...Newsweek
This is a bit of a sticky situation, and frankly, it scares the crap out of me. But not for the reasons that people might think.
I help to moderate a forum intended for serious discussion on a gaming site that I have long been a contributer to (yup, I'm on staff at a gaming journalism site...it's not nearly as exciting as that sentence makes it sound, my job is just to keep people from trolling a forum). I might bring it up every now and then. For those of you from Brunchma reading this, it's similar to The Library, but with a bit more...well, a bit wider range of right leaning opinions. Yeah, that's a good way to put it.
Anyway. Newsweek, which is what this is about. And what scares me about it. On that forum, people are using this kerfuffle as a reason to argue that the media should have some level of government oversite and regulation. Government oversite and regulation.
Now, the problem that I have with this is a rather obvious one, a single sentence, a handful of comma deliniated clauses (with an Oxford comma *glee*), a brief 45 words. Yeah, I'm being poetic and overstating, but it's the First damned Amendment of the Constitution of the United States. The very clause that says that the press is a seperate entity from the government, just as churches are. The press, the grand high alter of American democracy, the fact that the government can be questioned, can be brought to task, and is answerable. The very press that helped break Watergate wide open. And now, people are so willing to want to impose government regulation where government regulation does not belong. Government oversite over a portion of American life that should be a black box to government. Felt so important that it was put first among all rights that Americans enjoy.
And because of this, because of the perception of some that there is a concerted effort by the media to promote liberalism, and bring down The Administration, that they want it reigned in, they want it muzzled. And that just scares the hell out of me. It terrifies me that people are so willing to throw away the rights that were fought and died for, just because they feel that those rights are being used. I was going to lengthen that sentence, but that's the entire problem. These people are upset that others are using their rights.
You'll notice that I haven't gone into whether the story was true, or accurate, or fairly reported, because I don't think that matters to the situation at hand. This isn't an issue of what Newsweek got right, got wrong, or why it got it wrong. I have my own feelings along those lines, but to present them here takes away from the point that I'm trying to make. We can't allow rights to be stripped away because of mistakes, or because of partisan bickering.
I have no fear of America ever being taken down from outside of our borders. Fellow Americans are so much more of a threat to our Republic than any foreign forces will ever be.
...Life, and the Length Thereof
My apartment complex seems to be morbidly obsessed with the mortality of the tennants who live here.
Thus it is that, in the monthy newsletter that the slide between our front door knobs and the door jamb, there has been a new feature for the past few months. "Life is too short..."
Now, while it is true that most of us get, on average, less than eighty years on this planet to make of our lives what we can, before we don't have lives to make anything of anymore, my apartment complex takes things a bit far. Let's look at a few examples. Much like the titles of posts in this blog, each of these is an extention. Life is too short...
...to trust the weather report. Okay, this is, in general, decent advice. Meterology is, at best, an inexact science that is trying to predict the inherently unpredictible: chaos theory. No matter how good of a computer project you can create, they'll always be wrong. Which is why most weather reports are built on compositing what multiple computer projections seem to agree on, and averaging out details as they go. I'm more than willing to give my complex a pass on this one, and start of with it just to be fair, and say that not all the advice is bad advice.
...to check your luggage. Ah, so this is why the asshole that gets on the plane in front of me invariably has a carryon bag that fits an entire overhead compartment. They're not inconsiderate pricks who believe themselves more important than anyone else on the plane, they've just realize that life is too short to wait through baggage claim, rather than making us all wait while the overhead compartments are all rearranged. Thanks.
...to worry about hem lengths. UP WITH MINISKIRTS!
These don't really bother me all that much. If it was just stuff like this, I'd generall roll my eyes, and just toss them into the trash. But the reason I've collected a few of these, and why I'm actually taking the time to write about them are a few of the other things life is too short for.
...to swim upstrem.
...to do things you're not good at.
Well. Isn't that just the best possible message that could be sent along. Life is too short to try. Too short to struggle. Too short to try to improve yourself. Too short to better yourself. Too short to cause ripples. Too short to perhaps make any changes to your life for the better. Don't swim upstream, don't try to go against the current, just let life sweep you away. Don't do things you're not good at. Stay in your box. Keep at your rut. It's a rut, but damnit, it's the rut you're good at, and life is too short to try and get out of it.
Of course, this is a rental property, which means that they profit from people staying at where they are in life, and not achieving for more, such as property ownership. That's right, rental agency, keep us down!
I'm looking forward to next month. "Life is too short to mortage." "Life is too short to live."
Okay, I'm being melodramatic, but it's my blog, and I'll melodramaticize if I want to!
...Triskaidekaphobia
There are a lot of things that people are afraid of. Lots. I, myself, am scared of spiders, and absolutely petrified by snakes. And I mean that by the literal definition of the word, they scare me stiff, I can't move. Don't anyone be using this to their advantage, I'm trusting my blog readers entirely too much revealing this.
These fears seem to get divided into two groups. Well, they get divided into ONE group, but there is a natural negative. These are the irrational fears. Now, there are plenty of natural fears. It's natural to be afraid of something that can kill you. It would be quite natural to be afraid of, say, a Velociraptor if one was coming up the street. You're not going to turn tail and run, just to have all your friends mocking you for pissing your pants at the sight of a creature that could likely devour you. Being afraid of snakes, again, quite rational. Sure, maybe to the degree that I am, perhaps not, but in general, there is a very natural instinct from the time when mankind survived on instinct instead of reason and rationalization that snakes are bad, and they can kill you with a bite. Well, some of them can. But it's a rational thing for people to be afraid of.
Then...then there are the irrational fears. And the one that trumps them all, relivant if I can finish this blog post in the next 28 minutes, is triskaidekaphobia. The irrational fear of the number thirteen.
Now, I've seen a few reasons that 13 might have entered the vernacular of western civilization as a Bad Thing. The most compelling, or at least the least uncompelling, is the observation that the Last Supper of Christian tradition had 13 guests. And, well, things didn't go all that well for the guest of honor, or so the story goes. But it's a number. Like three. Or nineteen. Or six million, seven hundred forty-two thousand, three hundred four and two thirds. But you never hear about Triskaiphobia. Or Nonadekaphobia. Or Six-a-742-uhhhh...well, an irration fear of the number 6,742,304. I'm not about to work out exactly what that would be called.
Listen. I work, as many people do, in an office building. And it has 14 floors. And, amazingly enough, the 13th floor is actually called...floor 13. I've been there many times. To this point, the floor has failed to catch fire, or flood, or spontaneously wink out of existance, or be just a few but constant unexplainable degrees warmer than it is suppose to be. The elevator has neve stuck there, it's not plummeted from that heigth, it's not opened up and turned out to be full of velociraptors. Nothing but nothing bad has happened to be there, other than a computer crashing on me. And if I'm to believe that is a rationalization for the fear of 13, then the numbers 1, 2, 6, 7, and 9 are also horribly unlucky. Yet, so many office buildings, or other high rises, lack a 13th floor. Or lack a floor NUMBERED 13. As people conveniently ignore the fact that there still IS a 13th floor, but just called by another name.
Cause you know what they say about roses by other names...
It's amplified on today, Friday the 13th. Even MORE irrationally feared. No one cares about Tuesday the 13th, or Sunday the 13th. Or, for that matter, Friday the 3rd, or Friday the 17th, or Friday the 38th. Okay, that last one would concern me, but it's just so blatently arbitrary. Should we start skipping days as we do floors? Should students not have to learn what 7+6 yields, in the off chance they are traumatized by the result?
Here's my theory. No one is actually afraid of the number 13. No one refuses to learn about early American history because there were 13 colonies. No on recoils from the American flag because it has 13 stripes. It's all a joke, a laugh, something that people have been told they're supposed to be afraid of, so they play along, and pretend. Show me someone who is actually afraid of the number 13 in any bona fide debilitating way, and I still won't actually believe it.
So...just stop it. It's silly. And while I like silly, it's not the good kind of silly. So. Just stop it.
...Irony and DC Politics
What, you thought that these would all be my take on simple nouns? There's only so many nouns that I have takes on (though certainly they're not exhausted to this point).
DC Mayor Anthony Williams held a press conference yesterday. It happened around noon. This is not all that unusual. During the press conference, he praised the level of cooperation that he perceived between the District and Federal governments. It's a hard line to walk, being the federal city. Elements of life that would be purely municipal in any other city in the United States suddenly become federal matters, simply because pesky things like the White House, and the Capitol Building, and the Supreme Court, and the Smithsonian Institute, and many cabinet departments just happen to be located within the city.
Therefore, it's quite important that the federal and district governments work together, and Tony Williams (oh he, the bringer of Nationals) was discussing the importance of such at just about noon yesterday. Yup. 12:00 yesteday. Talking away, quite nicely.
Several of you, I'm sure, realize the importance of the time and the day.
See, at the same time, in the same city, the city that is supposed to work with the federal government, the federal government was ordering evacuations, as a plane had entered restricted airspace. And so, of course, the mayor's press conference was interrupted by someone passing along the news that there was a potential security event going on in his city.
...except...
...except no it wasn't.
The mayor just went right on talking about how important it is for the federal and district governments to work together, just as the federal government was not working with the district government. DC chief of policy Ramsey didn't know about the plane until it was alread diverted. Williams didn't know until it was nearly grounded. Had anything happened, it seems that the two leaders of the District would have not known until it already HAD happened.
Yet the federal government and Tom Ridge are both saying that the evac went perfectly to script. Guess Williams and Ramsey aren't listed in the dramatis personae in that particular script.
...Wednesdays
Ever since I first read the books, and carrying over through the radio show, television show, and movie, my favorite line from the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy has always been "I never could get the hang of Thursdays." So I was thus thrilled that the line survived a script writing process for the movie that not everything else did. It has always seemed to me that there is something quite specific about Thursdays.
Except. Except no there isn't. I've come to realize this very recently. The problem isn't Thursdays, the problem has NEVER been Thursdays. The problem? Wednesdays!
There you have it. Simple as that. Wednesdays are the bane of modern civilization, and should likely be done away with entirely. They give Thursdays a bad name. They force us to work a fifth day in any week. There's just nothing that they really give back to society to make up for everything they take away. Everyone seems to say "oh, it's hump day" as though the week is already magically open before Wednesday even begins. There's the problem right there. The human condition seems to say that the week should be half over when Tuesday has been completed. Two days up, two days down, and the weekend happens.
Except no. There's the plateau. That bastard of a day. Two days up, one day STUCK there, then two days down. An entire day life is frozen there, as far as it can possibly get from a weekend. Any rejuvinating effects from the previous weekend have worn off by that point, and one can only look ahead and realize just how much there is between them and the next weekend.
Two days up. Two days down. That's the problem with Thursdays. It isn't that they, themselves, are bad, it's that the wedging of a Wednesday into the middle of the week makes everyone think that Thursday should be Friday. So we're disoriented, we're confused. We know, somewhere, that at the end of the day, it would be time to escape, but then we look at the calendar, and see that even when Thursday is finished, there's that one more day of work before the weekend. And thus we think t ourselves Thursday...we never could get the hang of Thursdays. But Thursday is a scapegoat! It's getting a bum wrap! Thursday is just fine, and no one would mind Thursdays at all, if it just weren't for Wednesday insinuating itself right there in the middle of the week.
So rise up, oh ye readers! Let Wednesday know that we aren't going to take it anymore! Let Wednesday know that it isn't going to terrorize our work weeks! Let Wednesday know that it shall no longer be giving Thursday a bad name! Get the hang of Thursdays again! Only when we can present a united front will Wednesday finally be defeated!
Who's with me?
...Blogging
I've never really been happy with the way that I use Live Journal. Years ago I maintained a site that I called "My Take On..." which offered me the opportunity to write short-to-mid length essays on whatever subject caught my interest at the time. Some of them were serious, some of them were silly, the main difference is that most of them were a great deal longer than what I usually feel like I want to get into on LiveJournal.
I'm going to likely still use my LJ, but wanted to finally activate a Blogger journal, since I signed up for this site months and months ago when there was a plan among myself and some friends to do a journal where we would each take on the identity of one of the 2004 presidental candidates, and create a fake blog called On The Trail. I think I had drawn Ralph Nader. But, unfortunately, that fell through.
Not sure if/when I'll actually point out to anyone that I'm dong this blog. In a way, I'm just shouting into the void, and seeing what will come of it. Of course, being that I'm using the same name that I use everywhere else, I suppose someone might quite easily stumble upon this if they try hard enough. Or at all. Guess in a way this is a test to see if I have any net.stalkers *shifty eye*
I'm going to likely discuss the same subjects here as in my LiveJournal. There'll be some baseball, some politics, some television, just whatever I have a take on that I feel can best be described in more than just a few snarky lines in an LJ.
So. There you have it. The My Take On... manifesto.
