Snowboarding makes my legs feel like ouch

pic by:ZenMe
The only way you can tell this isn't me is because I stupidly forgot to take my camera. I'm a jerk.

I just got back from snowboarding and it was lovely. I'm occasionally gripped with fear of the new, which generally means it's time to go and try something new, and while I've been snowboarding before, it changes constantly, there's real threat of breaking important somethings, and the details of getting there and getting back could be enough to put me off.

On the other hand, I take snowboarding on Dr. King's birthday seriously. Why, you might reasonably ask? Is it because I think an expensive, elitist sport is a good way to recollect the remarkable deeds of a remarkable man? Is it because I perversely see echoes of Dr. King's dream in a sport where a large, white, immovable force manages to knock people down based solely on merit, not color? Perhaps. However, the reason I'm copping to is that I got seriously bad news on an MLK weekend two years ago. Let me explain.

I don't believe in Jesus, Santa Claus, the singularity, el chupacabra, or trickle-down-economics. And I particularly don't believe in superstition, so it was with some surprise I acknowledged that I'd arrived at the (fanciful) conclusion that the ghost of Dr. King had killed my father. Dad died over an MLK weekend while I was on a much anticipated ski-weekend with K-- and some friends, but there's probably more explaining to do. I'll go on.

Paola had the use of her mother's cottage near a ski resort, so we shot up on Saturday only to find that there was no snow for miles thanks to all the goddamn rain. Already Dr. King was thwarting us. Overnight, however, it snowed enough that we hopefully called the resort to see if there was enough to ski on.

Oh yeah, snow's great! Grand, we'll pop right over. The electricity's out though. What? Yeah, the electricity is out for miles and the resort's on part of the grid that won't be coming back until the 5^th of never. At this point I was joking that Dr. King didn't want us skiing on his day of memorial and maybe we should go look for a local habitat for humanity chapter.

Rather than grumble though, we played cards and I amused the ladies by chopping firewood - something not often seen in Manhattan I guess. Maybe there'd be a chance to ski the next day before driving hours back to NYC. Stupid MLK!

That night was when I got the call about my dad though. Everyone who was there was great (thanks to K--, Paola, Angie, and Peluce, Paola's dog who, almost immediately upon seeing my distress, stopped crapping in the living room).

Obviously, snowboarding wasn't going to happen, nor was it the most important thing at the time by a long shot, but I still added it to the bottom of the list of things I felt the universe owed me. Now every year I try to go snowboarding on the MLK weekend. I don't actually think that Dr. King ruined that weekend and caused my dad to die (that would be certifiably crazy - like believing that God flooded New Orleans to express rage at gay people or something).

Still, I take going skiing/snowboarding seriously each year so far. It occurred to me today as I was driving that perhaps it's because I'm a natural contrarian and I rankle at being compelled in any way.

After all, it's not uncommon after receiving seriously bad news to associate elements of how you receive it or where you are with the news itself. Sort of PTSD light. Your brain connects things with the moment of huge emotional shock just in case it's skiing, or MLK weekends that's really the culprit (your brain sometimes isn't all that smart). I know of at least two people who got late night calls telling them of friends or family dying unexpectedly and for a long time afterwards hearing a phone ring late at night raised heart rates and caused irrational agitas. This even though for years before, a late night call was at worst a wrong number and at best a booty call.

I think perhaps I go skiing now because I'll be damned if I'm going to let bad associations put me off ski-weekends for the rest of my life. See, I'm a stubborn cuss at heart. And actually, it is also a good way to remember my dad. He liked a laugh and was fairly fearless about new experiences, and he would have probably given me a good shake if he thought fear of the new, or travel details, was stopping me from enjoying myself.

Patrick, if you're reading this, I didn't break my arm for the daft sod though.

The press stand up (while sitting down and looking a little unprepossessing, but still)

Here's a neat video hosted on the Huffington Post:

Lookee!

Some of the comments are pretty good too.

The most interesting thing to me about the video is not that a politician gets caught lying (whether his initial assertion that his campaign isn't run by lobbyists is correct or not, he goes on to suggest none to subtly that he's not in a position to be influenced by lobbyists because he's not part of the Washington crowd - totally untenable after he just admitted that a lobbyist is on the plane with him a lot of the time). Politicians lie all the time. The best part is the bit afterwards where Romney's press secretary shows up to castigate the reporter for ruining the pageantry.

Image managers have to worry about their candidate saying something untrue, but not nearly so much as about them looking unprepared or foolish in a video - more's the pity. The first can be spun, but the second just sits there on YouTube. The current administration gets away terribly with intimidating the press, but Romney isn't even elected yet. I think it's interesting that A) this paradigm of treating the press like your own personal cast of extras for a choreographed pantomime is catching on, B) the press is allowing it - we haven't seen more of this during the campaign, instead getting reporters telling us after the fact that some statement was a lie, and C)That the little old lady in the background was trying to defend Romney.

C is the one I'm most worried about. We should expect reporters to be rude to our elected officials and candidates in our stead. If you say something false or disingenuous in the public eye, it's their job to call bullshit on you.

My dad

Today, or perhaps yesterday, is the second anniversary of my father passing away. My uncertainty about has nothing to do with existential detachment. I got the news on the 16th and there's a time difference. The shock jangled my nerves too.

I've been thinking about how there's an element of cognitive dissonance to how we miss the dead. I miss my dad, but we weren't as close as either of us would have liked, I think. It's the weary trope of there always being enough time to put it right until suddenly there isn't. He was a kind, generous man, but stubborn and difficult too sometimes. I love him, but no one is perfect, and the people we care most about are also the most likely to frustrate and hurt us even inadvertently.

When considering a missed someone, you never go on to think of the times they annoyed you. I'm not sure if a fair and balanced memory of the dead is valuable or good, but as I'm forever interested in the difference between perceptions and the real world, I think about this.

Also in connection with Dad's death I think about narrative. I still haven't constructed a satisfactory one around that period two years ago. Narrative, I'm convinced, is the name we give to how our minds order and emphasize certain events of our lives so we can glean meaning from them and their relationships to each other. We may gain simple cause-and-effect truisms, complicated rules to live by, or subtly themed and constructed models of how the world works from which we can deduce yet more. Whatever you gain, events in my life - in particular painful ones (those we should most urgently learn from I suppose) feel oddly un-finished until such a time as I've successfully created a narrative to fit them in.

I'm still feeling a bit shell-shocked from the events of two years ago insofar at least as the events still form more of a litany than a narrative. Noel begat Daniel, but what am I to learn from how and why Noel died?

Well, I got a bit further abroad on this topic than I planned, and I'm really alright so don't all start calling unless it's something to do with the theoretical topics I'm nattering on about. Love to the people who know who they are.

Clinton also huge racist, according to our stupid media

Alright, that's it. I'm voting for the BBC.

Hot on the heels of the news that Clinton is a woman, the press now give us the revelation that she's a racist. The kind who hates Martin Luther King Jr.

It's like Dave Snowden identifies here. In addition to pointing out how misogynist the Democratic race has become, he suggests that our culture often prefers a good story over the truth.

Hillary may have ridden the "comeback-queen" archetype to victory in NH because people wanted to live the story, but I doubt it was the electorate that was beguiled by the opportunity to join a fairytale. We're all guilty of liking this sort of thing as a culture, but the press craves it like sugar-coated crack because we like to hear about it and they like to keep their jobs.

Now listen, I don't hate Baby Jessica (or puppies), but most days of the week I literally couldn't tell her from a hole in the ground.
photo by sleestak66

Their ratings and salaries depend on selling a story, so the moment some photogenic moppet falls down a well we get Baby Jessica. The press is guilty of putting this easy-to-digest pablum in front of us, but we're guilty of cleaning our plates to make room for more.

So the press loves a story and we love an archetype. When that headstrong Clinton lady (who is a lady, and should know better than to state opinions different from ours) started talking smack about Dr. Martin Luther King, the press gasped, peed itself quietly with glee and started "objectively reporting" that Hillary was angry that Obama had injected racial something-or-other into the election.

It's simple, we've got our MLK story down. We don't want people mucking with it. He single-handedly ended racism in our country thank you very much. LBJ can go screw himself.

Now not everyone in the press got hold of this, but Clinton had to go to an event honoring MLK to sort this nonsense out. Apparently Obama is now taking the high road and saying we shouldn't be tit-for-tatting this early in the election. Great.

I wish that the press would, for the love of decency, stop offering up pre-digested mythology and start investigating the truth. Stop insulting the intelligence of your audience. Do you really think Senator Clinton is a huge racist? If not, why let the rumor start moving? Here's an example of something you might aspire to. The rest of you, stop it.

Looking up

I'm having a lovely (and apparently super secret) day.

In the last couple of days I've been offered a cool freelance job. I won't talk about it yet because I don't want to uncover secrets of the person offering me the job. To her however, thanks a bundle. I'm psyched! I may start practicing here.

Additionally, I started working with some guys locally on a web project I think will be quite funny. Again, can't talk about it because I want to keep elements of it under wraps until we launch. If you know what I'm talking about, do me a favor and keep it under your hat.

I can tell you that the wife of a colleague of mine is hoping to play yenta for me (in the matchmaker sense). While I think I might take some time off from dating so I don't start a relationship just to be in one, it's nice to know you've got prospects.

Finally, my kali skills were strong this week. On Monday I managed to avoid being stabbed by a guy with two knives for a while. He was going slower than a real fight, but I think I surprised the teacher by how fast he was able to go and I think I could have disarmed him if I'd needed to. On the flip side, the stuff we did since then's been really challenging and I look like a chimp trying to do trig. Advanced trig.

This just in: Hillary is a lady

Not pictured: A communist Nazi shark chewing on my leg and denigrating the constitution to make me cry.

Someone should put the American political press and a good portion of the electorate into a bag and whack it with a hammer.

For those of you not in America or otherwise not fit to vote in our general elections due to criminal lack of political attention, here's what happened recently to bring Hillary’s gender to light for our cherished fourth estate.

Senator Hillary Clinton, who was recently whupped in Iowa’s primary by Senator and spokesmodel-for-change Barack Obama, found herself on the receiving end of the powder-puffiest question since Christie Brinkley asked Billy Joel if he wanted to come up for coffee, viz: "how do you do it". The question may or may not have been asked in the context of "I'm a woman and I'd like to know how you keep your hair looking so nice." A few blogs - like the WSJ's - say that was the context, but I couldn't find video to that effect and besides the WSJ is now owned by Rupert Murdoch, so they can bark their conservative, misogynist banter down a well as far as I'm concerned.

Was it a planted question? Could be, but the world will never know because our political press has (yet a-fucking-gain) been distracted by the shininess of a brand new human interest drama masquerading as a proper story. Here, watch the video. I expected to be cynical and appalled by it, but if you can put aside the worry that the whole thing’s a setup, it may be quite affecting.



When I saw this, it reminded me of my stepfather, M. (not a woman). For years he’s been a gruff political commentator in our house. Of a morning, he’d gently intimate to us all at breakfast that a speck of political dissent was germinating in his head by slamming the paper down on the table and bellowing

"Those!"

"BASTARDS!"

“What is it?” we’d ask, and he’d take Reagan, the elder Bush, or a local politician to task for fucking up the world for us kids. “They’re making it worse for you,” he’d say. “We almost had it so good, and now they’re making it worse.” He’s 83 years old, so he should know if the world is getting better or worse.

M. is grimly patriotic about the U.S.A.’s potential and furious about the current state of it. (Distinguish this, please, from the current brand of popular patriotism which is more like supporting your high school football team – your team sucks; you cheer for them; rinse; repeat. If anyone tells you your team sucks, you tell them to fuck off – because you secretly know it but you can’t change schools and you can’t improve the goddamned team.)

Anyway, M. can’t even talk about our current neo-con administration because he can’t reconcile their actions with caring about the country more than they care about themselves, and by the country I mean all of us people in said country, and by themselves I mean themselves and Halliburton!).

Now, all along I’ve thought Hillary to be a self-serving, calculating, killbot (like most politicians – see, in particular, the newly minted John McCain who no longer seems to believe in anything but getting elected). It comes with the territory and I just have to vote for the pantomiming reptile who mums a political agenda closest to mine and hope that the “lies” term in the equation, “what they say” + “lies” = “what they’ll do”, is roughly the same for all the candidates.

So when I saw Hillary getting choked up about the responsibility she feels for the country and the fear she feels about what’s happening to it, I thought, “aha, perhaps behind that killbot skin she’s cultivated for political survival, she actually gives a rat’s ass about the citizens of the U.S. – including Time’s Man of 2006, yours truly.

But here's the thing, again for you non-US folk: It's still a serious debate in this horrifyingly misogynist country whether or not a woman can successfully run a country. No, I’m not kidding. It’s as though (“as though” he says coyly) they didn’t know about other countries. India anyone? Canada? The U.K (okay, it was Margaret Thatcher and she ruined the U.K. as savagely as Reagan screwed up things in the U.S. (and, I'll concede, the USSR), but no one thought the island would sink into the sea while she closeted herself for a good cry).

It turns out it's such a debate that people are saying - pay attention now - that Hillary's display of emotions has made her more feminine in the eyes of female voters and so now they’re voting for her. This might be an opportune place to point out that the whole premise of that is also hugely misogynist. So, men vote for Hillary because of her stance on the issues whereas women vote for her because she's a member of the sisterhood of the traveling pants? Give me a break you hypocrites.

I was just listening to a show on NPR (national public radio) where the host(-ess if you must know) asked three women who voted for Hillary if they’d voted for her on the strength of her crying and her newly revealed womanness. “Oh, yes”, they all responded. One went so far as to say she was voting for Hillary because the U.S. needed a woman president to clean up the mess made by the men.

Oh Christ! I cringed particularly at that because nothing galvanizes crazy misogynist voters like feeling there are crazy misandronist voters out there who need stopping. Not to mention, some of the Presidents of this country have been pretty good despite bearing the burden of a Y chromosome.

So I'm cheesed off at all of this nonsense about gender. Is it possible that a person's motivations for doing the job (plus perhaps their skill once they're elected) are more important than his or her race or color?

I guess, like M., I'd thought it was getting better, but where are my liberal peeps at? Bringing race and gender into serious discussion of an election is crazy. It's single-issue voting for the intellectually and emotionally retarded.

It drives me batty because it's such a stark reminder that the press isn't covering the candidates or their positions so much as it's covering the election. It's not your job to predict the goddamn election you opportunistic jackals! It's your job to pull back the shades and shine some light on the candidates so we can do a better job separating them from their lies come election day.

Speaking of, I’m probably going to vote for a black fellow or a woman in November, but God as my witness, I’ll cast a ballot for a white dude if I he’s my alternative to a whacked out evangelist who’s publicly stated he doesn’t believe in evolution. Sounds silly when you put it like that doesn’t it. Goddamned American politics!

I'm not a developer . . .

by alosojos
This picture reminds me of my friend Laura (a ginger - shhhh!).

but I play one on the Internet.

My mom is selling her art. Her paintings are surprisingly good for someone who just decided to pick up the brush again after 40-odd years (I'm guessing here Mom).

I've blithely offered to start helping her shill on the Internet.

Eventually it'll be a php page (if I can teach myself php in due time), so you may have to adjust the url. If that's all voodoo to you then view it as a warning that one day Internet squirrels will hustle that page off into the ether. I certainly won't remember to update that link you just ignored (PSYCH! I took it down already!).

Anyway, long post short, I'm back to mucking about with CSS and other web technologies. I'm only about a year and a half out of date, but it's been quite a year and a half. I'm most impressed by CSS3's exciting transparency and the fancy rounded corners I made using someone else's idea in CSS. Good fun if you're an enormous geek who's staying home on a Friday night to make a web-page for his mum.

Oh crackers!

In more interesting news, I saw this on BoingBoing.net and it's hilarious. Have a look: