Octopodial Chrome

I have just had an excellent wine: Velletri, from Italy. Vinted in 1994 (yup, folks: it’ a decade old), it is wonderful. I can best describe the aroma as like unto honeycomb, with that spicy sweetness common to the best honeys (and wines—this is no coincidence). Amazing stuff. It makes me wish that I’d picked up more when it was available.

Unfortunately, the supply of pre-twenty-first-century wines is steadily diminishing. Someday my (thus far theoretical and improbable) children will find a bottle of 19xx just as strange and exotic as I would a bottle of 18xx.

I just finished watching L’ Anglaise et le duc (The Lady & the Duke) by Eric Rohmer (a Frenchman, by law at least—with a name like that he’s no Gaul), a film about an Englishwoman in revolutionary France. It occurred to me whilst watching it that among the greatest of sins must be regicide: it is simultaneously an offence against a man (the king whom who has slain); against the State (for without a king there can be no State) and against God (who has, as St. Paul writes, placed over us our rulers). I do not think that any punishment is sufficient for those who commit the sin of regicide.

Interesting, too, how those who would strive against the Divine Order always seem to sink into worse. The revolutionary French ended up with the Reign of Terror, with the deaths of women and children; the revolutionary Russians slew women, children, priests & monks indiscriminately; the revolutionary Germans ended up with the Nazi reign of terror and genocide and the aforementioned atrocities; the revolutionary Chinese ended up with cannibalism and all the rest. Is it any wonder that revolutionaries are revolting?

For months now I’ve been arguing that we should not create gay marriage, but rather eliminate civil marriage entirely. Larry Elder agrees with me. As he writes, leave marriage to non-governmental institutions, like churches, synagogues, mosques, and other houses of worship or private institutions.

Some time ago I devised arms for the head of my family (contrary to popular belief, arms belong to a person not a family), blazoned thus:

Azure, a chief and an owl or, in chief three crosses crosslet countercharged

The blue & gold are for the US Navy of my grandfather, father & brother; the owl is for my last name, which means owl in an old dialect of German; the crosses are for the Church which my father serves (there are three because it balances better; period arms often arrange things in threes).

It might be emblazoned thus:

While my father is alive, I would adapt my arms with a label in chief, which is a cadence mark representing the fact that I am the heir; my other brothers could do similar things indicating their precedence. It might look like this:

Upon my father’s death, I would assume his arms. I’m not quite certain what my brothers would do, as the cadence-marks would then be in use by my sons (had I any). I suppose that they’d have to modify the arms in some degree for use on their own.

A thought which occurred to me, whilst meditating on the differences between the older interactive fiction and modern first-person shooters: the command line is a relic of a time when men spoke to their computers; the modern graphical user interface is a matter of point-and-grunt. Certainly, point-and-grunt is the lowest-common-denominator of human interaction—but it’s thus the lowest. The command line enables one to take advantage of millennia of human experience with speech, literature, grammar, rhetoric and the rest; the GUI is a reversion to the days of cave men and cave paintings. Think about it.

I’ve just finished reading-playing Photopia, a truly brilliant work of interactive fiction. It literally brought tears to my eyes the first time I played-read it.

For those who’ve not heard of it, interactive fiction is something which grew up out of the old text-based adventure games of the 70s & 80s. It’s long since outgrown those roots, though. While there are those which are still puzzle-based, hair-uprooting, goofy games, there are also those which are much more like interactive novels in which the reader-player participates with the author.

Photopia is actually much more like a traditional story. There are a few easy puzzles, but really it’s a story told by the author and experienced by the player-reader. What is unique about it is that it would be impossible in any other medium. It could not be a short story on paper—not without losing its emotional punch. It could not be a visual game. It is what it is: a work of fiction which is interactive. Download a Z-code interpreter and check it out. It will blow you away.

I worked 12½ hours on Wednesday and 17 yesterday, not getting home until 0200 this morning. Then I went on to put in a more-than-full day today. Truly, work is the punishment for one’s sins written of in Genesis. It beats the alternative, I suppose.

I cannot tell if the Shrove Tuesday Pancake Procession is a hoax or truth. On the one hand, it’s utterly mad. OTOH, I can just see a bunch of Episcopalians and Unitarians eating pancakes and scattering flower petals. The bit which rings false is that they’d bother, since to my knowledge neither preserves the fasts of Great Lent.

Joel C. Rosenberg has an excellent article on a loathsomely anti-Jewish film produced by Syria. Completely revolting.

We men of St. Mark’s Schola Cantorum chanted at church services for the first time this evening. I believe that we were pretty good, and were well-received.

There was an absolutely stunning young lady there, but she left before I could talk to her. I do hope to see her again.

The New York Times, of all places, has an article about the Soviet Gulag. In the city of Norilsk bones still rise to the surface.

I was awakened early this morn by the call of duty, and thus I rushed into work unshaven & unbathed. This afternoon we’d a luncheon with our customer and of course I was stuck at the table with both the CIO and the CFO, as well as the IBM project executive. Murphy rules all, that’s for sure.

The theme from A Summer Place—popularised by Animal House, IIRC—can be incredibly and amazingly romantic. My heart yearns for the day in which it may be profitably employed in my favour. A pleasanter piece of music it is hard to imagine.

Johnny Cash (God rest his soul) once described his musical taste as:

I love songs about horses, railroads, land, judgement day, family, hard times, whiskey, courtship, marriage, adultery, separation, murder, war, prison, rambling, damnation, home, salvation, death, pride, humour, piety, rebellion, patriotism, larceny, determination, tragedy, rowdiness, heartbreak and love. And mother. And God.

Hard to argue with that, eh wot?

Whether or not Gibson’s Passion turns out to be worthwhile (I hope so while at the same time I fear not), one thing I do respect is that he seems to have done his utmost to get the imprimatur of various Catholic hierarchs. While I’m certainly no Catholic, I must respect a man who tries to respect his church & faith, rather than mindlessly opposing it.

A side-effect of the film which I hope will take hold is a renewed public acceptability for being unapologetic about one’s faith. The fact is, we all believe something or other, and our actions reflect our beliefs; this theory that only traditional Christians should have to censor themselves is just so much nonsense. We’ve just as much right to hold and speak our opinions as a relativist or Hindu. Mel Gibson has been quite frank that his film reflects his beliefs; right or wrong though they may be, the fact that he has been so forthright should give us all cause to hope that someday it may be acceptable to proclaim to the world I believe in one God, the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven & earth…

The Democratic primaries are not yet over, and it is still possible for John Edwards (the multi-millionaire trial lawyer unbeholden to special interests who feels the pain of the poor) to win. This would be an utter disaster: he’s a much better candidate against Bush than Kerry could be. He’s a Southerner (most presidents in the last 40 years have been sons of the South); he can speak, well; he’s young-looking; and I believe that he may even believe his own bullshit.

Obviously the election of a Democrat would be an utter disaster for our ailing economy (worse, even, than the election of a Republican); it therefor behooves those of us who don’t wish to wither away in a socialist quagmire that the party of bad economics put up the worst possible candidate. Kerry is a good candidate from our perspective: Yankee liberal; turncoat; boring. With luck, Bush would clean his clock. Edwards would be bad

Sure, Kerry is the anointed candidate right now—but Howard Dean was the anointed at one point, and now he’s weeping into his wheat grass drink back home in Vermont. The danger’s not past.

A study has found that religious men are much less likely to cohabit before marriage, but that religious women are just as likely as their secular sisters to do so. Off disparity, that. Perhaps men feel more in control of relationships, and so a religious man can put the brakes on, but a woman cannot.

Other interesting statistics: cohabitation leads to depression; women in such households are 60% more likely to be abused; cohabitation increased the odds of divorce by 50%; after a decade, only 15% of couples are married.

Just Don’t Do It; It’s a Bad Idea.

I just saw Master & Commander: The Far Side of the Ocean. What a superbly wonderful film! Masterfully done in every respect (that I can tell—no doubt an expert on the period has a myriad nits to pick). An utterly gripping tale of masculine courage in the face of danger.

What I like best is that there was no Hollywoodisation (well, save for making Acheron a French ship; she’s actually American): no disrespectful kids; no modernisms (again, that I could tell); no made-up romances (the only woman in the film has perhaps a half-dozen seconds and is yards away from the captain): no stupidity, just sheer adventure.

If there’s any justice in the world, this film will give many cause to re-evaluate their views on the military, on courage and on duty. Doubtful, of course.

Terry Mattingly has a very interesting column about Jewish accounts of Christ. A passage in the Talmud—excised in the 16th century for fear of persecution—refers to the execution of Christ. A letter by the Jewish philosopher Maimonides declares that Jesus was executed for his interpretation of the Torah. Significantly, his letter also gives the lie to those who try to believe that a true Christian must live by the Jewish law which Jesus Christ fulfilled (so, too, Paul’s letters and Acts, but some folks take a lot of convincing…).

I’ve been investing in IBM’s Employee Stock Purchase Plan since I graduated college and started work—nearly four years. Well, as of Friday’s close of the NYSE I’ve enough set aside to live for over eight months. Not too shabby; it’s nice to have a safety net.

When we Uhls moved out to Denver, we came in stages: first my father, then some time later myself (to start school at DU), then later still my mother & brothers. When it was just Dad & I rented rooms, we had a weekly ritual, no doubt originating in his past career as a naval officer: we would clean the entire place from top to bottom every Saturday. Windows, mirrors, toilets, sinks, tub, oven, microwave, carpets—everything was cleaned.

It was a huge hassle. OTOH, now that I own my condo, I’m beginning to think that perhaps the old man wasn’t completely buts. I’m actually trying to do the same myself—it seems the only way to stay on top of housecleaning. And so each Saturday, if I remember, I clean the place.

Neil Cavuto points out a little-heeded but fundamental point in tax-cut discussions: it’s your dollar which is being divvied up. How much of what you earn do you deserve to keep?

I’m watching Prelude to a Kiss (so far, not all that great, actually) and it has Meg Ryan with long, slightly curly hair. She’s always been held up as an example of a woman who looks better with short hair than long. Well, let me tell you, those who claim that are idiots. Or they’ve not seen her with long hair.

Of course, I cannot vouch for her appearance these days (in fact in Kate & Leopold she bore an uncanny resemblance to a hag). But back in ’92…

Today, the cutest woman at work, the gal all the happily married guys groan over because she’s highly attractive, the gal all us single guys groan over because she’s highly married, says out of the blue, unprompted and without reason, that she loves my hair down, and that it looks good.

It’s amazing how a kind word from a girl can brighten one’s day.

Li Zhensheng has just authored Red-Colour News Soldier, a collection of photographs from the Cultural Revolution, one of the least-written-about atrocities of our modern era.

Col. Willian Campenni has written a long letter defending his one-time squadron mate, George Bush. Vital reading for all those who accuse the man of dereliction.

Jed Babbin reports that Bush is and was well-liked by those who served with him, and that he was considered extremely intelligent.

The @ symbol, to be known as commat, has been added to Morse code—the first such addition in decades.

Just finished watching First Knight. What a waste of time; what an absolutely horrid movie. It went beyond bad; it went beyond terribly bad; it went beyond embarrassingly bad; it plumbed depths of badness hitherto unplumbed by man. One doesn’t even know where to start, it was so utterly atrocious.

It had horse standing to receive a charge…of foot. It had men wearing no more than breastplates in battle; it had men not even wearing that, but a sort of bastardised shoulders-only brigantine.

It was theoretically an Arthurian film. And yet, for no reason whatsoever, they replaced Mordred with a Maligant. Why? What could they have been thinking? I’m no scholar, but ISTR that Lancelot was a noblemen, not a hire-sword. What were they thinking?

Those who made this filmed atrocity could not have been proud of what they were about. The costumes sucked beyond belief: I have seen folks at their first event with better. The weapons sucked: swords & maces large enough to need their own zip codes! The armour sucked: vambraces that were mere cylinders; supposed knights removing their helms in the midst of battle, the better to show off their faces! The dialogue sucked. The entire production was a vacuum powerful enough to envelop even the recently discover star-devouring black hole. There’s no way that anyone involved with this soul-eating thing could have enjoyed or been proud of himself. They must all have been humiliated even to be within a mile of the misery.

It’s truly sad. It beggars belief that such an abomination could have ever seen the light of day. As Marlon Brando once said, the horror, the horror.

Recently I’ve been reading the works of the Underground Grammarian, Richard Mitchell. Brilliant stuff, absolutely chock-full of interesting bits. Although he’s ostensibly writing about grammar, what he’s really writing about is philosophy, correctness, self-discipline, socialism, education and the intelligent way to approach the world; grammar is a device intended to illustrate the workings of the sloppy mind. Wonderfully thought-provoking, and absolutely right in almost all of his points.

I’m not certain that one can be well-read without having read this stuff.

So I took a test designed to detect the types of gals to which I am attracted; figured it’d be a hoot. The results confirm what I have long known: I’ve high standards and excellent, albeit somewhat unusual, taste. As a friend noted a long time ago, it’s quite a compliment if I find a girl pretty.

So I find attractive women to be attractive, and don’t care to settle. Big surprise there…

My poor brother Thomas (who has informed me in no uncertain terms that while his co-workers, colleagues, friends and fiancée may call him Tom, I mayn’t—implications left to the reader) recently expressed a hope that perhaps he & his fiancée will see one another once more before they marry. Not only that, but they’ll not be living in the same house, or the same town, or county, or state, or even on the same side of the continent, for a year and half or so after they marry, due to the needs of the service.

I don’t believe that most folks properly appreciate the sacrifices those in our armed forces make. They upend their lives and the normal order of things in order to serve our nation; they deserve our heartiest and sincerest thanks.

I’ve recently rediscovered crossfire, the game responsible for so many of my bad grades back it high school. Man was it fun! As the website states, it’s an open source, cooperative multiplayer graphical RPG and adventure game. Highly addictive, that’s for sure.

Guys, I have news of a new threat to our well-being and peace of mind: an organisation called Locks of Love. These folks are a powerful weapon for ill in the age-old struggle against short hair on women. As every guy knows, girls look better—lots better, amazingly better—with long hair. There are maybe a half-dozen in this country who look alright with short hair (although they look decidedly better with long), and there are possibly one or two in all of recorded history who looked better with short.

As we know, for some unknown reason, women are constantly wanting to shorten their tresses. It makes no sense, of course—if someone said to a guy that by never shaving he could increase his sex appeal a thousandfold, his razor would go into the trash approx. 0.003 seconds later—but there it is; just another of the many things about the fair sex which one cannot fathom.

For a long time, we’ve had a kind of truce: women use their hair as a kind of bait, and discard it after it has served its purpose. Look at wedding pictures, and then tenth anniversary pictures for evidence: one will invariably see long tresses in the former, and just as invariably shorn locks in the latter (in fairness, one might also note that the groom’s waistline is rather smaller than the husband’s). But at least a guy has a brief time of happiness before it is snatched away by the stylist’s scissors.

Has anyone ever considered the oxymoronic character of the title stylist? Here is a class of person whose sole job is the defacing of that which is beautiful: of putting lovely locks into a stern French braid; of slicing tantalising tresses off at the roots; of perming heavenly hair into an hellish horror. As children, I imagine young stylists must have cast stones at stained-glass windows and set fire to Christmas trees.

Well, these Locks of Love folks have introduced an atom bomb into the conflict. Their scheme is that one can donate one’s hair to children who have undergone chemotherapy or otherwise lost their own. How can one fight that? No matter how winning, how clever, how right one’s own arguments, one comes across like some monster who hates children.

The appeal of this is insidious. I spoke to a couple at a bar a few months back who were on their honeymoon: she had just donated her hitherto long hair. She looked ridiculous, but how could her poor husband say a thing (incidentally, I have never known a husband or boyfriend who—when his wife or girlfriend was absent—would not admit to greatly preferring her pre-cut look; this unfortunate confided as much when she was in the WC)? I’ve heard a few girls at church speaking about it, and they’re not even married. I have a nasty feeling that as this craze takes hold, soon only the residents of pædiatric cancer wards will have a full head of hair. It will be a miserable time, something like the Dark Ages or Depression, only worse.

The only solution is to bend the scientific might of Western civilisation to the problem: we must come up with a synthetic hair substitute which is as good as the real thing, and very, very cheap. This will put these shear-proponents out of business, and return things to the status quo.

Which isn’t all that good, remember, but at least is something. It’s cruel to shave any more time from those few short years of happiness one has before the barber is allowed to wreak his wreckage.

It’s common knowledge that Texas leads the nation in the death penalty and that blacks are over-represented on death row. Common knowledge about the death penalty is wrong. Texas is actually below average in its application of the death penalty; it more murders than any state but California, and hence a higher number of capital convictions, and it is far more likely to actually execute those who are convicted (in much of the country, death row is just another term for life).

Blacks are proportionally under-represented on death row: they commit 51½% of murders but make up only 42% of those awaiting execution. I should note that so many murders being committed by blacks has nothing to do with race and everything to do with class: the underclass in every society is violent and murderous. So loony-tune white supremacists can take a leap.

So I get a note from MovieLens ( site on which one rates movies in order to get suggestions for movies one might enjoy. They wrote that I am someone with fairly unusual tastes (that’s verbatim). Sheesh.

CNN has an article on Bertolucci’s Dreamers which spends a good deal of time espousing feminist theories that female nudity is common in movies, and male nudity uncommon, because men run the industry, or because movies are made for an assumedly male audience, or because male actors don’t wish to be ogled by homosexuals.

The obvious answer, of course, is that the female form is objectively more attractive than the male. A woman’s body is composed of aesthetically and mathematically pleasing curves—especially so in the case of those considered to be beautiful. A man’s, of course, is not. An alien who had never seen mankind before, but had an appreciation for line, symmetry and math would appreciate the art of the female nude; he would have no time for a male nude. Likewise, men and women can equally appreciate the non-salacious aspects of the female form, and can agree that there’s nothing non-salacious to appreciate about the male.

This is just another example of how feminists are stuck in an oppressed mode of thinking: they are, quite literally, obsessed with men to the point of blaming us for everything up to and including sunspots.

On another note, one of the folks mentioned in the article wonders whether there really is more female nudity than male. There are an awful lot of topless scenes for both men and women—it’s just that in America we find one acceptable and the other not. There are probably more shots from behind of women than men, but that’s easily explained by my hypothesis above. The number of shots including the nether parts is thankfully low even in modern cinema, and I imagine that it’s pretty equal across the sexes.

The South Koreans recently announced that they had created—and destroyed—30 human beings in a process euphemistically dubbed therapeutic cloning. A human being is cloned, allowed to grow for a short length of time, then killed for his cells, which are then used to heal someone else or conduct scientific research.

I try to avoid Nazi comparisons, as they usually blur the subject, but in this case the parallel is exact: this process is exactly as therapeutic as killing Jews to render them into soap was hygienic, or to use their skins as lampshades was decorative—or for that matter as using them in medical experiments was therapeutic. It is grotesque in the extreme; it is a crime against humanity; it is mass-murder. It is morally indistinguishable from the evil-doing of Mengele.

Kill thirty infants, and one is rightly derided as an homicidal maniac, a loathsome excrescence fit only to be executed as soon as possible; kill them before they’re born, and one’s a medical hero?

A group deceptively named the Physicans’ Committee for Responsible Medicine (they’re actually a bunch of vegetarians) purloined a copy of the coroner’s report on Doctor Robert Atkins, and revealed that he weighed 258 lbs. when he died. What they didn’t reveal was that he entered the hospital weighing 195 lbs; the liquid diet he was on (due to a coma) can greatly increase one’s weight (I assume because of fluid retention). Neil Cavuto has more to say on the matter.

It’s Washington’s Birthday (observed).

How can one oppose school vouchers? As long as we’re going to have a socialist education system in this nation, we might as well do our best to make it as free-market as possible. School vouchers help foster competition among school (something sadly lacking in today’s public schools, which get more money per student as students leave for better, private schools). Additionally, they let parents determine what they wish their children to hear & learn, getting the State out of that business. This can only be a Good Thing (imagine, no more evolution, drug or sex-ed controversies!).

A little over a month ago, several of us men at St. Mark’s formed the Schola Cantorum, a group dedicated to studying Gregorian plainchant in order to one day be able to properly chant the Divine Liturgy in its Western form.

Each week we get a little bit better; each week we try to add something a bit more complex to our repertory. It’s a fair slog, but worth it.

Plainchant is a very simple way of singing which anyone—given time—can learn. Our website has numerous bits of sheet-music which illustrate the square-note system. It’s much easier to follow than the modern scheme, and quite adequately expresses what needs to be expressed for singing.

The whole process is actually quite a lot of fun. Our Attende Domine has gotten to the point that I don’t mind singing it on my own.

Last night I hit downtown Denver on the off-chance that I might run into some pretty girl sans boyfriend (hey, a guy’s gotta keep trying). Anyway, I discovered The Blue Mule, a pretty decent bar which has live music just about every night. The opener was Arthur Lee Land, who has an interesting conceit.

Although he’s a solo musician, instead of using a pre-recorded backing track he creates one live using a so-called live loop: he'll record a drum beat, then record a bit more percussion, then lay down a few bass riffs, then perhaps even do some backup singing, then start singing & playing his guitar. Quite fascinating display, really.

I saw this recently:

It’s easier to pick on little old ladies wearing furs than burly bikers wearing leathers.

I love the mental image of a PETA freak assaulting—and then being assaulted by—a biker.

The city of Colorado Springs recently considered a measure which would have allowed city employees to pay for health coverage for a single adult dependent. This dependent could have been a retarded child, a parent living with one—or a lover (heterosexual or homosexual; it made no difference). Focus on the Family and its allies promptly assailed the measure. I don’t get it: it was a completely non-discriminatory measure; anyone could have taken advantage of it; the coverage had to be paid for; and last but not least, it was not evidence of any approval on the part of the City of anyone’s living arrangements, but simply a proposal that city workers be allowed an adult dependent.

But they had to go and mobilise over something so mild anyway. This is the sort of thing that gives us traditional Christians a bad name.

Once again it’s National Mock Singles Day, that wonderful time of year when the radio blares ads about how to show one’s love for the girl who loves one, when happy couples go about in broad daylight holding hands, kissing and laughing together, when the entire universe conspires to mock bachelor-loneliness.

Has anyone noticed that the initials of Valentine’s Day are VD? Just asking.

Who came up with the idea anyway? Surely if one loves another one would show it every day: why should one have to make a big production just because some merchants decided that it’d be fun to watch one spend money? The commercial interests are shouting Dance, dance! and all the non-single guys are dancing away. What’s next, I wonder? Toothbrushing Day, when one should make certain to brush one’s teeth, I suppose.

The idiocy of the idea aside, it’s clearly rude to have a day dedicated to couples when there are so many who are not encoupled. We don’t force a National How Great It is to Leave the Seat Up Day, or a National Isn’t Nice to Spend One’s Money on Oneself Day—why then do all the couples feel obligated to have a National We’s Not Lonely Day? Selfish gits.

Not that I’m bitter or anything…

I don’t always agree with Miss Coulter, but she ably points out that nothing will satisfy Democrats regarding Bush’s service: every time he’s shown to have served by the rules, they demand further investigation. It’s like Mormons trying to prove the aborigines were Jewish refugees: no amount of proof satisfies them that they are wrong.

She also points out how the Democrats have let the public believe that one of their politicians was a war hero, losing three limbs in battle. The truth is that, in a non-combat area, he accidentally set off a grenade. And yet he feels qualified to judge George Bush.

Florence King, funny as ever, writes about the saved man who is a burden to all.

fortune spat this out today:

My Bonnie looked into a gas tank,
The height of its contents to see!
She lit a small match to assist her,
Oh, bring back my Bonnie to me.

Enjoy!

After reading Jason Sheehan’s review, I felt that I simply had to try Sherpa’s Adventure Restaurant. The Nepalese food is something like Indian, but…different. Very tasty, and well worth eating. I recommend it to any who live in Boulder; it’s even worth driving in from Denver to try. Fine service, nice folks and good food.

Yesterday I gave my brother hell about quoting Elton John; today, though, I’ll admit that he has a point: music can be quite powerfully emotional.

My brother has quoted Elton John. I’m afraid that I must now disown him, as he is provably unfit for human company.

Doc Searls and David Weinberger have written a great document called A World of Ends, explaining why the Internet is what it is, and why we seem to keep on making the same mistakes about it.

If one looks at it, the fashionable ideal changes in a cyclical pattern. In the ’70s, it was fashionable for men to have long hair and beards; in the ’80s it was the little-boy look all the way; in the early ’90s it was back to a masculine image. Now we’re in the middle of another little-boy trend (clean-shaven, very short hair, trying desperately to look about six years old), but eventually the tide will change.

And I’ll be there ready for it! While the schmucks are waiting three years for their hair to grow, and trying to figure out how to have a neatly trimmed beard, I’ll be nicely positioned to wow all the gals with my leet skillz.

That’s my plan, anyway. Now, all I have to do is wait for fashion to turn…

I am getting sick and tired of seeing mysql_connect() errors when using websites. Why can these people not be using a real database like Postgresql? What is wrong with them? Don’t they know that their sites are nearly unusable? Don’t the know how unprofessional it looks? Don’t they know how easy it is to use a superior alternative?

As Bruce Barlett ably points out, to be in favour of the free market does not mean to be pro-business. Too many liberals and conservatives forget that. It also means not to be anti-business, I would add.

There’s been an awful lot of hullabaloo about Janet Jackson revealing part of her breast for a second or two at the Superbowl half-time show. What interests me is not that, but the minutes upon minutes of lascivious dancing—freaking, I am told it is called—which preceded and followed it. Somehow it is alright to prance about nearly naked, revealing thighs, arms, throat, cleavage &c., but is not OK to reveal a breast. It is perfectly fine to writhe in simulated sex, enacting scenes of lust & perversion, but flash a bit of skin and that’s a problem.

The issue is not nudity or the female form, but rather the sexualisation thereof—and worse, the lecherisation thereof. The issue is that as a society we do not seem to care about the cheapening of what should be a very dear thing: the relationship between a man and a woman. Compared to decades of that, a second or two of an old woman’s chest is no big deal.

Remember Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles? Remember Madballs? Remember Garbage Pail Kids? Then you’ll love X-Entertainment, a site dedicated to all that grand old stuff.

I never knew there was a GI Joe train set…

Oh, the pain! Oh, the agony! Oh, the misery of it all!

As is my wont once a month, today I purchased a homebrew kit for a German alt. I brewed the wort, and then I discover: the clerk neglected to include the yeast! So now I have enough wort for five gallons of beer, and cannot ferment it. And no homebrew shop is open until Tuesday, so my wort is almost certain to rot before I can add yeast.

I hate life.

Those bastards at the Denver Newspaper Agency have done it again. Not content with the first two-month subscription they sent me in October (which I loathed and hated), they’ve started another one, this time to the Denver Post. This morning I woke up to find their damned sheet blocking my door as I left for church.

I have just burnt the accurséd thing whole, unopened and unread.

According to this article in Time, an accused terrorist is said to have spent three months learning how to encrypt email. Three months?!? This is the sort of thing that an intelligent man can learn in a few hours, and even the average should have no trouble after a few days. These are the people who are hurting us—people so stupid as to need a quarter of a year to learn how to encrypt their emails? This is embarrassing.

OTOH, it does point out how utterly stupid they are, which leads one to suspect that their views are as ill-informed as one would expect.

Three months?!?

Ohio recently passed a ban on homosexual marriage; the Massachusetts Supreme Court recently demanded that its legislature pass laws creating homosexual marriage. What is the proper attitude to take?

First of all, one should consider what marriage is. Is it a state of being? Is it a legal condition? Or is it a sacrament? It seems to me that it is, first and foremost, a sacrament: a religious ceremony & condition. On that basis, the State should have no say in it. Why should one be forced by the law to get permission to marry (which is exactly what a marriage license is)? If the canons of a church permit a couple to be married, how can the State interfere? It seems pretty obvious that to do so is preventing the free exercise [of religion].

What interest does the State have in marriage? Well, (heterosexual) relationships produce children, and the well-being of children is a legitimate State interest. As people are the lifeblood of the State (they pay its taxes, fight its wars, run its economy and serve in public office), it is appropriate for the State to encourage population growth. That’s about it.

What interest do homosexuals have in marriage? Since it is a private thing, surely if two people consider themselves married, then they are married so far as they are concerned (although others may or may not recognise it, in exactly the same fashion that an Asatru does not recognise the ordination of a Baptist, but a Presbyterian might). But legally recognised marriage does confer certain benefits which privately recognised marriage does not: many forms of insurance cover one’s spouse as well as oneself; hospitals confer visitation rights to spouses and allow them to deny the same to others; there are tax benefits to being married; there are also inheritance benefits. Lastly, many homosexuals want not just tolerance but acceptance, and see the legalisation of homosexual marriage to be the means to that end. Let’s examine each of these claims in detail.

As for insurance—surely it coverage should be a negotiable thing between the company & the customer. If the customer wishes to pay an additional premium to cover a spouse, a lover, children, parent, relative, pet or indeed anyone else on Earth, why not allow him? Indeed, it seems unfair to state that one may add one’s spouse or domestic partner (an unattractive phrase, that), but not one’s best friend. No legislation is needed to allow this: any insurance company would be glad to get the additional premium.

What about visitation rights? This is a troublesome subject: these rights default to the person legally considered one’s next-of-kin. There have been, apparently, cases in which a homosexual’s parents, having an enmity towards that person’s sexual partner, have denied said partner the ability to visit the invalid. Whatever one’s opinion of homosexuality, if one is honest one must admit that this is quite unfair to both parties. Like it or not, they have a strong affection for one another, and the visit should be allowed. Could not legislation be passed, perhaps providing for a means of registering one’s next-of-kin, or perhaps going so far as to state that immediate family and sexual partners (of whatever gender or orientation) have visitation rights? Personally, I think that tying such rights to sex is silly, but ours is a sex-obsessed society, so perhaps that is the version that would fly. But then, there’s the issue of good friends being denied access. All in all, some way of registering one’s preferences before falling ill seems to me the best way to go. But no form of marriage or civil union is necessary.

Marriage confers certain tax benefits, it’s true, and homosexuals would like access to those same benefits. But after consideration this doesn’t make sense. The only proper basis for such benefits is two-fold: first, to ensure that parents can provide for their children; second, to encourage couple to produce children. Indeed, given that a couple living together already enjoy certain monetary benefits (two can live nearly as cheaply as one and often have twice the income), it would appear that neither homosexuals nor married heterosexuals (at least those with two incomes) need or deserve any tax benefit. Instead, eliminate the benefit to married couple; grant a tax benefit for all dependents (e.g. children & non-working spouses, lovers, roommates, live-in parents friends &c.), in recognition of the fact that heading a household generates a certain economic burden; and grant an additional benefit for children, the encouragement & welfare of which is a legitimate State interest, as above. No form of marriage or civil union is necessary in this case.

As for inheritance, that is what wills for. It’s difficult to summon up much sympathy for those who die intestate when their wishes differ from the default provisions of their local law. OTOH, surely it would not hurt to alter the law such that those who are one’s dependents—even if working—have some kind of claim on one’s estate? Once again, no form of marriage or civil union is needed here, either.

What about the desire of homosexuals to have their sexuality accepted? That seems to me something which no-one can command. While society must tolerate homosexuals, it need not accept them. If I wish to walk about with a stuffed duck as a hat, it would be wrong for the State to stop me—but it would be wrong for me to demand that the State laud me. For that matter, the State should not accept marriage, either: it is a religious matter, and the State should not be involved in religion. Those laws which create and regulate the legal condition of marriage should be abolished. If a Muhammedan wishes to have his four wives, that’s their business: the State should neither recognise nor accept it. If a homosexual wishes to consider himself married, the State should neither recognise nor accept it. If a heterosexual Christian wishes to be married in his church, the State should neither recognise nor accept it. The State has no legitimate interest in the affair. This is fair, and it is free. To create homosexual marriage would grant acceptance to something which should not be accepted by the State and may not be accepted by society. The existence of legal marriage grants acceptance to something which should not be accepted by the State, despite being accepted by the vast majority of society. The solution is to abolish the latter, not make matters worse by establishing the former.

As one can see, the problem is not one of homosexual marriage (an idea which I personally consider absurd: marriage is between a man and a woman as far as I’m concerned) but rather of the existence of legal marriage at all. It is something which is based deeply in the Christian idea of marriage (as opposed the Mohammedan or patriarchal Jewish idea, which allows polygyny, or the Tibetan, which allows polyandry), and hence is very much respecting an establishment of religion.

Now, I am very much in favour of marriage. It is a good and proper thing. But determination of what is good and proper is inherently moral, and moral decisions cannot be the realm of the State—else there will come a time when one’s own faith is discriminated against (see the old prohibitions against Catholics for an example). I believe that extramarital relations (which includes premarital relations, adultery and homosexual relations) are wrong. But those are my beliefs, and I have no more right to impose them on anyone else than a pagan has a right to force me to sacrifice to his gods.

I’ve been playing with Albatross, which looks like a pleasant little toolkit for creating web apps. It has a template system, which is good, and supports sessions, which is better yet, and appears to make switching from CGI to mod_python very simple. It looks to be a great improvement over Cheetah in the web domain (although one should note that Cheetah is a more general solution: it is designed to generate any text format, not just HTML/XML). I’m considering updating Tasting Notes to use it; I never completed the Cheetah-based version to allow logging-in and editing; I’ve had to add beers by hand in postgresql.

Although bachelorhood has its disadvantages (chief among them the soul-crushing loneliness), it also has several rather nice advantages. One’s money is one’s own to spend, as is one’s time. One eat what one likes, when one likes, as one likes—no strange unidentifiable health foods in a bachelor’s fridge! And one can make one’s bed as one likes. Why, at the moment mine has 4 cotton sheets, 2 flannel, 1 Mexican blanket, 1 US Army blanket, 1 quilt and two bath towels, due to the cold. A woman would more than likely just turn up the heat, raising one’s (already monumental) natural gas bill; but being a bachelor means that I do as I like.

There are other advantages. My car’s high-beams come on whenever I put on the left blinkers, unless I hold the light-stalk in a certain manner. I can put up with this, but if someone else regularly drove my car, I can imagine the celerity with which it would be fixed—at my expense, of course. No-one ever wakes me at 0200 wanting to shift furniture about the den, because it’s just intolerable for the couch to sit for another six hours where it has sat for the last six months. No-one nags me for not having hung my pictures or unpacked the boxes in the loft, despite living in the same place for nearly a year.

Of course, I’d trade the advantages of the single state for those of the married in something less than a heartbeat—but why not enjoy my present position thoroughly? Particularly since there’s no foreseeable change to it…

Like all great men (and more than a few not-so-great men), Ronald Reagan, trampler of Communism, smoked a pipe, as shown in this picture I pulled from CNN (used without permission—fair use and all that; image is a link to a larger version).

It’s his 93rd birthday today; he’s lived longer than any other US president.

In yet another example of good for thee but not for me, it turns out that the Democratic presidential candidates are each partial to gas-guzzlers—yet they’re quite happy to mandate increased fuel-economy standards for the rest of us.

I’ve just added the recipe for the perfect martini to my bachelor recipes. The secret is orange bitters…

Democrats are claiming that America is deeply divided as never before: Jonah Goldberg—ever reliable—tears their argument to shreds.

As the Honourable J.D. Hayworth point out, there was bipartisan agreement that Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. Clinton signed into law the Iraq Liberation Act, which made regime change US policy. Madeline Albright called Iraq the greatest security threat we face; Al Gore said, we know that [Saddam] has stored secret supplies of biological and chemical weapons throughout his country. Even as late as last October Clinton was insisting that he had been convinced that Iraq had had weapons of mass destruction.

I’ve recently developed a new type of hors d'oeuvre composed of brie, smoked salmon, capers and table water crackers. Damned good stuff.

In an odd story, a Dutch jeweller mailed out 200 diamonds and 3,600 cubic zirconia to his best 3,800 customers, asking people to come in and find out if they were real. Only 30 bothered to show up. I feel sorry for the guy:

It does hurt me that a lot of good diamonds are now lost for ever. I just wanted to do something nice for my clients. People don’t trust anyone these days.

A lesson not to assume that something’s too good to be true. Poor guy.

One hundred and forty-three years ago a Constitutional Committee met to draft a Constitution for the Confederate States of America, and a great experiment in federalism was born. One wonders how things would have gone if the South had not had the rather abominable institution of slavery, and hence the real issues of the war had been driven to the fore, and perhaps England or France would have entered the fray; or what would have happened had the Confederacy allowed her generals to take the war to the Yankees sooner.

Three hundred thousand Yankees is still in Southern dust,
We got three hundred thousand before they conquered us;
They died of Southern fever and Southern steel and shot,
I wish there was three million instead of what we got.

Oh well, it was a long time ago in a very different world.

Arms & Armor are the best smithy I know of (even though they cannot spell armour…). One of the things I really respect is how every item is based on a real piece, and is meant to be used: no fantasy crap or weak steels there.

I want nearly every weapon in their catalogue; in fact, for the first time I have sat down and determined exactly how much it would cost to purchase every item I want (weapons only, no armour; with scabbards where appropriate; without shipping): $21,236. You know, if I sold my IBM stock and took a loan against a bit of my 401(k), I could swing that. It would be nice. Someday they will be mine, someday. For now, I must content myself with the High Gothic Mace or German Flail which will soon be mine (I’ve yet to make up my mind…).