An important reminder
Neither Conan O’brien nor Jay Leno give a fuck about you.
It’s worth thinking about for a minute.
The same way you might want to think about how little the guys on “your team” think about you before your week is ruined by “your team’s” performance in “the finals”.
That’s all.
January in NYC – say it soft and it’s almost like praying
After being harassed by the cunts known as the TSA because they couldn’t understand how someone with a ticket for dean cameron and a credit card for dean cameron and a couple of other cards for dean cameron could possibly have a drivers license for dean cameron eikleberry. they made me go back to jet blowme and reprint my ticket with dean eikleberry. then, i told them they were destroying the country so they searched my bags like i was a nigerian packing tnt in his anus.
Good thing that i had stuff saying ‘NIGERIAN SPAM SCAM’ on it, eh?!?
But… i had the entire back row to myself…
Until a woman who took a handful or two too many xanax and jack daniels’sses collapsed and hit her head on the armrest, knocking her doped up self out.
They had her lie down in the aisle for 2 hours. i couldn’t really go back to sleep because that’s what an asshole would do (shut up!) so i feigned interest until…
“Do you mind if this woman sits here?”
“Um… no… of course not…”
So i didn’t really sleep.
There’s snow here.
It seems that my cabbie, a recent graduate of the cliche nyc cabbie school, had been told that ice and snow improve traction and braking times but was confused as to why it didn’t seem to work like that. Instead of vomiting, I got out at 6th and waverly and walked a fair distance instead of the location i can’t mention because i’m staying at a paranoid famous person’s place!!!
Ah well.
I’m thinking that having a child later in life as I’ve done is a good thing because I can’t stop thinking about how cool it will be to see him experience new things… snow, for example. It’s going to be difficult to be the “seen-it-all” guy with a little guy so full of joy and wonder at all of those beautiful things.
There’s that, too.
Besides the last 5 or so hours, I have a delightful life. My wife is beautiful, sexy, funny, smart and makes cookies… and I have a son who only wants to laugh and be happy.
But really. Fuck the TSA. Right in the fucking neck.
I have an atom’s worth of understanding what it must be like to “drive while black”. An RCH of understanding. To be regarded as guilty before proven innocent is a horrible thing and that is how the TSA is destroying this country.
An extra $740 bucks
What you’re looking at is $740 in ones and change. Later this week, I’m going to put it in the bank and then maybe buy one of these just because I can.
Or, do something responsible with it. Whatever.
How did I end up with $740 in ones and change at the end of the year? Here’s how.
Never spend a one dollar bill. Ever. It forces you to save.
If you’re at 7/11 buying the best coffee in the world every morning like I do, you pay with a five. Then you put those 1 dollar bills aside. You can’t spend them the rest of the day. That way, if you want to buy something stupid, like gum or condoms (I jest), you must pay with a bill larger than a 1. It makes you think about the stupid little purchases you make every day.
Any 1 dollar bill gets put aside and at the end of the day, they all go in to a box. Along with the change you acquired that day.
I take the subway to work every day and it’s $1.25 each way, so I use quarters for that, but I still ended up with some quarters in my change box. The change came out to just over $100. If you can do remedial math, you can figure out how many one dollar bills I had.
I don’t actually have 640 one dollar bills. There were days where, for whatever reason, I did spend 1 dollar bills. Those days, I put a five in the box along with any ones I had.
That’s that. That’s my savings tip. Now, I’m going to end up on the “I Can Teach You To Be Rich” blog and be one of those assholes who talk about “the latte factor”.
The only thing I would do differently is use the sharpie to cross out “In god we trust” the day I put the bills in the box. I got bored. This also makes me realize, I have about 600 “Where’s George” bills to distribute.
Hmmm. I need more time.
Speaking of holiday cheer: Fuck the IRS. I mean, really. Fuck you guys.
Oh, speaking of fuck you guys: Here’s to CESD, my voice over and loser commercial agency who dropped me the week after Duncan was born. Fuck you guys. Way to destroy a career. Well played.
Happy Holidays everyone!!!
Spam Scam @ Jackson, MI – II – Electric Boogaloo
8:15pm – The venue is a state junior college. Each of us silently take note of the paucity of cars in the parking lot as one of the tech guys meet us at the back door. We scurry in like people late for a performance.
The guys at the venue are, thankfully, ON IT and have all of the required cables, stands and screens set up and ready to go. I plug the show iPod in to their video cable and it works the first time. That’s never happened. I check and make sure that I have the right set of slides (there are three versions of slides) and I do.
I head up to the light booth and set up Paul’s computer and iPod for the audio as Victor and he set up the computers and props for the show. Victor irons his shirt. The computers are all set up, I pass Paul, give him a quick primer on how to make sure levels are good for the phone calls. I change shirts stage right as they let people in.
Total pre-show set up time: 2 minutes.
8: 17pm – they let the audience in. All 11 of them. Eleven people are there to see the show. We’ve done a couple of state schools and both times the taxpayers have paid our salary and it looks like this is no different. Good thing Michigan is doing so well.
8:25pm – “Dear sir, may the blessings of allah be upon you and grant you the wisdom and sympathy…”
We perform the show. This is the beauty of having performed a show over 150 times for the past 5 years. It goes great. The 11 people love it. Laugh in all the right places. Scream at the reveals, etc. Were you there? Killed.
9:40pm – instead of going out to the lobby for the crap collection, we just jump off the front of the stage and chat with people. Ellen Sawyer, a person I worked with at iWin.com when this whole thing began has brought her boyfriend and four other people. They have no idea where to go in Jackson and neither do we. We don’t even know the name or location of our hotel. After some conversation with our superstar tech guys, we figure out where we’re staying and where to go for foodstuffs. We are verrrrrry hungry.
9:55pm – We say our goodbyes to the staff and head off to the hotel. Usually, after a show, there is a nice glow… a nice feeling. It’s such a fun show to perform and we LOVE doing it, but we realize that we don’t really remember doing the show tonight. The show was secondary, at least, to everything else that has been going on. It’s not a great feeling. We do realize that the benefit of having spent so little time there was that we didn’t have any opportunity to feel badly that there were going to be 11 people in the audience. That’s the silver lining, apparently.
10:30pm – We find the ho-tel. It’s fine. Basic business traveller chain. Great. The restaurant is next door, we eat, have a nice time with Ellen and her friends. I have a nice hot fudge ice cream treat and we’re back at the ho-tel by midnight.
Our return flight on Spirit doesn’t leave until 7:30pm the next day. We get late checkouts and agree that we can sleep in and then maybe go exploring beautiful Detroit – Rock City.
12:30am – My room. Sleep of the dead.
11:30am – It seems that the housekeeper didn’t get the memo that I had a late check-out and she wakes me up. Ah well. I get up, pack what little i unpacked, check out and walk across the street to have a nice, leisurely breakfast at the Cracker Barrel.
1pm – As I sit down, Victor calls. He decided to double check our flight and learned that if one misses their initial flight on Spirit Airlines, you forfeit your second leg, ass well. We have no return flight home. We are, once again, fuckity fuck fuck fucked.
We get a hold of Paul, and get in the car and begin driving back to Detroit before we have a plan. We know that we probably don’t have time to have breakfast at the Cracker Barrel. Victor checks the web on his iPhone (technology saved us, by the way) and there’s a 2:15 flight on American for $175 each. Knowing the speed of Budget, we’ll never make it. He checks Southwest. Nope.
We’re laughing. Every time something’s happened, we just laugh. It got horrible so quickly that we didn’t have time to get bummed, it was just funny the entire time. I mean… yeah… so.
I’m driving really fast. Really. Fucking. Fast. Maybe we’ll try for the 2:15 flight, but Victor finds ANOTHER American flight at 5:30 for the same price. He calls, books the tickets and we are golden.
That’s basically it. We stop at a truck stop for breakfast, which is good, as the coffee at the Cracker Barrel was asstastic.
Once we get to the airport (Returning the fucking car took less than a minute. No fucking lie.) and are all checked in with boarding passes in hand, I see the Spirit counter and I get the idea to go over and fuck with them. Just because I can. The reason I booked the tickets on Spirit was that they were the only ones with a non-stop flight and the tickets were about $150 cheaper than the real airlines. But, they charge for each bag each way and also they charge for picking seats in advance. So, it ended up being about the same as I would’ve paid on a real airline.
We’re out just over a grand for the tickets on Spirit, and we’ve spent about 1200 for the emergency flights. It’s all covered by our booking fee and we’ll still make *some* money, but… one must subtract the cost of the extra flights now…
I head over to Spirit and I figure, instead of harassing them, maybe I’ll just try to get my money back. Once again, I use Aye Jaye’s excellent line. “Hi there… I have a bit of a problem and if you can help me, you can have the rest of the day off…” I explain (or ’splain, as ricky rickardo would say) what has happened and the woman takes my ID, punches up stuff on her screen. “It says here, you have three seats booked on the 7:30 flight.”
“What?”
“You’re booked on the flight at 7:30 tonight.”
To make a very lonnng story shorter, I’ve kept my cool and haven’t been an asshole traveler to her so she is able to refund five hundred bucks. It’s not the whole shebang, which I’m going to try to get (that’ll happen) but it’s five hundred bucks that we didn’t have a few minutes ago. I’m stunned. I aks her who I need to talk to so I can really try to get her the rest of the day off. She laughs and says “If I can’t go to L.A. where it’s warm, I might as well just stay here…”
The other silver lining is that we didn’t have to find a way to get from LAX to where I was parked at BUR.
Plus, at least the show killed. I think.
Random Movie Club
You really owe it to yourself to read Rich Nathanson’s write-ups of movies:
click him!
some good news, sorta
Downsize DC is embarking on yet another grassroots campaign (it’s what they do) to roll back the wildly unconstitutional USA PATRIOT ACT. (I exaggerate to clarify)
The good news is that some parts of the PATRIOT Act could expire at the end of the year. This provides an opportunity to roll back many of these dangerous provisions. Toward this end Senator Russ Feingold introduced the JUSTICE Act (S. 1686) on September 17, Constitution Day. JUSTICE stands for the Judicious Use of Surveillance Tools In Counterterrorism Efforts.
Havin’ My Babay
duncan @ five minutes
This past August 1, 2009 at 10:45am, my son, Duncan Huxley Cameron was born.
Not only is he quite a bit bigger now than he is in that photo, his ability to melt me with a look, has increased.
We are raising him as rationally as possible. Obviously, he’ll make his own decisions about how to interact with his world, but we’ll tell the truth as we see it and let it go. There’s plenty of woo out there for him to encounter and deal with on his own, so we don’t need to burden him with more at home. It’s going to be intersting as, even before he was born, people I consider rational were saying really weird and irrational things.
It makes sense, I suppose. There’s so much about having a child that is completely out of ones control that, like the rest of life, we tend to look for patterns to apply to random things. Here in the west, where we have an abundance of food and nutrition, once you’re out of the first trimester of pregnancy, if you’re not behaving like an idiot, your kid is probably going to come out just fine.
But… because that stuff is out of our control, people start making up rules to follow. Sure, some of ‘em might make sense and actually keep you healthy, but, again… as long as you’re not being an idiot, that kid is going to come out and, most likely, come out fine.
Childbirth as an Extreme Sport
Extreme Sports came about because of great medicine and the boredom of practice. Back in “ye oldene tymes” no one, except for inventors, had the time or inclination to go hang gliding because a) broken bones meant death or worse, suffering and disfigurement for the rest of one’s life and 2) life already had enough fucking terror, what with everyone dying because of disease and war.
Here in the future, if you survive a hang gliding crash and break your legs and crack your spine, the worst part is your drunken friends driving you to the hospital in the back of the 4-Runner. After that, it’s 6 weeks off of work, Fentanyl Patches and 150,000 hits on YouTube. As far as skill goes, it’s a matter of being able to buy the gear. The wealthier you are, the more three day weekends you can spend hang-gliding and the better gear you can buy. You can’t buy the skill that comes spending 4 hours a day doing boring tennis drills for your entire youth.
So, like extreme sports, unless there is a rare complication, the sheer terror of having a child is gone. Western Infant mortality rates are extremely low and mothers dying in childbirth is almost non-existent so, to shake things up, we make it exciting by having a kid at home or with people beating drums or standing up in the shower or in a hot tub with your family there or in a dumpster behind chuck e. cheese. If something goes wrong, you’re a quick ambulance drive away from the hospital and all is well.
(A side note… We had our son at Cedars Sinai here in L.A. Our hippie friends told us that it’s a bad place to have a child because they have such a high record of emergency births. We aksed (yes, aksed) the doctor about it and she said the emergencies were mainly home deliveries gone haywire and since Cedars has the best Natal Intensive Care Unit, the botched home births are rushed to Cedars.)
“Pitocin is Evil!!!”
Because we wanted to feel like we were “doing something”, the bride and I went to a Lamaze class. I made it through the three hours without having an episode. I’m not sure why; perhaps it’s the extreme sports thing, but we encountered quite a bit of anti-science bias associated with having a baby. The point of the Lamaze method is to have the baby “naturally”. Since we’re living in the future and having the baby at a hospital “natural” really just means “without an epidural”. This is fine, if that’s how you roll, but there was no reason for it. The instructor hinted, quite strongly, that it’s better for the baby if it’s “natural”, but wouldn’t come out and say as much (because it’s not true). She made the claim that medical students today aren’t shown “natural” child births. When I questioned her about this; pressing her for a source for her claim, she said she learned the med student facts from “articles”. The larger subtext was that women who chose to receive epidurals were less woman than those who went without because they weren’t completely experiencing the delivery. Not only that, it is, somehow, better for the child if it’s “natural”.
Yep, after a full term of pregnancy what’s really going to have an affect on junior is that final few hours.
We were told “don’t let them give her any drugs!!!” a couple of times. One of the drugs that the bride was given was Pitocin, a drug that induces labor.
Back in the “good old days” one of the many ways a woman could die in childbirth was bleeding to death after being ripped open by a too large baby.
Duncan was full term and ready to come out, but the bride’s body wasn’t ready to let him go. Instead of waiting another two weeks and getting a Caesarian, or worse, a drip of Pitocin induced labor and we were on our way. (Before you say “body knows best”, aks yourself if cancer is the body knowing best?)
When you google Pitocin, the very first result is an anti-science web page, childbirth.org. It’s so sad. It looks official, but it’s just some anti-science people picking and choosing their facts and scaring people.
We were told that Pitocin keeps the mother from producing milk. Once the bride had the epidural she was able to calm down, as she didn’t realize how freaked out she was. It was only a matter of minutes after the Pitocin kicked in until she began pushing. Duncan was born within the hour. The bride was breast-feeding almost immediately. So much for the horror stories.
(I know, personal experience is one of the worst ways to come to an understanding of how the world works. I’m just saying that our experience with Pitocin and the epidoodle was aces! )
The bride is a genius. She made the point that people now use bleeding edge science to get pregnant; in vitro pregnancies are so common now, and that is, rightfully, considered a beautiful and excellent thing. BUT, using science for the delivery cheapens the experience. If someone is of the mind that “nature knows best” then why take the shortcut around nature and go in vitro? Hmm?!?!
Genius, I tell you. Genius.
Infants as Unemployment Insurance
Since the turn of the century (I love saying that!) I was fortunate enough to have a nice career doing voice overs for radio and television. I began the century writing front end code at an online games web site. I also helped a friend develop a web service, Tightcircle.com, which he later patented and sold to an “unnamed company in Mountain View, California”. My main income was voice overs and I would, occasionally supplement it by doing web work.
About two years ago, the voice overs began slowing down. Thanks to strikes and technology, fewer people were needed to do voice overs. Finally, the work seems to have dried up almost completely. I had been averaging a couple of gigs a month. At this point, I haven’t had a VO gig since early 2008.
Once we discovered the bride was with child, I began looking for web work in earnest. Thanks to technology, I found myself a bit behind the curve as far as front-end coding goes. I’ve been on all the tech job boards for years so I started scouring those and other resources and by January of this year started sending out at least 2 resumes a day and doing tutorials online on the stuff I’d missed.
Our plan had been that by the time the bride finished her latest editing gig, I would either have some foot back in showbiz or a web coding gig. Unfortunately, that wasn’t happening and it began getting hairy.
I kept hearing “babies bring luck” and it only pissed me off more. What is the method? How does it work? Gravity? Hmm. The week before Duncan was born, I received two job offers. Some poor soul on MyFaceSpaceBook wrote “babies bring luck!!!” and I kinda/sort jumped down her throat. See… by saying that not only are you simply being an idiot, unaware of confirmation bias, you are discounting the work I did to get those jobs. If a baby is born every minute, wouldn’t there be more “luck” in the world? I can’t even begin to start deconstructing this…. The week before he was born, I had to put a new radiator in my car. Lucky? As Linus Van Pelt often said: Aaargh!
Pisces Virgo Rising is a very good siiiiignnnnnn
Racism is just lazy. Instead of investigating cultural differences, racism just lays down blanket statements about large groups of people. The only criteria is how they were born. Not who they are. People are different through their cultures, but it’s more about geography than biology. But, even then, I realllly hate it. It makes me so sad when I hear someone describe themselves based on their race. “I’m Italian, I can’t help being jealous!” Well, you were raised to think that. It has nothing to do with you being Italian, except everyone you know who is Italian has told you that you can’t help but be jealous. There are lots of Italians who aren’t. I bet there are Italians at swingers clubs.
The worst manifestation of racism is astrology. Because of the date and time of your birth, you are endowed with personality traits that are inescapable.
I think this is so maddening to me because I’m a Taurus.
duncan y bride @ one minute
But seriously… This country was created so we can be free. We are free to try to do whatever we want and be whoever we want. We are free to choose our own identity and make our own lives and yet people voluntarily yoke themselves with zodiac signs, shrug and say “I can’t help that I’m clumsy, I’m a gemini”.
Obviously, you are absolutely free to do this in this free country. You’re totally free to hamstring yourself or create excuses based on your deep misunderstanding of the gravitational effects of the planets. Please don’t do it to my son. Please don’t tell him how he is before he can walk. Please don’t make up your mind how he is before he can walk. Let him find out who he is and how he is. It’s going to take a long time and, this is important: it will change. Duncan may start out shy and become an extrovert, but let’s not keep him one way by telling him it’s preordained. It may be. But it’s not because of the moon and jupiter. As William Shakespeare wrote: “I should have been that I am, had the maidenliest star in the firmament twinkled on my bastardizing.” (Edmund has a great deconstruction of astrology in King Lear.)
There are so many real mysteries and phenomenon, both explained and unexplained, associated with infants. When does he begin recognizing us? Is he thinking abstractly? How does language happen? The nature/nurture question. All of those things. They are fascinating, vexing and beautiful. Why throw crap in there like ass-trology, babies bringing luck and anti-science? I loved him before he was born. Isn’t that enough?
Compromise
“…Oh, Johnny you’ve got a seed in your head
It is the seed of your demise
Ambition’s gonna lure you away
Into the land of compromise…”
kevin gilbert – city of the sun
I was thinking about the awesome ayn rand quote “There are two sides to every issue: one side is right and the other is wrong, but the middle is always evil”.
I think of the awesome penn jillette quote “compromise means no one gets what they want” and how the people who think there’s honor in the grey area always embrace compromise. (They embrace compromise for others, actually, not themselves.)
Compromise: two parties giving something up to create something that is inferior to each person’s individual concept.
There is no word defining two parties working on something and giving up something to create something better. I think, perhaps, that is the occasional outcome of what some may say is compromise. But it’s not. It is another word.
We have two things now:
- The first – after each person has given something up – is crap
- The second – after each person has given something up – is better
The “world is a grey area” people will tell you that both of those define compromise. I submit that by using the word compromise to contain both of those concepts, is a compromise of the word compromise!!!
There needs to be a word for the second instance: Two parties giving something up to create something better.
Maybe it’s partnership. It’s not compromise.
I’m certain!
Great Pleasures
One of the great pleasures I encounter each week is my Saturday download. It’s the day I hook up my iPhone and download my nutty podcasts. My current favorite is Skeptoid, which is described by Brian Dunning, the host as “…a weekly science podcast dedicated to furthering knowledge by blasting away the widespread pseudosciences that infect popular culture.” He’s done a couple of really great episodes about “organic” food and locally grown produce, but the most incendiary has got to be Sarah Palin is not stupid.
The Palin episode of Skeptoid points out how those of us who pride ourselves for being critical thinkers have to remember to refrain from ad hominem attacks, especially against those who have different beliefs than ours. It’s great stuff.
My other favorite, which I may have mentioned here, is the Skeptics Guide to the Universe. Steven Novella and his brothers, Jay, Bob along with Even Bernstein and one of several “skepchicks”, Rebecca, are the skeptic superfriends. Each week, they sit around and wax poetic about things skeptical. I was interviewed by them last week at TAM7, which is a true honor. Steven Novella has got to be the busiest man in the world. He blogs daily at Science Based Medicine as well as his own, Neurologica blog. Plus, he’s a neurosurgeon and does legwork for the Skeptics Guide podcast. The man is smart. Crazy smart.
I also listen to three tech podcasts: the Zend php framework, Ruby on Rails & JQuery. It sounds a lot like English. I’m pretty sure it’s English.
There’s also a guy who decided to read all of the Robert Ingersoll writings. Great. Nutty.
I put the new ones in the “Sleep” playlist and listen to that as I fall asleep. By the end of the week, from waking up in the middle of the night, etc., I’m pretty sure I’ve heard everything.
Fascinating, isn’t it?
I’m going to write about TAM7 real soon. No, really.
I am not afraid
The freedom fighters at Downsize DC have a great campaign going on. Downsize DC wisely points out that 200 times more “innocent American civilians” have been killed in automobile accidents than terrorist attacks in the U.S. and that our leaders have grossly overreacted to the threat of terrorism.
Take a look:
