I’m at a lacrosse game today, watching my son play. My wife and daughter are out of town at a dance competition. It’s been a busy weekend, so I’m taking this opportunity to see how effective posting from my iPhone is. I don’t know how well I can compose without a full-sized keyboard. Of course, time isn’t my only constraint on writing, so is being blocked. Sigh….
So it’s been 16 days since I’ve posted.
Yep, it is now mid-August, and I haven’t posted for more than two weeks.
Obviously, for me anyway, this blog obsession has receded from the fire of the initial years to a very, VERY slow burn of the current time…
…whether to say “I’d love to go that way,” or “Boy, that sucks.”
Naked couple who fell from roof to their deaths may have been having sex
This is a test. Nothing to see here.
I get more Technorati hits because of my Flying Spaghetti Monster image through inline linking than anyone linking directly to my posts. I’ve had some of my photographs inline linked without credit as well, which I find rather insulting given those photos are the direct product of my creativity. In other words, people are stealing my bandwidth and hosting space that I paid for to put images on their blog. At the moment, it’s not a bandwidth issue; Random Fate has been idle enough lately that I’m nowhere near hitting any kind of bandwidth limit. It’s the principle of the thing, though, especially for my photographs when they are put up uncredited.
I’m considering discussing with the person who runs my host how we can set up to block the inline links. Man, I hate it when people just take stuff without asking. All it would take is a simple email, and I’d give permission as long as they credited my site.
I just got the new laptop as a replacement under my accidental damage protection policy, the supposedly “worry-free assurance” that wasn’t so free of care. This new laptop is replacing my 1 year old one that suffered death from a massive milk spill. I shouldn’t complain about the upgrade, because I now have a dual-core system (AMD Turion X2, not the current best-in-class Intel Core Duo), but I’m already encountering two issues.
The first, and most concerning, is that the top of the laptop, where the heels of my hands rest when I’m typing, is getting warm, I suspect from the CPU. I’m not even seriously taxing it, so both the amount of heat generated along with the location of the hot spot do not bode well.
The second problem is with the operating system. It has Windows Vista, and unfortunately my favorite firewall/antivirus software currently does not have a version for Vista. I can’t figure out how to get the pre-installed Norton Internet Security to recognize an IP range as my home network, and it doesn’t seem to want to recognize individual computers that I have put in IP addresses in the “allowed” list. In other words, I haven’t been able to connect to my home network to print or download files.
Not good…
Hopefully I’ll get this all figured out soon, but the security features of Internet Explorer are making me crazy already. I much prefer Firefox with the security plug-ins that I use.
Oh, well, it is a new computer, so that gives me at least one more year before it is obsolete and bogged down like all my other systems.
I’ve managed to reload my old posts, but in the process I broke access to my new posts since the reboot to the new host.
I should be able to recover them, but it’s not like I wrote some deathless prose or had some outstanding ideas in there, but I’ll likely lose the comments.
Oh, well, now on to fixing the layout, post categories, and blogroll, along with trying to generate some original, interesting, and hopefully entertaining content.
A few weeks ago I tried to write a movie review of Casino Royale, the new James Bond movie. (In case you’re interested, I enjoyed the movie a lot, especially considering I went into it expecting to not like it.. I’ll finish the full review if anyone cares to read it at this late date after the release of the movie). This past weekend I went to see the movie Babel, and this movie prompted thoughts that went beyond those of a simple review.
Random images from movies reflect the undercurrents of the times. The images of an alien craft destroying the White House in the trailers for Independence Day prompted cheers at the time, now the sequence presents an uncomfortable visualization of the fear peddled in the wake of September 11, 2001. Many of the visual and storyline themes since that day have had the undercurrent of fear, uncertainty, and doubt that combine to poison reason. As shallow and banal as it might sound, the evolution of the James Bond movies over the last four decades provides a good cross-section of the underlying concerns of our culture, which sadly enough now in an unintentional irony reflect more of the Cold War-inspired real fear origins of the original novels than of the later frivolity of implausible madmen attempting to rule or destroy the world.
I have written before of the over-reaction to the attacks of September 11, 2001, but I was not noticed.
Now, some big-bloggers are starting to recognize that over-reaction may be the right description…
In the movie Babel the casual brutality of the Moroccan police is depicted without accompanying music to sway our emotions, it is simply silence spiked with the sharp crack of hand against face and questions asked and answered.
The themes of the movie are myriad, and more than I would have attempted because of the short attention span theatre that US culture has become:
insular westerners exposed to a land without the infrastructure routinely taken for granted, and with completely different
unknowing poverty contrasted with unconscious wealth; teenage disconnectedness with society made worse through physical disability and recent tragedy
how governments act in ways that show utter indifference to the individual human consequences
the difficulties of communication, especially with those closest to us
the individual tragedies imposed by grand immigration policies
the shallow analysis that jumps to the easy conclusion of “terrorism” rather than acknowledging the possibility of acts arising from innocent ignorance could create woe
Complexity doesn’t have to be subtle or “nuanced,” to use the disparaging term adopted by those who prefer a black-and-white world to avoid the heavy lifting of thought; complexity exists without the need for affirmation, and it will bite those in the ass who make choices based upon what they want to be true rather than upon the reality that will not be denied in the end…
My former method of comment spam protection was blocking trackbacks as well, so even though I haven’t written much that is being linked to lately, I turned off the plugin that was keeping the spambots from posting. As a consequence, I’m getting comment spam again, but now some is more creative than I recall and at the least provides some entertainment value. Take this joke for instance (it’s borderline PG-13/R rated):
There was once a great actor who could no longer remember his lines. After many years he finds a theatre where they are prepared to give him a chance to shine again.
The director says, “This is the most important part, and it has only one line. You walk on to the stage at the opening carrying a rose. You hold the rose to your nose with just one finger and thumb, sniff the rose deeply and then say theline Ah, the sweet aroma of my mistress.�
The actor is thrilled. All day long before the play hes practicing his line over and over again.
Finally, the time came. The curtain went up, the actor walked onto the stage, and using just one finger he delivered the line, “Ah, the sweet aroma of my mistress.�
The theatre erupted, the audience was screaming with laughter and the director was steaming!
“You bloody fool!� he cried, “You have ruined me!�
The actor was bewildered, “What happened, did I forget my line?�
“No!� screamed the director. “You forgot the rose!�
I hope everyone is able to appreciate the day with their family, even if they are not what is called “real’ family, and even if they are not physically present.
Family is not always related, even by marraige, and being there isn’t always in person.
The outcome of the election last week underscores exactly how poorly George W. Bush understands his role as President. His political opponents mocked him, and rightly so, for proclaiming that he was “the Decider” (and the capitalization could be heard in his statement) and it was up to him to “decide what was right for ‘Merica.” There is one catch in that, however, which is our Constitution proclaims the People are soveriegn and the government exists to serve those people.
Unlike other nations which have a single person as head of state and different individual as head of government such as in the United Kingdom where Queen Elizabeth II is the head of state and Prime Minister Tony Blair is the head of her government, in the United States the People are the head of state, hence the opening words, “We the People…” The President is the head of government. Many assume, wrongly, that the President is both head of state and head of government, but the President merely represents the People on occasions where a head of state is required. The original government of the United States, outlined in the Articles of Confederation, showed how the founders did not want a true head of state, but they recognized the need for a central representative and therefore called the Constitutional Convention that resulted in our current form of government.
George W. Bush apparently forgot he is merely representing the true origin of power in the United States, the People, and instead has chosen to behave like a CEO operating a company in a top-down management style. We can only hope that he learned the error of his ways on Wednesday morning when the scope of the “thumpin” administered by the real “deciders” was apparent.
Happy birthday, Marcie, I hope you have a good one.
It appears that the most poular weblogs capture the personal take on the topic of discussion, whether politics or art or science or technology or whatever.
Unfortunately for me, and for this weblog, I tried to argue reason in an arena filled with those who are not interested in reason, I tried to present fact in a venue where facts are unimportant, and I tried to use logic in a battleground where raw emotion rules the day.
It wore me out, through both frustration and disappointment, and events in my personal life did not help.
Where to go from there, though, especially after a hiatus that has only been partially abandoned in favor of writing something, even if not on a different path than that which created the frustration and disappointment?
I am not comfortable revealing the personal for reasons that arise from events long past that are unimportant to anyone other than me.
Recently I re-watched the movie Gattaca, a movie which resonated on many levels with me when I first saw it and reverberates with meanings that go far beyond those of a decade ago in ways that no one anticipated before the events of a half-decade past.
What are the implications in the larger context?
First, one must understand the context, and it is that milieu that troubles me a great deal.
What are the components of this disturbing tableau?
They are almost too numerous to mention, and unfortunately for me, some of the components have been lost in the churn of the web that cannot be tracked despite my attempts.
One of the most notible is a study on how the maturity of people in America has been on the decline, and I truly wish I could find the link to that research, not only because it reinforces my observations and conclusions, but because I feel it is required reading where even those who disagree with my beliefs will find it illuminating.
The reason I wish I could find the study is that I have found the collective reaction to September 11, 2001, incredibly immature, emotional rather than reasonable, reactionary rather than thinking.
Unfortunately for us all, reacting rather than thinking tends to lead a society down a path of destruction rather than survival.
What is the true worth of our principles if they can be so easily undermined by events?
Who is the patriot and who is the traitor among those who question the actions of the government, especially when they seem to violate both the Constitution and the principals upon which it was based?
I am a patriot; I believe firmly and deeply in the principles upon which the Constitution is based.
However, I am NOT a nationalist.
There is a key difference, as noted by Christopher Dickey in an outstanding essay from which I lifted the definitions of “nationalist” and “patriot”.
Yet this subtle yet key difference is now blurred because of the reckless use of the word “traitor” by the extremists.
Ask yourself, divorcing your thoughts from the screeching of supposed fellow-travelers, and look at actions. Whose actions are consistent with our fundamental principles, and whose actions are concentrated solely on getting power for “their side”?