Goldilocks goes SoMe

I see that Facebook is flapping its corporate hands in shock—shock, I say—at discovering a “coordinated disinformation campaign” (per WaPo) in the run-up to this year’s elections. They claim they can’t find any link to Russia in the pages they’ve shut down, so I suppose that means their “ad” checks are still clearing the bank.

Here’s the thing—everything about Facebook is geared around them producing data that will support whatever they choose to do. And if having all those Russian trolls create pages and engage in activity so that it makes their user numbers look good, they’re going to find data that backs them up.

Every single time they pretend to solicit feedback, it’s in the form of “you want us to do this, right?” not a real attempt to collect our opinions, much less act on them.

A case in point is a survey they fielded a few weeks ago. It was page after page of multiple choice questions that were utterly meaningless. (And don’t even think about a verbatim option.) Here’s one utterly idiotic example:

What does this even mean? It makes me think of Goldilocks and the three bears. If I say I have “too many FB friends”, what are they going to do about it? Bring out the guillotine? And If I say I want more, are they going to cook some up for me? (No, no—I know: they’re going to demand access to my email contacts list and start soliciting people to join up. After all, they need to replace all the fake account they’ve purged.)

But aside from that, I'm pretty sure that Facebook gathered no meaningful information from it. It was a Potemkin survey.

Teamwork

Some time ago PBS ran a program on White House staff, and how they work as an integral team with the President and First Family. (This was pre Klepto, so I’m guessing that it’s not quite the same since 19 January. He has, after all, famously referred to the White House as a dump.)

It was fascinating, actually, because it’s rather like the crew of a naval vessel—frigate maybe. Everyone working hand-in-glove with everyone else, perfectly synchronized.

This one clip, of Jacqueline Kennedy in a receiving line, demonstrates this. Check the handoff at the end.

Man, I love it when a good plan comes together.

Piss off, Facebook

Between Facebook prompting me to find out what “people are saying” about every step in this presidential election and foisting “memories” on me, I rather wish I were still in the Valley They Call Silicon so I could deposit some sort of memory on their doorstep.

It’s not like I don’t click the Close-X on the former every time it presents itself to me, or on the “Hide post” box every time that presents itself to me.

I even walk through the extremely limited and kludgy interface that they give you to tell them which dates and people you want to block.

(And isn’t it interesting that they don’t give you the option of never displaying used memories ever again, and that they frame your preferences in terms of “blocking” people, like you’re being anti-social?)

I find it both annoying and insulting that they’ve built their little algorithms on the premise that Facebook knows better how to live my life (both past and present) than I do.

Horsing around

I’m not sure why this meme came through on social media recently. I mean, any more than any of the “do you remember princess phones/poodle skirts/roller skate keys” memes.

If you don’t recognize it, it’s a vaulting horse, used for gymnastics. (In the Olympics, women use the horse to vault (think: Kerri Strug); men use it for upper body routines.) I recognize it, but not because I’ve ever seen it in use, much less used it myself.

When I was around junior high age, I picked up a paperback copy of The Wooden Horse, by Eric Williams, at a used bookshop on East Colorado Boulevard. That was in the days when E. Colorado was seedy and you had to be willing to push past the winos to get to the used book stores. I was.

(These days it’s Old Town Pasadena, and you have to pay big bucks to valet park your car while you eat at the trendy bistrot-du-jour. If there’s a book store of any stripe there, it’s got expensively distressed plank floors, exposed brick (possibly faux) walls and free-trade organically-grown hand-roasted coffee served in an eclectic array of porcelain-like cups. And nothing in the store costs less than $10.95, including the coffee.)

The book is a fictionalized account of a real escape by RAF officer Williams and two fellow POWs from Stalag Luft III (yes, the camp of The Great Escape, although a different compound). The schtick was that the vaulting horse would be carried out to an open field in the camp, with a man and a shovel hidden inside. The horse would be set down in the same place every day, the man would dig a tunnel under it, and each afternoon, men would carry the horse, the man and dug-up dirt back to the barracks, where the dirt would be distributed. (They covered over the opening to the hole, but I disremember exactly how that was done.)

So—a bunch of guys would carry the horse (which had to be not a trivial weight), with one or two men inside, out every day. Then a larger bunch of guys would vault over it throughout the day with enough verisimilitude that the German guards never questioned what it was there for. Then they carried horse, men and dirt back. Remarkably, to my mind, in light of the fact that they all knew that they weren’t going to benefit directly from this repeated exercise.

Eventually the horse hid two diggers, and at the time of escape (October, 1943), three men. All of them made their way to Sweden and back to the UK.

Now here’s my conundrum, as a junior high schooler, reading about a World War II POW camp populated mostly by RAF officers—a world thrice-removed from my life, with respect to the horse—I had no earthly notion of what the man was talking about. I knew what a vaulting horse was—it looked like this:

I knew it looked like that because that’s what we had in our school gym. How the hell could you conceal anything, much less three men in that contraption?

The paperback book had no illustrations, and there was no handy-dandy Internet then to come to my rescue. I went through the entire escape narrative without being able to clearly visualize how Williams and his mates did it. It wasn’t until some years later, when I found another edition of the book, that it became apparent. (I never saw the 1950 film based on the book, but here’s a still from it.)

So, when this meme made its way to my feed, what I first thought of was not gym class, or how old I may or may not be, it was of the ingenuity, perseverance and teamwork of comrades to support a crack-brained escape scheme over a period of months, back in the days before princess phones, poodle skirts and roller skates were even a thing.

About that word...

This came to me from a friend. If you don’t know Tim Minchin, you really should become acquainted with him. He’s a brilliant actor, comedian and musician/composer, mostly Australian, with that antipodean ability to find exactly the right part of the balloon to prick.

Here he takes on prejudice, focusing on that word—you know, the one with two Gs, an ER and an I and an N…

Oh, yeah? You what?

Nope—I can legitimately use it, since I am one. And, as Minchin points out, that entitles me.

And remember—“It’s a homophone!”

Mild men

I don’t know why I didn’t know about this long before now, but there is an organization called The Dull Men’s Club. Yes there is, and it's real because they have a website.

And later this month they are publishing a 2015 calendar, “The Dull Men of Great Britain”.

This features blokes who collect lawnmowers, traffic cones, milk bottles, bricks and buses; spend five days per week moving rocks; and document drain covers, roundabouts, post boxes and hedges.

And, close to Ms. Language-Person’s heart, there’s the founder of the Apostrophe Protection Society, engaged in the never-ending struggle against the tsunami of misuse of that punctuation mark.

And no, I am not making up a single one of those pastimes.

There’s also a man who’s given his wife the same Valentine’s Day card for 35 years, but I’d categorize that more as sad than dull. She must encourage him, though. Or at least be inured to it.

You’re not going to see any naked torsos in this calendar; that might, after all, be outside the remit of dullness. Or public decency. Besides—the point is more the activity than the actor.

The DMC was founded in the 1980s, in New York City. They claim membership of 5000 around the world, but from their website, it looks as though the power base (if that be the correct term) has shifted to the UK.

Although—interestingly (again, if you can apply that modifier to an organization devoted to dullness)—they purport to have an “International Committee of Dull Men”, which meets in London and…wait for it…Washington, D.C. I would purely love to know the story about that.

And, uh, interesting (?!) again: their last nomination for “Dull Man of the Year” appears to have been in 2011. Is it possible that they’re actually living such fascinating lives that they don’t have time to keep this very important honor updated?

But the notion of making Keith Richards an honorary DM is totally, um, you know, inter…

I'm not a rabbit!

Oh, let’s close out the week with a report from the Division of the Blindingly Obvious in the CDC: they’ve done a study, & it turns out women are more tired than men.

No kidding.

So, I’ll leave you with also the blindingly obvious: Madeline Kahn as Lili Von Shtupp singing “I’m Tired”. From Blazing Saddles.

Oh, I just crack me up.

Bring it!

Tomorrow is the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November. It’s Election Day, and there are a lot of things at stake. You’ve no doubt been barraged by TV campaign ads, robo-calls and a whole load of crap in your mail. If you’re like me, you were ready to cast your ballot and have the whole thing in your rearview mirror at least a month ago.

But it’s time to get past your disgust with pretty much everyone involved in politicking, from presidential candidates down to city councilors. Forget how much money the Koch brothers and Sheldon Adelson have poured into PACs and alleged “social welfare organizations” helmed by Karl Rove; or—if you lean the other way—the millions that George Soros and Ariana Huffington have donated to Democrats. Put aside the fact that your local and state office candidates are being funded by people who’ve never set foot in your fair community, but have a vested interest in fielding candidates who think their way get into your political offices. Draw a breath and disremember that once they’re in office all they seem to think about is the next election.

Leave all that crap aside and think about what a wonderful thing it is to vote. The Founding Fathers laid the framework for a government of the people, by the people and for the people. Their “people”, of course, were adult white males; but the Fifteenth and Nineteenth Amendments to the Constitution rectified that. We are privileged to elect our governments—it’s a principle that tens of millions of people view with longing because they know it only in theory.

And this brings me to my point for the day: my fellow women—my sistahs: we have not had the right to vote for even 100 years. Our grandmothers and great-grandmothers first went to the polls in the presidential election of 1920. To get that vote, generations of women agitated, educated, annoyed and became thorns in the sides of every civic, religious, political and business organization in the country. They suffered ridicule, legal prosecution, imprisonment, financial hardships and ostracism from family and community. In a very real sense, they went into harm’s way so that we can mark the ballot with our choices for those who will act as our leaders.

(Yes, fine—generations of men before them struggled for the vote, before democratic republics became the norm. You want to feel good about that?—post to your own blog. I’m talking the ladies, here.)

We owe it to the suffragists who won that vote at hard cost to themselves to exercise that right.

And consider the sistahs:

This election year has any number of themes that are categorized as “women’s issues”. In my opinion, this is a misnomer. The right to access to affordable healthcare (for all aspects of health), the right to make decisions about whom you’ll associate with in what relationships (First Amendment, anyone?), the right to be protected from physical harm in the home as well as on the streets, the right to a sound education that leads to economic opportunities so that your children don’t grow up in poverty—these aren’t “women’s issues”. They’re “human issues”. They affect us all.

But they’ve slapped the women label on them, so I say, sistahs: bring it on. Bring on those votes. Offer to drive someone to the polls who might not otherwise be able to get there. Urge your friends to vote. High-five anyone you see wearing one of those “I voted” stickers. Strut your vote. You talk the talk when you bitch about political leaders; now’s the time to walk the walk by voting.

This is only the 24^th presidential election we’ve been able to participate in—so vote for your man. One day your man may be a woman. But don’t stop there—vote for your Senator, your Representative, your Governor, your state reps, your initiatives and your referenda. What the hell—do not stop voting until you’ve run out of ballot. (If you need guidance on issues, consult your local chapter of the League of Women Voters. These broads know their onions and they give you the straight scoop. They are not the Junior League.)

My sistahs—I’m as cynical as they come about politicians. But your vote matters.

Think about this, my sistahs:

And bring it.

Social helpfulness

A while ago one of my friends posted this on her Facebook status:

If you can’t read the caption, it claims that Facebook (or its representatives, management, board, employees or something) will “give $1.20 Dollars [sic] on each share!” to the girl in the picture, who is allegedly suffering from cancer.

Despite having been raised in Brooklyn and Connecticut, having worked for several global corporations and having been a social worker in a couple of prisons, my friend has a remarkably naïve grasp of what might or might not be a hoax.

Since she’s created a FB presence, she has reduced the number of emails urging recipients to forward to seven new recipients within 16 minutes of receipt and be prepared for a major wish to be fulfilled, or promising that Bill Gates is using this email to test the effectiveness of [Hotmail, Windows, the whole flipping Internet], so he’s going to give $5 to everyone who forwards it to their entire addressbook.

(I did have to quit sending her the Snopes debunking stories I pulled up because she got sniffy about me being such a party pooper. Well, fair enough—but why you’d expect me not to look that stuff up, I don’t know. Would a Jack Russell Terrier pass up an opportunity to bounce repeatedly off your cocktail party guests’ $3500 Nino Cerruti trouser legs?)

What I don’t get is the total dismemberment of any form of critical thinking from people who post these things. Leaving aside the issue of how a Higher Power keeps track of the number of people to whom you forward an email (or the question of what constitutes “time of receipt”—is it when it appeared in your queue? When you saw it in your queue but didn’t open it because you know what “This really works!!!!” in the title bar means? When you actually opened it? Or when you finished reading 15 screenloads of multi-font text attesting to the veracity of the offer?), why does no one seem to stop to inquire about the logistics of receiving $5 with nothing to go on but an email address?

I’ve learned my lesson with this particular friend—I keep my Snopes to myself and let her feel good that she’s just helped a cancer patient winkle $1.20 out of Internet zillionaires. (But what’s up with $1.20, anyhow? Why not $1.50? Why not $5.00—is Zuckerberg cheaper than Gates?) I myself always clap for Tinkerbelle, so who am I to police the Marche des naïfs?

BTW—if you were in any doubt, this FB thing is a total hoax.

Chocolate coating

Following on my post yesterday about the Israeli study on the benefits of chocolate for breakfast, there’s another study indicating that…well, that people in Michigan think the last chocolate they’re offered tastes best.

In this study, subjects were offered, in random order, five kinds of Hershey’s Kisses: milk, dark, crème, caramel and almond. One group wasn’t told when the supply of chocs was going to run out; the other was informed when the fifth was brought out that it was the last.

In that second group, when asked to rate which Kiss they liked best, they tended to pick the last one--to the tune of 64%. (The first group rated the last chocolate best only 22% of the time.) And researchers concluded that if you think something is the last to come your way, you’ll choose it as the best.

Here’s my response:

I’m not sure I’d have eaten any of the Kisses, because Hershey’s? Please. Second, I’m going to choose dark chocolate no matter what order it comes to me. I definitely wouldn’t have ingested the milk chocolate one at all.

So, I don’t know what’s up with those Michiganders, but this is one study that I'd send back for rework.

Rain in Spain

Okay, I can’t tell whether this is the goods or just another “it’s-close-to-April-1^st” story, but I’ll pass it on anyhow. Last week I learned of an alleged strike by Spain’s “high-class” prostitutes, targeting bankers specifically in what might in high-tech terms be called a Denial of Service (DOS) attack. (Thanks to Roo for passing on the news.)

The UK’s Daily Mail reports that they’re, erm, cutting off the plutocrats until the banks start opening up credit lines for Spaniards who have, as you know, been really hit by the economic turmoil. So far, Snopes hasn’t debunked it, but I can’t find any corroborating report on this, so I’m reserving any serious judgment on any of the stakeholders (as it were).

Now, true or not, this reminds me of Lysistrata. That 2000-year-comedy by Aristophanes tells how the women of the various Greek city states collaborate to end the Peloponnesian War. By basically depriving their men of any what you might call home comforts. Wives, mistresses, prostitutes—they all agree to a pre-emptive DOS attack in this regard.

When the men realize the real cost of the ongoing war, they negotiate peace. Exeunt omnes, as the Bard used to say. I personally find it hysterical—some of the dialog is serious LOL stuff—although, I dunno, maybe men wouldn’t find it quite as entertaining. Sourpusses.

But where I’m really intrigued by the current state of affairs in Spain is the call girls’ targeting bankers. Because in Lysistrata the way the women of Sparta, Athens, Corinth & the other cities first grabbed the minds of their men (preparatory to grabbing their hearts) was by seizing the treasuries. They cut off funds for the fighting. When the soldiers came home to ask “WTF?” they responded, “Um, no—none of that, either.”

(As an aside, Aristophanes stole my story line. I found this out sitting in a poly sci class one summer, kind of drifting, as you do, when the professor described the basic plot. I was incensed, but I guess it’s really a universal kind of story. As another aside, Aristophanes gave us “cloud cuckoo land”, in The Birds. Really—why are they not reviving his plays?)

At any rate, if the Spain sex & money story is true, I give major props to the ladies of the night. & maybe the Occupy movement would like to take a pointer from the classics.

Distracted driving

Something going on in Dorset, UK, that I’d love to see throughout the US: cops are empowered to slap £60 ($90) fines on drivers who think phoning, texting, eating, putting on makeup, faxing & other activities are not incompatible with safe driving.

Here’s the sweet part: no excuses accepted.

Drivers trying out the vehicular version of “the dog ate my homework” to weasel out of the fine get no points for creativity. But they will get points on their driving license if they choose not to take a driver safety course in addition to paying their 60 quid.

Not that they don’t try. I can’t tell whether I’d give the whopper award to the woman who claimed she’d left her smart phone at home (unaccountably found on the passenger seat with her Facebook page open) or the one who seemed to think she was exempt from having kids secured by seat belts because “they’re not my children.”

I understand that Dorset is a small area to patrol & that US police forces are faced with balancing massive workloads with decreasing resources. But I really think instituting similar programs would be nothing but beneficial: new revenue streams, lower numbers of accidents due to basic driver idiocy & vastly improved morale amongst the cops.

After all, being able to bust morons without taking seriously their lame-ass excuses has to be a boost.

Although I suppose that pesky Constitution would constrain implementation, it apparently being enshrined there that Congress shall make no law restricting Americans’ right to behave like a bonehead & wriggle out of it by lying like a rug.

Sweating spirituality 2

Further to my post of last October about three deaths in an Indian-manqué sweat lodge: the self-styled shaman who charged nearly $10K per head for the experience has been charged with three counts of manslaughter.

As of this writing James Arthur Ray has been arrested and tucked into the Yavapai County slammer. Bail set at $5M.

Let’s see how the guy who earns $9.4M per year putting on retreats (as well as seminars, DVDs and possibly Amway and Tupperware parties) deals with the intense experience of being in a cell with the Arizona branch of the Crips.

It’ll bring new meaning to the term “spiritual warrior”.

Remember, remember

Today is Guy Fawkes Day in the UK. It’s not a holiday in the sense that you get out of school or off work; but tonight across the realm there will be fireworks and bonfires lit (along with suitable amounts of drinking) to celebrate the exposure and foiling of the Gunpowder Plot to blow up Parliament and King James I on this date in 1605.

Guy Fawkes wasn’t the leader of the plot, but he was the one charged with its execution (so to speak). Having been a mercenary fighting for the Catholic League and the Spaniards against the Protestant Dutch, he presumably had the experience necessary to handle barrels of gunpowder and set the charges.

He did, but the plot was revealed via a letter warning a Catholic Member of Parliament to stay away on the 5th. One thing led to another, the gunpowder was discovered (“Oi, mate—did you order 30 barrels of black powder and all this firewood and coal?”), Fawkes was apprehended and duly tortured to reveal the names of co-conspirators. (Unsuccessfully—as “interrogators” in our current foreign wars have learned, torture isn’t a good means of acquiring reliable information.)

Eventually there was a trial, but the verdict was a foregone conclusion. Fawkes cheated the hangman, though: he jumped from the gallows and broke his neck.

I’m guessing the executioners went ahead with the drawing and quartering, however.

Since the 18th Century, effigies of Fawkes, “guys”, have been burnt in bonfires with much gaiety on this night.

Now, while I think it’s a good thing indeed to foil mass murder plots (even when the prospective victims are politicians), there’s something about continuing this tradition of dissing Catholics down into the 21st Century that just creeps me out.

It’s not that I was baptized in the Roman Church, it’s this holdover from the time when where you worshiped defined your entire existence for good or ill. I mean—that’s so 19th Century. (Okay, people over here were certain that JFK would be taking all his marching orders from the Pope; but we got over that.)

But the Brits are stuck in this time warped mentality in which Catholics = Satan-worshiping-overthrowers-of-civilization.

Just last year, there was major hoopla over one of Her Majesty’s grandsons being affianced to a Canadian commoner…Catholic. Under the Act of Settlement, passed in 1701, no one can be in line for the British throne if s/he is or marries a Catholic.

(You can marry/be a militant Muslim, a Moonie, a Wiccan, a foot-washin’ Baptist or a Baha’i and ascend to the throne. But Catholic? Fuggedaboutit.)

So Autumn Kelly, who married Peter Phillips last year, converted from Catholicism to save her husband from having to give up his place in line to the throne.

There was talk, right up to two months before the nuptials, of Phillips renouncing his place in the royal succession, but in the end his situation was deemed more important than her faith, and she caved.

(BTW—he’s 11th in line to the throne. The royal yacht would have to go down with most of his close relatives on it to make him any sort of a contender. That just boggles my mind. I have as much chance at winning the Powerball as he does of becoming King Peter.)

And it’s not like the Royals are the same old Bastions of Propriety and Examples to the Nation they’ve been ever since Victoria and Albert. Phillips and Kelly sold the “rights” to their wedding for £500K to Hello! magazine. (If you don’t know the rag, it makes People magazine look like the New Yorker.) By all accounts Her Majesty was Not Amused.

Evidently they needed the cash to pay for the nuptials, even though the service was held at Saint George’s Chapel at Windsor Castle, and I’m sure the Queen hardly charged them more than £25 for it.

(She might have wanted more for the reception, held at Frogmore House in the Castle grounds. At least some kind of damage deposit. But still.)

This whole aversion to Catholicism is related to the monarch being the head of the Church of England, which emerged from Henry VIII having the hots for Anne Boleyn (and the possibility of producing a son who wouldn't die in infancy) and needing a divorce from Catherine of Aragon, which Pope Clement VII refused to give him. For centuries after Henry declared the papacy irrelevant, all non-CoE followers were required to support the established church with their taxes. So if you were a Methodist, you were voluntarily giving money to your chapel and involuntarily giving money to the Anglicans.

That’s one of the reasons why our Founding Fathers slipped that separation of church and state clause in the First Amendment. That established church thing just rankled. (A lot of the provisions in the Constitution were reactions to British governing practices.)

There’s been talk, post-Phillips, of finally getting around to repealing the Catholic part of the Act of Settlement, seeing as to how the Catholic Church and its followers aren’t the danger they were in the 16th and 17th centuries. Really, the Pope, the Cardinals and the Bishops have too much on their plates to consider invading Britain in the name of the True Church. The cover-ups and payoffs for pedophile priests in the US alone would keep the entire Jesuit order occupied in civil litigation until 2050. And after that the Church couldn't afford an invasion.

However, even if the Act is repealed or amended, I won’t hold out hope that the latent anti-Catholic animosity that underlies Guy Fawkes Day will disappear. I think that’s bred in the bone.

Sweating spirituality

There’s something about the story of three deaths in a faux-Indian sweat lodge ceremony earlier this month in Sedona that grabs me.

It’s a pity about the three people who lost their lives, of course. But what strikes me is this whole phenomenon of adults so in search of…something that they pay money (in large sums) to any fast-talking self-proclaimed spiritual leader who'll put them through an ordeal that, if mandated by some government, say, or an employer, would spark class-action lawsuits.

I guess what surprises me is that there aren’t more deaths resulting from this sort of thing.

In the “spiritual warrior” experience led by James Arthur Ray, “nationally known New Age guru”, 50 people paid $9,695 for the privilege of spending 36 hours without food or water in the Arizona desert on a vision quest and then three hours in the sweat lodge. (For those unfamiliar with the term “sweat lodge”, think unregulated, smoke-filled sauna.)

I don’t know why this wasn’t seen as a recipe for disaster. Fifty people in a space 24 feet wide and 4.5 feet high. Twenty-one people ended up in local hospitals, with three eventually dying. Despite several participants showing signs of serious trouble, Ray, it seems, blocked the exit.

Yavapai County sheriff investigating the incident as a homicide, but so far no one’s been charged.

Ray, whose company made $9.4M last year from speeches, seminars, retreats, books and videos, says he’s cooperating. It’s gotta bite, after all, if you lose paying customers in such close proximity to your “empowering” events.

Now, here’s my issue. What is it with people who scoff at organized religion as institutional superstition but fall slack-jawed in awe at any caftan-wearing self-proclaimed guru with bad teeth and a worse haircut who promises them spiritual enlightenment if they’ll only [insert ceremony here].

I have a friend who falls into that category. About eight years ago she tried to get me to go on a trip to Sedona run by someone who was supposed to be au fait with all types of spiritual practices. I never told her but the prospect of spending ten days in a mini-van/Comfort Inn with 11 middle-aged white women oohing and ahing about Hopi ceremonies and then engaging in replicas of same just gave me the willies. Their mission, and I am not making this up, was to focus cosmic energy on righting 400 years of wrongs done to the Native Americans.

They were conducted around by some local middle-aged white woman who was supposed to be connected to the local tribes, although there were apparently a couple of instances where the women had to stand at quite a distance because the Hopis weren’t wild about interlopers, no matter how sterling their intent.

When she returned, totally enthused about the experience, my friend showed me her photos of the events. There was one of the women seated in a circle on the ground. It was some sort of prayer circle, meant to concentrate their spiritual powers. She said that the picture was taken just before the heavens opened up and poured rain down on them.

“But that’s okay—it was a cleansing rain.”

Apparently the thought that the gods might be pissed off at the effrontery of 12 middle-aged white women from Virginia thinking that they could erase 400 years of policies in ten days at the Comfort Inn and were expressing their displeasure with the downpour never occurred to them.

So many of these spiritual guides make a very, very good living out of their vision quests and seminars and retreats. Maybe not $9.4M, but comfortable. (And I’m not saying that some don’t indeed have some spiritual gifts that they do share with their followers—maybe without even charging.) But when a New Age guru accepts MasterCard or Discover, how is that different from Jim and Tammi Faye?

BTW, for that vision quest, Ray sent his paying guests out into the October desert for 36 hours with only a sleeping bag. Although he offered to sell them Peruvian ponchos for $250.

I rest my case.

However this investigation turns out, I’d like to think that at least one charlatan has been revealed. But even if he is, his acolytes are sure to stick by him.

Or move on to the next one.

Learning from history's mistakes (not)

Ah, the grand old days of black-is-white socialist realism are not entirely behind us. In the revisionist Russian regime of Prime Minister Vladimir Putin & President Dmitri Medvedev that old blackguard Josef Stalin is on his way to rehabilitation. & the latest step in that process is a libel suit being brought by the Man of Steel’s grandson against a historian who wrote a journal article that would not qualify as hagiography.

Seems that Stalin never made policy of the destruction of whole classes of Soviet citizenry (in their tens of millions); didn’t really make a deal with Adolf Hitler & refuse to believe that his fascist friend would actually breach the pact by, you know invading the Soviet Union; didn’t eviscerate the Red Army with the show trials of the 30s; didn’t order the murder of 21,000 Polish officers in the Katyn Forest; & blah, blah, blah.

This is an example of the cyclical nature of both historiography & national development. Were it not a desecration of every soul starved, shot, drowned, frozen, tortured & overworked to death in the service of Stalin’s ambition & by his direct mandate it would be rather farcical.

I mean, really—suing for libel instead of just eviscerating the offender in the bowels of the Lubyanka & sending his family to Siberia? Somewhere Stalin is whirling like a dreydel.

Any road—it doesn’t bode well for Russians today or the nations that interact with them.

Crustacean crime

So, the WSJ reports that crayfish rustlin’ is big business across many states (& Oz), both farmed & in the wild.

Now, this is interesting because it’s kind of unexpected to those of us who only encounter crayfish in a bouillabaisse along with a rather nouveau Beaujolais. I mean—I didn’t even know crawdads were big business, much less major crime. (I also wonder where you fence hot mudbugs?)

But the interestingness doesn’t stop with Astacidae. Drift on down the story & see where, “Maine lobstermen and Alaska crabbers have been said to shoot at people who pull up their pots. In June, a San Diego Superior Court judge handed down a 90-day jail sentence to a man who was found smuggling contraband lobsters in his pants.”

Well, damn—now, that’s what I call a crime story.

Seems that, just before lobster season commenced last October, Binh Quang Chau, 33, was apprehended by San Diego Fish & Wildlife wardens with six lobsters stuffed down his pants. Chau, a serial poacher, caught the wardens’ attention when they spotted “odd bulges” in his trousers.

(Obviously, Chau wasn’t wearing the skintight jeans you see around West Hollywood, where you can see whether the wearer has a penny or a dime in his back pocket.)

I was somewhat relieved to find that the critters were wrapped individually in newspaper before filling his pants. (Hey—keep that in mind when you’re reading your news online: if you ever want to smuggle contraband crustaceans in your attire, you can’t do that with electrons.) Even so, I wonder if PETA is getting on his ass—that has to be lobster abuse.

Chau got 90 days in the clink—this wasn’t his first offense, after all. & the story goes on to recount lobster thievery on a grand scale--& that’s just in La Jolla.

Well, this story reminded me of something I’d seen in one of those emails some time ago—a pet shop thief trying to hide stolen snakes in his (you guessed it) trousers. So I went on a Bing & found one story about a guy making off with a python crammed into his jeans from a Florida pet shop.

But pants-related purloining is not limited to the Serpentes suborder of Reptilia, or even to the male of the homo sapiens crowd:

A suburban Houston pet shop caught a thief on surveillance video jamming a tortoise in the pocket of his jeans & absconding.

& then there’s the woman who went into a Lansing, Mich., pet shop, cased the joint & then stuffed a young boa constrictor down her trousers.

& that’s only the first page of the search results.

I guess desperate times do call for desperate measures. & baggy trousers.

Phoning it in

In the category of nice-try-but-not-going-to-happen, some business etiquette consultant has declared July “National Cell Phone Courtesy Month.”

To give you an idea of how futile this concept is, she made this unilateral declaration in 2002.

Yeah, you’ve noticed how many folks have taken up the idea in the past seven years, haven’t you?

This woman states the blindingly obvious—turn the damned thing off during meetings, movies, weddings & funerals; remember that when you’re in public your call is, too; not every call takes precedence over your real-time companions; etc. She puts numbers on them, like that’s going to imbue them with greater force than just being sensible imparts.

But the very fact that she has to state the obvious is an indicator that mobile phone users don’t give a toss about courtesy, sensibility or even the obvious.

& she doesn’t even go into the whole thing about people driving with one hand holding the triple shot mochaccino & the other the iPhone, weaving through traffic as though the Almighty Himself were clearing the way in a T-34. Those morons are the 21st Century justification for the Second Amendment. In fact, we should be issued 9mm pistols just for the purpose of removing them from the gene pool.

So, observe the made-up month-long focus however you see fit. Don't make me a lick o' difference, since I only use mine to check my email.

Sign of the Times

‘Kay, there’s plenty of news to talk about, but this just stopped me cold. I saw that Farrah Fawcett lost her battle with cancer, so I went to her hometown paper to see what they had to say.

Imagine my, well, surprise at finding what the LA Times thinks is good (or even appropriate) context-generated advertising. (I’ve highlighted the relevant offenders in yellow.)

In case you’re unable to see in this rendering, I’ve cut out the offenders for separate viewing:

As if the text ads weren't bad enough, we also have:

What you can’t see here is the changes in the caskets that are displayed, so there is this constant neon-light-like flashing in your line of vision.

I understand there’s an algorithm that matches ads with content, but you’d think there’d be some adult supervision in the equation somewhere.

Evidently you’d be wrong.

Yuppie armageddon

I’ve been focusing on other things the past few days but I couldn’t let this story go by without comment.

Don’t know whether this was reported with tongue in cheek, but the first thing that struck me was how really unsympathetic the Robbins family are as exemplars of people hard hit by the recession.

They’re pulling in $130K a year, but within a week of him being laid off they’re on Medicaid and food stamps? What’s up with that?

“That three-month emergency fund—we should have done it, but we didn’t,” Kim Robbins rued. Three months? Evidently they didn’t have seven days. How does that make them victims?

In fact, on $130K per annum “it was hard enough to keep up with living expenses…Plus, they had credit-card debt.”

So, there they were, spending everything they earned and more, evidently in the expectation that reality was never going to catch up with them.

But I love their response to the crisis: her mother brings them toilet paper and paper towels; they eat pasta; they stop the kids’ sports leagues and music lessons.

And Mrs. Robbins moans, “It’s all gone. Everything you had is all gone….Everything you were connected to—it’s gone.”

Well, except for the health club membership and Catholic schools.

Plus, their “agony” doesn’t even last two months—so that’s a lot of melodrama for a family that restored its income in six weeks.

I don’t know—I’m beginning to sound like my parents, who went through the Great Depression and made only two classes of purchases “on the cuff”, as my father referred to it: houses and cars. So I really don’t get the sort of mind set that lets you run up expenditures like you’re the federal government or GM with never any expectation that you’re going to have to, you know, pay for them.

Evidently no one’s read Mr. Micawber’s precept:

"Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen pounds and six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery."

Including that reporter.