Category: Uncategorized

this is the way the world ends, not with a bang but a Hummer

  1. Welcome to Orange County, where being a summer reading star gets you deadly, lead-tainted toy prizes from the library!
  2. Welcome to Orange County, where a nice crab roll at Riptide Sushi fills your lungs with ravenous, deadly parasites! Edit: link fixed
  3. Welcome to Orange County, where even the [correction] guy who looks like a carnie biker to the Register, who fixes cop cars and drinks at Skosh Monahan’s thinks that the mayor of Costa Mesa is fucking shit up with his anti-Mexican pogrom.
  4. Welcome to America, where we push our children through our gigantic supermarkets in remotely managed mind control devices on wheels.
  5. Welcome to New Orleans, where a night in jail turned into the Raft of the Medusa last year.
  6. And now, welcome back to Orange County, where the richest, whitest, prettiest kids in the world will try to convert you you a religion they cannot in any meaningful way understand.

THIS SHOULD BE AN ADVENTURE

For the last three weeks I’ve been at half the dose of the two antidepressants I take, Welllbutrin and Lexapro. This is part of my neurofeedback therapy; at a certain point the drugs are more of an obstruction than a help for technical reasons, so it’s a good idea to reduce them.

So far, so good. I had some crummy withdrawal effects but nothing out of the ordinary psychologically. Not better, not worse.

As of today I’m off both meds completely. After another three weeks of NFB I stop NFB, and then over the next few weeks I’m supposed to get some idea of how much this whole thing has helped. My practitioner says that in her experience people don’t really feel the useful effects of neurofeedback until after it’s stopped and some of its side effects are reduced. We’ll see.

This is the first time in nearly 20 years that I’ve not been on some type of SSRI antidepressant and the first time in at least two that I’ve not been on a dopaminergic medication. I wonder what Mr. Brain’s gonna do this week?

If you see me up in a tree wearing a Russian admiral’s uniform and singing the Laughing Song from Faust, etc., notify a physician.

I can’t believe I’m tying an onion to my belt, here.

Today is August 11, 2006.

I am using Windows 98 SE and an RS-232C serial cable to program a new radio. To do this I have to run Virtual PC on my Mac, use a USB serial adapter, tell VPC to use that adapter as COM2 on the Windows box, and manually set all kinds of options for this “serial port.” Then I get to use a 1996 quality Windows application to read spreadsheet type data and very slowly write it to the radio over the serial cable. This works approximately 40% of the time.

I have no reason to believe it would work more of the time if I had a PC laptop running Windows natively.

There’s a place where the wonderful Web 2.0 Nifty Gadgets Open Source Free Extensible Modular Optimized World of Today ends. It’s the place where you have to hook your computer up to a device, any device: radio, weather station, medical equipment, anvil, surface to air missile, automobile, inclined plane. Immediately you’re struggling with some antedeluvian program written by a semicompetent nerd who hates humans, using ten-year-old tools, which is never ever going to be updated. The interface is guaranteed to be opaque, features will be missing or greyed out forever, and there will be no tech support of any kind. You are, at this point, in Hell.

I wish I knew how to write software. Half this shit has open protocols and is just begging for someone who isn’t an assclown to write something useful using exciting new technologies like “USB” and “user interface.”

liberty

I generally don’t get along with people who self-identify as libertarians.

This is partly due to my home town. Orange County is full of wealthy blowhards, and many of these red-faced yahoos like to believe they’re Promethean self-made heroes rather than grifters and heirs. They aren’t really interested in liberty as an ideal; they just want more money for themselves.

This is also partly due to the Internet, where “libertarian” usually means a socially isolated, idealistic, and poorly educated geek who prefers an unassailably perfect dogma to any compromise with the real world.

And of course I’m not one and can’t be. I’m a left liberal in U.S. terms, or what other countries call a Social Democrat. I like things like socialized medicine. I don’t mind taxes. It’s just a whole nother world.

But in the last few years I’ve had more in common with libertarians than ever. Our common dream — the ideas expressed in the U.S. Bill of Rights — is under the worst attacks yet. Things like the Patriot Act get me cheering for right-libertarian opposition figures like Chuck Hagel, and some very strange alliances have been made.

It’s heartening, because both left-liberal and right-libertarian people tend to be intolerant. Both groups care a lot about ideology and get pretty upset with each others’ ideas about how humans should relate.

More than five years ago, before 9/11, I was driving down to San Diego. Near San Clemente, the northbound side of Interstate 5 has a Border Patrol checkpoint intended to deter illegal immigration, smuggling, and people bringing in fruit with evil flies in it. It’s been a part of the landscape as long as I can remember, and I take it for granted.

Today was different. As I headed south, an unusual site greeted me. Coming up from the south was a convoy of maybe 20 cars and trucks. They were decorated with huge American flags, and some of the pickups had a few flag-waving people in the beds.

Two huge banners were flying over two of the bigger trucks: NO CHECKPOINTS ON AMERICAN SOIL / LIBERTARIAN PARTY

Wow! I’d never thought of that. They were right, too. Goddamnit, I realized. I don’t want checkpoints anywhere but the border itself! They shouldn’t be able to stop me just any time…

And they didn’t stop these people. They blew the checkpoint at a respectful and safe 25 mph or so. The Border Patrol guys stepped back and just kind of dealt with it, and I didn’t see anyone pursue them. Maybe they got pulled over by the CHP or something further north. I assume they were ready to get a ticket or go to the station if they had to do so.

I am proud of those people for reminding me that I’d let a chunk of my freedom go and not noticed. I’m also proud of them for getting off their asses and risking something to make that point publicly, instead of just flaming people on internet forums or engaging in competitive harrumphing.

So, I found out, I have more in common with libertarians than I thought. I don’t care about tax hikes or seatbelt laws, and I like social welfare spending. But I prefer someone who hates checkpoints, the Patriot Act, wiretapping, and censorship to someone who bends over for that shit.

Continuing Education in homph homph homph homph

I’m not a good cook in any complete sense. I’ve never been to a cooking school and there are huge gaps in my skills and knowledge. I’m a dilettante; I learn what interests me and get as good as I can at it. There are some things I wanted to master and I did them over and over and over again and got very good. There are some other really basic things I’m no good at. I check something off when I’m consistently successful at it.

This week I hit the target conclusively on marinara sauce, shellfish cookery, and mesquite-smoked meat cooked on a charcoal grill. Those had all been long journeys of improvement, especially the last one.

I recently hit my groove with omelets so they now come out just about perfect every time. The same is true for stir-fried eggplant. About a year ago I got most fish cookery, at least sautéeing, poaching, and baking, to a routine. I can also roast a chicken and get consistent results.

Two years ago I “arrived” with potato salad, stirfried green beans, cornbread, basic curry sauce, pot roast, ginger/molasses carrots, barbecue type sauces, and a slew of salads mostly with garlic or beets or cabbage or all of those in them.

It’s time to make another list of things to learn.

My new discipline is to be called “Forensic Futurology”

  1. This newly translated novel by an unpronouncable Kenyan looks very good. I like the idea of the dictator who wants to build the world’s biggest structure and instead gets bigger and bigger himself.
  2. They don’t look like the sort of earring men usually wear, but I’m attracted by the idea of a neurotransmitter hanging off my ear. I’d choose dopamine I think.
  3. Green stuff might make computers faster. Maybe I should try that green marker on the CD thing now too.
  4. NORWEGIAN SALMON CREAM CHEESE GOLDEN CRUST PIZZA
  5. If you’re near a Philippine volcano, the full moon may actually be very dangerous.

Sociopathic Soccer Moms Kill 3

http://www.ocregister.com/ocregister/homepage/abox/article_1237890.php

1. Drunk driving mom in her big fast Lexus passes on the right at 90, hits guardrail, kills her 6 year old son by hitting it so hard that the seatbelt is ripped out of the car and he’s ejected.

2. Hapless hamburglars running from botched auto theft get run over on freeway. Woman calls cops from a bar some time later to say that there was clothing and human remains stuck to the bottom of her minivan and she “may have been involved in an accident” earlier.

I’m not including the other news story about the woman whose tire blew up and her 12 year old kid was ejected due to no seat belt, even though three other occupants of that car had no seatbelt either, because for all I know she could have been yelling at them to buckle up when it happened.