Octopodial Chrome

James Howard Kunstler writes about what an expensive-energy America will look like. He’s a bit more pessimistic than history might suggest is reasonable (in the past, we’ve always figured out a way to get cheap energy), but in this case it might actually be warranted: there are no promising cheap energy sources in development that I know of. The suburban-sprawl model just doesn’t have a future.

Mark Kleiman write with intelligent solutions to the drug problem. He is not in favour of ending all drug prohibition, nor in increasing punishment levels, but instead of modulating our response to the different drugs (including alcohol and tobacco) in turn. Although his programme is not mine, I would readily vote for his package, if given the chance—and if you are at all wise, you would too.

Back in March ’06, the New York Times wrote that beards are coming back into fashion. If these things start in New York and catch on slowly in the rest of the country, then I should become a sex symbol sometime this year. I want to note that I bear an uncanny resemblance to the Ralph Lauren model in the article. Ladies, this is your chance to get in on the ground floor of something grand. Please form an orderly queue to the right…

Today marks a decade since my Grandmom Uhl passed away. In March of ’96 I had gone down to Texas to visit two of my potential colleges (Southern Methodist University & Austin College), and she was doing well for herself, but IIRC got lost driving shortly after, and decided to head into a nursing home. By the time I started at AC that August she had already started to have difficulty speaking. I would try to visit her every few weeks after church, and very quickly she stopped being able to speak much at all. It was pretty awkward: I’d sit in her room at the home, talking at her rather than with her. I think that my Dad & his sister must have known that she was not long for this world, for a weekend or two before her death he flew down to Dallas so that they could make cemetery arrangements—but I don’t know if anyone expected the end to come so quickly. Possibly I wasn’t paying attention (18 year olds are hardly known for their attentiveness to others), or perhaps there was a certain amount of denial in effect.

I remember grandmom as a grand old lady, well-dressed and well-mannered. She was always very affectionate and kind to us grandchildren; I remember how when we’d visit her at her condo how she’d have tinkertoys and such on hand.

Her home always smelt of stale cigarette smoke (Benson & Hedges, or maybe Chesterfields), and when I was a little boy I always loved the smell of cigarettes for that reason (oddly enough, nowadays I dislike ’em), and when she’d visit us she have to stand out back next to the trash cans with an ashtray in her hand.

Her life was not a particularly easy one, with more than its fair share of heights and lows, but I’ve not heard it said that she complained much at all (she wouldn’t have complained to me, of course—see above how she was well-mannered).

I remember the evening when my mother called with the bad news. I was playing around on my computer, and the phone rang. Mom told me that grandmom had died, and that dad was about to start praying the memorial service. I went down to the campus pub (generally deserted at that hour), lit my favourite pipe (a beautiful Stanwell Hans Christian Andersen churchwarden much like this one) and smoked it quietly, thinking of all my happy memories. When my pipe was finished, I knocked it out and the stem softly split in two, which seemed somehow appropriate.

May her memory be eternal!

Rod Dreher (of Crunchy Cons fame and a recent convert to Orthodoxy from Roman Catholicism) has set up Stump the Priest, a blog for his pastor, Fr. Joseph Fester of St. Seraphim Cathedral in Dallas, Tx. Some good questions and answers.

Discovered Homeslyce today. They’re a shopping site with a twist: you pick a gift for a friend, then email your other friends. Everyone chips in, and if enough money is given, then the gift is shipped to the friend; if not, no-one pays a cent. Not a bad little idea, although I don’t know how their prices compare to just buying the item. A small uplift might be worth taking the hassle out of gift purchasing.

I found an article about eight folks who won millions in the lottery, only to lose it all. The big common denominators seem to be spending like morons, sinking money into stupid investments and giving money to friends & family. One woman gambled a lot, and claims she didn’t sink a million into the slots; given how much gamblers underestimate their losses, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if she gambled away well over a million dollars. Other folks went into businesses (like car dealerships or restaurants) instead of putting their money into low-risk investments. And many of them couldn’t say no to their friends and family.

The latter is particularly galling to me. If one has $1,000,000, one isn’t really rich: that’s enough money to make, every year, $50,000. Would you consider someone with an income of $50,000 rich? I sure wouldn’t. If you made $50,000 a year and someone in your family asked for $20,000, would you pay it? Of course not. Moreover, at 5% interest a year, that $20,000 would be worth $140,800 in forty years. Would you have the unmitigated gall to ask a relative making $50,000 a year for $140,800? I don’t think I would.

Really, a lottery winner who has made a million in the lottery should keep on working, as $50,000 this year (not bad money for doing nothing) will be worth at most $23,000 (not really enough to be comfortable) in forty years. The really great advantage of that million would be in being able to retire much earlier than previously.

A fellow in Michigan decided to spend only $30 on food for the month of November. It turns out that it was a lot easier than he had expected; he actually spent $27.28 for the thirty days, and managed to come up with some dirt cheap 30¢ meals. A worthy endeavour, really: it’s good to know that, if push came to shove, one can manage on quite a bit less than one currently does.

The latest telephone poll taken by the office of the Governor of Texas asked whether people who live in Texas think illegal immigration is a serious problem.

• 35% of respondents answered: Yes, it is a serious problem.
• 65% of respondents answered: No es un problema serio.

Hee hee hee.

cityrag has links to videos of the twenty greatest guitar solos of all time. Well worth the time to download & watch. My favourite? Hard to say—perhaps Stevie Ray Vaughn’s Texas Flood or Jimmy Page’s Stairway to Heaven.

Oh, and 70s rock looked gay.

From Saturday Night Live, a view of possible Star Wars screentests. I don’t know about you, but a version with Christopher Walken as Han Solo, Richard Dreyfus as C-3PO and Walter Matthau as Obi-wan Kenobi would have been quite cool.

Simon Jenkins points out that technology really hasn’t changed since the Victorian era: a sobering thought indeed.

How to beat the obesity epidemic? Simple: just design walkable cities. It turns out that a well-designed city has average adult male body weight ten pounds less than a poorly-designed city.

You need to read this Guardian article. Those three men in the photographs along the top, the ones who look like concentration camp victims: they’re German prisoners of war, starved, beaten and abused after the end of the Second World War. One POW’s temperature could not be taken because it was less than 95 degrees, and the thermometer started there.

Today marks the 34th anniversary of the Supreme Court decision in the case Roe vs. Wade. This decision is an abomination on several levels. First and foremost, it’s just plain bad law: the decision is based on a specious misreadings and misunderstandings of history, and is nonsensical in its own right (its more honest defenders tend to agree these days). This is the more important failure: the job of the Supreme Court is to render non-ideological decisions on the law, and the Court fell down big-time on this one. To those who think it made sense, please answer me this: if one’s right to one’s body is so inviolate, why is it still illegal to take whatever drugs one may want?

But the decision (with its companion Doe vs. Bolton) is also notable for its after-effects: a regime of abortion-on-demand far more drastic than in any civilised country of which I am aware (even Europe has more restrictions than the United States). Since that black day, there have been more than 48,000,000 killed. Forty-eight million human beings; forty-eight million souls; forty-eight million men and women, some of whom may have gone on to change the world for the better (or, of course, for worse).

Forty-eight million is eight times the number of Jews killed by Hitler. That’s two hundred times the number of miles from the Earth to the Moon. Put another way, assuming an average width of 2 feet, if every one of those slain were to stand shoulder-to-shoulder, there’d be enough people to circle the equator 1,927½ times.

And none of this counts the children the victims could have borne themselves.

We may be the basest society that ever lived. Even the pagans who practised routine infanticide—did they practise it to so great an extent? It is disgusting, and it is atrocious.

I’m not saying that Roe vs. Wade should have been decided otherwise because of its effects; if it had been good law, then I would support the decision (and also support any necessary efforts to change the law). But it wasn’t good law; it was bad law which enabled a far worse result: murder on a scale to delight Mao or Stalin.

And thirty-four years later, we still have yet to overturn it.

Today is Robert E. Lee Day, and not just any Lee Day, at that: it’s two hundred years since the day that lion of a man was born. Sadly, his beloved home state hasn’t honoured him with a special license plate or anything similar, just a mere tourist brochure. Still, I think the great hero of our history wouldn’t be bitter, but would be as noble as he ever was.

I, on the other hand, will be bitter enough for both of us…

I just found a glorious page of specialised shotshells. Family & friends: these are what I want for Christmas. Who wouldn’t want a tracer shell, or an incendiary shell, or a flechette shell? Or a pepper gas shell—how sweet is that? Or a shell designed specifically for stopping vehicles. Granted, I don’t need to stop any vehicles. But it’d be great to have it on hand anyway, for the bragging rights if nothing else.

I want Keith Lynch’s apartment. This guy has three VT420 terminals in his living room, and a VAX. How cool is that?

A great blog entry explains why emacs is so incredibly cool.

Imagine an operating system where you can switch from writing code to browsing the web or chatting without leaving a consistent environment, with the same set of commands and shortcuts. Imagine a set of integrated applications where data is seamlessly shared, where any single functionality can be tweaked, extended and adapted to your particular needs. Where everything is easily scriptable. Imagine, in additon, that the environment provides powerful and complete interactive self-documentation facilities with which the user can find out what is available.

Emacs is that operating system---it really is that cool.

This month marks ten years since I began to go insane. I’d always preferred to dress somewhat more formally than my peers, and indeed during my first semester at Austin College I tended to wear slacks and a button-down shirt (this at a time & place when jeans & t-shirts were the norm), but then I went home for Christmas and my parents gave me a choice: I could get a stereo or a coat from Brooks Brothers. What self-respecting young man wouldn’t go for the coat?

I returned to school for my first JanTerm; that year I took a month-long intensive course in J.R.R Tolkien’s Middle Earth writings (taught by Prof. Bill Moore, a fairly old-school professor). So I owned a tweed coat, it was grey & blustery, I had several pipes and I was studying Tolkien: no-one needed to draw me a diagramme. And so I started to wear coat, tie & sweater-vest. It was a blast: walking across the quad on a cold January morning, smoke streaming from my pipe, looking forward to another day of musty old Oxford dons—add in the fact that the girl I thought the finest in all the world was in the same class, and life was pretty much perfect.

And thus began my long sojourn in the land of the mildly deranged. For the next three and a half years I was the guy in the coat & tie. I loved it, pointing out that I was the real non-conformist; after all, if everyone else is wearing rainbow tie-dyed shirts then they’re hardly radical, are they? That’s quite true; what I’d not realised is that no-one should want to be different; it’s the normal guys who get girlfriends, the non-eccentrics who advance in the world. It wasn’t until I’d graduated and been working for a few years that I quit the coat & tie thing, too late to have any real understanding of style. Oh well.

Incidentally, if you’ve never had the chance to study Tolkien on a grey day, wearing a tweed coat with a pouch in one pocket and a tamper in the other, a tie on your neck, a sweater over that and a pipe twixt your teeth—you really haven’t lived yet. It is more than cool.

Fast Company has an excellent article about Wal-mart’s big compact fluorescent push. Very interesting to see how once an idea makes economic sense big business gets behind it 100%.

Dheera Venkatraman has suggested a technique to reveal information hidden by blurring. It’s quite simple and should work; of course a new blurring algorithm could defend against it.

By now many of y’all should have heard that former Chief Justice William Rehnquist spent nine years addicted to the sedative-hypnotic Placidyl. Jack Shafer in Slate writes about the double standard we have for drug addiction amongst the powerful.

Andrew McCarthy reviews The Truth about Muhammad, a new book by Robert Spencer which closely examines the life of the supposed prophet and what it implies for his modern-day followers. An excellent review filled with disturbing facts.

I’ve earlier written about the December Mix; now I’m listening to the January Mix. This month’s songs are:

1. Death Cab for Cutie: The New Year
2. The Postal Service: Such Great Heights
3. Billy Bragg: A New England
4. Walter Egan: Magnet and Steel
5. The Beatles: Nowhere Man
6. Brendan Benson: Cold Hands, Warm Heart
7. David Grey: Please Forgive Me
8. The Doves: Snowden
9. Joe Jackson: Steppin’ Out
10. Dream Academy: Please, Please, Please Let Me Get What I Want
11. Regina Spektor: Us
12. Aztec Camera: Walk Out to Winter

While not quite as perfect as the December Mix, it’s still a great listen—check it out.

So I’ve been doing my year-end accounting runs today. All in all it was a decent enough year, showing a healthy profit over the year previous. In my reporting, though, I’ve discovered some disturbing facts. The most disturbing is that my single largest expense item is federal income tax. I pay $691/month for the services of the federal government: more than I spend on myself, more than I spend on mortgage interest, more than I spend on my home, more than I spend on food. While the aforesaid federal government does provide some very useful services (it has done an excellent job keeping out the Canadian government & army and the Mexican government, rather a less good job keeping out the Mexican army and individual Mexicans), it seems strange to me that these services should be so expensive.

Then there’s the asinine Social Security programme. I have been paying $351/month into that money pit. What really hurts is that if I had even half that to invest on the market I should be in a considerably better financial position in a decade. Thanks, Uncle Sam! With the Democrats in power, don’t expect this to improve at all. Thanks, Republicans!

I discovered that this past year I’ve been somewhat more frugal than in ’05; my personal expenditures have been reduced about 9% and have gone from the most expensive item to the second-most expensive. This is pretty good, although it could be better.

My mortgage interest has decreased about 30¢/month. This is pretty annoying, but that’s life. It beats annually-increasing rent for certain—and once inflation is taken into account, it is a decent decrease.

An unfortunate item is that my household expenses have increased nearly 18%, due mainly to some purchases of kitchen tools which I wrote off as expenses instead of depreciating over time. I’ll have to keep an eye out on this sort of thing in the future.

Another bit of good news is that I’ve managed to knock my food expenditure down by over 9%. I need to crunch the numbers further to discern if this is due to eating out less, or to starting to purchase groceries at Wal-Mart vs. Albertson’s & Costco. Still, it’s welcome to see.

The final numbers show that total expenses went up 1.64% from 2005 to 2006. This is not bad, and is probably less than inflation. Now if I can only hold it down next year…

Jem Matzan has an article regarding driver-downloaded firmware and the issues this causes for free operating systems. The root of the problem is that hardware vendors don’t just deal in hardware: they also write software for their products, and they don’t make free this software—this is a little absurd, since you’d think they’d want their products used as widely as possible.