Decrepit Old Fool

I’m quite certain that neither the cop or the professor were at their best that night.  Both of them should have shut right up while the shutting was good.  But in a weird twist of fate, the president went and shot his mouth off too, and the three of them wound up having a beer together.  I’m guessing it went something like this but was probably covered up by the liberal media.

Anyway, remember the campaign of 2004?  When John Kerry was an windsurfing, wine-drinking effete elitist but George Bush was a regular flightsuit-wearing guy you’d want to have a beer with?*

Mister “regular guy” spent more time on vacation than any president before him (I think he even beat Ronald Reagan’s record) and he sure didn’t just have a beer with a cop and a professor.  Which sounds like the setup for a punch line.

But the funny part?  It Barack Hussein Obama who actually did it, bitches.  Yeah.  He’s the one who did the “having a beer with” political theater.  No, I didn’t see it coming, either.  But I should have, since he once ran a community jobs-training program for out-of-work steelworkers.  So he’s probably had quite a few beers with quite a few guys.  He knows the grammar and the vocabulary.

One more thing: our new president is a really talented guy.  He was able to be born in The Republic Of Kenya before it was even a Republic.  Tricky!

NOTES:

• * (No, I don’t know why you’d want a “regular guy” for president either.  Seems like a job that calls for some pretty elite abilities.  Made all the more obvious by the regular guy’s record in office, which The Economist called “calamitous”. )

• Class, not race

Being intrigued by a song, and then learning it’s about something altogether different than what you thought, is a test of your adaptability.  Can you still enjoy the song, after you see it in the light of day?

Sunny Came Home (YouTube link, sorry no embedding) is such a song.  I’d only heard it on the car radio, and picked up these lyrics:

Sunny came home with a list of names,
She didn’t believe in transcendence
“It’s time for a few small repairs”, she said
Sunny came home with a vengeance…

OK, no matter how you slice it, that’s pretty mysterious and cool.  So yesterday I looked up the lyrics and as is often the case, still didn’t understand the song.  But gradually it dawned on me – Sunny is setting fire to the home and there’s some weird stuff going on in her head while she’s at it:

Get the kids and bring a sweater
Dry is good and wind is better
Count the years, you always knew it
Strike a match, go on and do it…

Whoo!  I’m not sure what I thought the song was about before – it sounded so upbeat.  Determination or something.  And it kind of is, but in an outré direction.  Of course the music video is weirder than it has to be.  Must be an occupational disease of music video directors or something.

Song isn’t what I wanted it to be, but it’s otherwise too nifty to discard it.  Have to like it for what it is, I guess.

If you haven’t heard of Anthony Watts, he’s a TV weatherman who thinks he’s refuted climate statistics.  He’s a big favorite at the Heritage Foundation (you remember them from tobacco denial) and his shtick now is that some weather reporting stations are in urban areas where they get hot. He’s been on Glen Beck’s show, and rebel climatologist Roger Pielke has used his findings.  Two important questions are: how much difference would that make in climate statistics, and what other indicators tell us that the climate is changing? 

The section where the video talks about the Heartland institute seems off-topic, unless you know what a mendacious and mercenary organization they really are.  The most interesting stuff is at the end where NOAA answers Watts’ charges.  Of course he tried to have this video removed from YouTube, instead of just coming up with a substantive answer. 

NOTES:

• Here’s NOAA’s response to Watts (pdf)

• Video h/t Pharyngula, where there is a lengthy discussion of this video
• Courtesy Deltoid, the Rules For Climate Denial are just out.

Just pointed out to the clerk at my favorite coffee house that their website URL is misspelled on their new employee recruitment poster, which instructs them to go to said URL.  Much amusement on both sides of the counter, though perhaps the business owner who paid to print the posters won’t be quite so entertained.  It’s hard to see the difference between the two letters on screen, but easy in print.

That’s the beauty of working on the web.  If I misspell something, I just drop back into the page and fix it.  Misspelling?  What mispelling?  “Wvhat are you talkingk about?”

But that’s also the danger of working on the web.  Too easy to pretend you never made a mistake in the first place, and a lot more corporate, media, and government information is web-only now.

Social networking sites are tremendously effective ways of systematizing interaction among people of similar interests.  My son found a specifically good implementation in Google Reader, too:

Google Reader introduced a new feature a few days ago, where you could publicly “like” a post, and anyone can then follow your feed of shared items if they want to.  I’ve now got people from all over the world following my feed, and I’m following people from all over the world too.  I think it’s the bee’s knees.  Some of the people I’m following include:
CS students from: China, England, Massachusetts
Mathematicians from: Russia, Texas
Programmers from: Brazil, India, Oregon

That’s actually very cool and useful.  But it adds another decision layer in my usual practice of overthinking even trivial problems.  I follow quite a few interesting people on Google Reader.  Usually I “like” items they share, and in some cases I re-share them myself with the original person’s comments intact.  I would hope one could deduce likeatude from that chain of events.  And even items that I don’t share, I generally find interesting, which is a form of liking.

But doesn’t affixing the digital label that I “liked” an item suggest (since the label is either switched on or off) that I disliked other items in the stream?  Plus, what does it mean to “Like” a story?  Suppose I read a story about some idiot Senator who thinks that science is a liberal conspiracy, what exactly am I “Liking”?  Because I certainly am not fond of having idiots in the Senate.  But I like that somebody is reporting about it.  Can’t we have finer distinctions?

Then there’s “Friending” on Facebook.  A friend of mine – an actual friend with whom I have interacted and collaborated on stuff – talked me into getting a Facebook account, which I’ve visited like, three times.  But I have dozens of “Friend requests” sitting in the queue.  Facebook seriously needs to start using different relational words, like “Acquaintance”, “Contemporary”, or “Well-wisher, in that I don’t wish you any specific harm.”

OK, I admit it – the whole post was just a ruse to quote Moe Sizlak from The Simpsons, describing his relationship to Homer.  Because sometimes I feel like Homer out there in the sand trap.  And I will start using the “Like” feature because it is a novel and useful way of finding people with similar interests.  Now if I could just figure out what Facebook is really for.

Crap, is it OK to admit to not liking Facebook?  Will that get me in trouble with Homeland Security?