happy birthday, america!

Two hundred and thirty-three years ago, a bunch of anti-authoritarian misfits got together in Philadelphia, and wrote a declaration that boldly said, “We’re our own country now. Anybody got a problem with that?”

America: where our unofficial national motto is “You’re Not The Boss Of Me”.  May she survive the combined efforts of politicians from both sides of the aisle to tear up that inconvenient Constitution.

(July 4th fact: The United States is the world’s oldest functioning constitutional republic.)

I’m heading into Boston today to pick up a high school friend from Germany who’s going to stay with us for a few days.  You folks go and celebrate the Fourth of July in whatever way seems best to you.  Gather some friends, have some beer, launch some fireworks, fire some guns…and take some time to appreciate the fact that you get to live in the place that Ben Franklin, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and  Thomas Paine built.  America is the Great Social Experiment–the first country in the history of the world built on the notion that all men are created equal, that the government is not the master of the citizen, and that there are inalienable rights that the state may not touch.

So raise your glass in the direction of Washington, D.C. today, and join me in reciting the ancient oath and sentiment that got our country started:

You’re Not The Boss Of Me!

performance art, in permanent pen.

This is the wall of my recently redecorated office, after leaving two kids out of sight for a few minutes.  It took them no time at all to discover the furniture touch-up pen I had so cleverly hidden underneath the ledge of the headboard in the picture.  When I walked into the room, they had not only painted the lovely mural pictured above, but also decorated each other’s faces with whiskers and tribal patterns.

(I didn’t take a picture of the faces because I immediately tried to clean them up, since I had no idea how permanent that touch-up pen would be on skin.)

Now I’m thinking of leaving the wall as is.

Ah, kids.  Children, sanity, a neat house: you can only pick two.

Here’s a picture of the actual “office” half of the office.  (The other half contains a nice queen-sized bed, since the office also serves as a guest bedroom for the occasional visitors.)  The table just edging into the frame on the right is a gen-u-wine typewriter table, holding the Olympia SM-9.  Another Olympia (SM-4) is currently pulling decorative duty on the bookshelf.

Lifestyles of the not-so-rich-and-famous…

<nelson>ha ha!</nelson>

Burglary 101:

When breaking into the home of the old guy next door, do a bit of background verification before you commit the burglary.  Your victim may just be a 72-year-old veteran and retired boxer, and you may get punched in the face repeatedly.

Good to see that there are still folks in England who don’t take that kind of stuff lying down, and judges who jail the right folks on occasion.

Quote from the “victim”:

"If you can’t defend what’s yours, where are we at?" 

Mr. Corti doesn’t live in driving range of Castle Frostbite, so I can’t buy him a beer in person.  On the other hand, I’m pretty sure he won’t have to pay for his pints for a while around town.  As for the burglar, I predict he won’t ever live down getting his face all rearranged by a 72-year-old despite being armed with a knife.  If you follow the link, you’ll read that Mr. Corti disarmed his knife-wielding attacker before punching him out.

This is a good example of the importance of the proper mindset when it comes to self-defense.  Having a weapon doesn’t make you dangerous by default…and not having one doesn’t make you harmless.  The weapon is between your ears—everything else is just a tool.

 

canada day.

Happy Canada Day to our neighbors to the north!  (And they are quite literally our neighbors up here—NH shares a border with Quebec , and you can get poutine in a lot of places here in the Live Free Or Die State.) 

What, I ask you, is the proper protocol to observe for Canada Day?  Is one expected to throw a beaver on the grill? Ride a zamboni to work?  Run around with only a strategically placed maple leaf for clothing?  Drink a case of Molson Ice while listening to Anne Murray?  I don’t want to be culturally ignorant, so enlighten me, dear current or former Canadians.

(In exchange, I offer the proper ritual for observing our Fourth of July, which involves charring tasty animals on the grill while trying to balance the fine beer-consumption level where you’re comfortably sloshed, yet not so drunk that you blow off a limb with the obligatory fireworks.)

is this thing on?

I got to talk to Cam Edwards on the NRA News show for a little while tonight.  A few of my loyal minions out there in Intertubes land actually listened in on that chat, so I’ll leave it up to those folks to decide if I sounded coherent, or merely babbled randomly for ten minutes.  In any case, it was fun.  (We talked about kids and toy guns—Cam read my recent blog post on the subject, and asked me to share my thoughts.)

I have some more items for the rest of the week: a look at our country’s utterly borked immigration and naturalization process, a brief review of of some gun leather I bought recently, and other odds and ends.  Stay tuned for Actual Content ™!

monday search term safari LVII.

bare chested adolescent males

And ten minutes after running that search term, Michael injected some Demerol, and fell flat on his face.

What? Too soon?

lord of the cheese

That’s my personal nickname for Michael Flatley, the self-proclaimed “Lord of the Dance”.  Lord of the fucking Dance.  You think that all the professional dancers who don’t put on a gauche little headband and prance around on stage like a spastic springbok may take offense to Michael Flatley proclaiming himself the supreme potentate of the art?

should i quit riding

That’s a question that only you can answer.  I quit a few years ago after Quinn was born, after some close encounters with idiot cagers.  I have to say, though—living in low-population rural New Hampshire, with all the twisty roads curving through the pretty landscape, I’m feeling the itch again.  (When I got my NH license, I spent an extra $80 to transfer my motorcycle endorsement as well.)  It all depends on where you live, and how attentive the cagers in your area are.  I’d not get back on a bike in Knoxville, that’s for sure.

corporate laptop policy porn

Here’s the general corporate policy on porn on corporate computers:

Boobies will get you fired.

Don’t be the sad sack who turns his laptop over to Tech Support for repair with a few gigabytes of meticulously catalogued porn on the hard drive, only to be walked out to his car with his belongings in a box a few hours later.  I’ve seen it happen more than once, and it’s never a pretty sight.

any way to suck up water from wood floor

Shop vac, or lots of paper towels.

beating spouse in marriage

There is absolutely no excuse for hitting your spouse—none whatsoever.  There are very few lifeforms that rank lower in my eyes than a wife beater.  Being a bully is not manly, and if you are looking for justification for ending your marital arguments with your fist, you won’t find it here.

flight simulator x samsung nc10

The Samsung has the same graphics processor as all the other netbooks on the market.  (Under the hood, they’re all the same: Intel Atom processor, 1GB of RAM, XP Home, and 120-160GB hard drives.)  The graphics chip in the Samsung is the Intel GMA950 integrated GPU, which is a bit anemic, to put it mildly.  I was able to run World of Warcraft on my NC10, but the frame rate was usually in the single digits.  FS X wants lots of GPU grunt, and it’ll probably look awful and run very slowly on an NC10.  If you want to play a flight sim on your netbook, track down a copy of FS2004, which has much lower hardware requirements.  (You’ll need a no-CD patch, since the Samsung has no optical drive, and FS2004 requires a CD in the drive while playing.)

alphasmart neo backing up to a cell phone

The Neo has an infrared transfer function for sending text to computers with infrared capabilities.  I’ve heard of people using that function to send text files from the Neo to an infrared-enabled phone, for backup or remote filing of articles.

can you legally sell a kidney?

Sure, as long as it’s not a human one.  Remember: it’s better for people on the organ recipient list to die, than to run the risk of someone taking advantage of poor people by offering them cash for their kidneys.

batgrowl

That’s Christian Bale’s addition to the Batman mythos.  Tip: when you have to take four deep breaths to finish one sentence, you might be overacting just a little.

can you build up tolerance to thujone

Don’t know about that, but I know that you can build up a tolerance to iocane powder, which can come in handy if you ever find yourself having to go in against a Sicilian when death is on the line.

 

That’s it for this edition of the MSTS, friends and neighbors.  Tune in again next week, when we comb the blog stats for repeat instances of “pretty girl fuk” and other high-brow search queries!

on the general suckiness of sequels.

So I hear the Transformers sequel is pretty good….if “good” is defined as “sucks only slightly less than ‘Gigli’.”

I have a pretty dim view of sequels in general, mostly because the majority of sequels merely tries to cash in on the success of the first movie, rather than offering something new and original.  The worst sequels, coincidentally, are those made after surprise indie hits like the excellent, creepy and claustrophobic “The Descent”—the follow-up gives us the very same storyline, disregards the ending of its predecessor, and negates everything that was laudable about the original.

There are exceptions to the rule, of course.  A handful of sequels managed to expand on the narrative of the original and surpass the first movie in both impact and quality.  The first and best example that pops into my head is Aliens, which took the horror template of its predecessor, and liberally blended it with military adventure, serving up a whole new meal instead of just reheating the leftovers from Alien.  Other than that, however, there aren’t too many sequels out there that are as good as the originals, much less surpass them.

(To yank the “sucky sequel” stats back in line, the third and fourth movies in the Alien franchise were once again forgettable, unnecessary, and underwhelming, especially Alien 3, which starts by killing off two of the three main characters whose fight for survival was the core dramatic thread of Aliens.  Way to alienate your fans right from the start.)

What other movie sequels are markedly superior to their predecessors? 

observation and emulation.

Meet American Bear:

American Bear is Quinn’s favorite stuffed companion.  She got her name from the knitted sweater she wears, which has an American flag on it.  (Quinn picked AB’s gender once he was old enough to understand the difference between boy and girl.)

A month or so ago, Quinn started to emulate Daddy’s kid maintenance tasks with American Bear.  He started dressing her in his clothes (the outfit pictured above was selected and put on American Bear by Quinn himself), and putting her down for naps.  The other day, we were driving into town, and Quinn had American Bear on his lap, pretending to change her diaper.  He’ll put pull-up diapers on his bear, and when I ask why American Bear needs diapers, Quinn informs me that “she doesn’t know how to use the potty yet.” 

(He also puts AB on Lyra’s training potty, presumably to wean her off the diapers.)

I know my old man would look upon such un-boylike activities as dressing and diapering a bear in horror, for fear that the kid will turn out gay.  Me, I’m rather amused by Quinn’s emulation of Daddy’s daytime chores.  One thing’s for sure—however that kid turns out as an adult, he’ll not only know how to change a diaper, but also consider it a perfectly normal job for a Dad to do.

ten books in ten years for tons of cash.

British SF writer Alastair Reynolds just signed a ten-book contract with publisher Gollancz.  He’ll be delivering one book every year for the next ten years, and receive a million British pounds in return.

My first reaction was “Good for him!”.  The second thing that went through my head was “Would I sign a similar contract for a million bucks?”

At first glance, it seems a no-brainer, especially for a writer at the very beginning of his career who is not exactly in the same writing income bracket as Orson Scott Card or David Weber, to put it mildly.  A million-dollar advance for a Decalogue would mean a guaranteed hundred grand per book—which is nothing to sneeze at, even after Uncle Sam takes his share.  It would mean financial security and income stability for a decade, which is a rare thing in the writing field.  A book a year, for ten years, and a million bucks in advance?  Most writers I know would sign their name so fast, the pen would leave a contrail.

But is that kind of deal really only positive?

I mean, I can do a novel a year—that seems to be my natural pace.  I’ve written one per year for the last three years, and there’s no reason to believe I won’t be able to keep that pace going.  In ten years, I’ll probably have another ten novels under my belt.  But tell me that I have to write those ten novels, at the pace of one per year, and I’d probably seize up mentally at some point, and start writing crap.  Right now, I’m on my own schedule, but a ten-year contract obliging me to write ten novels would feel like sort of a golden cage.  Being put on a schedule like that would mean a certain loss of creative freedom.  You can’t just take a year off for whatever reason, and you know you have no choice but to adhere to that schedule, lest the publisher asks for their money back.

That said, writing’s a business like any other, and ten years of guaranteed employment/income means a security that may just crank up the creative flow.

Truth be told, 99.9% of writers won’t ever have to face such a decision, and this is a highly theoretical discussion that will most likely never occur in real life in this particular household.  But would I sign that kind of contract if someone were to put it in front of me right this second?  And more importantly…how would I best protect my head against the cast-iron skillet Robin would swing at me if I turned it down?

monday search term safari LVI.

“model m” blank keycaps

You’d have to either strip the keycaps from your Model M and sand off the lettering from each key top, spray-paint them, or buy a Das Keyboard, which is a Model M clone in black that’s available with blank keys.

(If someone in my old corporate IT team had dared to put a Das Keyboard on his desk to show off what a L337 h4xX0R they are, we would have fucked with that person on general principle.  For starters, they’d find their label-less keyboard remapped to a left-handed Icelandic Dvorak layout.)

toy guns being destroyed

The way my kids treat their toys, I have no idea why anyone would spend the time and expense destroying something that will break in a few weeks of regular use anyway.

cocked and locked tomcat

The safety on the Tomcat only blocks the trigger, not the hammer or sear.  I wouldn’t carry one with a round in the pipe and the hammer back, safety or no.  I always carried mine with the safety off, and the hammer down.

quiche-eaters

I’m going to guess that’s a term of endearment for Francophones.  Quiche is good breakfast/brunch food, especially the killer quiches Robin makes on occasion.

(She had a boyfriend once who asked her if “men were supposed to like quiche”.  You’re a sad, blubbering sack of insecurity when you make your dietary choices by their perceived gender-specific reputation.  “Oh, no!  This tastes good, but I can’t be seen eating it!  Quiche is for girls!”)

no such thing as collective right

That’s correct—there’s no such thing as a “collective right”.  The term is a fiction employed by people who want to restrict a certain right by making it dependent on group membership.  Rights are always individual, and there’s no right you gain by joining a group that you didn’t have already before you joined.

theocracy online

That’s TOL for short, and it’s the biggest ISP in Iran and Saudi-Arabia.  There’s no sex, nudity, political discussion, or access to movies or music on TOL.  It’s basically a really dumbed-down version of the Internet with all the fun removed, and tedious content controls in place.  In other words, it’s just like America Online in the late 1990s.

why can’t i buy a humvee

Because you’re sixteen, you’re living in your parents’ basement, and you’re broke as shit.  Also, the Humvee would take up both parking spots in front of the garage, and if you think your Dad will park on the street after springing for the insurance bill on that godawful monster car of yours, you have another thing coming, young man.  Get used to the idea of driving that ‘88 Chevette after your sister gets that cute RAV4 as a graduation gift.

beretta 93fs

There’s no such critter.  You’re looking either for the Beretta 92FS, which is the civilian version of the military’s M9, or the Beretta 93R, which is a select-fire machine pistol.  The number of legit, transferable 93Rs in the United States is in the single digits, which makes the accessory market for them a bit limited, to say the least.

(Random trivia: Robocop’s sidearm in the movie was a Beretta 93R with a lot of cosmetic add-ons.)

can fisher cats be kept as demestocated

They’re wild animals.  Not only are they wild, but the other animals in the forest consider them batshit insane.  Only a nutcase would try to tame what’s essentially a scaled-down Wolverine.  (On second thought, contact me if you manage to trap one, and you want to give the taming thing a shot.  I’ll show up in chain mail, tape the whole thing, and make a zillion bucks off the video, “When Mustelids Attack”.)

3 chiwawas dogs corner bobcat in garage

Let’s run that equation briefly:

This is a bobcat.  It stands up to 24 inches tall at the shoulder, and can weigh more than thirty pounds.  It can kill game up to the size of a deer.  Its main fighting technique is to shred its prey with its razor-sharp claws while biting it in the neck to sever its spine.

This is a Chihuahua.  It’s about the size of an anorexic rat.  It weighs less than a baseball, and can be thrown or kicked into the next area code by anyone stronger than a toddler.  It’s high-strung, and generally not known to reliably bring down anything bigger than a cockroach.  Its main fighting technique is to annoy its prey to death with its piercing yip.

I don’t know about you, but my money is on the super-sized fucking wildcat that can kill a deer.

That’s it for this Monday morning, folks.  You may now safely resume your regular Monday activities!