Fables of the reconstruction

What a Great Day

So, I was laid low today by some really ugly virus.   All I want to do is lie down.  So I am lying in bed about an hour ago and hear drip, drip, drip, coming from somewhere.  Turns out to be a leak in the bathroom ceiling.  It hit me that I had scrupulously cleared the snow off my front walk, but didn't even think twice about the roof.  What a moron.  The roof is flat and has only one downspout, which makes it easy to spring leaks when something obstructs the spout and causes water to stand in pools.  So I crawl out the ceiling hatch (there's a roof deck up there, too, and that's how you get up) in my weakened state to clear the snow off in the dark.  Of course, I don't have a snowshovel, so I take the lid from my clothes hamper up there with me.  It's flat and stiff enough to shovel with. 

Well, turns out the downspout was clogged by ice, not snow.  A solid sheet of ice about 3 inches thick that ran along the entire edge of the roof.  The edge, I might add, is two stories up and I hate heights.  So I do what any nitwit does when confronted with a big problem: I went and got the hammer.  And got down on my knees in the snow and hammered at the ice inches from the edge of the roof, chunks springing off in the dark so hard they flew across the neighbor's yard and pinged off his windows.  It's remarkable to me that I could drum on my roof with a big hammer in the middle of the night, sending ice flying, and as far as I know no one so much as peeked out:  "Oh, look dear.  It's that crazy Mithras guy up on his roof, wielding tools again." 

So after about half an hour of chopping on my knees, my hands frozen around the hammer (I had visions of it flying out of my grasp and crashing through the neighbor's window), pants soaked, I managed to dig a channel in the ice from the bathroom vent pipe, which is carrying warmth up that is causing the melt, to the downspout.  Tomorrow afternoon, I will get back up there with a proper shovel (assuming one of my neighbors is not as big a moron as I am) and rock salt.

In the meantime, I have Return of the King Extended DVD to watch.  So, being sick is not all bad.

Hillary Clinton Collapses During Public Appearance

1:19 p.m.: Associated Press says "Hillary Rodham Clinton collapses during a public appearance in Buffalo."

Update: Sounds like Sen. Clinton is fine; just a stomach virus.  Is there something going around?  I'm down for the day with rotovirus, one of the side effects of being friends with people who have kids. 

Be a Sadist and Get Paid For It

Women have it so very much worse than men in so many ways. If this were not self-evident, here's a video of women getting their pubes waxed. Speaking as a sadist myself, I can tell you the woman doing the waxing is having a LOT of fun hurting them.

(From Amanda at Mouse Words.)

Doug Feith Quits

The "fucking stupidest guy on the face of the earth" leaves DoD for "personal and family reasons".

Good riddance. In a just world, he'd be pilloried, not given some cushy consulting/lobbying gig, which I am sure is in the cards.

(From Josh Marshall.)

Re-Phrase: They're "Alpo Accounts"

Pass it on. 

Thought of by RDF at corrente.

Buy Your Own Conservative Pundit

A conservative talk-radio host in D.C. is auctioning his services as a pundit on eBay. He says:

“Hey—Where’s MY gravy?”

That’s my question after finding out my fellow conservatives like Armstrong Williams and Maggie Gallagher are on the “cash for commentary ” bandwagon. Why not me?

Since the Bush Administration hasn’t called (yet), I’m dropping a not-so-subtle hint that I, too, have bills to pay. I’m making my services as a talk host, writer and pundit available quickly and easily right here on eBay. And, because I’m a true conservative capitalist, my services are available to the highest bidder!

Bidding is now at $255. Auction ends February 2.

(From Holden at first draft.)

Does Your Car Have a Computer Virus?

I think I've had quite enough technological innovation, thanks.  SC Magazine:

Lexus cars may be vulnerable to viruses that infect them via mobile phones. Landcruiser 100 models LX470 and LS430 have been discovered with infected operating systems that transfer within a range of 15 feet. ...

The virus affects the cars' navigation system.  That's right, you head off for an important meeting in your big, expensive Lexus and you end up in Hoboken. 

(From Slashdot.)

Update 2/18/05: Oops.  It's a hoax.

The Poor Man on Andrew Sullivan

I note this not because I want to make any particular point, but just to point out that occasionally blogging will turn out a gem of description like this, that is so completely dead-on, that I remember why I like reading blogs.  Also, The Poor Man rocks.  To wit:

... Andrew Sullivan accuses people of opposing his current country of residence the way other men breathe. Or perhaps the way a dog barks - as a way of signaling displeasure or discomfort, or just as a way of drawing attention to itself, but with no real "meaning", at least not such as can be ascribed to human speech.

It's about the dollar, cruelty, and enemies lists.  Really.  Go ahead and read it.

How Should Married Gay Couples File Their Taxes?

I wonder if someone has thought this issue through:

As if tax season isn't stressful enough, gay newlyweds in Massachusetts this year are pondering a new thorny question: Do they check "married" or "single" on federal tax forms?

The federal government wants the gay couples who are married in Massachusetts to file as single.  This is a lie, of course, and discrimination as horrendous as counting every black citizen as only 3/5ths of a person was.  But filing jointly just means the IRS will eventually catch it, kick the return back, and fine you and charge you interest.  So gay couples should just file single, right?

Well, maybe.  I can think of at least one area in which the feds may have to recognize the couple's status: itemized deduction of state taxes.  Under federal tax law, you can deduct the state taxes you pay.  In Massachusetts, spouses are responsible for each other's state tax liabilities (presumably; I am not a Massachusetts lawyer or a tax expert).  I can imagine scenarios in which you would pay your spouse's state income tax and would then want to deduct it for federal purposes.

As an example, let's say you make $50,000 a year and owe Massachusetts $2,500 in state income tax.  And let's say your same-sex spouse is self-employed, makes $60,000 and owes $3,000 in state income tax.  (The numbers don't matter so long as your spouse doesn't have sufficient income tax withheld.)   Filing single, you would be able to deduct your $2,500 in state income tax.  But what if your spouse is unable or unwilling to pay his or her state income tax, and the Commonwealth of Massachusetts secures an additional payment of $3,000 from you as the spouse via a tax judgment?  Can you deduct that state income tax payment for federal income tax purposes?   You would still be filing single but deducting your spouse's taxes, which would create a kind of hybrid filing status, "single but married".

When and if this situation arises, will the IRS deny the deduction?  It's a valid state law income tax.  If you don't pay, Massachusetts can seize and sell your property to satisfy the debt.  I suppose a court or the IRS could recharacterize your spouse's tax as tax on your own income, but wouldn't even that legal fiction violate DOMA or some other inane federal law?  On the other hand, if the IRS denies the deduction, it would be a triumph of form over economic substance.  You would have paid a state income tax that you legally owe, yet unlike everyone else in the country, you can't deduct it. 

This scenario might seem kind of far-fetched, but it happens all the time.  If I were part of a gay married couple in Massachusetts, I might be tempted to engineer the situation and then bring it to the IRS's attention via a letter attached to my return.  It's a plausible position to take under current law, so I can't see that I would be fined for trying it.  I might lose, but it would highlight - if it needed to be demonstrated once again - the ridiculous lengths to which America will go just to mistreat gay people.

Gratuitous Teenage Breasts Video

I am sure this clip is from some show that everyone but me watches because, to be honest, I have no idea what has been going on on television for the past several years.  But if it's that, then I have to say, good.  From mak at 'til the cows come home.

Equal Time for Democratic Idiots

Associated Press:

One witness told investigators the five defendants, dressed in "Mission Impossible" type gear, black outfits and knit caps, left the Democratic Party headquarters at about 3 a.m. on Nov. 2, and returned about 20 minutes later, extremely excited and talking about how they had slashed the tires.

Wonderful. Let's see how this is transformed into "Democratic voter supression" by the Wurlitzer. Three, two ...

Tool Guesses What Language Text Is

Ever been in the position of trying to figure out what language something is written in? I have. Here's a tool I just found that will tell you: Languid, a statistical language identifier. By Maciej Ceglowski of Idle Words.

Philadelphia in the Snow

What's funny is that people are working really, really hard to clear the snow out because the game starts at 3.  Ah, Philly, lazy unless sports are at stake.

Lots more pictures of snow after the jump.

Digging Out

Passyunk near Bainbridge.   

Kevin Drum, Clueless Privileged Liberal Man, Speaks

Kevin Drum says that Lawrence Summers' now-infamous remarks about the possibility that women are innately intellectually inferior to men were so bad because Harvard has had problems with how it treats women in the past.

This is one of the times that I understand why large numbers of people want to slap Drum.

Update:  We're going around in circles in comments.  In the meantime, Charles Murray gets to pull an op-ed out of his ass and put it up at nytimes.com: 

The proportions of men and women mathematicians may never be equal, but who cares? What's important is that all women with the potential to become terrific mathematicians have full opportunity to do so.

Of course, new knowledge will not be without costs. ... Against the cost of the new knowledge is the far greater cost of obliviousness, which can lead us to pursue policies that try to make society conform to expectations that conflict with what human beings really are.

(Emphasis added.)   To recap: there may possibly be some slight gender difference in mathematical apptitude; therefore, an elite university like Harvard is justified in discriminating in favor of men.  Did you follow that?  (If not, and you're a woman, the problem is probably you.) This is the direct political expression of the "truth" Drum says he is promoting.  It's actually  science misapplied in the interest of protecting power. 

Jokes You Might Get If You Listen to a Lot of Radio

I wouldn't want to get OnStar because I don't want to end up in one of those commercials where they have to unlock my car for me.

Say, how about some rich chocolate Ovaltine?

A Good Winter Storm in Philadelphia

Independence Hall as seen through the snow:

The park, on Fifth Street, behind Library Hall:

I cleaned the walk off in front of the door about an hour ago and now it has about five inches of snow on it. 

 

That Would Save a Lot of Effort

The sign outside the Zaro's in Penn Station says "Toss your own salad."

It just started snowing. We're hoping to get back to Philly by 3.

Afterparty

I have no idea how bad those pictures came out, since I'm blogging from the Treo and can't see the site.  It was a pretty kickass show, though, and everyone in the place seemed genuinely sad to see Sea Ray quit.

It's almost 4 now; time even for rockers to leave the bar.  Cab to Willliamsburg!

Sister Gone

The Moebius Band

Say Hi To Your Mom

Challenger

Play List

Sound Check

Loading In

Sea Ray's Last Show

I'm off to NYC to see sea ray at the knitting factory mercury lounge.  After 8 years, they're quitting.  It sucks.  Should be a great, emotional show.

Update: It was.  I'm glad so many people came out.

Facing Reality

Tresy from corrente and his wife move to Canada, analogizing the red state thing to a guy who just stood there and watched as the tsunami engulfed him.  Best part:

In the final analysis, Bush is no tsunami. ... He's more like the La Conchita mudslide, an ugly wall of sludge, triggered by an underlying structural collapse, that slowly fouls and smothers everything in its path. ... Perhaps this waking nightmare will finally end short of ruination, though the wreckage will still take years to clean up. Nothing would make us happier, but until then, the facts in front of us tell us that the prudent action is to seek higher ground.

I Believe This About Myself, Too

Atrios:

I'd say one of my better blogging qualities is that my bullshit detector and my "too good (or too bad) to be true" detector work pretty well. I've linked uncritically to a few stupid things over the years, but on the whole my record's pretty good.

I think I do pretty well with this, too.  My powers of analysis may be average (I thought Dean would be the Dem nominee; I thought  Kerry might crush Bush) but with individual events I usually can tell a hawk from a handsaw.  The only time I can remember tripping up was when I credited a story Dave Neiwert put up about  a gay-bashing.  Usually the stories I call bullshit on are slanted toward the right, but not exclusively so, such as the one about American soldiers bulldozing Iraqi farmers' trees while playing jazz music over loudspeakers.  I don't know if blogs will actually ever play a positive role in analyzing news, but if there is anything to the "wisdom of crowds"-type argument, then distributed reaction to individual events in which we each decide whether a story sounds plausible or not and then pool the results is where you'd see the benefit.

Not Listening to the Inaugural Address

I hear Bush is giving a speech today.  Right now, in fact.  Ho hum.  Seriously, I can't bring myself to listen to the nitwit.  I am sure it'll be as smarmy and hypocritical as I imagine.  Freedom, freedom, freedom! 

Other things I don't care about:

The insinuation that Bush has punished or even had killed reporters who were mean to him.  They said this about Clinton, too.  I just don't think the government is that effective.

NotOneDamnDimeDay.com.  Total bullshit, okay?

The cost of the inaugural.  So what? 

Seymour Hersch's story The Coming Wars in the New Yorker.  First of all, I don't believe we're going to invade Iran.  Second of all, we're paying the military a fuck of a lot of money, so they better be doing something productive with it.  Scoping out targets in Iran = productive.  War's just an extension of diplomacy, or whatever the fuck the saying is.  And you can't war on a country if you don't know what to hit.

I don't care about a lot of other things, too, but that's it for now.

South Street, Philadelphia, January 19, 2005

The Legacy of America's Fear and Anger

Pop quiz.  Who said this?

The biggest regret is that we didn't stop 9/11. And then in the wake of 9/11, instead of redoubling what is our traditional export of hope and optimism we exported our fear and our anger. And presented a very intense and angry face to the world. I regret that a lot.

Answer here.

(From Atrios; originally blogged by Martin Pike at Northcote Knob.)
 

Thank You, President Bush

What a pretty dress she has on.  (It looks so chic accessorized with arterial blood.)  Maybe Bush can invite her to attend the inaugural gala.

Sgt. Falafel Veterans For Truth

A great idea:

Ok here's the deal. I offered a $100 reward to anyone who could corroborate Bill O'Reilly's claim to have actually been in a firefight in a combat zone. ... [O]bviously the more money we raise the more attention we'll get. ... So if you're interested in trying to call Bill O'Reilly on his crap you can help out by contributing here.

I just kicked in $10.  (Via Mr. Black.)

VDay Soon

The Bush in the Box

washingtonpost.com:

"Obviously, there are terrible things going on in the world," says Brad Freeman, co-chair of the inaugural committee and a $100,000 donor himself. "But life goes on . . . We're not not going to have an inauguration."

Which is exactly how they pitched donors. "We worked hard for four years to get this person elected and now he's won," says Freeman. "This is time for to celebrate."

"Time to celebrate," adds Mercer Reynolds, committee co-chair, "and put the bow on the box."

Buying a President: the gift that gives back. The people who own the country ought to govern it. Obviously.

Jeff Jarvis is a Scumbag

Read as much of this bullshit as you can stomach. (That is, if you give a shit about this Dean/paid-blogger crap.)

I've come to the conclusion Jarvis is just a GOP mole. He doesn't give a shit about anything but himself; he's just riding blogging and faux-moderate credentials, like a slightly smarter Glenn Reynolds. Jesus, what a wanker.

Programming Notes

I added categories to the template:

• Chemicals (i.e. drugs and alcohol)
• Food and Drink (no posts yet)
• Fucking and related
• Law-talking guy (no posts yet)
• Music
• Piteous
• Political
• Republican reprehensibilities
• Stupid people
• Travel
• War
• Web/Tech
• Whatever
• Words, words, words

So I went back and classified a few posts so something would show up in the category archive (over on the left).  But there are 1,070 posts total - no fucking way am I going all the way back through them, unless I get laid up in the hospital, with ugly nurses, with broken televisions, in a country where I don't speak the language.  You get the drift.

My Darling Whore

WORD HISTORY:

Derivatives of Indo-European roots have often acquired starkly contrasting meanings. A prime example is the case of the root *k–, “to like, desire.” From it was derived a stem *kro–, from which came the prehistoric Common Germanic word *hraz with the underlying meaning “one who desires” and the effective meaning “adulterer.” The feminine of this, *hrn–, became hre in Old English, the ancestor of Modern English whore. In another branch of the Indo-European family, the same stem *kro– produced the Latin word crus, “dear.” This word has several derivatives borrowed into English, including caress, cherish, and charity, in Christian doctrine the highest form of love and the greatest of the theological virtues. •Another derivative of the root *k– in Indo-European was *kmo–, a descendant of which is the Sanskrit word for “love,” kma, appearing in the name of the most famous treatise on love and lovemaking, the Kamasutra.

(From Viewing the local antiquities.)

Another Death on the Warlovers' Heads

so i think i might have made a mistake. too many things have entered my mind recently. i don't know if it's because i've been in 3-4 fire-fights, but i'm realizing some things. i'm not going to go into it, but if you must know, ask and i'll say what i can. i don't even know what i'm thinking anymore.

i'm just taking this one day at a time, one mission at a time. ...

i know i've always said i don't regret anything i've done in my life, but i think i found one.

- Taken from November 22, 2004 and January 3, 2005 LiveJournal posts by Michael J. Smith.

Spc. Michael J. Smith, 24, 1st Battalion, 503rd Infantry Regiment, 2d Infantry Division, Media, Pennsylvania.  Killed when his military vehicle was hit by a rocket-propelled grenade in Ramadi, Iraq, on January 11, 2005.

- CNN.com .

Not That There's Much of My Youth Left

Fuck.  I used to love that station, a million years ago.  It was an oasis in the Balto-Wash corridor.

On the other hand, driving down to Florida without a CD player recently made me realize just how "alternative" was really alternative to nothing.  They have the same guy doing the station commercials all over the country, and playing the same songs. 

Must. Have. Plastic. Box.

Update: Ouch.  I mean, um, ouch.  Really.

Working Girls

Mark Frauenfelder of Boing Boing passes along a link from someone who stumbled across a Miami-area escort agency's on-line shift diary from 1998.  Sounds like the last restaurant I worked in.

Media Punks

Antigone at XX sends a notice to the lame-asses in the news business, including the infotainment has-been.

In The Leper Colony

Philalethes at Bouphonia :

If a man offers to buy your six-year-old daughter for the international sex trade, you're not going to haggle over the price; you're going to see to it that this predatory monster is stopped dead in his tracks. That's precisely the emotional response that's appropriate when right-wing ghouls take to the airwaves to defend torture and terrorism and racism; the situation calls not for debate - not even heated debate - but for deep-seated spiritual revulsion, and immediate and effective preventative action.

If we refuse to rise to that occasion as a nation - if we can't say "enough is enough," and cast these intolerably arrogant moral lepers back into the outer darkness where they belong - it seems to me that we're just as despicable and dangerous as they are.

I don't think it's a refusal so much as a inability to be bothered.  Anyway, we're the morally untouchable nation.  Did you see how much we gave to those poor tsunami victims?  So, we kill a few of those brown people with "death squads."  On balance, we're saints.  Why do you hate America so much?

Poly Means Many, Not Any

Mistress Matisse has a great life.  If I may summarize her post, married couple A and married couple B go out to dinner, at the end of which, one of the men goes off to a social event, the two women go on a date together, and the other man is met by couple C.  The three of them go to another restaurant where the couple has dinner while the other man talks with them, then the woman and the other man go on a date, while the man from the couple goes on his own date with yet another woman.  Both pairs end up back at the third couple's house for the night in separate bedrooms, although they do have coffee together in the morning where they compare notes (and, happening to be kinky, bruises). 

Got all that?  Being poly myself, I have to admire the sophistication and complexity managed in that one evening.  And as she says, it is both very satisfying and kind of surreal to be in that kind of social situation - but surreal in a good way.  I would love to impart how satisfying it is to non-poly people, but I am afraid it's probably not possible.  Suffice it to say, the quality of the relationships is the important thing, not just the quantity.  (Although the element of variety is part of the fun.)

I love the end of her post:

After a nice chat, everyone hugged each other and the party broke up. As we watched our friends walk away from the house, I turned to Max and said, "I sure love you." He kissed me. "I love you too. And I'm glad you had fun."

What an amazingly complex and satisfying life.

Awwwww.

Weak, Liberal Simps Unwilling to Do What It Takes

Jim Henley at Unqualified Offerings:

All together now: Saddam was worse! In terms of body count in Iraq this is true, though the man had a big head start on us, so we ought to be allowed a couple of decades to catch up. But what about the world? Is it better? And are we? We have gone from a time in which the tyrant of an oil patch with a broken army and 23 million inhabitants practiced a tyranny which all decent people abhorred, to a time in which the largest and most powerful country in the history of mankind justifies torture and contemplates assassination teams - we should call them terror squads - as official policy. And the people who most consider our virtue unchallengeable are the quickest to publically avow our need to torture and murder. That is quite a change. Is it hard to see why so much of the world regards it as unwelcome?

Trackback Spam

In the past two days trackback spammers have begun hitting blogs in a big way.  My experience seems to be typical - on January 5, someone left gibberish trackbacks.  Then today, the first one that actually links back to the spammer's site was left.  There is a lot of discussion going on out there on how to knock this phenomenon down.

For me, I don't think I care.  The trackbacks are coming in to old posts that have high google rankings.  I delete spam from comments because it interrupts the flow of a conversation.  Trackbacks are not a conversation.  Frankly, I don't see the value of the spammers doing this anyway, except that a bot can do it cheaply so there is an element of "why not?".  No one clicks trackbacks (especially on a site like mine where I don't have a sidebar list of recent trackbacks) and google doesn't index them.

Allawi Extends Martial Law to Cover Election

What the fuck did I tell you?  He's been taking lessons from Dear Leader:

Iraq's U.S.-backed government said on Thursday it was extending emergency powers equivalent to martial law for a further 30 days to try to safeguard Jan. 30 elections under threat from deadly attacks by insurgents. ... Emergency powers allow the government to impose curfews, close borders and airports and detain suspects without following normal legal procedures.

Not that the vote will be rigged or anything.  Ha!

Safe Return

Well, I made it back alive, despite having put a serious dent in South Florida's drug and alcohol supply, and despite the fact that the flight had to abort the initial landing because some other traffic got in the way.  That's always fun.

Also, my friend I was worried about being missing in the tsunami zone has turned up.