Half-demolished Kitchen of the Soul

The amorality of money

The first half of this video clip is about big business's usual opposition to restraint. That's not news. The second half, though, shows how utterly self-serving and amoral the quest for wealth can be. 

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It's okay, I'm a professional

Tasty

My dreams are usually only visual, aural and tactile, but last night I dreamed I was having fish at a fine restaurant. I think it might have been the first time in a dream that I actually had the sensation of flavor. Yum.

Music Video Monday: Manu Dibango

Odd state

In North Carolina many counties and county seats share a name. Gastonia in Gaston County, Lincolnton in Lincoln County, Durham in Durham County. Sometimes a county has no city with a similar name. But the oddity is when a city isn't in the county with a shared name. 

For example, the city of Davidson is a couple of counties over from Davidson County. The same is true of Cherokee and Cherokee County. 

Asheville and Ashe County are five counties apart. Rockingham city is almost in South Carolina while Rockingham County is on the border with Virginia. 

Henderson is the seat of Vance county in the northeast, not Henderson County in the southwest, where Hendersonville is the seat.

Hmmm, that was... interesting

I pulled the California Pizza Kitchen single serving barbecue chicken pizza from the microwave and sprinkled on some red pepper flakes. Except I'd grabbed the cinnamon.

Are you smarter than a fifth grader?

"We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" is from:

(A) The Declaration of Independence

(B) the Constitution of the Untied States

Easy, right? Unless you're House Minority Leader John Boehner speaking Thursday to the assembled opponents of health insurance reform. While he claimed to be holding a copy of the Constitution. Which he is sworn to uphold. Though he might not have actually read it in a while.

Or maybe Boehner knew he was quoting the Declaration rather than the Constitution. Citing the preamble to the later might have caused distress among the hardcore conservative throng. "Promote the general Welfare?" Eek! And the protesters weren't in the mood for any "domestic Tranquility" either.

Now he knows

I was with a cluster of vehicles driving just a hair over the speed limit. One after another, drivers would zoom past on the left, only to slow down because the way was blocked by us slower vehicles.

One impatient guy pulled into the HOV lane even though he was alone. A couple of seconds later he swerved quickly back into his previous lane because he saw what the rest of us already knew. There was a State Trooper at the head of the pack.

Return Glenn Beck's appendix

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In what way?

This blog headline could have been worded differently. Someone who opens fire on a crowd probably isn't "stable."

Now I remember...

...why I like living alone and working at home. I don't like dealing with this kind of stuff.

Encouraging election news

Charlotte, North Carolina, hasn't had a Democratic mayor in 22 years, even though there have been Democratic majorities on the city council and county commission most of those years. That changed yesterday. 

Some Republicans around here, particularly a certain obnoxious county commissioner, believe they are actually the majority, or should be. But the numbers tell a different story. The Board of Elections published two interactive maps of yesterday's mayoral race. One shows the margin of victory for the candidates precinct by precinct. As expected, the most Republican precincts show wide margins for the Republican candidate. The pro-Democrat margins of victory were lower in the other precincts, but there are more of them. The other map shows precinct turnout, which was greater in the Republican districts. So even though a higher percentage of Republicans voted, there weren't enough of them.

Meanwhile, the Democrat majority on the city council grew to 8-to-3. The city and county are divided into seven districts that were carefully gerrymandered to assure perpetual Republican victories in three and perpetual Democrat victories in three others. In fact, some years opposition candidates don't even bother running, as was the case in the three city council races this year. 

Besides the districts, there are four city- or county-wide at-large seats. The top four vote getters out of a field of seven to nine candidates win. This year, three of the four were Democrats. Republicans haven't won an at-large majority in a decade or more. Yet the delusion they're the majority still persists.

Can't get there from here

Since there's talk of sending me to far-flung parts of the world (other than the usual, "Get out of here! Go far, far away!" sort of thing) I got wondering how long it takes to fly to Australia.

I figured rather than doing it all in one butt-numbing ordeal, I could break it up by flying to California first, spending a couple of days, then heading Downunder. Okay, how much more would that cost?

I went to a travel site that searches all the other travel sites. The results also show travel times. The shortest one I found was 13.5 hours, but only on the return leg. Flights to Australia ran from 17 to 28 hours. I clicked for details. The 17-hour flight from Los Angeles went through San Francisco. 

Okay, what if I were to make San Francisco my jumping off point instead of LA? I plugged in SFO and searched again. The flight was 18.5 hours, because they want to fly you through Los Angeles first—via Palm Springs. Doh.

Okay, low fares are about suffering inconvenience. I get that. So you can get the shortest direct flight by paying more, right? No. In fact, the flights got longer as the prices increased.

It's okay, I'm a professional

Funny coincidence

I spent part of Sunday watching clips of Craig Ferguson on the computer because he's on too late for me. He got me thinking, "Hey, what about that other Scottish comedian, Billy Connolly? So I watched a bunch of his clips too. What a fine way to spend a cold rainy day.

Last night I couldn't get to sleep. Taking a two-hour nap in the late afternoon might have had something to do with it. After some futile tossing and turning I switched on the TV. Ah! Craig Ferguson. Excellent. And who should be his first guest? Billy Connolly. Super excellent.

I suspect my Scottish ancestors were the wool underwear and haggis type rather than the comic type.

Music Video Monday: Phil Collins

The grinch who stole Halloween

Halloween was wonderful when I moved into this house 14 years ago. There was no one in the neighborhood under 15 years old, so I never got trick-or-treaters. But demographics have changed. Most of the empty nesters died or moved away and young couples moved in. Sigh.

So in case not having any exterior lights on doesn't deter ghosts, skeletons, ninjas and princesses, I taped a sign to my door announcing: Sorry, I don't do Halloween.

Boo humbug.

UPDATE: Oh joy! It just started raining. Hard.

But quote this

"I worry that, especially as the Millennium nears, pseudoscience and superstition will seem year by year more tempting, the siren song of unreason more sonorous and attractive. Where have we heard it before?

"Whenever our ethnic or national prejudices are aroused, in times of scarcity, during challenges to national self-esteem or nerve, when we agonize about our diminished cosmic place and purpose, or when fanaticism is bubbling up around us—then, habits of thought familiar from ages past reach for the controls." —Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World.

What Sagan didn't mention, perhaps because he was more optimistic than me, or because it was only 1995 and things were relatively saner then, was that fanaticism and superstition feed off each other, creating even more fanaticism and superstition.

Don't quote me on this

We use quotation marks to signify a group of words is an accurate copy of something spoken or written by someone else, as in:

Bob said, "Sure, I'd love to go antiquing instead of watching the game."

However, we also use quotation marks to signify something rather opposite, that the word or words aren't an accurate representation of what was meant, as in:

Sure, I'd "love" to go antiquing instead of watching the game.

"Funny" language, English.

Yes!

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Through rose colored sunglasses

Thanks to the reddish tint of my sunglasses (the darkest ones I could get at the time), autumn appears to be farther along than it actually is. And leaves that only turn brown before falling look much nicer. 

The first photo below is normal while the second one was shot through my sunglasses.

By the way, unlike the Californians I lived among for almost 20 years, North Carolinians aren't big believers in protecting their vision from solar damage. Many think sunglasses are affected.

And so?

I had a small run-in with a conspiracy theorist. I'm not saying there are no conspiracies, only that most of them are highly implausible, like the super secret global puppet masters variety.

Let's say the Illuminati/Trilateral Commission/Swiss Bankers/Vatican/Jews/Satanists/United Nations really did control the world. Let's say they came out of the shadows and admitted it during Super Bowl halftime. After a little neener-neener-neener-I-told-you-so celebration among the conspiracy theorists, then what? 

If the evil puppet masters really control everything, if they have all the money and power, then there's nothing anyone could do about it. You're left where you started, with only a bit of vindication for comfort. 

(Insert swearing here)

Once upon a time I got my high-speed internet service from the cable company. But it was unreliable. I kept losing my connection. Three entities were involved: Time Warner, its Road Runner subsidiary, and a third-party installation and service company. Each passed the buck to the other. The best they could come up with was that even though I live near the center of the city (and about a mile and a half from the regional Time Warner office) I was way out at the end of one of their nodes. The signal was weak. Nothing to be done. Sorry. 

So I switched to DSL. Not as fast but no connection problems. Except for their (insert swearing here) e-mail server. About once a year, when the technicians do some sort of fiddling with the system, it decides it won't recognize my password. I call tech support, they claim it must be something I did, I assure them it wasn't, they eventually admit they were messing with the servers, apologize, tell me it will be X hours until service is restored, and suggest I access my messages via their clunky web mail. (Insert swearing here) 

It's that time of year again. The mail server falls with the leaves. After a day of waiting for them to get their act together, I decided to call customer support. A little while ago, old Bell South merged with AT&T. Bell South didn't make it easy to find their live customer support number, but AT&T goes to great lengths to hide it. Oh, the numbers to order service are prominent on every page of their site. The number to complain? They don't want you to call. But I was determined. I found the secret number.

The friendly recorded voice told me there was an unusually high level of cranky customers wanting to chew them out, that the wait would be about a half hour. I switched to the speaker phone and went about my work while AT&T played commercials.

Another friendly recorded voice came on the line and asked me to enter my phone number. I did. The commercials resumed.

Finally a live voice came on the line. A not-as-friendly voice asked for my phone number again. I gave it again. The now-even-less-friendly voice repeated the request. As I repeated my answer, the now-not-friendly-at-all voice said, "I can't hear you," and hung up.

Rather than wait on hold again, I tried the live chat. I was 19th in line. Then 15th. Then 12th. Then 8th. Then (insert swearing here) the session timed out.

I logged back in. I was 17th in line, but this time I ended up connected to a rep. I explained the situation. She apologized, admitted they were messing with the servers, and told me to use web mail.

I tried connecting to the old Bell South site and it redirected me to a badly arranged AT&T site. I finally found the nearly hidden mail button and (insert swearing here) it sent me to Yahoo's web mail site, which is even clunkier than the old Bell South one.

After much typing back and forth I learned AT&T had cut a deal for Yahoo to handle its e-mail service. Regular e-mail was down because AT&T techies were doing the switchover. Or trying to. And, well, it might take another day or so. And, oh, I'll have to change the settings on my e-mail client in order to migrate.

When were they going to tell us about this? Or was the plan to wait for millions of customers to call wanting to know what the (insert swearing here) problem was?

The customer rep sent me a link detailing the new e-mail client settings with the caveat they might not work until some unknown time when the techies finished messing around. I set the new settings. It didn't work. I waited a few hours, double checked the settings and... it didn't work. Later, I could receive but not send. Hmmm, can't send? What if I changed the STMP server back to the Bell South one? Presto.

So e-mail is back up and running as it should. For now. Who knows what fresh (insert swearing here) they might inflict next. I can only hope the change was a case of AT&T admitting it sucked at e-mail and wanting to give its customers better service. I hope it wasn't just a matter of AT&T just wanting to cut costs while still being able to claim it offered something vaguely resembling e-mail.

UPDATE: This message popped up a little while ago. (insert more swearing here)

It's okay, I'm a professional

This is my life

I just got back from seeing the movie Art & Copy. It's about the craft of advertising and my life for the past 33 years. How many people get movies made about their line of work? I wish all my clients would see it.