Social comment, Sports

Coaches Hot Seat froth on the Pac-12 Networks

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Yeah, I know that college football discussion is not in the wheelhouse of a good percentage of the readership here at the ‘Lancer, but maybe some of it will work out. Here’s a rather frothy rant from the guy at Coaches Hot Seat, who Uses A Lot Of Caps and Exclamation Points! (It’s also a way for me to test a Firefox WP add-in. But I’m going to let you watch Larry Scott get blistered, and that should be worth it. I hope.)

Coaches Hot Seat froth on the Pac-12 Networks

The CHS fellow and I disagree about the meaninglessness of bowl games. I would, however, agree that the proliferation of stuff like the Kraft Fight Hunger With Manufactured Junk Food Bowl, the Beef O’Brady Bunch Bowl, and the Idaho Potato Bowl (they repeat themselves, ahem) has made college football bowl season ridiculous. Most times, all it takes is a .500 record to be assured of a bowl in a major conference, or a winning record in a non-major. It feels like ‘every kid gets a trophy,’ even though it isn’t, quite. Though at the rate we are going, we might end up with enough bowls that everyone makes it. It would only take about 60, and we’re halfway there. Bowl games I think would be fun:

  • The Rotten.com Bowl (play it in East St. Louis)
  • The Experian Credit Wrecker Bowl
  • The Bank of America Nickel-and-Dime Bowl
  • The Onion Bowl (in reality, it would turn out to be a hoax)
  • The Bismarck Bowl (let’s see how well your team really travels: North Dakota in December!)
  • The Twilight Bowl (during Fairbanks, AK’s few hours of dusk that pass for daylight)
  • The Lentil Bowl (played at Pullman)
  • The Begging Bowl (hold it in whichever EU country, that refuses to tax its rich people or rein in spending, is in the worst shape and needs a boost…Greece would be the current frontrunner, though Spain is mounting a credible bid)
  • The Crock O’ Crap Bowl (where else but our nation’s capital?)
  • The Smoke-A-Bowl (alternating between Colorado and Washington; I think that’s fair)
  • The Tidy Bowl (Geneva, Switzerland, since you can basically eat off the streets in Switzerland)
  • The Sanction Bowl (best two teams on bowl probation; held in the yard at a maximum security prison)
  • The Facebook Bowl Sponsored by Everyone

What isn’t funny this year, as the CHS article mentions, is the colossal failure of the highly touted brand spankin’ new Pac-12 Networks. Here was the idea: imitate the Big 10 (which used to have twelve members, now the number keeps shifting, but only ten of them are even remotely big anyway) by starting the conference’s own network, getting nearly every Pac-12 football game on TV and also televising a lot of other sports that don’t get as much exposure. It was a good idea.

What we did not expect was that the Pac-12 would get so greedy. It had a year to reach agreements with the major premium TV providers. In the main, the conference failed at the basics of business: you need to get the sale. My understanding is that the Pac-12 had promised the member schools Big Moola, forgetting two things: that one still has to reach agreement with providers, and that if one fails in this, one’s network is a not-work because your viewers can’t watch the games. In our area, the Pac’s failure to reach agreement with DefectiveTV and Cheater (two of our three primary providers) denied a majority of the local viewership any chance to watch the games. In my case, four Husky games plus one non-Husky rivalry game mattered to me. During that one, I sat down to write a letter, since it wasn’t on my TV. I’d like to share it with you.

November 24, 2012

Mr. Larry Scott

Pac-12 Conference

1350 Treat Blvd., Suite 500

Walnut Creek, CA 94597-8853

Dear Mr. Scott:

Normally right now I would be rooting for one disliked Pac-12 rival to beat a more disliked Pac-12 rival on TV. Unfortunately, the UO/OSU game is on your Pac-12 Networks, which DirecTV doesn’t offer, so I have free time to write you a letter I have spent most of the season formulating.

In 2011, I was able to watch all twelve Washington games on TV. In 2012, I was able to watch eight. Sadly, the other four were on your vaunted Pac-12 Networks, thus unavailable to me. I trust you understand what this means: your network has been a detriment to Pac-12 sports coverage. If that weren’t bad enough, you have sicked our almae matres on us. Pliant minions that they can so often be, they’ve tried to convince us to blame the satellite and cable providers, and to switch to a provider that carries the Pac-12 Networks. I am not an unreasonable man, nor am I new to DirecTV. I know that DirecTV, a perennial corporate spoiled child and bully, manages to fight with some content provider most months, causing loss of coverage. I am not taking DirecTV’s side when I fault you for the situation. I’m pointing to results: we were better off without your networks. Your networks made sports worse.

It didn’t have to be this way. There were other options. You had a year to work out some sort of deal with the likes of DirecTV. If you had to settle for less money than you have evidently promised the schools, you could have negotiated a one-year deal and returned to the table later. You could have offered online viewing through the Pac-12 Networks website for a reasonable subscription fee (or even free). I would have paid. Instead, you co-opted the schools into repeating your talking points, pressuring fans to pressure their TV providers. One problem with that, Mr. Scott: bright minds graduate from Pac-12 schools. Most aren’t fools. We learn critical thinking. We aren’t all so easily manipulated, and the attempt insults our intelligence and education. Who’s going to dump an otherwise functional vendor relationship over such a small percentage of their TV service? That would be dumb business.

I can tell what this stance cost the conference, because I happened to see some Pac-12 Networks coverage while visiting a friend. While I found the overall coverage substandard, the commercials stood out most. Nearly all were yours, which tells me you didn’t sell much airtime. While the ADs may parrot the line, the advertisers aren’t buffaloed. They know that your stance has lessened the audience, making your price higher than your viewing base is worth to them. It was more sad than comical, but it was a bit of both.

Sir, you have failed. You have taken yet another step in the transformation of a great sport into purest moneyball, where fans are just annoyances who had best hush, accept what is thrown to them, and keep their noses out of corporate management. You have made it pointedly clear that the fans’ good does not matter.

Proud of that?

Sincerely,

J. K. Kelley (UW ’86)

I don’t expect a reply.

Homeownership

Groucho stance: the world’s worst light fixtures you don’t need a ladder to reach…

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…are the ones in our bathroom. They’re halogens, four of them, and they don’t last as long as they should.

I have to use a stepstool to get up and stand on the counter.

The lights cannot be on because if one must manipulate the bulb, it becomes extremely hot, thus a lamp has to be placed on the bathroom counter for basic ability to see.

The roof is too low for me to stand up on the counter, so I have to do something like what cavers call the ‘Groucho walk.’ Call it the ‘Groucho stance.’

One must remove a ridiculously long screw that holds in place a little screen piece that keeps dust from landing on the bulb. One must not misplace this. The only easy part is removing the old bulb, which of course flashes light a couple of times while doing so, thus making me suspect that it isn’t really burnt out and that this is a needless pain in the ass.

I have to get the new bulb out of the blister packaging without getting finger oil on it, lest it burn out within minutes. That isn’t as simple as the writing makes it sound.

For the same reason, I must handle the bulb solely with a washcloth fresh from the dryer. It is hard to do all this while doing the Groucho stance.

It’s then time to attempt to screw the bulb into the fixture. Usually it’s too loose. The washcloth is a pain. Don’t fumble it, even though washcloths are not designed to be primitive oven mitts! If it lands in the bowl-like covering, which is full of dead bugs, guess what–bulb is rendered useless. Start again.

Did I get the bulb in correctly? Hope so. Have Deb switch the lights on. If it comes on, we’re almost done.

Now the screen has to go back in place–without touching the bulb. At all. It must be held steady until the screw is driven all the way down. I have excellent manual dexterity for a man; even so, I manage to ruin one bulb in four this way, just by bumping the bulb, which resides about 1/2″ below the screen’s final resting position.

Repeat this whole pain in the ass two times. Because you can now see why I don’t get into this until three of them are dead.

If in the end, I have four functioning light bulbs in the bathroom, I deserve a beer. If they all still work correctly the next day, I should go buy a lottery ticket. If only three still work, I declare marginal victory and am grateful.

Languages

Foreign-related stuff people get wrong

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English just might be the $2 hooker of languages. Every language you’ve heard of has done English a few times, so many that English’s Latin and Greek words don’t even stand out except to cognoscenti. That may be why its vocabulary is gargantuan. A lot of more obvious adoptions are frequently misused, mispronounced or misspelled, a thing one only learns when one studies the language of origin. I’ll help.

You are not an alumni. You are an alumnus (male) or alumna (female). Alumni are the masculine or mixed plural, so don’t say you are a Flat Rock State U. alumni unless you’re really huge. More than one alumna are alumnae. If you went to college, it’s pretty embarrassing if you do not know how to refer to that fact, but I accept that lots of people neither took Latin nor absorbed that much by osmosis. No problem; your fellow alumni are here for you.

A male betrothed is a fiancé. A bethrothed female is a fiancée. They are pronounced the same.

The problem with spelling résumé correctly in your cover letter is that in today’s Murrica, it’s likely to get your application tossed as emblematic of too much education and intelligence, both of which are out of fashion. Correct accents look snooty and suggest that you might actually speak French, which could indicate the kind of education that dares question things. Spell it down to the level you think will help you get the job–but hold the truth in your secret heart. Even if you have to get it wrong as resumé.

Scotch is a drink, not a nationality, as any Scottish lad will tell you. Another name for that drink is whisky, which is not whiskey. Don’t ask me why the Scots care so much about how English renders the Gaelic word for ‘water of life.’ They just do.

Coup de grace is not pronounced koo day GRAW. Never do this again. If you want to use it, say ‘koo duh grawss’ (last word rhymes with ‘floss’). Bonus: when you say it like my D&D groups all have, you’re actually referring to the ‘stroke of flab.’ Player: “Okay, my paladin is going to coup de gras the ogre.” DM: “How can he do that? Your paladin is totally ripped. He has no fat to hit the ogre with.”

If there are twö döts over a vowel in German, it’s an umlaut. Non-Germanic languages do not have umlauts, so please stop referring to Noël as having an umlaut. It has a trema. To think otherwise is naïf (or naïve, if the thinker is female). The trema tells you to pronounce two vowels separately, which is why we say no ELL rather than nole, and na YEEV instead of nyve or nave.

When you see an Å in a Swedish word, pronounce the little ring, not the A. It’s a long O sound. Your True Blood stud, Alexander Skarsgård, pronounces his last name SCARS gourd. The Ångström unit in atomic physics is ohng struhm. I can live with it if you get the ö wrong (kind of rhymes with ‘book’), but if you make the first part sound like ‘angst,’ I suffer pain which you could have so easily avoided.

If you know just enough Spanish to be dangerous, you have wondered why it’s Buenos días, with what looks like a masculine adjective on a feminine noun. On about your second day of Spanish class, you learn that the last letter is not 100% reliable at indicating gender in Spanish. The true marker is the article: el día, masculine, thus ‘buenos’ is correct. However, it is la tarde and la noche, thus buenas tardes and buenas noches.

French accents are pronunciation, not stress. French has no stressed syllables, and you won’t believe how difficult that is until you try adjusting to it. Live there a decade, it’s the last vestige of your native accent you defeat (if ever). Spanish accents are stress. Why bother, then, to have an accent on a one-syllable word like sí? To distinguish it from si, which means ‘if.’

It’s time to stop abusing Cyrillic. Let’s start with Я, which is pronounced ‘ya’ just like German ja. When you write Яussia, we who read Cyrillic throw up in our mouths, because the country is not called Yaussia. Г is the Russian G. Н is the Russian N. П is the Russian P. Р is the Russian R. С is the Russian S. This is how USSR could be СССР on Soviet Olympic hockey jerseys: Soyuz (Union) Sovietski (Soviet) Sosyalistcheski (Socialist) Respubliki (Republics), SSSR in the Latin characters, СССР in Cyrillic.

Since French accents do not mean stress, everyone is screwing up mêlée. D&D players have been destroying it since Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson started the thing (I blame them). It is not mealy nor is it ma-LEE. Say meh-lay, trying like hell to have equal stress on both syllables. There is no hope of straightening out the gamers, a highly literate but notoriously careless band, but others of you may yet be saved from barbarism.

César Chávez‘s name probably gets pronounced correctly by a non-Spanish speaker once a decade. Let this be the decade. It’s not SEE-zer sha-VEZ. Say it with me: SAY-zar CHA-vez. Yes. People botch both the consonants and the accent on his last name, even as they rename streets after the guy.

Yom Kippur is not yawm KIPP-er. That makes it sound like a pickled herring, which can be kosher food but isn’t kosher pronunciation. It rhymes with ‘home for sure.’ Rosh Hashanah is not rawsh ha SHA na, but roash ha sha NAH. (Last syllable rhymes with ‘blah.’ In fact, the last three syllables do.)

You are probably saying Qabalah wrong. Nearly everyone in the U.S. is, at least, including a fair number of people with names like Goldberg. In a spiritual practice where letters are important, it seems sloppy to butcher articulation, eh? It is kah-bah-LAH, Madonna. If you say it as CAB-uh-luh, you are being positively qlipotic, leaving the listener’s mind a shell. (Qabalah joke.) Do not say kuh BAWL uh, either. That was a hokey occult game from the 1960s. Oh, and if you play one of those console games that uses a character called Sephiroth, know that this is the gross mutilation of a word for the spheres of the Qabalah: sfirot, uttered sfeer-OAT. If you say SEFF ur ROTH in Hebrew, it means nothing at all. Ah, but you heard it from someone you just know is well learned in CAB uh luh? My sources are my collegiate professor of Hebrew and a retired Israeli colonel, native born. Either neither of them actually knows Hebrew, or they are correct. Your move.

Don’t even try to pronounce a Chinese word unless you have heard a fluent speaker and emulated his or her tonal until s/he told you it was correct. Otherwise, you might accidentally confess a sexual longing for brick mortar (or something worse). True for some other Asian languages as well.

If using the word año in Spanish, do yourself a favor and make sure to articulate the Y sound produced by the virgulilla, called a tilde in English. Thus, ON yo. If you say ON oh, you just referred to the anus. To say one’s age in Spanish, one says that one ‘has’ however many years. I had great merriment in college Spanish when an attractive young lady answered the professor by declaring that she had nineteen anal openings.

Tijuana, Mexico is not pronounced TEE-a WA-nah. The nearest translation of that pronunciation is ‘Aunt Jackie.’ I have an Aunt Jaque and have been calling her this since junior high school. As for the city, it’s tee HWA nah.

Some non-Murrican English bits: Greenwich is really, truly GREN itch. Norwich works likewise, and probably all the other -wiches do too, though I’m not sure what happens if you order a ‘sanitch.’ Anything ending in -cester gets the middle mooshed up. Leicester = LESS ter. Worcester = WOOSS ter. Gloucester = GLOSS ter, etc.

The media are getting most of the Russian names wrong. It is brutal. Example: Gorbachev is actually GAR ba chyov. Ivan is ee VAWN. Just believe me that, half the time, what you hear from newsies is wrong. It’s not your imagination; they really just don’t care, because they have a low opinion of their audience and a casual relationship to accuracy anyway. It’s much worse with Arabic names, complicated by regional dialects which make the correct pronunciation a matter of valid difference. Most everyone outside the Islamic world is saying Allah wrong: it’s all LAH. Pronounce the L both times. During both Gulf Wars, our beloved newscasters made the city names look like a bombed-out area of Fallujah.

Good examples of botched Russian are czar and czarina. Tsar only takes three letters in Cyrillic, which has a letter TS. Why the serial botch? It has caesar as its root, like kaiser: the name that became Latin for ’emperor.’ It’s not too late to save the words, provided we stop appointing czars in government, and provided we learn that it is tsaritsa, not tsarina. Oh, and there actually is no N in Kreml’, Moscow’s great fortress and sometime seat of government.

And lastly: no matter how you try, you’ll never pronounce Polish correctly by looking at the letters and imagining them to relate to English. These are not the Latin characters you want. Move along.

Human relations

My computer sales brain spasm

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Back in the years of the XT, AT and early 386 clones, I used to sell computers. Sales had its moments. I was never a big star in sales, but I did it well enough that when I left after two years, it was of my own choosing. Remember the Microsoft/IBM wars? I was a foot soldier in the trenches of those, five miles from the M$ campus. One of these days I’ll write about just how tremendously out of touch IBM was with dealers and clients. For now, I’m going to make fun of myself instead.

One of my best clients was an underwriting firm south of Seattle, run by two brothers named Doug and Dick Rodruck. Great guys, steady customers, the sort of people a commissioned salesperson could make a living by helping. I looked forward to all their calls.

The sales floor could be chaotic at times, with people needing help on the floor, calls announced for you while you were helping them, stressed-out receptionists desperately seeking someone to help the biggest salesman’s clients (with zero hope of profit or appreciation from him), and warehouse staff moving forty boxes in for storage wherever space could be found. One could lose one’s focus. Sometimes real badly.

Of course, I knew most of my customers by voice. When I wasn’t going in six different directions, I picked up on who I was talking to. At the same time, I had a lot of customers, very loyal ones, amazed that I could ‘remember’ what they bought a year and a half back. (I wrote it all on rolodex cards. I cheated.) So when I heard the page “Dick is on line 1 for Jonathan,” I didn’t think. I took the call and said hello.

“Hello, Jonathan, it’s Dick. [Here followed a bunch of specifications for new hardware they wanted to buy.]” I listened and started working up pricing, but after a time it occurred to me: I do not know who this is. I can’t place him. Well, I’ll eventually pinpoint him.

Which I did. Unfortunately, that was before I learned in life that not everything on one’s mind needs to be blurted out at random, especially stuff like evidence that you had no idea who was on the phone. I watched my mother do it all growing up, so in addition to the blurt genetics, I had an unhelpful example. I was still learning how to shut the hell up rather than spit out my latest revelation.

Thus, when Dick finished describing whatever computer need he was describing, and asked me a question, it was blurtin’ time: “Oh. Dick Rodruck! You’ll have to excuse me. There are a lot of Dicks out there.”

A very awkward silence. I realized what I’d just said.

Now what? The silence was mine to break. Or, at least, it had better be me.

“I do hope and trust you realize, Dick, that in no way did I intend that the way it came out. I apologize profusely.”

How you can know that Dick Rodruck was such a great guy? He forgave me. He said not to worry about it, and continued with the substance of the discussion. The bullet of a ruined relationship whistled past me.

Adventures, Human relations, Social comment

The only white guy on the bus

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With nearly zero experience of the east, a few years back I went to D.C. Deb had a training event in Silver Spring, MD, which gave me free housing. Now, I have zero basic interest in the nation’s capital for its own sake. Like many residents of Washington, I am habituated (if not accustomed) to people asking “oh, you mean the state?” It’s difficult. If I say what I’m thinking, it sounds very churlish. Sometimes it comes out anyway: “Of course, the state. Is there another place called Washington that is relevant?” I’m not good at holding back, unfortunately.

Of course, when the Smithsonian card is played, I fold. Is there anyone with a passion for history who would not brave our nation’s capital if it meant a chance to spend almost unlimited time browsing the Smithsonian museums? Besides meeting up with a longtime online acquaintance who lives in the area, the Smithsonian was the reason for tagging along. I didn’t care about anything else. My world resolved into the need to get to the Smithsonian in the morning, then back to the lodgings at night.

Living in Seattle for sixteen years, bus travel is old hat for me. Not so light rail, which Seattle didn’t build until I was safely out of town. My day therefore meant taking a bus from Silver Spring to Fort Totten, where I would board DC Metro for the National Mall. I could then choose my museum, and wander freely and joyfully, lingering until closing if I desired. It was, of course, complete museum overload–and in a good way. I’m not sure the Smithsonian museum complex has an equal in the world. Whatever percentage of my tax dollars keep the Smithsonian going, I will cheerfully pay.

Thus, I didn’t expect that commuting to the National Mall would be an educational experience. Oh, sure, I knew I’d be a minority. I’m not ignorant of demographics. Didn’t bother me, and I even kind of felt I might learn something.

It was about a forty-minute milk run to/from Fort Totten. In nearly every situation, I was the only white/Anglo on the bus. Everyone else was black or Hispanic (perhaps both). Many times in Seattle, there had been only one black person on the entire bus. Now I was getting some exposure to that feeling, however brief, and it was an interesting sensation. No one was friendly or talkative, but that’s big city bus travel, and is the same in Seattle. People are in their bubbles. No one was hostile, though; no glares saying “you’re in the wrong place.” I’d describe it as similar to a Seattle bus, except perhaps a little more polite overall. Seattle bus travelers can be quite indifferent to basic manners.

But as the bus filled up, the last vacant seat was always the one next to me. Sometimes it stayed vacant even when the bus had standing room only.

I don’t think it was conscious. But I saw that in reverse plenty of times in Seattle, and now I had a sense of how it felt. I wasn’t offended, nor terribly surprised. I guess I could have been offended, but it wouldn’t have done me any good. No action available to me was going to change habits overnight, or in a week. Nothing for it but to mind my own business, ride the bus to my stop, and that was that. It’s not as if anyone were singling me out on purpose; I just stood out, with my pale skin, crew cut and heavy beard. They weren’t talking to me, but they weren’t talking to each other either.

The only real epiphany from it, I suppose, would be this: I think I understand why minorities are sometimes bemused and philosophical about implied racism, rather than angry. The anger will kill you without changing the reality. One gains more from just observing, accepting that it’s not going to change today, and getting on with whatever life details face one that day. It’s not like anyone acted in a way to force me to take notice of the situation; they just decided not to sit next to me. I have no basic call or right to influence where someone chooses to sit on a bus. Or stand. The only way one can lose in that situation is to call more attention to oneself, which would probably confirm to everyone else on the bus–and one is heavily outnumbered–that it was smart of them not to sit next to one. That’s going backward.

It does make me wonder how different the world would be if we all made a better effort to bridge the gap. On all sides.

Social comment

Roy Benavidez

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In case you don’t know, Veterans’ Day used to be Armistice Day. It was chosen as 11/11 because that’s when the World War I shooting stopped, which is why it is such an important part of Commonwealth life as well, and why it rains poppies (“…in Flanders fields…”) in nearly every Anglophone country.

While many Americans (and citizens/residents of other countries who celebrate their veterans) will take time to thank a lot of people for service, and this is a good thing,  I’d like to pick one veteran and tell you his story. It went far too long with insufficient recognition.

His name was MSG Roy Benavidez, and he entered the U.S. Army from his native Texas.

On 2 May 1968, a Special Forces A-team was doing some recon near Lộc Ninh, Republic of Vietnam. Unfortunately for them, the Vietnam People’s Army (North Vietnamese) had effective control of the area, and the SF team got in serious trouble. Surrounded and under heavy fire, they called for extraction (“get our asses out of here”). Three helicopters couldn’t reach their position due to the intense ground fire. They came back shot up, birds and crews alike.

Benavidez decided that wasn’t the end of it. You couldn’t make this stuff up. He grabbed a bag of medical supplies and a knife, boarded one of the helicopters and rode toward the scene. He had the helicopter land him some distance away from the SF team, then infiltrated past the VPA. They shot him in the face, leg and head in the process. When he reached the A-team, it was trashed: everyone WIA or KIA, but the wounded were still fighting. (SF quits real hard, as many of its adversaries have learned to their great unhappiness.) Benavidez got the wounded into better positions from which to defend, popped smoke and prepared to load the survivors onto a helicopter.

That didn’t work out worth a damn. He managed to drag some of the wounded onto the helicopter; as he went back for the A-team leader’s body, Benavidez’s problems multiplied. Not only did he take small arms fire and grenade fragments to the body–remember, he was already shot up–a VPA rifleman shot the helicopter pilot dead, crashing it. (I presume it was ‘light on the skids,’ so it didn’t fall far enough to kill everyone inside.) Benavidez got the survivors back out, set up another perimeter and gave them aid while directing their defense. They were probably outnumbered about 50-1, give or take.

Next, Benavidez started calling in airstrikes and gunships. He continued directing all the fire, doctoring the wounded and getting further wounded himself. Another helicopter landed to extract the A-team, and Benavidez began hauling them aboard. While doing this, a VPA soldier clubbed him from behind. Benavidez paused to kill him, obtaining some more wounds in the process. A couple of enemy rushed the helicopter, so he killed them too. He made one last trip back to the position for the rest of the wounded, by which time he was pretty near dead himself. He then let the aircrew haul him aboard the helicopter, and everyone booked out of there. It had taken six hours, and Benavidez had thirty-seven separate wounds from shrapnel, bayonets and bullets. That’s a Mansonian level of punishment to absorb.

When the helicopter landed back at whatever base or hospital, Benavidez looked dead enough that Army medics were trying to zip him into a body bag. Without much strength left to move, Benavidez spat in the medic’s face. Seriously. They stopped trying to body-bag him. I would have stopped too. I’d have been very concerned that he would find a way to rip the bag open and strangle me with it.

MSG Benavidez survived those wounds. The Army awarded him the Distinguished Service Cross, our second highest decoration and one they don’t pass out like candy. He retired in 1976. His former comrades, however, would not let the matter rest. If Benavidez’s heroism wasn’t worthy of the Medal of Honor, then what on earth must one do in order to deserve the thing? Based on testimony from the limited number of surviving eyewitnesses, on 24 May 1981–as I was dealing with senioritis and starting to get really excited and scared about college–President Reagan hung the Medal of Honor around MSG Roy Benavidez’s neck. About time.

Benavidez passed away in 1998. He was 63.

Gracias, Sargento Mayor, para su servicio pundonoroso y valiente. No olvidaremos a Ud.

Editing/writing life, Social comment

Why no politics

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Those of you who visit here regularly may have noticed that we managed to get through a whole US election season without any partisan politics. I thank you all for not starting any such irritations in the comments; my affection for the readership grew in this time. But it may be useful for me to explain the many reasons behind my studious avoidance, since many of them relate to the views that fuel the writing:

  • I am not aligned with a major party, and am fairly bereft of faith in the process, so my rooting interest is limited to begin with. I feel that elections are something for other people to get worked up about.
  • This is my professional public presence. I make my living with my writing. I don’t check my readers’ political cards, and I find the notion abhorrent. If I share writing, it is for all, and whether we might agree or disagree on any issue is beside the point.
  • The above relates to a view I do hold strongly: one of our great problems today is political incontinence. I define this as the inability to set politics aside and work/play/eat/laugh/boff/live together in amity, caused by the inability to shut the hell up about one’s politics. Politics are like bowel movements: they’re fine in the proper places, even necessary, but the world doesn’t need a report on every last instance, nor does it need a constant flow of other people’s on display. I have determined that this must be a bastion of political continence. I know too many deeply intelligent people all over the spectrum of politics to think less of any person based purely on a political stance. It is important to me that no one walk away from here feeling litmus-tested, and to fulfill that mission requires strict political continence, which must begin with me.
  • If I started the discussion, it would become a fight, because I am a fierce and passionate man. I have seen how many people have behaved over politics in the past year, and many of the types of things people have said would be things they couldn’t take back–it would not be my way to let them. I also might respond with words I couldn’t take back, and being me, I probably would not want to back down. Know thyself, especially thine weaknesses. Whatever gain could be had from allowing that, well, it eludes me. Who could I blame but myself, were I to open that door? It would all be beside the point, which is that I am here to represent my writing to the world, not bicker. There are other places I could bicker, if so minded.
  • People need oases from politics at the best of times. These are not the best of times, and in these, they need oases that much more. People need good places, and I’ve striven to craft one.
  • I have never made a pronouncement/demand that commenters avoid politics, because I didn’t need to. The blog seems to have drawn people of good political continence. If I had to, I suppose I would, though the reflex of just deleting the political comments might be enough to send the message. It is fatuous to come out all bombastic against a problem that does not and likely will not exist. “Okay, thanks for that. What’s next, a proscription outlawing all living velociraptors? No mammoths allowed to post on the blog?”
  • The blog has taught me that social comment is possible without overt political commentary. At the outset, I wondered if this would be the case, and how to handle it.
  • Politics tends to bring on the sin of bloviation. Blogging should not be bloviatory.
  • Confession: I’m not really that knowledgeable about politics, nor do I think most people are. It’s my view that most people who take to political pulpits really don’t and can’t know the facts, because most people would not invest the time. They would take the word of news articles, or their favorite websites, even simply take the headlines and not read the articles. If I find myself having to guard against that, I must assume I’m not the only one. Therefore, my default assumption is that most of what I see is baloney based upon baloney: unsubstantiated conclusions based on unchecked, taken-for-granted suppositions. It is impossible for everyone to check everyone’s references, or even all of one’s own; there simply isn’t enough time. We do have substantial reason to believe one thing: that a lot of what we read and hear and watch is misleading, either by journalistic sloth or by design. I once heard a co-worker, a pretty bright guy, take issue with my questioning of some version of events. His argument: “But it was on the network news! Of course it’s true!” With that statement, it became evident that our world views were parallel. There’s a word that gets misused. What does it mean? Two lines are parallel only if they can never touch. ‘Parallel thinking’ doesn’t mean agreement, despite how people throw it around. His thinking and mine emanated from such different fundamental assumptions that common ground was elusive.

So, from deep inside me, thank you for keeping us free of partisan crap here at the ‘Lancer. Thank you for reading, commenting, liking, visiting, and for motivating me to write. When I begin to conceive a blog post, I am asking myself: “How will this inform, uplift, entertain?” I have aborted quite a few posts because they didn’t supply good answers to that question. Thanks for being the reasons for the question.

Human relations, Social comment

Rote repetitions that simply aren’t true

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One grows very tired of incorrect rote repetitions that have taken on the air of fact in the public mind. Some I remember from childhood, but haven’t heard much since; some I started hearing in adulthood, and some I’ve heard all my damn life from people that I know are smarter than that. So let’s haul them out, starting with one that’s pertinent to the day…

“If you don’t vote, you can’t complain.” Watch me. Whether I vote or not, the exorbitant tax bill I donate to our corporations with the IRS as their collection agency should count for more than whether I marked a piece of paper for the felons and boneheaded initiatives of my choice.

“The only stupid question is the one you don’t ask.” In some contexts it can be true, but not universally. I am very often asked by complete strangers “How long have you been growing that beard?” It’s stupid because they aren’t using their brains. One would presume that at some point I had trimmed it, rather than just letting it go; one might judge this by the smooth bottom edge and well-pruned mustache. So, no; in fact, there are a lot of stupid questions that should really never be asked.

“Profanity shows a lack of vocabulary.” Not necessarily. It might show anger, laziness, vulgarity, disrespect or many things, but just because you use the word ‘fuck’ does not mean you have a limited vocabulary. I know people whose brains are stamped Merriam-Webster whose favorite word is ‘shit.’

“Two wrongs don’t make a right.” A complete fallacy designed to deter decent people from retaliating against jerks in the only language a jerk understands. If it’s true, we should never have fought back against Japan or helped crush Germany. This one is closely allied to…

“Violence never solves anything.” Oh, yes, it can. It does not cure the underlying problem of the need for violence, but violence will solve a lot of things. The Holocaust did not end because the Allies asked Hitler nicely and patiently to stop the genocide. It ended because the Allies used violence against his country.

“You can’t prove a negative.” Sure I can–at least some negatives. I can prove, for example, that I am not an ostrich. Ostriches have feathers and much longer necks, check a picture of one. This statement has its place, but is used incontinently where it does not apply.

“Everything has shades of grey.” If you really think this, you have no authentic moral compass. If you can’t see absolute evil and absolute good, then you are forever finding good in evil and evil in good, in which case none of your moral judgments mean a thing.

“You have to respect the law.” No, actually, you do not. You can have zero respect for it while still obeying it, either because it makes sense, or because you don’t want the penalties. Compliance under threat is not respect. Some police think they are getting respect, when in reality they are getting fear.

“Everything happens for a reason.” If you mean for a demonstrable scientific reason, probably yes. If you mean because it needed to happen as part of some grand plan, you just said that your Grand Planner needed bubonic plague, the Armenian genocide, 9/11 and Steve Carell movies. Really want to go there?

“The pen is mightier than the sword.” Not always. You start writing with a pen. I’ll start slashing with a saber. If that were true, the awesomeness of your pen would defeat me. However, it is true that the pen is powerful. It’s just not all-powerful.

“A vote for a third party is a vote thrown away.” Common form of pressure used by someone about to become a hysterical bitch if you say you aren’t going to vote for the least odious option (which happens to be the one they want to win). A vote thrown away is a ballot not submitted, thus discarded.

“You can’t hit someone for words.” That should usher in a renaissance for the world’s loudmouthed abusers: a guaranteed pass against any actual consequences that might teach them a lesson, such as not to be a verbal abuser. Some words not only deserve a knuckle sandwich–they demand one.

“If you don’t exercise a right, you’ll lose it.” Nah.  Exercising a right has zero impact on whether it gets taken away, unless of course people exercise it very stupidly. If they do that, exercising it is indeed likely to get it revoked.

“It takes one to know one.” I suppose in the case of biochemists, that’s nearly correct. In most cases, it’s not only incorrect, it’s developmentally five years old. I am not a police officer. I can usually tell one when I see him or her. They usually wear khaki, black or blue, carry guns and badges and Batman belts, drive cars that say ‘POLICE’, and so on. It doesn’t take one to know one.

Privacy, Technology

My current privacy array

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I’m fairly sure I’m at the right asymptote of ‘willingness to go through headaches and try new things in order to thwart people’s data gathering just because.’ The tools for this are in a state of constant change, so this might be a time for an update.

My basic browser is Firefox 16.0.2, not because I want to be on that version, but because I was forced by sunsetting to upgrade from a previous version. FF has heavy memory leaks, and has become clunky, but a) it has the most add-ins, b) I hated Safari, c) there is no way I’m going to let Chrome have its way with me, and d) these days, if you use Internet Explorer to do anything but download a real browser, your friends will stage an intervention. “Jonathan, we’ve all come here because we care about you. Your use of IE has affected my life negatively in the following ways…” For all FF’s flaws, it has the most dynamic privacy tool authoring community, and that’s what matters most to me.

It begins with Adblock Plus, which hides just about all the advertising, everywhere. There is a certain irony in all the efforts I exert in order to ruin Facebook’s data mining, when I don’t in fact see their consequent advertising. ABP is low maintenance. It has the added benefit of allowing me spot removal of any image I happen to find offensive and just don’t need to see again.

NoScript is a very helpful package that doesn’t let JavaScripts run unless I say so. It probably also accounts for most of the headaches and tweaks I go through, because it goes by site, and some pages have scripts from fourteen different sources (some of which you only learn of after unblocking this other one). Which one is the one needed in order to do what I came to the page to do? At times I have to turn it off temporarily, but I usually just enable scripts one at a time for the session.

FlashBlock is easier than NoScript because it shows a ‘play’ button on the screen where the Flash content is. Usually it’s a video. Do videos automatically play when you go to a page? Not for me, they don’t, and that’s how I want it.

TACO is wonderful, because it does the best job on cookies. For example, I can accept Facebook cookies on Facebook and on the one game that I play, while blocking them everywhere else. I have to do that one page at a time, but once you do it for the pages you visit most, it’s less necessary every day. That also lets me blow away Google’s ubiquitous cookie-mongering. There is no reason either of those sites needs to set a cookie on my browser just because I visited, say, CNN. That visit, and what I did there, is neither Google’s nor Facebook’s business. While TACO also blocks most web trackers, it doesn’t do it as well as…

Ghostery. In addition to cookies, many sites use beacons/web trackers to keep tabs on what you do. Ghostery blocks nearly all of them by default. If it finds one unblocked, you can choose to add it to the list. Very easy to use, and very satisfying.

GoogleSharing partly convinces Google that I’m somewhere else. Currently, Google News thinks I’m in Austin, TX. Once in a while, I believe when GS resets to a new ‘location,’ my GN shows up in a foreign edition and I have to change it. Although if it’s a language I understand, sometimes I’ll do a bit of reading first. GS says that it anonymizes my search results in some way; sounds good to me.

TrackMeNot spams Google with spurious searches on mundane things. The effect of this is to bury my actual Google searches in a sea of irrelevant crap. Slight downside is that sometimes it gets a little zealous, and Google makes me do Captcha in order to search, announcing that it has detected a lot of traffic from my IP address. This is rare.

WebOfTrust assigns reliability/safety icons to links, especially in Google searches. This mainly keeps one from blundering into sites that attempt to emplace spyware or viruses on your machine. Foolproof it’s not; helpful it is. Part of the problem is that the color of the icon could mean anything from ‘naughty pictures’ to ‘unsafe due to spyware,’ and you have to hover the mouse in order to find out. Part of the problem is that the safety rating of a page comes mainly from user input, so it’s possible that a given page was given adverse ratings simply because a bunch of people wanted to hurt the page’s owner. Use it with some discernment, and it’s helpful.

What are the downsides?

The biggest one is the need to selectively enable JavaScripts until a page works. I admit that sometimes I just punt and use another, unshielded browser. Since I don’t go from place to place with other browsers much, the dossier they compile from them is a tiny fraction of my web surfing. It’s also pretty much impossible to know which script unlocked what I wanted, unless I do it one at a time, which is often more futzing that I desire.

Second biggest is needing to go into TACO each time I go to a new page and block/delete all its cookies. You’d be amazed how many sites stick you with Firefox or Google cookies; WordPress and Yahoo are also frequent offenders.

Third would be the inability to save Google search settings because I won’t take Google cookies on their search page. At times, the non-evil folks at Google break Google search for people who do this–I’m convinced it’s to teach us a lesson.

Fourth would be that you have to use Firefox, which isn’t a very efficient or robust browser compared to others. For games, I use Sleipnir, Opera and/or Maxthon. Sleipnir and Maxthon are very robust. Opera is lousy, but it’s good to have some backup without resorting to IE. Maxthon’s update nags are very annoying; haven’t found out how to get them out of the system tray. At least I can ignore Opera and FF’s update nags.

Anyway, if you want to try browsing my way, there are all the links. Enjoy.

Blogging freelance editing, writing, and life in general. You can also Like my Facebook page for more frequent updates: J.K. Kelley, Editor.