, one by one. I did get to study language diversity, ranging from the pert, starched young woman who sometimes brought food and announced herself as "diatectic," to the older, more ample employee who kicked the door open, saying "Got your brekfoose!"

My favorite moment, though, was the one night they thought they needed a chest x-ray of me. By the time the orders for this filtered through the layers of bureaucracy, it was 8:00 PM when they finally sent a cart for me. Covered in a blanket and wearing a respiratory mask, I was wheeled down through the bowels of the hospital and left lying in a bleak corridor. Eventually, a huge, impressive Star-Trek style set of automatic doors swung open. A disembodied voice said, "Ah, kiss my ass," and the doors swung shut again.

Ah, and then the food. Let a few photos suffice to describe it.

Off we go ...

Today, I check into Karamanos for several weeks of rest and relaxation. I should be emailable, even if the wifi doesn't work, since I'll have the Treo along. Enjoy the chaos of the holiday season!

Let's cut driver's ed costs

Today, after quite a long elapsed time, I found myself in a large, general - purpose consumer junk store (Target, in fact,) the sort of place I usually avoid like the plague. And while it was as bad as it usually is, I did have a sort of an idea: for the first week of driver's ed, don't let the students drive actual cars, just walk 'em around one of these big box stores, watching the idiots who can't even push shopping carts without doing dangerous things. There's the turn - out - of - a - side - aisle - without - looking manoeuvre, the shopping - while - on - the - phone syndrome, the discipline - the - kids - in - motion approach, and so much more. In fact, you could even argue that people do anti-social things with shopping carts that they wouldn't do with cars, viz, slam on the brakes and park the damn thing crossways in the street, blocking all lanes.

I mean, you can see how this would work: instructors and students would walk the aisles, trying to avoid getting run down, and taking notes: "Now class, see what that woman just did? Don't do that!"

All of that, of course, got me thinking about my own experience with driver's ed, back in the summer of 1968. It consisted of two week's worth of training, one week in the classroom and then one week, later on in the summer, with three peers and the high school principal (earning some extra cash) as the instructor. He'd pick us up in a big old Oldsmobile, donated by the local dealer (car dealer, not drug dealer -- this was a rural school district.) Just gathering up the students used up almost an hour, since we were grouped alphabetically, not by where we lived.

After that, we'd drive to a small town nearby, park on the street, and walk around for half an hour while the principal had coffee at his mother's house. Then, we'd do some two-lane highway work, maybe a spend a little time on parallel parking, and as a special treat, duck into the state capital to experience "city" driving. I'm talking about Lansing, Michigan, here, not anywhere with actual traffic (still hasn't got any, by any modern standard), but it did give the man a slightly larger set of things to talk about. To this day, I remember when I forgot to signal a lane change. He corrected me, then said, "Let's not have any of this changing lanes without, um, following proper procedure." After nearly 40 years, I can't hear the phrase "proper procedure" without thinking of that timid, ineffective little schoolmaster. Makes me smile.

Kops at Karmanos

It took something over four hours of lying around, plugged into a machine not unlike a large dishwasher, but they got enough of my stem cells to come out and surrender -- actually, enough for two transplants, if (perish the thought) another of these circuses is ever needed. So next week, the fun begins in earnest. My plan is to have technology with me such that I can continue to keep updating this thing. How inspired I'll be to do so will remain to be seen.

Folk Songs

Stuff I wrote long ago:

---

From, obviously, the days before 1/1/2000: COBOL Lizards Ever since I was a young boy I've heeded coding's call. From APL to Fortran, I must've used 'em all. But I've never seen anything like this In any function call. Those funky MIS guys Sure wrote some strange COBOL. It's utterly unpredictable, Immune to any test. JCL starts it running, And it just does the rest. ABENDS every Thursday, It's out to break my balls. Those creepy MIS guys Sure wrote some mean COBOL. Why do you think it does it? I don't know! What makes it so slow? Don't have no specifications, I must be in hell. It's all one giant module, Debugged by sense of smell. Aren't even any comments, No comments there at all! A plague on all your houses, And your silly-ass COBOL! They were COBOL lizards, There's got to be a twist! COBOL lizards, At least it isn't Lisp! Even SmallTalk would be better, Than this undocumented crap. Written fifteen years ago, And dumped into my lap. It's not Y2K compliant, It's about to hit a wall ... Those goddamn MIS guys, Sure wrote some bad COBOL.

From a time when I managed development of a multi-platform product: Buy A Sun When I find myself in tons of trouble, There's a thought that always comes. I'm sick of all this nonsense, Buy a Sun. And when the console's frozen, And the cursor doesn't blink, And smit is therefore useless, Then I think: Buy a Sun, buy a Sun, buy a Sun, yeah, Buy a Sun. AIX ain't Unix, buy a Sun. Now, when they say "multi-platform," Then I know we're in for fun. We run on thirty systems, Buy a Sun. DEC wouldn't know a driver If it bit 'em in the ass, And did someone mention Sequent? Thanks, I'll pass. Let it run, let it run, let it run, yeah, Let it run. Then I can ship this puppy, let it run. When things that worked this morning, Stop working overnight, And we know that nothing's different, And a checksum says we're right, It's then I type init 6, Having first su'd to root, And I hold my breath in horror, Let it boot. Let it boot, let it boot, let it boot, yeah, Let it boot. HP is purely evil, let it boot. Now, I've read of web performance 'Til my eyes begin to run. "Cellular" my fanny, Buy a Sun. How many of my users, Need to render in 3-D? When IRIX dies at midnight, They'll page me. Buy a Sun, buy a Sun, buy a Sun, yeah, Buy a Sun. Not sexy but they're stable, buy a Sun.

NOMINATIVE DETERMINISM

A little something from November, 2000:

---

Ann Arbor: New Scientist magazine has for many years and with tongue in cheek promoted the idea of nominative determinism, meaning that your name somehow influences your profession if not your destiny. People around the world send them examples like "Doctor Payne" and "Judge Hanger" and so on. Now that you know that, let me tell about a story from this morning's Free Press.

Seems that the US Marshal's service has raided a house in Palmer Woods and seized vast amounts of high-end consumer goods, aiming to auction them and pay off, in part, the debts to society of the house's owner. They found 911 purses; 606 pairs of shoes; 165 pairs of boots; an entire room full of costume jewelry; $125,000 worth of Baccarat, Waterford and Lalique crystal; a baby grand player piano; couches, chairs, stereos, big-screen televisions, artwork, a jukebox -- and furs: leopard, coyote, mink, fox, sable, chinchilla, snake, lynx, rabbit, lamb, beaver, weasel, and raccoon.

So what? So this lady was an Imelda Marcos wannabe -- what's interesting about that? Well, suppose I told you that she's in jail in Chicago for stealing federal money that was supposed to pay for feeding low-income children at her chain of day-care centers. And her husband wasn't on hand to argue with the Marshals, since he's got his little problems, too -- he's awaiting trial for allegedly having killed his third wife.

Again, so what? Well, how about if I mention the woman's name? Marie Antoinette Jackson-Randolph.

--

Traditional Medicines

As some of you know, I'm not a fan of traditional medicines, holistic approaches, homeopathy, power-tool-based therapies, and so on. They strike me more or less the same way that plain old faith does -- it would be so nice if it worked, so people tend to transpose hope with conviction. And when conviction sets in, rational thought tends to move out. Recently, China has given us a great example of this process. See New Scientist, #2629, 10 November, 2007, pp 59. (I'd provide a better link, but you have to be a subscriber to get to the full content.)

Zhang Gongyao, a philosophy of science academic at a Chinese university, published an article calling for the removal of Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) from the public health system over the next five years. He called it a hoax and a superstition.

TCM, if you're not familiar with it, is one of the world's health-belief-sets that focuses on balance within the patient, specifically yin/yang and a form of energy called qi. It also uses a range of vegetable and animal substances, some of them from endangered species.

The response was loud and extensive -- even the Chinese government was displeased. But nevertheless, it plans to spend 130 million dollars on a study of TCM and its effectiveness -- not, admittedly, a real double-blind study with the potential to prove anything conclusively, but still 130 mill worth of poking around under the hood of this ancient set of practices. Problem is, those who already believe that TCM is effective have an out: since TCM deals with the dao ("the way and order of the universe," as the article described it), it can't be evaluated scientifically, says one supporter. Sigh.

As a vaguely related addendum, here's an article on Wired about the top 10 gadget scams. Amusing.

The University of Michigan

Looking over some old Wood-Charles posts, I note how many fictional U of M departments I seem to have invented. Given that tomorrow the school will be shutting down the town for the annual fiasco known as the Ohio State game, seems like a good time to compile a partial list of the various academic organizations I attributed to our ivy-covered sheltered workshop here.

• the University of Michigan's Coloquium on Things We Can Get Somebody to Pay Us to Study
  
• the University of Michigan's Office of Shameless Opportunism.
  
• THE UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN'S DEPARTMENT OF STAYING UP ALL NIGHT GIGGLING
  
• THE UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN'S CENTER FOR MAKING THINGS UP AS THEY GO ALONG
  
• the University of Michigan's Centre for Having Too Much Time on Its Hands
  
• THE UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN'S CENTRE FOR WORRYING ABOUT THINGS LIKE THIS
  
• THE UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN'S CONSORTIUM FOR CUDGELING OTHERS INTO SILENCE WITH NITPICKING AND AD HOMINEM ABUSE
  
• HE UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN'S INSTITUTE FOR FINDING NEW SOCIAL PROBLEMS TO STUDY, EVEN IF WE HAVE TO MAKE A FEW UP
  
• The University of Michigan's Department of Hosting Expensive and Probably Useless Conferences
  

I don't really know why I spent the time to pull this together, but there was probably a reason of some kind.

Oddly disappointing

So I spent a whole day this week, running around a huge hospital campus, getting a range of tests that my insurance company wanted (they'll regret it when they see the bill, I'm sure). They tested my heart function, my lung function, and xrayed every bone in my body (almost literally). Today, we had a brief de-brief with my doctor, and the executive summary was, "looks good."

What? An entire day of being jabbed with IVs (my forearms look like I've been assaulted by a porcupine), taking long walks down tiled corridors (a thing I've hated since elementary school), and getting nothing else useful accomplished, and they didn't even find a little dysfunction? I'm not a candidate for a triple bypass? Good news, I guess, but somehow also oddly disconcerting.

Anyway, this presumably clears the way for the big transplant thing in December. After that, we just keep an eye on things, says the doc.

It's Back ...

Absinthe, that is.

Foreshadowing the BitTorrent Scandal

This week, we learned that Comcast may have been discriminating against peer to peer traffic via BitTorrent. The following old Wood-Charles article, from Lord knows how long ago (note coy references to defunct ISPs like Prodigy and defunct browsers like Mosaic), shows that it ain't a new issue.

---

COMMERCIAL PROVIDERS SLUFF OFF LOAD

ANN ARBOR: INFOWORLD COLUMNIST ROBERT X. CRINGLEY REPORTS THAT TWO OF THE MAJOR COMMERCIAL INTERNET ACCESS PROVIDERS ARE EXPERIENCING DEMAND SO FAR AHEAD OF CAPACITY THAT THEY RESORT TO CREATIVE, SOFTWARE BASED SOLUTIONS TO HANDLING IT. THE PROVIDERS WHICH SHALL REMAIN NAMELESS (EXCEPT THAT ONE ISN'T BOSNIA-OFF-LINE AND THE OTHER ISN'T A CHILD PROGENY) DO THINGS LIKE, RESPECTIVELY, CLOSING OFF ACCESS DURING PEAK HOURS AND DOWNGRADING CONNECTIONS FROM 9600 TO 12OO.

NOW, A NEW APPROACH IS EMERGING FROM ANN ARBOR'S OWN MARMOT NET. MARMOT NET IS THE WORLD'S LARGEST, LEAST-EXPENSIVE PROVIDER, HAVING (ACCORDING TO ITS FIGURES) 12 TIMES MORE USERS ON LINE AT ANY TIME THAN COMPUSERVE AND MSEN PUT TOGETHER. THIS DESPITE A HARDWARE BASE CONSISTING OF A 2400 BAUD ZOOMODEM AND A FIVE-YEAR-OLD TOSHIBA LAPTOP. HOW DOES MARMOT COPE WITH LOAD? "LIKE THE OTHER PLAYERS, WE HAVE RESORTED TO SOFTWARE SOLUTIONS," SAID A MARMOT NET SPOKESFOOL. "WE QUIETLY DOWNLOAD A PROGRAM ONTO YOUR HARD DRIVE THE FIRST TIME YOU LOG ON. THEN, ANY TIME IT DETECTS UNACCEPTABLE DELAYS IN SYSTEM RESPONSE, IT TAKES OVER AND ACTUALLY BEGINS SIMULATING INTERNET ACCESS LOCALLY. IT'S COOL. WE CAN GENERATE ABUSIVE MAIL FROM GRUMPY ETHNIC TYPES, UNSOLICITED ADVERTISING FROM LAWYERS, INACCURATE TECHNICAL INFORMATION FROM NEWS GROUPS, AND EVEN SHOW WHAT APPEARS TO BE MOSAIC, ENDLESSLY SPINNING ITS LITTLE WORLD THINGY. AND OF COURSE, MAILING LIST TRAFFIC FROM THE ANN ARBOR COMPUTER SOCIETY IS ALWAYS GOOD FOR KILLING TIME AND CONVINCING USERS TO LOG OFF."

Loonies in the news

So what is up with the Zoe's Arc people? In case you missed it, this is the French NGO that took "donations" from people to "foster" Darfur orphans. But, somehow, when they actually went into the region to gather up the suffering children, what they came up with seems to have been Chadean non-orphans, mostly, whom they are aledged to have suckered into their cars (I'm not kidding -- this is what the Chadean authorities claim happened) with offers of sweets and schooling. They were busted trying to fly a large number of kids out of the country (Chad, not the Sudan), and so far, it's taken a visit by Nicolas Sarkozy himself to get even a few of the do-gooders sprung and back out of Dodge. Bizarre.

Life, as a character in Once Upon A Time in America says, is funnier shit.

Syllables Lost

One of our local FM stations, based at one of our local universities (we have several) employs a handful of professional broadcasters and another handful of fumble-mouthed halfwits. One of these has somehow managed to stay on the air for a couple of years, doing nothing, far as I know, but the mid-Saturday morning station breaks. He has many, many annoying mannerisms, but the greatest of them was his pronounciation of the word "currently," as in "currently at W***, it's 27 degrees." When he began his career, the best he could do was "curly." But now, after substantial practice (and I like to think, at least some coaching or coursework) he's gotten it up to "currnt-ly." Perhaps this year, we'll earmark our pledge to buy him a vowel.

Crying Sumo

I didn't dream it! I thought I might have, but it turns out there really is such a thing as "crying sumo" wrestling. Here's more.

Halloween: arrgh!

Perhaps more in a spirit of Fasching than Halloween or piracy, but in some spirit or other, we gathered a few like-minded types for drinks and potluck this week. Here's the executive staff of DSMDB, showing off their finery in the corporate kitchen.

---

This year is the 40th anniversary of the death of Ernesto Guevara, better known as "Che." Back in in 1999, the old Wood-Charles News Service had this to report about religion and Che.

---

THE ONGOING WONDER OF IT ALL

"Ann Arbor: Some evangelistic group in the UK gets advertising people to donate their time, striving to promote Christianity to -- well, to somebody. This week, The Independent is reporting that the group's latest ad is supposed to make the point that Jesus was not a wimp. Not kidding a bit. They don't want him to be thought of as some kind of easy-going, turn the other cheek, martyr. Nope, he was a real bad ass, and so they're running a poster of Che Guevara in a crown of thorns, over a kind of val-speak headline.

Traditional Church figures are not amused, and one of 'em is calling for excommunication. The group itself admits to being a bit concerned that people will see the poster, go to their local C of E service, and be turned off to discover that the service isn't conducted in camo vestments. Nobody, however, has explained just exactly what audience this is supposed to reach. "

Send the Kids to Bed, Dammit

Those of you who have sub-21 kids really should take a look at this article
from New York Magazine (of all places.) Send the little buggers off to bed
earlier, will ya?

Seemed like the right thing to do ...

Since really bad executive talent has been a topic somewhat on my mind,
and on the minds of others, too, I imagine, I thought I'd dredge up this
little item from what was probably the late nineties.

---

RECURSES, REVILED AGAIN

Ann Arbor: There is some danger, meta-software cosmologists warn, that the universal all may be entering an unstable phase and beginning to exhibit some of the symptoms commonly seen in overloaded or poorly-thought-out computer systems. For example, recursion, the mathematical and programming term for the process of functions calling themselves, seems to be rearing its head in areas of daily life that are not specifically software-related.

For example, the White House is calling, apparently without more than the usual lingual length in cheek, for an independent prosecutor to investigate the behavior of the independent prosecutor who's investigating them. You could argue (and you probably will) that this is not a recursive call but just an example of instantiation, where the constructor, independent_prosecutor (target, agenda), is being called to create another instance of the independent_prosecutor object. However, I could argue (and I think I will, right now, in fact) that the situation is less clear-cut than that, since the instantiating object (the White House) is only enabled to issue the call after a triggering action by an existing instance of the class being instantiated, namely the issuance of a ludicrous_gaffe message. Metaphysically, then, we could see Kenneth Starr as having called himself by providing another object with the enabling condition it requires to sic Janet Reno on his mangy ass.

Now, the definition of "recursion" offered by the Free On-line Dictionary of Computing (http://wfn-shop.Princeton.EDU/foldoc/) includes the following important note:

"If a function will always call itself, however it is called, then it will never terminate. Usually however, it first performs some test on its arguments to check for a "base case" - a condition under which it can return a value without calling itself."

In other words, the implementer of a recursive function has the responsibility to provide a guard or short stop, preventing runaway processing. However, since the independent_prosecutor object was almost certainly (oh, ok, certainly) not designed using sound computational principles or in an ISO 9001-certified environment, the probability of there being no such guard in place approaches (oh, ok, is) 1. So, from this, we can postulate the frightening vision of 100% of the intelligent life in the universe being named independent prosecutors within a period of time that can be (but hasn't been) easily calculated. At the first point at which an object attempts to execute an independent_prosecutor constructor and receives a NULL return, indicating that no more sentient beings are available to fill the office, there had damn well better be somebody checking the return values, or the universe will seg fault.

--

Meanwhile, in yet another example of recursive corporate behavior, Reuters reports that Al Dunlop, the so-called "chainsaw" of corporate downsizing, has himself been downsized by his latest victim -- that is, employer -- Sunbeam Corporation. It is not the case, yet, that Sunbeam had to bring in a downsizing expert in order to rid itself of an incompetent, inefficient executive workforce, but that situation is certainly not impossible to imagine (at least, not for me, it isn't, but then I enjoy imagining things like that). Since companies bring in Huns like Dunlop to improve short-term performance, and since these people carry a substantial price tag themselves, it's only a short step toward hiring another CEO whose specialty is cutting out the cutters- out (since after you improve earnings per share in year 1 by reducing labor, closing plants, and generally gutting a corporation, there isn't much left to cut in year 2 -- except the high priced axemen and axewomen left over from the previous year.)

Fortunately, this form of recursion does have its own, fundamental guard in that the corporation in question represents the scope of the operations. When the last employee (presumably the last CEO hired) lays himself off, the last pointer is freed, and the system executes a graceful shutdown.

--

The Wood-Charles News Service and Computer Science Rant has been brought to you by the Odd Town Tavern, now pioneering the hospitality industry's first recursive last call. "Oh, call yourself," suggested a member of wait staff.

Trip to Toronto

Spent a long weekend in the land of the equivalent dollars. Lots of fun, good food, like that. Hitchhikers were a bit persistent, though.

Avocado Salad's Influence on Rock n' Roll

Clearing out noise from the back of my head:

I take them avocados off the shelf
I dice and mash 'em up by myself.
Add some lemon and I serve it cold.
I like that old time guacamole. Bob Segar

Everybody in the whole cell block
Got salmonella from the jailhouse guac. Elvis

You can spill guac in America... Night Ranger

She's another guacamole widow,
Living in this town.
Another guacamole widow
Since they gunned him down. Wishbone Ash

By the way, your Editor would like to point out that we do, in fact, know that it's not really pronounced "gwak-a-mohl," but rather "gwak-a-mol-ay." However, that latter doesn't really sound anything like rock-n-roll. We'd have had to rhyme up things with, oh, I don't know, the word "holy" in 'em. Or "rolly-polly." Or at a stretch, "E. coli." So be glad - you could have gotten "Guacamole Mary, Mother of God, pray for us now and at the hour of our lunch, ..."

Not the polar bears!

It's one thing to endanger a bunch of socialist animals like coral, or nasty, poisonous reptiles, or anything else that, say, Steve Irwin would have been into, but for God's sake, the polar bears?!?! Come on, can't we tax somebody into saving the polar bears? Dick Cheney, maybe, or Lou Dobbs? It's gotta be somebody's fault.

A good week ...

... for those unclear on the concept.

First, our beloved Ann Arbor News ran a piece on a family who try to buy American as much as possible. Not a problem, philosophically, right up to the point where Mrs. needed a new "mixer." They went to local stores, and looked for products that said "Made in America" on the box. Then they went home and bought one, for cheap, on eBay. Let's protect American jobs. Idiots.

Next, in reference to her mother who was killed by a neighbor's pack of American Bulldogs, a woman said, "It's ok for God to take her. But for God to take her like this is unacceptable."

So there's now some kind of standard for acts of God? And God stepped over the line on this one? Are you planning on suing God, Madame, or just talking trash about him on the talk show circuit? As far as I could tell from the newspaper coverage (admittedly it was the Detroit Free Press), everyone except the victim seemed to be an Idiot.

As an aside, I was reading the bulldog story, aloud with annotation, to Linda this morning in the cafe', down at Kerrytown, and the young woman sitting next to us got up and left. She'd been reading "Jewels of (something) from the Gospel of Matthew."

Oh, Jeez, not poetry again

A Used Textbook
2007 09

Thirty years ago
My mother recommended to me
An old anthology
Of poetry: A.J.M. Smith's
Seven Centuries of Verse.

Being poor, I bought a used copy,
And it was full
Of the worst struggling notes
In someone's hand
Trying to understand
Yeats and Hopkins
On a public school education.

"Poet is split into two
This separates him from animal part"
Whatever this meant
To some poor sod
Copying down blindly the phrase
Of a bored TA in Humanities
Nothing does it impart
Of the first two lines
Of Sailing to Byzantium.

And apparently
There was nothing to be said
(no notes appear)
Of Byzantium's first two lines
That end, "The Emperor's drunken soldiery are abed."

Big 9?

By the way, in case any of you missed it, the University of Michigan Wolverines lost their opener to fabled football powerhouse, Appalachian State University. The Mountaineers left the field singing their fight song, "An Appalachian State of Mind," specially written for them by alumnus, Billy-Bob Joel.

Some folks like to get away
Take a holiday from civilization
Hop a flight to Boone
Or to Bumpus Mills, TN
But I'm taking an old pickup truck
With six coonhounds in behind ...
I'm in an Appalachian state of mind

I've seen all the movie stars
In their fancy cars and their limousines
(well, not actually, 'cause they seldom come down here)
But I can imagine what they look like,
'cause I watch "American Idol,"
In an Appalachian state of mind

It was so easy living day by day
Out of touch with the rhythm and blues
No reason to change that, far as I can see
The Slippery Rock Times, The Dirt Farmer's Journal

It comes down to reality (or not)
And it's fine with me 'cause I've let it slide
Don't care if it's Front Royal or Chattanooga
Long as there's a Walmart to plug inta
I've left them all behind
I'm in an Appalachian state of mind

I'm just taking my old pickup truck up I-95
With a case of PBR in behind
'Cause I'm in an Appalachian state of mind

Meanwhile, the Michigan State University Spartans beat the Kyrgyzstan National Agrikultural Kollege Komrades 174 to 3, ushering in the era of MSU's new head coach, ex-President Jimmy Carter ... oh, hell, I give up. College football is so crushingly boring, not even a vastly embarassing loss to a school with an even funnier name than Slippery Rock or Shippensberg can help me spice it up.

An end-of-summer medley

Because nothing much new or interesting has happened the last week or so (except every Republican in sight resigning from something or other -- Gonzales and Craig are actually resigning and, even more importantly, Sen John Warner of VA announced that he wouldn't run again in 2008. Now if only that Hoonyack from Kentucky who sullies my surname would hang up his squirrel gun ...), here's a contextless melange' of stuff from the old WCA archives. I thought it was funny, back then, and I still sort of think so now.

---

From 2000:
Ann Arbor: Recently, WCA Facilities staff purchased two new smoke detectors for HQ. Like the lazy, featherbedding weasels I am -- that is, they are, they failed to install them, and the two units were left sitting on a credenza in the executive dining room. Last night, one of the executive staff, namely a large black cat, jumped up on the credenza and sat down on the detectors, one of which promptly went off. After I picked myself up off the floor, laughing, the question I had was: what did it detect?

---

From 2000:
OH, WHAT AN HONOR!

Ann Arbor: There's this person, Judy Rose, who writes about Detroit-area real estate in the Free Press (not unlike being the quality of life Editor at a concentration camp). Her column in a recent paper was headed, "St. Clair Shores looks like the next Royal Oak." And as if that wasn't enough, the lead points out that, in past years, Berkley and Ferndale have also been the next Royal Oaks.

Ok, I see how the game is played. Pick a depressing near-in suburb with one or two early buildings left in what can be described only geographically as a downtown. Pick another one nearby, where someone has recently opened -- say -- a new restaurant, and write 250 words on "X is the new Y." Ok, I predict that in the next 10 years, Inkster will be the new Taylor. How's that? Or Wyandotte is well on its way to becoming the next Ecorse? Warren the next Sterling Heights? Gore the next Clinton?

Folks, these are not cities we're talking about. They're either small towns that were swamped, devastated, and destroyed wholesale by urban sprawl, or they're development-driven accretions of the fifties, refugee camps for white folks fleeing the big bad city. And Ms. Rose, it takes more than (and I quote from your encomium to St. Clair Shores), "... brick pavers, trees, flowers, a park with a pond and bridge, and a trolley to transport visitors from one Nautical Mile site to another" to make them anything but a hellish endorsement of rigid urban planning policies.

Meanwhile and much more existentially, Ann Arbor is all set to be the next Ann Arbor.

---

From 1999:

WHAT?!?
Ann Arbor: By now, your WCA Food Editorial staff have heard pretty much everything out of new, ill-trained, and/or just plain young wait personnel. Our long time favorite was the response from an employee of a now-defunct Ann Arbor brunch venue, when our son asked if he could have hard boiled eggs: "We just don't have the facilities for that." However, two new instances have just recently come to hand, and we thought we'd share them with you.

First, from a waitress at that new place out in Saline, Mac's Acadian: she brought a bottle of wine, uncorked it with at least a reasonable degree of ability, poured it around, and then asked, "Now, should I let it breathe, or should I put the top back on?"

And not a week later, 1500 miles away, a young man in a Santa Fe restaurant took our order, noted our wine request, and was turning around when Linda said, "... and we'd all like water, too, please."

"Oh," he said, "Um, Ok. The water will be a few minutes. We're out."

A whole new product opportunity!

The following story illusetrates a fantastic opportunity to take
products somehow related to a disgraced celebrity (in this case
Michael Vick, the Atlanta Falcons pond scum who plead guilty this
week to various charges related to running a dog fighting enterprize)
and disdain-ize(tm) them by having dogs chew on 'em.

Now between the various dogs residing with us and our near acquaintances,
I figure we can achieve a throughput of 10 to 15 thousand chewed sports cards
a day, especially if we "sweeten" the deal a bit with beef broth
and other chew-performance-enhancing substances. (Even allowing
for the occasional completely-eaten object d'art.)

Then, when we're really up and running, we approach the owner of a
local wash-your-dog shoppe about turning the dog-o-mat into a chewed sports collectibles venue. Imagine: Babe Ruth signed baseballs with ferret bites! Dale Earnhardt NASCAR keychains with St. Bernard slobber! Videos of David Beckham being chased around a soccer pitch by pit bulls! It'll be huge, man!

And don't even get me started about the potential of other
once-precious artifacts with their value enhanced by disrespectful
animal behavior -- reliquaries with paw prints, full size replicas
of Michelangelo's David with a pomeranian gnawing on its ankle,
prints of the Mona Lisa with dog hair on her gown ... the sky's the
limit!

And you cat owners -- no need to be left out!
Let's get the business plan lagged down and get this off the
launch pad! I haven't been so excited since the Y-prize (a million
dollars to the builders of the first rocket to crash on Cleveland.)

Vocabulary Tests

Some mornings are better than others; mornings when I get up and immediately take a Vicodin are not necessarily the best. Viz, our coffee technology consists of old Chemex drip pots and a Capresso grinder. The Capresso features a clear plastic lid on the bin where the unground beans go. Making a morning's worth of coffee involves grinding twice, once for caffienated and once for decaf. (Can you see this coming, yet?) On more than one occasion, I've removed the grinder lid, poured in one kind of coffee, replaced the lid, ground the coffee, dumped the results into a chemex, come back to the grinder, measured out the next set of beans, and dumped them ... onto the nice, clear lid, which I've forgotten is still in place. Beans here, beans there, beans all over the place. And it makes such a great noise as it's happening, too. Definitely exercises my vocabulary.

And then there was last week, when I dropped 4 or 5 of Coney Dog's allergy pills on the floor (yes, the dog's on meds, too). I can't quite bend down that far -- my knee complains -- so I thought, ok, I'll go get one of those nice upholstered cylinders we bought (Ottomans or Ottomen or whatever the plural is), sit on it, and that'll get me down far enough to rescue the doggie benadryl. That worked, but then in getting up, I shifted my weight slightly and the damn thing collapsed, dumping me on the floor, again causing me to resort to my great facility in the language of abuse and complaint.

These are the things that Doctors and physical therapists should know about -- they're the great motivators, the events that make you want to get better fast, throw away those crutches, and have fewer reasons to take the name of the Lord thy God in vain.

The Hanging Gardens of Joseph St

I've mentioned to a couple of people that we were trying the "hanging tomato" thing this year. The blank looks suggest that y'all are not reading enough airline magazines ... anyway, here's the result so far. You put the plants in at the bottom of this thing, fill the sack with potting soil, water it religiously (thanks, Linda), and in fact, tomatoes grow out the bottom. These are supposed to be Romas, as you can see. I'll report further when we actually eat one, but so far, so good.

Downtown, Eastside, Lamb Chop News

Last night, we took our dinner plans downtown and again found that the Earle's outside tables are the best seat if what you want is sunset action. Yes, I said "sunset" in the context of Ann Arbor. We do have 'em, here in the midwest, although they tend toward pastels and not the flaming pallettes of seaside venues. And since it's a block off Main and doesn't specialize in huge plates of medium-competent tourist food, like most of the Main Street Ventures shoppes, you can usually get a seat, more or less on demand.

So we ate, and my meal included half a dozen frenched lamb chops, the bones of which I requested "to go" for a certain Shepherd who'd had a hard day -- jumped unexpectedly by a traumatized grayhound. No damage except to Coney's ego, I suspect. Anyway, we took the bones home to the Eastside, presented her with one, and -- and then, what DID we do with the rest of them? Whatever it was, it wasn't secure, since the box appeared on the floor at bedtime, autoclave cleaned of every last organic molecule, no bones to be found. Oh, well. Stealth dog. We knew that. No osteoporesis for her, she's getting her calcium.

Marnee Thai

Went to the downtown incarnation of Lotus Thai (which is over in the Target Mall, whatever it's called), namely Marnee Thai, in the Ashley Mews building, just south of Main and WIlliam. (Whew, that was a long, comma infested sentence.)

Still working the liquour license, so nothing to drink but Thai Iced Coffee, etc. Otherwise, an identical menu, in a smaller, much more pleasant venue. The views leave something to be desired: the BP gas station or the DTE local office. Kitchen not quite as fast and one or two items might have been a touch overcooked -- otherwise, a near replica, food wise, of the suburban food, and a more relaxing place to eat. And they were doing well, seemed like. 3/4 full at 8:30 on a Wednesday night, several other couples after us, and 2 or 3 walk-in take-out customers. All with no booze license. Maybe this will work out for that silly development, finally, and actually accomplish the extending of downtown by another block south. After all, Leopold Bros. is down there in the valley, just another two blocks' walk, and a block past that is the old Ark locale, where Susan Chastain is moving the Firefly. And both of those places have PARKING, for God's sake, as do the immediately nearby sidestreets (as we well know, since we used to live a couple blocks up from the Ark, then the original Main Street Market.) Now, if we can just keep global warming from flooding Allen Creek and making a lake out of Fox Tent and Awning's parking lot, maybe the Downtown Development Agency can actually claim a win, for a change.

But don't bet on it.

Dogs are Literal-minded

Wednesdays, we take Coney to a doggie day care place, partly so she gets
some extercise and partly so, as an only dog here at home, she stays socialized
and friendly with other dogs.

Yesterday, we all left the house to implement this policy. I got into the
passenger's seat, and Linda and Coney were still out in the yard, browsing
the fresh, green crab grass (Coney was, not Linda.) My car door was still
open, but the back door wasn't. Linda said, to Coney, "Are you ready to get
in?"

Apparently she was, since she leapt -- not crawled, but leapt -- into the front
of the car, into my lap, all 65 pounds of shepx. It took, oh, a good two to
three minutes to sort this out, in between the hilarity (I was laughing
uncontrollably) and the knowledge on Coney's part that there are biscuits in
the glove compartment, but that her usual place to receive one is in the back
seat.

Guess you had to be there.

Nothing Earth Shaking

Last MRI was as positive, when someone who knows what he's doing looked at it, as the previous one. Basically, tumors in head gone, good.

We have also, however, backed off on the steroid that I was taking, down from a big 'ol 40mg 4 days a week to 1mg, daily, just for the fun of it, far as I can tell. This has its interesting aspects, since while I was taking the big dose, I never, ever, got anything resembling a headache. Now, it's possible to get one, and I'd gotten used to being immune, even to things like slighly misadjusted glasses frames. Bugger, back to reality.

What's next? We haven't really decided -- a different drug, probably, but not clear which or how. And once I can successfully navigate more than 10 or 20 steps without a crutch (a physical one -- my psychological crutches are far, far too deeply ingrained), I'll be back at work, physically, instead of just virtually as I am now, a mere wispy voice on the phone, demanding compliance with standards.

Meanwhile, it's Sunday night, and that starts with "S" and that rhymes with "don't mess," and that means "rawfish." Time for our weekly religious observance at the shrine of hamachi and others. Yum, can't wait.

The following appeared in the WCA news in 2000, when the original Sweetwaters cafe' on Washington was my morning stop, before work, and I used to hear a lot of this kind of thing.

---

AND SPEAKING OF AFFIRMATIONS

Ann Arbor: Overheard in the cafe this morning: two women (regulars, who I suspect of being public school teachers) -- one says, "It's one thing to LOVE your dog, but it's something else to LICK your dog." Her friend gives her a completely emotive, between the eyes, I'm really listening to you look and says, "Mmm-hm." Minutes later, they were discussing sushi and giggling.

--

Very Random Semantic Rambling

Returning from a walk with the dog, Linda said, "Coney got a horse biscuit."

Consider the possible range of meanings, there. A biscuit FOR a horse? A biscuit MADE OUT of horse? A biscuit SHAPED like a horse? A crude euphemism?

Turns out, it was a biscuit FOR horses, a thing we didn't have in my youth, when horses were lucky to get a sheaf of hay and some sweet feed and maybe a pat on the back with a shovel. But it raises some other questions: what animals now have their own snacks, that I don't know about? I know that Purina makes "chow" for just about everything that's held in captivity -- are there high-end, gourmet treats for primates, for example? Bonobo Bites? Rhesus Pieces? Macaquearoons?

This is apparently how going off steroids makes you think ... if "think" is the right word, here.

Can you interpret MRI Imagery?

So I had another MRI of my head last week, and they gave me a CD of the results. Trouble is, I have no clue how to interpret the results. They look a little funny to me -- both the stills and the motion. Anybody have any ideas?

---

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Look kind of interesting, don't they?

What more do you need to know?

Even one Whole Paycheck Store in your community is too many.

Old Family Pics

Found this old sepia tone of Uncle Mert, cooking from his rolling chair, probably sometime around 1937. Funny looking old geezer, wasn't he?

---

So hundreds of you have written in, asking about Uncle Mert. I did a quick search on our family geneological database for a sketch of him, and came up with these short little notes. Hope you find it interesting.

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Mert (Mertram) DeNyal-Dodder McLuggage was an early immigrant from County Kerry, in a plague ship with his parents, Shilaligh and Allison McLuggage, fleeing the porrige famine. Landing in the St Lawrance (they were aiming for Canada, not the US, since they were devout Protestants), they made their way about as far south as Kingston, ON, when the ship was set upon by a press gang which pressed Mert (even at the tender age of 14) into the local mounted infantry (since he was the only one willing to admit that he knew which end the hay went into.)

A cavalryman for the rest of his days, Mert fought with the commonwealth troops in any number of key engagements, including being part of the little known Canadian forces operating with the Sioux, against Custer, at the little big horn; fighting with Wolsley in Ashanti-land; taking part in the harrying from one end of Afganistan to the other of the elusive Sultan of Swat; and finally the viscious retreat from each well-defended pension and auberge in Belgium during 1914. Severely wounded in his drinking elbow at Ypres, he was assigned to training duties for the rest of the Great War, and was not called up for the second. The picture shown here is uncharacteristic, since he appears to be unarmed (except for the spoon). He was, according to family and neighbors, seldom without a sidearm, and usually a carbine and sabre as well. He passed away in 1939, infuriated as usual at being turned down for active duty.

ART FAIR CANCELLED IN ESTHETICS FLAP

Found this -- dating to 1995. How quickly 12 years go by. Notice that it pre-dates the art-on-a-stick phenomenon, the bogus "free art fair parking" raids, and the premeditated false-directions-to-Zingermans campaigns. Ah, the good old days.

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Ann Arbor: Collapsing in a heap of bitterness and ill-feeling, Ann Arbor's famed Street Art Fair has finally been cancelled. After years of declining attendance and waning interest (last year's event drew 28 human visitors and a schnauzer), the fair was no longer providing the city with the revenue draw that was its admitted original purpose.

A State Street area restaurant owner who asked not to be identified sobbed, "Time was, I'd move more Rolling Rock than you could shake a credit card at." Last year, his sales for the entire 5 days totalled 2 pints of shandy (sold to some confused English tourists) and a bottle of Mad Dog. "And what am I gonna do with all these leftover crawfish?" he added. A spokesman for the crawfish declined to comment.

The demise of the fair is generally traced to civic ordinances passed during the administration of Joseph "The Bohemian" McLuggage, the city's first (and so far only) Surrealist Party mayor. Elected during a moment of inattention on the part of the Republicans, McLuggage's brief ascendency resulted in a flurry of unusual laws, such as the creation of a Visual Environmental Protection Agency, charged with cleaning up toxic arts and crafts; the establishment of a "Superfund" to pay for a 75% reduction in the number of mini-vans; and the so-called "Brady Bill," named after Mert Brady, a University of Michigan software engineer who lost most of the feeling in his big toe after someone ran over it with a stroller. The Brady Bill requires a 30-year waiting period prior to the purchase of "wheeled infant transport assault vehicles," during which time the applicant is checked carefully for sanity, driving ability, and prior history of art fair attendance.

Staff at Ann Arbor's Odd Town Tavern feigned indifference to the loss of Art Fair revenue, claiming that most of their regular customers were only dimly aware of the annual event, anyway. Management also denied a report that a clandestine, unofficial "Tempeh Fair" was being planned for the alley behind the bar.

Oh, that K-mart kami-flage

Hilarious shot of a member of the armed forces, using his new "universal" camoflage to blend in with household surroundings.

iPhone or not to iPhone

For me, that would be "not," since I rely on several 3rd party packages
that run on Palm OS, and I'm actually quite happy with a relatively new
Treo. But I will look forward to assessing the quality of the first
phone call I get from anyone of y'all from your new Jobs-box. Surely
somebody in our old gang of geeks is out there now, standing in line?

Here are some old whacks at Apple and its prior mistakes, that is, new
product extravaganzas:

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AUTHOR CITES MULTIPLE DISCONTINUITIES

ANN ARBOR: PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE ACADEMICS ARE ENGAGING IN AN ESCALATION OF NUMBERED DISCONTINUITIES, IT SEEMS. IN THE COURSE OF DEVELOPING MAN'S VIEW OF THE UNIVERSE, AUTHORS CITE THREE TRADITIONAL DISCONTINUITIES THAT HAVE BEEN OVERCOME, NAMELY THE DISCONTINUITITY BETWEEN EARTH AND THE COSMOS, MAN AND ANIMALS, AND THE RATIONAL MIND AND THE SUBCONSCIOUS. THE ELIMINATIONS OF THESE THREE ARE USUALLY ASSOCIATED WITH COPERNICUS, DARWIN, AND FREUD. SO SAYS JON TURNEY, REVIEWING A BOOK CALLED "THE FOURTH DISCONTINUITY: THE CO-EVOLUTION OF HUMANS AND MACHINES" BY BRUCE MAZLISH. WRITING IN THE APRIL 23RD ISSUE OF "NEW SCIENTIST," TURNEY SAYS THAT MAZLISH GIVES US THE DISCONTINUITY BETWEEN HUMANS AND MACHINES AS THE FOURTH IN THIS SERIES OF BINARY CONUNDRUMS AND GOES ON TO QUOTE MAZLISH AS FOLLOWS:

"MY AIM IS THAT READERS WILL FEEL DEEPLY THAT THEY ARE THAT PARTICULAR EVOLUTIONARY CREATURE WHOSE ORIGINS ARE TO BE FOUND IN BOTH THE ANIMAL AND MACHINE KINGDOMS, WITH THE ANIMAL AND MECHANICAL QUALITIES TOGETHER INCORPORATED IN THE DEFINITION OF HUMAN NATURE."

MAZLISH IS APPARENTLY ONE OF THE STARRY-EYED GROUP THAT SEE THINKING MACHINES AS "A NEW PHASE IN EVOLUTION," AND FOR ALL WE KNOW, HE MAY BE RIGHT. HOWEVER, SOME DISAGREE, FIRST WITH HIS CHARACTERIZATION OF MAN/MACHINE AS THE "FINAL" DISCONTINUITY, AND OTHERS WITH THE VERY BASIS OF HIS ARGUMENT.

IN THE FIRST GROUP IS THE COMBINED FACULTY AND GLEE CLUB OF THE UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN'S CONSORTIUM FOR CUDGELING OTHERS INTO SILENCE WITH NITPICKING AND AD HOMINEM ABUSE. IN A JOINT PAPER, THEY POINTED OUT THE STILL-EXTANT DISCONTINUITIES BETWEEN SERBS AND MUSLIMS, BETWEEN HUTU AND TUTSI, BETWEEN VI AND EMACS, BETWEEN THOSE WITH INTERNET ACCESS AND THOSE USING PRODIGY, BETWEEN THOSE WHO BEGIN PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE ARTICLES WITH REFERENCES TO "JURASSIC PARK" AND THOSE WITH TWO BRAIN CELLS TO RUB TOGETHER, AND BETWEEN THOSE WHO THINK THE IDEA OF A FREE VERSION OF NEWT GINGRICH CALLED "GNEWT" IS A REAL THIGH-SLAPPER AND PRACTICALLY EVERYBODY I'VE MENTIONED IT TO.

THE SECOND GROUP OF DETRACTORS COMES FROM THE RELIGIOUS RIGHT WING OF CARNEGIE MELLON'S SOFTWARE ENGINEERING INSTITUTE. THEY DISPUTE WHAT THEY CONSIDER THE BLASPHEMOUS NOTION THAT COMPUTERS EVOLVED FROM MAN, ALTHOUGH THEY ADMIT THAT THE NEWTON DOES SHOW SOME SIMILARITIES TO THE AVERAGE SIXTH-GRADER. "OK, SO IT'S SMALL, AND IT CAN'T SPELL," SAID AN ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR WHO ASKED NOT TO BE IDENTIFIED AS AN ANCESTOR OF THE IBM PC JR. HE POINTED OUT THAT THE BELLEVUE, PA, POLICE DEPARTMENT IS USING NEWTONS, RUNNING SOFTWARE WRITTEN BY CARNEGIE MELLON STUDENTS, AND THAT THIS HAS RESULTED IN 143 ARRESTS OF PEOPLE FOR SELLING RUGS. HE DENIED, HOWEVER, THAT 4 FELONS HAD BEEN RELEASED BECAUSE COURTS WERE UNABLE TO FIND ANY LAWS AGAINST "ARMORED RUBBERY."

WAIT STAFF AT THE ODD TOWN TAVERN ANGRILY DENIED THAT THEY WERE THE ANCESTORS OF MICROPROCESSOR-CONTROLLED TOASTER OVENS.

-30-

Wanna work for Google?

Check this entry in one of the innumerable CNET blogs, first. I didn't find it especially surprising, particularly including their disinterest in experience -- so much of their stuff acts like they just thought it up and launched it.

Deploying New Technology

My new hat, new sunglasses, and new crutches

After a couple of shots at cooking whilst hobbling around on one crutch, we were brainstorming other possibilities -- and the notion of a casters-equipped, height-adjustable bar stool came up. I could scoot around on it, both hands available, do prep, watch things on the stove, even load/unload the dishwasher. But where would you ever get such a thing?

Ha! One search on the internet brought Linda to http://www.sourcemedicalequipment.com/, where they have a vast array of "task chairs." I have a deluxe version on its way, complete with a big height range, foot rest, special hard-floor casters, multi-port fuel injection, and the ability to run on premium unleaded, biodiesel, or leftover Riesling. Cain't hardly wait.

Meanwhile, situation with hip improves day to day, somewhat slowly. I may actually be back "at work," although virtually, not literally, as early as next week.

A toe hold

In what the media is comparing to the US troop surge in Iraq, 50% of one cook
was redeployed to the kitchen green zone at our house last night. Specially
trained in techniques such as moving one thing at a time around in the left hand while moving into combat on a single crutch in the right, US forces were able to prepare a sausage with balsamic reduction pasta sauce from scratch, while other units focused on dog walks and on moving heavy weapons such as pots of boiling water.

"It is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is the end of the beginning," said Winston Churchill.

How efficient

The argument went like this: A tumor in your hip has removed enough bone that you are extremely likely to fracture something down there, and then it'll be non-trivial to repair. So let's do the repair first, before the fracture occurs, and that'll be trivial, and you'll be walking around in a couple of days.

We pondered this, and decided that "trivial" sounded Ok, and had the surgery. But recovery the last week has been painful and far, far short of "walking around." More like crawling around.

So yesterday, we had the followup-appointment with the osteopod and some x-rays. Turns out that either during or immediately after the surgery, we also had the fracture! Who knew? Neither us nor the doc who was equally surprised to see the pics. Nothing more to be done, since the procedure he did was exactly what he would have done, anyway, and the various kinds of pain, need for crutches for weight-bearing, etc. is explained by the break, so it's still better to have it all over with, but the recovery from the, um, surgery/fracture won't be quite as quick as they thought -- more like a couple of months than a couple of days.

Things somehow, seemed to look up yesterday, though, whether it had anything to do with knowing what's going on in there or actual improvement. I'm hobbling with more vigor, although cooking is an issue, since I can a) move around or b) carry things, not both. But if given a chair and a table, I can do immoble kinds of prep like shelling peas and giving instruction to sous chefs, and so we tried out team-cooking chicken and rice with fresh peas, last night, to great success. Timing is an issue, since I used to cook while Linda gave Coney her evening walk, but we'll work that out, too.

And no, before you ask, we did not watch the last of the Soprano's. To those who did, our condolences, and may your grief be short lived.

Don't get no respect

Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf is apparently channelling the spirit of Rodney Dangerfield. This from a Griff Witte Washington Post Foreign Service analysis this morning.

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"I bluntly say you always leave me alone in time of trial and tribulation," Musharraf told the lawmakers, according to a report in the News, an English-language paper. "You are not delivering. You have lost the war of nerves. You all are silent upon what the media is doing. If I myself have to do everything then you are for what purpose."

A strange ruling

The United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit in New York ruled today that the FCC can't punish broadcasters for "fleeting profanity" when both our President and Vice President have been broadcast doing exactly that. Weird. I'm not going to detail all this, but you can read it for yourself here.
However, I will append an old Wood-Charles News Service item, from an unknown date in the 1990's, that may have some vague relevance.

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KILLER QUESTIONS: LATEST POLITICAL PLOY?

ANN ARBOR: POLITICAL SCIENTISTS AT THE UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN'S STASSEN INSTITUTE FOR THE STUDY OF PERSISTENT IF SOMEWHAT OFF-THE-WALL POLITICAL FIGURES ARE TRACKING WHAT THEY BELIEVE MAY BE A NEW TACTIC IN THE INCREASINGLY MEDIA-DRIVEN AMERICAN POLITICAL VAUDEVILLE. THEY CITE THE RECENT DISMISSAL OF JOCELYN ELDERS AS THE MOST VISIBLE AND VISIBLY SUCCESSFUL RESULT OF THIS NEW FORM OF ATTACK: THE GIVE-'EM-ENOUGH-ROPE PLOY. THE FACTS ABOUT ELDERS' UNFORTUNATE COMMENTS -- REGARDED AS THE LAST STRAW IN HER INCREASINGLY SHAKY RELATIONSHIP WITH THE WHITE HOUSE -- BEGAN TO EMERGE THIS WEEK AS REPORTERS FINALLY TRACKED DOWN AND CORNERED THE AMERICAN PSYCHIATRIC ASSOCIATION OFFICIALS RESPONSIBLE FOR THE EVENT AT WHICH ELDERS MADE HER LET'S-TEACH-KIDS-WANKING STATEMENT.

AN APA SPOKESSHRINK ISSUED A RAMBLING AND CONTRADICTORY ACCOUNT IN WHICH HE FIRST SUGGESTED THAT THE PERSON WHO ASKED ELDERS THE DEADLY QUESTION ("SO, DOC, WHAT DO YOU THINK ABOUT SELF ABUSE, ANYWAY?") WAS NOT AN APA MEMBER AT ALL, BUT A CHIROPRACTOR WHO HAD WANDERED INTO THE WRONG MEETING ROOM BY MISTAKE. HE THEN REVERSED HIMSELF AND SAID THAT IT WAS ACTUALLY RUSH LIMBAUGH IN DISGUISE. PRESSED
FOR DETAILS, HE SHOWED REPORTERS A SERIES OF RORSCHACH BLOTS, AND ASKED THEM HOW LONG THEY'D HATED THEIR MOTHERS.

WHAT COULD HAVE BEEN SEEN AS AN ISOLATED OCCURRENCE ASSUMED ADDED SIGNIFICANCE YESTERDAY DURING A VICE PRESIDENTIAL PRESS CONFERENCE. A MAN IDENTIFYING HIMSELF AS GOOT NINGRITCH AND WEARING A FALSE NOSE AND MUSTACHE ASKED GORE IF HE FELT THAT MANDATORY LSD INJECTIONS FOR SPOTTED-OWL RAPERS WAS OR WAS NOT FUNDED IN THE NEW CRIME BILL. THE VICE PRESIDENT DODGED THE QUESTION AND WAS ALSO EVASIVE IN RESPONSE TO A FOLLOW-UP ABOUT FORMING SQUADS OF INNER CITY YOUTHS AND SENDING THEM OUT INTO THE NATIONAL FORESTS TO SPIKE TREES.

THEN, DURING AN APPEARANCE ON THE BARNEY THE DINOSAUR SHOW, SENATOR JESSE HELMS WAS ASKED BY THE PURPLE AND GREEN TALK SHOW HOST WHAT HE THOUGHT SHOULD BE DONE TO GAY WELFARE MOMS. THE SENATOR RESPONDED AT LENGTH AND IN TERMS THAT LENT CREDENCE TO RECENT RUMORS THAT HE
HELPED SCRIPT THE FILM, "PULP FICTION." AIDES TO HELMS LATER DENIED THAT HE SAID ANYTHING OR WAS IN FACT ON THE SHOW, AND ADDED THAT 90% OF THE PROGRAM'S PRE-SCHOOL AUDIENCE WOULDN'T KNOW WHAT A BASTINADO WAS, ANYWAY.

EXPERTS AT THE STASSEN INSTITUTE SUGGESTED THAT INITIAL PUBLIC REACTION WOULD BE UNFAVORABLE, PERHAPS FOR THE SAME REASONS THAT MOST POLLS SHOW VOTERS ANNOYED BY NEGATIVE CAMPAIGN RHETORIC, DESPITE THE WIDESPREAD SUCCESS OF CANDIDATES EMPLOYING IT. HOWEVER, THE POLITICAL SCIENTISTS DID FEEL THAT THE PRACTICE WOULD HAVE A LONG- TERM POSITIVE IMPACT IN THAT IT WOULD MAKE POLITICIANS MORE AND MORE UNWILLING TO SAY ANYTHING OR EVEN TO APPEAR IN PUBLIC, "AND GOD KNOWS, THAT WOULD BE A RELIEF."

THIS WEEK'S WOOD-CHARLES NEWS SERVICE HAS BEEN BROUGHT TO YOU BY THE FINE FOLKS AT THE ODD TOWN TAVERN, WHO, IN A RECENT INTERVIEW, APOLOGIZED FOR THE GAP IN NEWS COVERAGE DURING THE LAST FEW WEEKS, CITING EXHAUSTION AND A GENERAL SHORTAGE OF ANYTHING FUNNY TO WRITE ABOUT. REPORTERS POINTED OUT THAT THE LATTER CIRCUMSTANCE HAD NOT BEEN AN OBSTACLE UP TO NOW, AND MANAGEMENT OFFERED TO PROVIDE THE NEXT ROUND OF TEMPEH BURGERS ON THE HOUSE.
- 30 -

Rumor Control and Status Check

2007 06 04: Ok - so I had the surgery. Here's what they stuck in my hip - a "gamma nail," as it's called, for some reason. We're home (poor Linda stayed with me for two nights, in a barca-lounger in the hospital room -- not a great sleeping experience), and I'm gimping around and complaining. Painful, but looking at this picture, I'm surprised it isn't more so, I guess.

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Didn't you always sort of suspect?

If you get the Sunday NY Times, have a look at the "Fashion Magazine," and in particular, the ad for Borgata Hotel Casino & Spa, in Atlantic city. It features a woman doing something with nautical decor, but it's about their restaurant, Sea Blue, "by Michael Mina."

The tag line is, "When food becomes an art, an appetite is entirely optional."

So if the chef uses enough silly prep techniques (liquid nitrogen) or chemistry class ingredients (Methylcellulose) or wierd presentation (savory lollipops), it won't matter if you're hungry? You'll still pay top whack just to say you were there, whether the food tasted like anything or not? I guess that's what it takes to compete in casino towns or no-class towns (Atlanta and Houston come to mind). But it still seems strange to admit it in your promotional material.

By the way, if you look at the Michael Mina link, you'll find him in a number of no-class towns, mostly Las Vegas, but also, strangely, San Francisco. Wonder if his ads for that place focus just a bit more on taste and less on "art?"

Joe's Chemo Crunch

So I'm not much of a breakfast guy, but these days, I need to quickly gobble something fairly substantial along with the steroids. Later on, Hobbit-like, I tend to have second breakfast, but in case you have any interest, here's the formulary for a bowl of gunk that seems to buffer Dexamethasone pretty effectively.

• 1 cup of some kind of sugar-free oat Os. Doesn't matter which one.
  
• 1 handful dark raisins
  
• 2 dried apricots, chopped
  
• 2 tbsp salted cashews
  
• 1 or 2 large strawberries, chopped
  
• 1/2 banana, sliced
  
• milk to taste
  

Mix; share bites with dog. Drink most of remaining milk. Allow dog to lick bowl.

Color me psychic

Just found this, from (apparently) 1998. Could things really have been this predictable? If so, how sad.

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1998 01 07

FORD, GM SEEK NEXT BIG THING

Ann Arbor: The US automakers, still riding the crest of the light truck wave, are already beginning to cast about for the next major vehicle category. Few in the industry will claim to have foreseen the popularity of small pickup trucks, built on an automobile chassis; and fewer still would assert that building what are essentially four-wheel- drive station wagons on heavy pickup frames was a rational, logically- arrived-at marketing strategy. Instead, most analysts see the industry as taking a "products happen" approach -- people want "safe" because they've allowed themselves to be sold on the need to procreate while still working time and a half with both hands, just to make the payments on a 4500 square foot esthetic nightmare, built in what was a cornfield until twenty minutes ago -- so they carry a big wad of guilt around concerning their parenting skills -- hell, they even invented the word "parenting" to describe what they're being told they ain't got -- and so they're susceptible to a sales pitch about safety on the road. Jeep, stuck with a low-quality, retro-looking lump that mostly appealed to the flannel-shirt and deer rifle segment of the pasty-white- male market category, decided to invent a reputation for reliability and flog it to the wrong-way-down-Ashley set -- the sub-segment of the minivan or deeply confused grouping who not only drive around with fourteen children and a basset hound in the car but who worry about "safety" while they're doing it. Voila, le sport-futility vehicle.

Next, the economy stumbles into good times and gas prices are still low, so the sport-ute buyers allow themselves to be sold "big." Safe and big. So the automakers stumble onto the tactic of recreating the Chevy Suburban with leather seats and cup holders. Like the German Navy after Fisher unveiled the Dreadnought, other drivers, in self - defense, are forced to follow suit or be run off the road by people sitting so high up, they're suffering from hypoxia. Your neighbor's 1997 defense budget includes two "Indefatigable"-class battlecruiser - size Cadillac Life Activity Vehicles, so you lobby your Reichstag for Ford's dee-luxe "Enterprise" offspring carrier and a squadron of Chrysler's new Somali Warlord Signature Technicals (remember technicals? Pickup trucks with pintle-mounted light automatic weapons in the back?) for the kids to kommute to kommunity kollege in.

Oops. But what about the small but well-heeled segment of society whose members don't actually need to (or have been able to stick the wife and/or nanny with) toting around the yard apes? What about the mature gentleman with the hair plugs? What about all those post- thirty guys who are making a mint marketing Rosa Parks collectibles or running internet porn sites? Relax, boys. Detroit has you covered, too. This year's big in-car accessory is -- yes, you guessed it -- a humidor. Now let's see -- that's one hand to use the cell phone, one to work the cigar cutter, one eye on the Windows CE-based real-time portfolio management system ... got a good estate lawyer?

Right. As you can see, all of this is evolutionary, not revolutionary (the new VW Beetle to the contrary -- it looks like a slightly squashed Neon and sports a built-in flower vase. Venceramos!) What Detroit needs is some really breakthrough marketing ideas before one of them sneaky third-world outfits -- Japan or one of them -- eats our Big Mac again. Well, fear not. We hear that the big three have actually agreed to form a joint brain trust. In our relentless pursuit of something we can pass off as truth, we've managed to obtain the following time lines, presented earlier this week to top Ford and GM management.

1999 model year: Ford announces new line of touring motorcycles, based on the F-150. GM goes after a World Superbike win with Carl Fogarty riding an inline-four-powered machine, built up on a Catera frame, split lengthwise with a Sawzall (the frame, not Fogarty). Chrysler adds more cup holders to the Dodge Ram.

2000: Ford debuts the Millenium Falcon, a retro-styled economy car to appeal to aging boomers (based on the Escort chassis) with built-in hash pipe holders. GM rolls out the Akwarius, a Chevy Citation with special flower and paisley interior and exterior treatment and in-dash, aroma-tight "humidor." Chrysler adds under-seat air bags to its minivan lineup.

2001: Ford re-launches the Thunderbird as a retro-styled two-seater with 6.5 liter v-10 engine, available full-time four wheel drive, and burled walnut in-dash handgun holder (based on the F-150). GM announces acquisition of Perot Systems. Chrysler announces layoffs.

2002: Ford, GM announce joint acquisition of Chrysler, Jeeps to be built in UK Jaguar plants, Dodge Ram to be re-engineered onto the Catera chassis. Hyundai announces acquisition of Ford, GM.

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The Wood-Charles Auto Industry Alert is brought to you by your caring, servicing, selling hall-of-fame master tavern, the Odd Town, proud to be doing business in the magnificent community of Ann Arbor, Michigan, where we can show you more drunks in half an hour than you'd see in a week of shopping other taverns. So come on down, bring your wallet, name your poison, and we'll make you a deal you'll be happy to stumble away with or from.

-30-

How to Waste Time

So I have some time on my hands, as you can imagine. If you should find yourself in similar straights, I can heartily recommend the "50 Movie Pack" series shown below, as outstanding examples of what I believe Ed Vielmetti used to call shovel ware. There are more genres than just the two shown here, and the price-performance ratio is astounding, as long as your only requirement is "entertain me while I stare mindlessly at the TV."

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To see the whole, sordid collection, do a search on
50 Movie Pack on Amazon, and marvel at the amount of content a few bucks will buy you.

The urban dictionary reference for shovel ware is incomplete, by the way, since the original usage was applied to those paperback "guides to the internet" that you used to see. Someone should submit an update.

Lots of UK News This Period

What with Blair calling it quits and the Queen visiting the US, this old WCA article seemed like a natural to resurrect. It appears to be from sometime in 1998.

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WE'LL ALWAYS HAVE ENGLAND TO KICK AROUND

Ann Arbor: Ok, look; I know some of you think I'm soft on Clinton, and the Dexter Chapter of Hell's Dentists has issued death threats in retaliation for my scorning of Harley's Motorclothing Booteek. And I realize that occasionally my critical review of jurisprudence in the Detroit Suburbs ("Prosecutor Donates Brain to Science: 'I never use it anyway,' says Patterson" WCA News, March 12, 1994) may appear harsh. But I'm really not all that much of an extremist. For example, I've never (publically) suggested that the world's oldest continually-running musical comedy -- I mean, democracy might be in need of a lube and oil job. I (usually) refrain from taking shots at the British Government, per se, because:

* a) Its individual members are so much funnier than the body politic in general.
* b) Most of WCAs readership consists of Amerikun geeks, a group notoriously unconcerned with foreign affairs other than the giant sucking sound caused by US web page owners farming out development work to starving Bosnian COBOL programmers.
* c) Our own gummint has enough of its own little ways to occupy three or four of me (what a frightening thought that is).

However (you could see that word coming a mile off, couldn't you?), I'm not above straight reportage when Her Majesty's Finest start tweaking things. And so (really, I couldn't make this up), I bring you the news that Blair's Labour Government is seriously talking about bringing to an end the current algorithm for being a member of the House of Lords (which approximates P(LsubS) where L is your antecedent who sucked up succesfully to a deceased monarch and S is you, whether you are clinically conscious or not). Instead, "The Independent" tells us, under a story datelined April First, the plan is to replace heriditary peerages with randomly-selected, rotating "People's Lords."

The story cites "leaked" documents that say, in part, that "The committee looks forward to the Lords eventually becoming "a statistically perfect and genuinely inclusive sample" of the British population. It will then function as 'the ideal national focus group for test-bedding new legislative initiatives'."

It also reports on opposition to the change, including a claim that Blair "... has been spending too much time on the phone to Clinton ...", and a warning from Professor Pamella Benlott that "The British constitution is fragile. Hereditary peers have centuries of in-breeding in their blood. The fact that many Lords are congenital idiots is a subtle and unique part of the constitutional settlement with which Tony will tinker at his peril." It quotes a peer, The 27th Earl of Thanet, as threatening violence in the form of a mass uprising of the landed gentry and their "supporters" if the measure is adopted.

Is the date of the story significant? Who knows? But if not, if this plan is really under consideration, then it represents an exciting departure from hidebound convention, and one that we here in the colonies should consider very carefully. How'd you like to be, say, the Senator from North Carolina for a day?

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The WCA News Service is brought to you by the House of Drunks at the Odd Town Tavern where "peerage" is usually taken to mean the act of peering closely at your plate, trying to identify the ingredients of your tempeh burger.

-- 30 --

Sample Issue of Sea Power Magazine On Line

The folks at Defense Tech have posted a link to a sample of the electronic version of Sea Power Magazine, if you're at all interested. See it here. Some intriguing stuff.

MS's Euro Issues Still Not Solved

As Microsoft continues to argue with the EU over various issues too boring to contemplate, we were reminded that way back in the nineties, Bill Gates got pied while banging the PR drum on the continent. Our J. Francis McLuggage talked about the holes in Gates' security measures.

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GATES PASTRY ATTACK SPURS NEW CONCERNS

Ann Arbor: In the wake of a Belgian cream cake attack on Microsoft Mogul Bill Gates, industrial security experts are openly talking about a whole new level of threat from terrorists, criminals, the deranged, and consumer advocates. That Gates was sufficiently vulnerable to be hit, not once but three times, with potentially lethal doses of sugar and dairy products just points up the extent to which corporate executives are leaving themselves open to assault. But what measures can a CEO take? Wood-Charles News Service talked to our own J. Francis McLuggage, chairman of the vast WCA holdings.

WCNS: What did you think of the attack on Gates?

McL: The man has no moves. If you watch the footage -- which I have, over and over -- you'll note that his right hand moves in the direction of the incoming custard. Classic panic response, trying to ward off the projectile rather than carrying out his training.

WCNS: Training?

McL: Sure. All Microsoft execs go through extensive threat-reduction training, and they all carry. I happen to know that Bill packs a hand- made black forest torte, plus a holdout eclair in an ankle holster. But in the clinch, instead of trying a combat draw on the cake -- which has a US-made counter-ballistic pastry sight -- tracks the incoming calories with millimeter-wave radar and plots a trajectory right back at the flinger -- all he could do was cringe and get sticky. Wimp.

WCNS: What about his aides and bodyguards?

McL: They panicked, too. You can see one of them trying to hold a portfolio between Bill and the tart boys -- of course, it's one of those useless kevlar-panel things. Sure, it'll stop a nine millimeter, but Jell-O will make a mess out of it, flow around the edges, and keep right on going. I've seen it happen. No, proper doctrine calls for taking out as many of the threat personnel as possible, and for my money, there's only one way to do that.

WCNS: What?

McL: Seltzer bottles. All my direct reports have 'em. Hey, you don't think they all wear those rubber noses for FUN, do you?

WCNS: So you'd really advocate turning a public location into a shootout?

McL: A groceried society is a polite society. Nobody has ever tried that kind of funny business with me, precisely because they know what would happen.

WNCS: What, exactly?

McL: Well, first, you open your eyes really wide, wipe away some of the goop, and say, "Oh, a wise guy, eh?" That freezes their blood -- lets 'em know they're dealing with a pro. Then you grab a seltzer bottle, shout "Front sight!" and let 'em have it. Meanwhile, your protection unit is piling out of their Volkswagen, tripping over each other, and waving their rubber nightsticks around -- that gets the media's attention -- in the ensuing chaos, you pick out a large woman in a formal gown -- there's always one or two around, at affairs like this -- and you duck down behind her so she gets the next pie. If you can't find a woman in a formal, try a guy in a silk top hat. It's almost as good.

WCNS: And then what?

McL: Oh, by then, every body's covered in shaving cream, fighting, and screaming, and you can sneak quietly away and bundle a few browsers in your operating system.

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About Comments on this blog

To post comments, click "comment" at the bottom of any posting. I have it set to "moderate," which means that before your comment shows up, it gets emailed to me for "approval." Comments from people I know get approved -- comments from others don't. Simple as that.

New Restaurant Listings in Culintel Database

The Culinary Intelligence DB has been updated with a couple two-three restaurant recommendations from our Chicago weekend. We particularly liked BOKA. Just search on "IL" as the state and you'll see 'em.

Another Cultural Stone Kicked Over

I had reason to mention "Mommy, Mommy" jokes last night, and a colleague of mine expressed unfamiliarity with the form. Of course, someone has created a web site devoted to them, but first a quick discourse on the nature of the gag. They're a pre-adolescent joke form, usually without sexual, ethnic, or class aspects. They take a simple two-line format in which the first line is a seemingly innocent complaint from a child about some aspect of the parenting he or she is receiving; the second line, delivered usually by the child's mother, reveals the horrifying depths of depravity in which the family unit is existing. Extreme cruelty, to someone, is usually involved.

For example:

"Mommy, Mommy, I don't want to go to Europe!"
"Shut up and keep swimming!"

I seem to remember these from grade school, say two to three years either side of 1960, and as being overshadowed quickly by more sophisticated media-driven humor such as elephant jokes. Later, the set of puns supported by this structure:

What do you call [describe person of disability here]
in a [describe quandry or dire straits here]? [Pun goes here,
usually something about "stew."]

put the superficially horrible circumstances of Mommy, Mommy jokes into the
shade and relegated them to the occasional neuron-firing memory of truly bad childhood humor.

We did discuss the potential of Mommy, Mommy jokes for being at least politically clean in the sense of being hard to direct against individual groups. Here are a few opening lines you can play around with:

"Mommy, Mommy, I don't want to play for Rutgers!"

"Mommy, Mommy, I don't want to be a Federal Judge!"

"Mommy, Mommy, I don't want to have to override a veto!"

If you care, here's a web site that collects some of them.

2006 Sicily Trip Notes Rediscovered

In the fall, last year, we went to Sicily for 10 days or so. It was right in the middle of preparing for our CMMI appraisal, doing our CMMI appraisal, and subsequently getting sick, and in the course of all that, I forgot that I took some notes on my Palm. Here they are, briefly HTML-ized and crudely illustrated. Enjoy.

Some Random Spring Humor from 1999

Because of the Easter reference, here's a resurrected WCA mailing from 1999.
Enjoy, and don't, along with Don Imus, visit the Ho Ho Home Page.

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19990414

RANDOM NOTES FROM THE SPECTACLE

OH, CHEER UP, DAMMIT

Ann Arbor: The ever-insightful Free Press had the following to say, the Monday after Easter:

"Police were searching for suspects Sunday in a Detroit restaurant massacre that left three members of one family and a teenager dead, casting a pall over Easter celebrations."

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SIR, YOU ARE IMPERTINENT

Ann Arbor: After a while, most college instructors get their patter worked out, and the better ones learn to read their audiences and to pitch rhetorical questions at individuals who will play ball. This isn't as easy as it sounds, though; recently, a very new professor got well along off his subject, wandered into a kind of irrelevant, babbling talk about how company networking can be dodgy, and then, feeling the need for an affirmation or something, tried to get his older, more experienced students to agree. Unfortunately, he picked a grumpy gentleman who manages a test lab for Marathon Oil. The instructor asked, :"So you have an intranet, right? Does it always work? How well does it work?" Our colleague said, "We have billions of dollars; it works great."

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CORPORATE MALAPROPISMS

Ann Arbor: There's a fascinating master's degree in comparative linguistics waiting out there for someone, centered around the incidence and propagation of strange, incorrect usage in companies. Just as one example, the phrase, "straw man," (somewhat questionably(1)) used to mean a tentative version of something, is commonly rendered "straw horse" in a large tape drive company of our acquaintance -- apparently a conflation of straw man and stalking horse -- and less commonly but even more strangely as "straw dog" in another corporation. And just yesterday, a manager admitted, right in front of everyone, that "You sent me that file, and I went down like a dead balloon!"

If we weren't such upstanding corporate citizens ourselves, we'd be inclined to mess with this thing a bit -- perhaps trying to introduce such terms as "straw woman" or "barley boy"; "I think we should go off-base, here, and have a conflab, maybe punt around the straw woodchuck and see if we can reach a census."

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AND FINALLY ...

"And any place I flang my cat was home ..."

Cafe newbie: "Do you have, um, diet birch beer? ... What _is_ birch beer?"

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The Wood-Charles News Service has been brung to you by the straw bartenders at Ann Arbor's Odd Town Tavern, and by Ken, "Right Wing Ideologues Don't Waste Your Tax Dollars, The Special Prosecutor Law Does," Starr.

-- 30 --

(1) The book definition of straw man is: "a weak or imaginary opposition (as an argument or adversary) set up only to be easily confuted 2: a person set up to serve as a cover for a usually questionable transaction;" not really, I believe, what most people have in mind when they use the term. The possibility for confusion is increased by the existence of "straw vote," a kind of running-up-the-flagpole of something, and of "straw boss," basically, a project leader.

Another Take on Wikipedia

Wikipedia in the Comics

A Fawlty Towers Moment

Recently, we initiated a project to replace a set of ceiling lighting fixtures, horrible Pottery Barn Art Nouveau crap, reflecting the non-existent taste of the previous owners. We got a tremendously competent old friend in the handyperson business to do the high ladder work (one fixture was 15 feet up in the air, dangling from our great room ceiling), and the whole thing was executed with, from my perspective, efficiency and quality.

The high lights, installed by someone who knows what he's doing and isn't on chemo.	The dining room pendants, those vicious, vicious bastards

However, at the same time, we ordered what looked like a simple set of pendent lights to go over the dining room table, one fixture with four halogen low-voltage drops. And since this was just a normal height ceiling and nothing that required risk of life and limb for someone taking doses of steroids that will keep me out of the Olympics for at least the next few sessions, I said, "Oh, I can do that one."

Visualize, if you can, the Fawty Towers episode where John Cleese has to keep running back and forth to a local restaurant to pick up dinner, since the hotel's newly hired cook has had an alcoholic relapse, and the car keep stalling out.

I discover that, in order to shorten the pendent cords to something less than the 17 meters or so of length they come with, you need to strip them carefully (read with a precision wire stripper) to get just the Teflon coating off), then tease the outer wire mesh apart to reveal the inner conductor, twist the mesh into a conductor of its own, wrap with tape ... you get the picture.

Then, force the newly reconfigured pendent cord up through the strain relief, destroying what you've just done. Tighten the strain relief, redo the conductor work, standing on a ladder, and connect each of the four lamps to its transformer, using wire nuts.

Schlep down to the breaker box, turn the power on, and check to see if all lights light. They do not. Power off. Redo the connections on those that don't. Power on. Hooray, all four work.

Slide the cover, through which the lights are dangling, up to the fixture plate (standing on a ladder), tuck cords neatly away, secure cover. Power on. Test. Two of four lights do not light. This is where the John Cleese bit comes in.

"You vicious, vicious bastard! I've given you fair warning! I've been more than patient, and now I'm really fed up. Now, I'm going to give you a damned good thrashing!"

Actually, what I said as this up and down the damn ladder business went on (redoing wire nut connections, one by one) was substantially more graphic and Americanized, until I realized that I had the dining room window open and that our neighbors small children were playing in their back yard, 15 feet away. Oops, stifle.

Anyway, after more test and rework episodes than my many years of software quality planning would suggest, the damn thing works, but two or three clear-cut results have emerged:

• I am not an electrician
  
• I will never do this kind of job with more than one light again
  
• As long as she avoids the biopsy scar on the back of my head,
  Linda is empowered to administer a dope slap each time I say, "I can do
  that part," at least until the chemo is over with
  

Doesn't bear thinking about

As a friend so aptly puts it, "yikes!"

Best of the Worst Ads

Late breaking: after I posted this old stuff, Def Tech supplies us with a recent example of "doesn't anyone review this crap?"
See Boeing Says "Doh!"

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Over the years, the Wood-Charles News Service used to run the occasional set
of critiques (read: scathingly sarcastic rants) about bad IT and other advertising. Here's a compendium of some of the more scathing. Enjoy.

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Starting off, we reviewed a huge multi-page spread from Gateway. Their
(inspired, no?) buzzphrase was, "Let's Talk." So the ad we're looking at
shows a not-too-bright-looking individual on what we assume is a golf course
in North (or is it South?) Dakota (you can tell because there's no horizon).
The headlines say: "Let's talk about getting connected. Let's talk about
graphite-shafted irons. Let's talk about a nine handicap."

On the facing page, the copy says: "Chris is always looking to improve his
game. We tailor made his PC with a ten gig hard drive and a 19- inch monitor (18" viewable). Now Chris can download tons of files into his "golf tips" folder and view them on a spacious course."

Chris is such a poor golfer that he needs 10 gig of tips? And he needs a 19-inch
monitor to read 'em? Maybe Chris' problem is his eyesight. The conference call -- probably at 5:30 in the afternoon, when the marketing idiot who approved this thing was anxious to get out on the golf course himself -- seems to have mixed up positioning ("... people hate work -- give it a recreational flavor ...") and featurism ("... 10 gig hard drive, 19 inch monitor, all that techie stuff ..."). This is what you get when you hire people who play golf.

Oh, and it goes on. In the following pages, we're introduced to Marne, who appears to have something to do with movies -- at least she poses behind a 16mm camera with her hair in her eyes -- and needed a lap top to "... blow them away;" the Lanphiers, a family whose Gateway "high- resolution TV, DVD player, stereo, gaming station, and PC (Internet ready) keep them on the edge of technology and ahead of their neighbors ('Let's talk about a digital playground ... we'd never have to leave the sofa';" and Emily who decorated the garage with banners to welcome her brother home from college.

So the message is, Gateway's customers are golf-playing slackers, hype artists,
couch-potato families, and annoying, precocious little brats? Um, do you sell servers? Does any of this stuff perform? I need 20 workstations by tomorrow night -- sorry, Sir, you need to talk to Dell. They do that boring business stuff.

The I-don't-give-a-rat's-ass award: Micrografx' FlowCharter ad. "Discover Why Ford Chose the World's Most Productive Diagramming Tool. When Ford's Customer Service Division faced the daunting challenge of documenting all of its business processes to obtain ISO 9000 registration ..."

And finally: the I-was-visualizing-something-quite-else award: Visoneer makes OCR software, and their ad is supposed to pitch the product's capabilities in scanning beat-up, crumpled, stained legacy documents. But what the headline says is, "Visioneer ProOCD100 handles even the most degraded documents ..."

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An ad for some kind of ludicrously expensive watch: So here's the concept: the primary illustration is a full-page duotone image, run in dark blue so it looks like twilight. We see a sort of Asian-looking scene -- could be rice paddies, I suppose -- anyway, water with planted rows of vegetation sticking up. There's a tree and mountains in the distance. In the middle ground, seen from behind, is a young woman. She's wearing a white, untucked shirt, and she may or may not have any pants on -- hard to say. She's riding on an elephant, and the elephant is pulling a rustic-looking log raft. On the raft is a Harley-Davidson Motorcycle. Oh, and the headline is "Explore new dimensions in time."

Now, I suppose it's possible (hell, it's certain) that the people who created and paid for this ad weren't aware of Harley's unenviable reputation for spending a lot of time being trucked and trailered around, rather than running under their own power. They probably didn't know that "What's the first thing a new Harley owner buys for his bike? A pickup truck." is a well-worn cheap shot, flung around the net and elsewhere. So we can let 'em off on that point, I guess. But what is this ad supposed to say to the viewer? "If you're going to be incredibly late getting home because you've somehow wandered into Vietnam and off the road on your bike and had to borrow some villager's' elephant and raft, at least you'll know HOW late?" Or, "The next time you're selling Harleys to starving third world refugees, be sure you bring a couple of fantastically expensive watches to bribe the customs officials with?" Or maybe, "This thing costs so much that looking at the price tag will trigger a halucinatory episode much like the one this ad's art director must have been having?" Kind of makes a Swatch look good, don't you think?

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And, in the "At least we're being honest with you," category, there's the EDS ad that features a scientist-like fellow, proudly pointing a pointer at a chalk board (how 60's!) on which is scrawled "1 + 1 = 3." Uh-huh. That's certainly the EDS I'm familiar with.

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First place in the "What are you trying to tell me?" category goes to Oracle workgroup 2000 (what a great product name! How'd they ever think of that?) for their half-page, across the gutter spread of 10 nude infants with a URL painted on their ethnically diverse arses. I'm not kidding a bit: 10 unclothed juveniles with a web page address on their butts. What does this mean? "Oracle is as slick as a baby's behind?" "Build client server applications with this thing, and you'll wish you were home changing diapers?"

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Another good one is AT&T Paradyne's nasty-looking ad that asserts, "Where you are is sick of hearing the word "access" without knowing what it means." Where I am is sick of illiterate-sounding horseshit like this headline.

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But the winner had to be Make systems' ad for NetMaker XA. A simple but elegant concept: "At last (don't you love ads that start, "at last?") software tools that'll make any network manager look good." This headline runs next to a photo of a man holding up the product CDROM. His head is in some sort of chrome thing (a hairdryer, I guess, since he's wearing curlers), his cheeks and jaw line have been smeared with white goop, and each eye is covered with a slice of cucumber. I suppose the idea is that he's getting a beauty treatment ...? If so, this has to be the worst concept execution I've seen in years; if not, then I just flat don't get it. "Use this product and you'll get vegetables stuck on your face?" All together, now: "I don't think so."

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What we have in front of us, presumably because we're an AMA (M as in "Motorcyclist," not "Medical." How Politically incorrect do you think we are, anyway?) member and they sell their mailing lists, is a catalogue from Harley, specifically their "Motorclothes" catalogue. Now, when I see the word "motorclothes," I tend to think of oily red flannel rags or perhaps deeply stained, railroad-striped overalls with "Vinnie" or "Dick" (or "dick") embroidered on 'em. These items are not listed in Harley's catalogue, however. What we do have here is a wide range of wildly impractical leather jackets, illustrated with a series of feature icons, so you can tell at a glance which ones feature "action back" and "rotated shoulders." There are also leather shirts, leather chaps, leather pants (in black or what looks suspiciously like left-over seventies "wet look" red), leather boots, leather gloves, leather hats, and leather fanny packs, all bearing that Harley logo. For the ladies, there are shirts, sleeveless shirts, shirts meant to be tied off at the midriff, tank tops, denim tank tops, denim shirts with and without sleeves, jacquard lace bodysuits (really), and stretch denim skirts (very practical motorwear there, boy), all, again, Harley- emblazoned.

But what makes this such an interesting document is not the predictable range of merchandise, but the "theme" or whatever you'd like to call it. It's a celebration of Milwaukee, that gritty, working man's town. It features shots of great places around Milwaukee, full of happy Harley owners, doing all that great, rugged stuff Harley guys and gals do. For example, hanging out at an espresso shoppe. Watching the sunrise. Standing around at the Laundromat (The Laundromat!?! Yes, it's true. And the small, rectangular object that "Dana" is holding in his right hand as he leans on a dryer and models the Primary Denim Vest and Race Team Watch is not a pack of smokes, it's an individual-sized package of detergent. But will this bad boy share it with "Mavis" -- Zip-Front Denim Jacket -- and "Joseph" -- RWB II Vest and Long-Sleeve Henley?)

On other pages, we see "Rod" and "Deana," posing on their hawg, having apparently just taken "A Great Short Ride: Holy Hill Area, from Milwaukee, 94 West to 45 North, 20 miles." Twenty whole miles and no pickup truck in sight! Duuude! And then we run across "Antonia," "Tosca," and "Jamie," three naughty girlies if we ever saw any, perched on bar stools at a "Great Late Night Hangout, the Up and Under Pub." Of course, since these are nineties naughty girlies, they're in the no smoking section and the pints on the table are apparently Cokes, but, hey, they've probably got "My Rug Rat is an Honor Student at East Milwaukee Middle School" stickers on their Sportsters.

But our favorite, especially given the graying of your Editorial staff, is the page intended to symbolize (we assume) the older Harley guy. It's "Sam" and "Mike," clearly two old dudes who've been on the long march with Harley, probably have panheads sitting in the garage, and are -- Mike, anyway -- coifed like an Arthur Andersen Senior Partner. They're both showing their independent spirit by wearing jeans and leather vests with NO watch chains, probably planning their next ride-by shooting of a rival corporation -- that is, gang, and ... eating popcorn in a movie theatre lobby. If you look closely, you can just see the wire that Sam's wearing and his BATF badge peeking out from under his Harley Holdout Holster.

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