House buying, Part 3

Well that didnt go quite as planned.

When we got to the house for a final inspection, to ensure all our requested repairs had been conducted*, the repair invoices were not there, so no evidence of them except trying to physically inspect it ourselves. The house was also left fairly dirty, and with quite an accumulation of kludge all over the place - old kettle & food processor, some towels, used bottles of cleaner, and a couple of other unidentified bits, just in the kitchen, and quite a bit of other stuff sprayed out around the place.

Cat decided she could cope with all that, as she was planning to clean the house herself anyway. However, the back yard is strewn with a swing-seat, play-fort and a bunch of other kids' toys which the old owners obviously didnt feel it was worth dragging to Houston, and this I'm seriously unimpressed by: they are obliged to drag this stuff away. Fortunately our realtor has a sister who would be able to use all this stuff & she will come and collect it.

Once we had that sorted, and a guy to check under the house & make sure everything was actually fixed there, we finally got to the title company, which is where the signature signing happens: that took a while, because there was a stack of papers yea! high to sign or initial, plus it got interrupted halfway through when the woman dealing with us had to rush out to the parking lot - someone had just rear-ended her new(ish) Corvette**

Then, it turns out, still no keys - as the vendors have moved to Houston, the papers all have to get couriered to them to sign, then returned, so maybe tomorrow or Friday we actually get into the house. Fairly annoying. As I understand it, usually it happens the same day as the sellers usually haven't left the city & will go to the office to sign at the same time. Oh well, just another little aggravation.




*I have no idea why they don't think to have the guy who did the first inspection check again: a cost-cutting idea I suppose, but talk about penny-wise pound-foolish. How would I know if the chimney is now up to code, or whether they actually repaired the shower pan, rather than getting a friendly repairman to scribble a soi-disant invoice?

** She also amused Cat my reacting with 'You got to be fucking kidding me!' which is, she say, the first time she's heard a Southern Woman really swear

A quick frenzy

Of course, today it has to be busy, with ridiculous meetings about reviewing an 'Incident' that everyone agrees we handled correctly (noone could answer why we were having the meeting, other than 'It's policy requirement'), and reviewing Naming Standards and Procedures - now there's a real barn-burner of an issue - after commissioning a consultancy to review our standards and report on them.

That latter wouldn't have been too bad, except the consultancy appears to have done a complete hack job, ignoring our current standards and just producing a 'standard template' that they recommend to everyone: and the standard template is (no surprise) absolute bollocks in various parts, and violates both company policy and (where it obtains) the Sarbanes-Oxley legal requirements (which is another piece of purblind idiocy produced by Congress, but that's neither here nor there at the moment).

Anyway, between that and the actual productive work, plus trying to ensure everything is ready for closing on our new house, it's totally manic today, so no great rant (silence in the cheap seats!!)

Hopefully will have a little more leisure to write tomorrow afternoon, after the closing.

These guys really are crazy

From ABC news:

President Obama at the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation dinner last night, discussing false claims made about the health care reform bill, told a little anecdote.

"I was up at the G20 -- just a little aside -- I was up at the G20, and some of you saw those big flags and all the world leaders come in and Michelle and I are shaking hands with them," the president said. "One of the leaders -- I won't mention who it was -- he comes up to me. We take the picture, we go behind.

"He says, 'Barack, explain to me this health care debate.'

"He says, 'We don't understand it. You're trying to make sure everybody has health care and they're putting a Hitler mustache on you -- I don't -- that doesn't make sense to me. Explain that to me.'"

Well, I can't explain it. As far as I can tell, most of what is called the right wing in this country has gone completely insane because a black man is in the White House and (I'm guessing) they automatically assume he's going to screw the white race as badly as they have done to his race whenever they've inserted one of their own into the office. When I say insane, I do actually mean insane, this is not political rhetoric. They believe things that are blatantly obviously false and do not relate to reality, and then act on this and expect everyone else to act on it.

I don't think it's quite possible to realise how crazy they are, from outside the country. I'll try and provide some examples tomorrow & following, but ..... just the insane bullshit advertising that is getting run in prime time (paid for indirectly by deeply crazy right wing millionaires, of which there are a terrifying number), are just utterly incredible. Big deep booming scarey voices telling you that the Health Reforms will mean that old people will be denied all medical coverage and left to die, or that you wont get to choose your own doctors but faceless Washington bureaucrats will tell you who you have to see and what treatments you can have. And this stuff is running 4,5,6 times an hour in some program slots.

It's hard to believe it doesn't have some effect, but it's such an utter and total lie: and yet it doesn't even get denounced in TV 'news' or on a lot of the print media (buy thats a slightly different rant). You know, when the Clintons were talking about a vast right-wing conspiracy to pull them down and destroy them back in the '90s, I thought, yeah, yeah, right, sure: how could there be such a conspiracy. Watching them try to destroy Obama over the most idiotic of lies, I see what they mean. It's not a conspiracy per se - that would be logistically impossible plus half the conspirators would kill eachother if they met in the flesh - so much as an automatic and unspoken way of thinking, a modus operandi, which operates whenever the right sort of target pops up, and seems to be where all the old KKK-style open racism has been channelled.

To try and explain my political leanings, I keep telling people here that this country has a party of dangerously right-wing extremists, and then there are the Republicans as well - definitely in the ha-ha-not-funny category of joke, as far as I'm concerned. Of course they all look at me like I'm just pulling their legs and noone could actually think the Democrats are right wing. Oh, so wrong.

The really sad bit is, in England I'd be a centrist, and back home probably centre*-right (although I'm not sure I could ever grit my teeth long enough to vote National, Little Bobby Muldoon did a pretty good job of inculcating that feeling).

* I do find it alarming how much my spelling is deteriorating here, I'm starting to write center, color, Theater .. akk!! I'm sliding into decadence, and it's not even any fun!!!

Catchup day

oops, cut off in mid-stride: a few emergencies erupted yesterday, and I thought I'd better hit publish as it didnt look like I'd get time to get to it.

As I was going to say before I so rudely interrupted myself :) - our moving day is set for Friday 9th, so we've got about a week after settlement day (30th) to have some people go in, repaint the bedroom, lift the carpets in the hall & 2 bedrooms and polish the hardwood floors underneath them, and fix some minor things we want changed (toilet needing reseating, electrical outlets needing upgrading, new shower head, picayune stuff but nice to get sorted out - and nice to own the house so we can, without having to ask permission!)

And it looks like another mad day today: had to spend a couple of hours last night fixing some headaches, and now in addition to the tidyup and paperwork (well, electronic, but it comes to the same thing), I need to chase up why this occurred (fortunately not my problem) and whether we caught it in time (definitely a potential problem). Oh well.

Cat applied for a couple of floristry jobs - one of which she didn't hear back from, oddly, as the woman seemed to be terrifically interested in all the new techniques she could offer: but she may have priced herself out of that one, or the woman may have reconsidered in light of the economic weather. The other she was offered but turned down, partly for the poor pay rate (not much over minimum wage) but mostly because 90% of the work would be funeral work as the shop is owned by a big funeral home chain - and unlike England the funeral work here is amazingly dull and unimaginative, very simple and repetitive and hardly better than production-line floristry.

However, the proprietor shop she's been working unpaid at for the last few months - which is definitely one of the 2 or 3 elite floristry places in the city - heard about her looking, and has offered her a parttime position, which is what she wanted. She won't be starting until mid-October, after we're moved in, which is definitely a Good Thing, as she has a lot of projects she want to get done by then.

Other than that, I am still feeling fantastic, released from the Dopey Prison of apnea. It's just, well, like dawn after nightfall, feeling so much more alert, and having energy to actually do things. Not a huge amount of energy, but anything is good: I've been able to increase the amount of daily exercise I'm getting, and cut down a bit on meal sizes, which is paying dividends in losing weight (slowly, but anything is good). Even the pestilentially annoying psoriasis seems to be clearing up (except for a particularly annoying patch on my scalp, under my hair, which seems to be resistant to everything: I'm considering napalm, or perhaps a mohawk, to expose it to the sunlight).

Oh, and my nose has started working, at least intermittently. After decades of not really smelling anything much at all, of a sudden I can - sometimes anyway - detect quite subtle small smells, which is wonderful .... sometimes! Of course most of that will be down to not smoking any more (wow, nearly 5 years since I stopped now), but blowing lots of warm wet air up my nose has done wonders to clear the congestion as well.

It has also definitely improved my humour - both my general mood, and my capacity to hang on to my temper and not fly off the handle. Probably hasn't improved my terrible puns and jokes though! In fact, it may have made them, well, more numerous if not worse in quality.

Magic!

One thing I keep stumbling on here, is the supposedly magical properties of words.

When I'm playing WOW, I'm forever seeing people cursing by saying Jebus, or f*ck, or similar pseudo-expletives. For quite a while, I didnt really think about it, until at one point recently, I was upbraided for saying Jesus and told the acceptable spelling was Jebus.

Now, I get the idea that cursing by the name of someone else's god might be offensive to that god, but ... what is it, do these people think their god is that stupid, that you can fool him by changing a letter? That it's the actual shape of the word that is offensive, not the underlying referent? As far as I can tell, on the internet this whole style of thing arose because it was away to curse without setting off parental-screening-software and obscenity-detector-software (both of which strike me as an exercise in pointlessness, but never mind): not to avoid giving offense.

Of course, the Americans (at least) have a long tradition of this sort of idiocy: heck instead of hell, by golly not by god, and so on (and on and on and on), so perhaps they do think their god is extremely dim, or that words DO have a magick power just from their shape.

But damnit, one reason I go to the Internet is to -escape- the whole Bible belt culture of rotten hypocrisy and worship of conformism.

What particularly galled about this upbraiding is that the guy who delivered it had previously commented to me several times that he is not a Christian, so it's not like I offended him - he was just griping because I may give offense to someone else who is listening. Of course, he was actually using it just as an excuse to throw his weight around and show off to - well, I don't know who, or care really.

It's not the first time I've run into this whole attitude: there's a whole Oh-noes-not-in-front-of
-the-children attitude which seems ludicrous. First, if the Internet is a child's first exposure to obscenities, then somehow he/she has grown up without any access to TV at all (which, yeah, good luck on that), and second, if the child is stupid enough to not be able to work out that Jebus might be just a synonym for Jesus (or any of the other idiot substitutions), then, man, they are so stupid that they couldn't log onto the Net in the first place.

OK, end of rant.

On brighter news, it's a week til our settlement day! Ray (our friend in Oklahoma) is insisting I need a musket and a bedroll now that I'm about to be a landholder & potential militia recruit, but I've said I had a couple of thousand already (small ones, it's true). I should have promised to acquire them as soon as the nearest rampaging British army came within 500 miles, but ... well, they might send Brit troops to New Orleans for R&R & then where would I be? (having seen the English abroad, rampaging is an understatement - beware all your booze and beachtowels as soon as they come anywhere near!)

I

Immigrants

They really do seem to have the strangest attitude to immigration here, given that the whole country is essentially all quite recent immigrants*, voluntary or otherwise. Legal immigration, as I found, is onerous, time-consuming, expensive, and quite petty-minded: plus with all the changes and whimsy inflicted by what G W Bush was pleased to call an administration, also quite contradictory, badly-specified and confusing ... of course, in all fairness it might have been like that before him too, but the whole overreaction to Sep 11 seems to have laid several additional layers of confusion on top.

But with illegal immigration, things are just dreadful. These are people who invariably are here to work, and have jobs. What's more, in almost all the cases, they are doing dirty, unpleasant and often dangerous jobs, for terrible wages (being illegal, they don't have to be paid the legal minimum), and are often treated terribly on top of that.

Of course part of the disgusting part is that they put up with that because it's still better wages, and often better conditions, than they can get back home, wherever that may be: but that's a different topic, for another day (solve world poverty? sure thing, just after I've done the cure for cancer, and before I devise the end of all racism. World peace is still impossible even on that scale). But because they are being treated marginally less terribly than they are accustomed to, is no excuse to abuse or exploit them, either.

However, there seems to be a general rage, at least among the right wing, and much of what passes for the centre in this area, the so-called Independent voters, directed at illegal immigrants*** sneaking into the country, paying no taxes and using up all these valuable services, like health care at Emergency Rooms.

Which is ridiculous on so many levels it's hard to know where to start. First off, they may not be paying income taxes (although they might well be, & certainly their employers often withhold such taxes), but they are certainly paying sales taxes, car taxes, and so on, all the other taxes and pseudo-taxes that are imposed. Of course, if they did pay income taxes, the amount collected would be very modest at best, given their rate of pay.

Secondly, they're not free-loading - they are doing disgusting jobs that no American is willing to do, at least at anything like the rates of pay offered, and everyone else is benefiting from the fact that those jobs are getting done: either in cheaper goods & services, or in services that don't fail which otherwise would fail. How can this be a bad thing?

Frankly, I think it is the immigrants that are being ruthlessly exploited, and that American society at large is gaining enormously, and would be considerably less affluent, without them. The fact that there are an estimated 12 million**** of them in the country shows how essential they are.

One thing I find endlessly amusing is the right-wing idea that they should be rounded up and sent 'back home'. Aside of the total chaos of trying to enforce this and enact it - a nightmare of
malicious accusations, wrong identities, and shameful abuse - the impact on society, especially in the south-west, would be terrifying and disorienting. Worse, the same right-wing loons would then blow a gasket about the expense, and the terrifying expansion of government power, and how the new Immigration Police needed were Obama's new BrownShirts (again).

Occasionally, right wing politicians try to suggest some way of resolving this, like giving them all long-term visas or creating a guest-worker status. This inevitably leads to their being politically savaged, and either recanting hastily (cf John McCain) or being utterly politically destroyed.

I know many on the left would love to do this, but the whole anti-immigrant thing (conflated by deepseated racism) seems so widespread and deepseated, that they need political support from the right as well, and I can't see that happening: both for the reason above, and because at the moment the whole of the right seems bound and determined to refuse any slightest hint of cooperation, no matter how visibly beneficial it might be for the whole country. Or, to put it simply, they've gone crazy.

I'll end with this charming little anecdote:

When Miriam was 15, her parents trespassed into the United States from Mexico.

Now in her mid 20s, the Wilmington resident still doesn't have citizenship but has become familiar with the health care system.

In the spring, she and her husband -- who both work as custodians -- were admitted to St. Francis Hospital in Wilmington for two days with pneumonia.

When they were released, they faced bills amounting to more than $4,000 and were put on a payment plan that eats up about one-fourth of their combined paychecks.

"I'd rarely go to a hospital because I can't afford to pay for it again," said Miriam, who is not being identified due to her immigration status, through an interpreter. "If I get sick again, I won't go to the hospital unless it's really serious."

-------------------
* Haven't got a clue what Native American** attitudes are, as they seem pretty scarce around here (not surprising what with all the depopulation, massacres, and relocations of course). Lots of people who claim to be 1/16th or 1/8th this or that - never something as scarey as a half which might carry, yanno, racial connotations). Not that that would ever happen in New Zealand, naturally :)

** And apparently American Indian is derogatory & been replaced (which I pretty much get, once told, after all what do they have to do with India?). I wonder how long it will be before they twig that America/American is also an imperialist label and they find a word in one of their languages to substitute for it? I would guess some activists have probably tried this already and had the idea kicked to death, as Americans do nationalism & chauvinism exceptionally well (almost to a French level, really).

*** Of couse this is usually meant as short-hand for Mexicans, whereas a lot of the actual immigration is from south america & the caribbean. But then, most Americans dont see any difference between the various Latino nationalities anyway.

**** Who makes these estimates and how, lord only knows, but I'm sure this estimate when made, was deliberately inflated to make more impact of one sort or another. I'm also fairly sure that reality has probably caught up with, and possibly overtaken, the estimate.

In the Wish I'd Written that category

but well, definitely not wishing I'd gone through the formative experience required:

"...the late Israeli poet Dan Pagis, a Polish-born internationally known linguist who survived a notorious Nazi death camp at the River Bug in Romania where forty thousand Jews are believed to have been killed in just four days. One of Dan Pagis's best known poems is a spare piece that manages to encompass the catastrophe endured by twentieth century European Jewry in just six lines, called "Written in Pencil in the Sealed Railway-Car" ("Katuv b'iparon bakaron hehatum"):

here in this carload
i am eve
with abel my son
if you see my other son
cain son of man
tell him that i

-----------------------------------------
I mean .. wow. Just .. wow.

(lifted from Unholy War, a book on the Middle East mess)

Poor poor pitiful me

Well, actually poor Arkansas actually, but I can never resist a Warren Zevon song*

I was talking to Ray when he visited last weekend, and one thing he observed was 'I don't understand why Arkansas is so poor**, it's been settled a long time (by midwest standards anyway), it's great land, copiously endowed with mineral wealth and a pleasant climate. We didnt really come to a conclusion over it at the time, and I was talking to Cat about it this morning.

She thought that the deepseated racism might be the cause, and I'm sure that that is part of it, but after a bit of consideration and comparison, I think it may have stemmed from a different cause, namely the railroads.

Back before the Civil War, the railroad companies drove two enormous lines across the country to the west, one in the north and one in the south, completely missing Arkansas in both cases. Each of them of course had spur lines, so instead of classic ribbon-development, the railroad lines spurred a broader swathe of progress, more like 2 wide belts. Both of them still missed Arkansas.

Of course, without easy access to markets, manufacturing was reluctant to move here, and farming remained local - thus smaller, less efficient, and less prosperous. Without the expanding tax base to fund improvements, the state infrastructure developed more slowly, also discouraging industry.

Just to reinforce that, as education is funded at a local (county) level, that means Arkansas remained (and remains) more poorly educated, which again discourages industry moving here, as they depend to some extent on an educated workforce: and also discourages innovation and invention, plus creating an urban drift for the smarter, getting out of Arkansas to places offering more opportunity (something that is a bit of a major thematic theme in America, of course).

I have no real idea if this is correct, but gosh! it sure is a pretty theory :)
-----------------------------------------------------------------------

Update: Ray has observed (to good effect):

The Mississippi river is a huge artery of transportation and yet Arkansas seems to have not benefited from it. Education is locally financed as you say, yet Arkansas seems to have missed out in the old days when public education (as known in America) was more basic. Not so much a money issue I think as a culture issue.

My fatuous opinion is that Arkansas is a paternalistic society, not a yeoman society.



------------------------------------------------------------------------
* Who couldn't love the writer of Werewolves of London, Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner, and the immortal lines - "Send lawyers, guns, and money, the shit has hit the fan"
** And it really is poor, by American standards. It's generally in a neck&neck race with Mississippi and sometimes Alabama for lowest income, education, desirability, you name it: whatever it is, those three are always pretty much on the bottom of the pile. But Arkansas is a much nicer climate and place to live than the other two (especially before the advent of air conditioning).

Personality

I know it's a truism that everyone has many different faces that they put on, depending on the people they are with, and what they are trying to achieve, consciously or otherwise. Like everyone, I suppose, I've seen myself do it, usually making small & subtle changes to bring forth or suppress various facets and try to charm, please, anger, impress, scare, whatever: and always assumed that everyone else did the same, of course*

But, 15-odd years of wandering around the internet has really driven home how much this happens and how enormous the changes can be. Of course that's mostly in watching my own presentations: I primarily assume that everyone else is experiencing the same things, it's almost impossible (by definition) to see very much of this in anyone else.

I do find it a bit astonishing just at the scope though, I have found myself (more or less without conscious volition), being charming, loquacious, flirtatious, dynamic and driven, leading and encouraging, angry and volatile, even cruel and tough-minded - all at different times, of course, I'm not a complete psychotic!** Until I had the opportunity to show these in online situations, I didnt really know that I had any of that inside me, and it's quite astonishing: well, to me anyway.

I guess it has actually helped me try to find it in real life, too, although overcoming the things that inhibit all those traits is much tougher when you are actually looking other people in the eye (and habits are kind of concreted-in like fence post by now). It's a truism of course - you can be more than you are - but also disconcerting to discover and connect with the idea at a visceral level rather than just mentally acknowledging the truth of it.

I should add that while we dont get much chance to see other people do it, in some online situations you get to see quite a bit of it in some ways: for instance, in playing World of Warcraft, the online role-playing game, people talk at both the character level (that is, the person they are portraying) and also at the person level (that is, their actual persona, rather than the role).

That isn't too illuminating, but .... when you play WOW, you create multiple characters, and unless you tell them, noone knows that you are the same person behind different ones: which means you can actually see some of the different personae that the same player exhibits to different people. I dont mean this in some sneaky fashion intending to deceive (at least not for me), just usually from inattention or some other cause. It certainly can be interesting though, particularly (of course) when someone wants or needs something from one character and not from another: you sure get to see different sides to some people.

I've also seen this in other places of course: one thing I noticed, with WOW, with online chat, and other programs, that the same person can exhibit quite different traits in chat to that of email, even when they know they are addressing the same person. I assume that is just because of the different nature of the media: in chat you generally write more or less as you talk, although you generally have a moment or two to reconsider*** between typing a sentence and sending it; whereas in email you have time to polish and consider at more length**** and craft it to fit your recipient (target was the word that sprang to mind, but that's a bit harsh).

As usual, I'm not really going anywhere in particular with this thought, more just banging on about what's on my mind today - naturally, as an upshot from an experience in WOW last night, which somewhat revealed an, ah, unexpected side in someone I thought I knew quite well - in as much as you can know someone online, of course.





*If I'm wrong and I'm the only one in the world doing this, well, damn I just stepped in it! and also, whats wrong with all of you? LOL
** Bits of me are missing, hahah
*** Sadly much underused
**** Sadly even more underused. Of course one could say the same about blogs :)

TV and information

I've been watching the soi-disant news shows here, and getting more and more dissatisfied with them (as I suppose is obvious from other rants I've made). It occurred to me quite recently that one reason is the quality and type of guest that is always getting interviewed.

I should explain, first - there are 4 free to air channels here, which frankly are all pretty much rubbish: tons of "reality TV" with programmed reactions but nice cheap non-actors, a few game shows still survive, and some very formulaic and guarenteed non-offensive sitcoms and cop shows of various ilks. Then there is 'cable' (although I actually get this via satellite) which is divided into 'basic cable' and 'premium', based essentially on price - which in this case tends to actually relate to the quality of programs, as premium channels to tend to have the few really good and occasionally innovative programs.

The news shows are all on basic cable, or some variation thereof, and there are several channels of them, plus specialised business news and so forth. They all run 24 hours a day, which means they all have 24 hours of broadcast to fill with something, anything. The approach to this varies between channels, but it basically comprises some mix of massive repetition, pointless interviews, and endless editorialising by journalists, generally about subjects they exhibit a stunning ignorance of, or about their own idiot prejudices. Some of that can be amusing of course, especially if they either share my prejudices, or if I'm in the mood to be loudly and rudely mocking at the TV.

Anyway, one of the things I noticed is an awful lot of the people getting interviewed on these shows are other journalists. Now that might be fine in the case of, say, a financial analyst being interviewed about things economic, or a political analyst being interviewed about politics, or even say a political reporter being interviewed about what he's observed. However, an awful lot of it seems to be just reporters being interviewed for their completely uninformed opinions on, say, what the public thinks about X or Y, or what effect a government decree will have on Z, without any training or specialised knowledge at all: essentially just banging on about their own prejudices again, but palmed off as actual news.

Then in addition, you get the people who started as specialists on one subject, but obviously the news director liked them, so they start getting interviewed about broader and broader subjects, until it's completely removed from any knowledge or specialisation they might have. Which I suppose can be entertaining if they are someone who speaks vivaciously and has a fund of stories and metaphors to colour the interview, but in terms of disseminating actual information and real analysis and dissection, it just seems that anything useful gets inundated in a tidal wave of twaddle, misinformation (and of course outright lies and delusions).

This of course is not really different from what I do here, but then I don't ask for money or pretend to some greater significance. Hmm, perhaps I should consider a new career as a talking head? :)

The end result, however, seems to be an enormous echo chamber that outshouts any serious information, reinforces existing prejudice however crazy*, and lacks any real positive attributes at all. I don't have a solution for this**, but it looks like it will not get addressed - in fact it's very hard to see anyone who could address it - and will only continue its' ever-growing din.




*thus the nonsense about Obama being a foreign citizen, born of insane racism and amplified and repeated endlessly
** well none that is either politically or ethically acceptable. Shooting them all probably wouldn't work anyway

Just a very quick one

Frantic Friday & an upgrade going awry, so short on minutes - just a quick observation for Jeanne, based on Di's last email:

Keep working on doing the cha-cha, but no more tangoing in the movie theatre lobbies! I promise to steer clear of all shonky staircases :)

Wrong again

Wow ... actually, apparently Hell is just having a phone. Or at least yesterday was devoted to phone-hell. I was working from home yesterday, partly in order to intermittently make calls in the morning to resolve various issues about our new house & other things: arranging a mover to give us a quote, setting up a handyman to do various bits of work, arranging for Cat & the handyman to have access to the house next week, calling IRS, calling Arkansas Tax Department, calling my doctors office to try and get a blood sample organised (four times, without success). This last was in fact my prime reason for working from home, I was aiming to go & get the bloodtest in the afternoon, not that it worked out, for some odd reason.

Aaaanyway, after all that, I got sucked into a pointless teleconference with some clients, some developers, and other IT staff, for 120 minutes, of which I was needed for maybe 2 minutes. Apparently the project manager feels a lot more important and valuable by sucking in any and all people who might be even peripherally involved into one titanic meeting, rather than several smaller (and shorter!) meetings that might be more efficient for everyone involved (except the project manager, naturally). Oh joy. And I have 4 more of these titanic meetings scheduled for the next 5 days (plus one that I declined for a time conflict).

Immediately after that, I had to join my regular pre-Change meeting to review changes scheduled for Thursday, which trundled on for half an hour. About five minutes after that, I got phoned up by two of our company's middle-managers (not my boss, others on his level more or less), and quizzed about technical details on a proposed project - however, the proposal had changed since I'd last seen it, and they didn't bother communicating that to me until halfway through the meeting, to endless confusion. They also seemed to expect me to read their minds about their intentions and desires.

The whole thing also raised a tricky ethical question about whether to provide what the client wants (i.e. makes us look good now), or what is actually in the best interests of the client longterm but appears initially less beneficial. Of course the logical thing would be to demonstrate this, but that is seen as undoable, for reasons not explained to me.

I deliberately punted* on providing a recommendation, as I didnt want anything to do with suggesting anything unethical, or anything contrary to our company's interests (or at least, the -managers- best interests, in terms of looking good: after all, by the time the longterm issues are apparent, they will be long-gone, and possibly our company will be as well).

After all that, my poor phone ear was buzzing and red.

Oh, and the work we want the handyman to do (as I dont think I've talked about that before), we want the master bedroom repainted, the hallway carpets lifted and the underlying hardwood floors repolished, and a few minor things (replacing antiquated power fittings in a couple of spots, securing & replacing a couple of other bits). We've deliberately left 10 days between the time we take possession, and our moving day, so that there is unoccupied time available for him to do the work: and we were fortunate enough to get a personal recommendation for this guy, from a woman at work who has just bought a house & had him do similar work for her.



*Heh, American sporting metaphor! Just meaning, to put off, to push away and defer - from gridiron, where a team will punt the ball in order to force the opposition further away from their goalline.

Hell is not Texas

Hell is in fact phoning the Infernal Revenue Service - exactly on their stated opening hours - and, after spending 5 minutes wrestling vainly with their autophone service, getting a message saying, 'Your anticipated wait time is greater than 15 minutes', without even the option to leave a message or request a callback.

Oh well.

Ironically I phoned the Arkansas Tax Department & got everything sorted with them in about 2 minutes total :)

Update: I do have to apologise to the IRS for some of the mental ill-wishing I indulged in, as once they did answer my call, the woman I got was amazingly friendly and helpful, and couldn't do enough to resolve my issue and make me happy. It did take quite a while, but rather than the usual bounce-me-round-the-department crap, she made all the ancillary calls herself, & let me know what she was doing, and her progress on each one. Score a big plus for the civil service, I must say.

Heaven, on the other hand, is getting enough sleep. I've been on this new CPAP machine for about 10 days now, getting used to wearing it at night, and the results are ... fantastic! I've got energy, and bounce, and much more cheerfulness. No more periods of feeling dopey and dozey, no more extended lethargy, no more afternoon naps in the weekends.

Cat says I've got a twinkle in my eye, and I'm present and here so much more. It sure feels like it - last night after work, I got home, did my regular exercise, had dinner: then instead of washing the dishes then sitting quiescent in front of the laptop all evening, I got up, cleaned the kitchen, helped Cat with a problem with her furniture project, did stuff, was all energetic! Wow ... just ... wow.

Of course, it does feel weird, at night, but I'm gradually getting adjusted: and finding I'm even waking up before the alarm goes off, and just thinking & planning the morning.

Not sure if this burst will last or subside as I get more used to feeling rested, but damn it feels good so far!

Anything but music

Isn't music in such a strange strange place, these days. I was just talking to the guy at the next desk, & he mentioned that, growing up, he loved music & it was all he was good at: but he declined to seek it out as a profession, or study it at Uni - after all, the only thing you can do with it nowadays is go into teaching music at high school: and the first thing that gets cut when the budget gets squeezed is the music teacher (before even the art teacher).

Of course, I guess this has always been somewhat true, but the gap between popular (or at least high-selling) music, and what is taught as music seems to get wider with every year. Perhaps this is just my perception though, and part of the Old Mans' Grump - kids nowadays dress funny, dance funny, talk funny, listen to awful music, and aren't respectful enough, blah blah blah. Goes right along with the dont-the-policemen-look-so-young-now spiel, I guess.

Still, popular music does seem odd .. but then, perhaps it always did. I'm listening to Bob Dylan at the moment, which is - as always - a decidedly mixed pleasure. His voice resembles nothing so much as a castrated cat being slowly strangled, in all honesty, the melody is often indifferent and the beat all but nonexistent, but then - ah - the lyrics just lift and soar, carry you along to unexpected destinations, or familiar lockers of the heart, or just into the imagination. It's hard to hear some of these and not be moved, at many levels. Like:

Time is a jet plane,
it moves too fast
ah but what a shame,
that all we've shared can't last
I can change I swear
oh, see what you can do
I can make it through
you can make it too

A change in the weather
is known to be extreme
but whats the sense
in changing horses midstream
I'm going out of my mind
oh with a pain that stops and starts
like a corkscrew to my heart
ever since we've been apart

Or

Disillusioned words like bullets bark
as human gods aim for their mark
made everything from toy guns that spark
to flesh-coloured Christs that glow in the dark
it's easy to see without looking too far
that not much is really sacred

while preachers preach of evil fate
teachers teach that knowledge waits
can lead to hundred-dollar plates
and goodness hides behind its gates
but even the President of the United States
sometimes must have to stand naked

Or

Praise be to Nero's Neptune
the Titanic sails at dawn
everybody's shouting
which side are yo on
and Ezra Pound and TS Eliot
fighting in the captain's tower
while calypso singers laugh at them
and fishermen hold flowers
between the windows of the sea
where lovely mermaids flow
and nobody has to think too much
about Desolation Row

Which last just about brings me back to where I started, the divorce between high culture and popular culture. I still don't really see its' roots, in truth, whether it has always existed, or it is something that has grown up out of capitalism, a combination of elitism and market differentiation. A hundred years ago, opera and music hall seemed to co-exist, and both were popular and on the lips of anyone and everyone. Now, well...

But, speaking of Bob Dylan as I was, I found a jazz singer, Madeleine Peyroux, who has done a number of covers of his songs (along with some from Leonard Cohen, that other mordant bleak wordsmith of genius), and they sounded just amazing: add a warm rich voice, and a swinging jazz background, and they lift the songs to another level again. Now all I need to do is find a couple of albums of people doing Dylan covers to make me happy !

Omg jfk wtf and all that slang

Welcome to Arkansas - this is so appalling I couldn't believe it, but apparently it's true:

When the fire chief of Jericho, Arkansas, finally got fed up and went to court a few days ago to challenge his second traffic ticket in as many days, the town's entire 7-man police force showed up for the hearing. And then shot him.

Seriously. Apparently a scuffle broke out and one of the cops pulled out his gun and shot the guy in open court. He's OK, but the police department, which was already in deep trouble for its habit of ticketing everything on wheels that rolled through Jericho, has been disbanded and all outstanding tickets have been voided. The town's part-time judge has quit too. And nobody knows what's happened to all the ticket revenue.

Apparently the (county-based) Sheriff's department is now investigating the disappearance of all the ($150) fines levied by the police department: and the Police apparently had also been abusing their power by issuing tickets on the nearby interstate (motorway) which is outside their jurisdiction.

After the shooting, Martin said police chief Willie Frazier told the sheriff's department he was disbanding the police force "until things calm down." The sheriff's department has been patrolling the town in the meantime.

I just love the 'until things calm down' bit ... so as soon as the press have packed up and gone away, these vile execrable excuses for human beings will be back, abusing their power and gouging any passers-by of spare cash on any excuse, no doubt.

Mayor Helen Adams declined to speak about the shooting when approached outside her home, saying she had just returned from a doctor's appointment and couldn't talk.

"We'll get with you after all this comes through," Adams said Tuesday before shutting the door.

A white Ford Crown Victoria sat in her driveway with "public property" license plates. A sales brochure advertising police equipment sat in the back seat of the car.

Of course, as of Saturday she still hasn't made any public comment.

Welcome to Arkansas, monkeys, and nuts, to misquote Shakespeare

Friends, a little more

Busy day in prospect today, lots of changes and installs scheduled (and of course, none can ever wait for another day once they have been approved, naturally).

But I was thinking about friends again last night, after trying to soothe one of my online friends. I need to explain a little: I've been playing an online game, World of Warcraft (or WOW), for the last 4 years, and essentially it is similar to playing Dungeons & Dragons or such games, online rather than face to face, and with a computerised Games Master providing automated quests and challenges.

A large part of succeeding at the game is finding and cultivating people to team up with and rely on, and the game has a mechanism (called Guilds), which allows you to create your own online home-rooms, and longstanding (or not) groups of people to cooperate with. Naturally, for the more long-lasting of these associations, these relationships spread out beyond just the game and immediate requirements and assistance, and flows out into the rest of your life - you share tidbits of what you're doing, why you're feeling bouncy (or grumpy), & what's happening, and generally establish friendships.

Of course, like all online friendships, these are much more fragile and transitory than personal, real-life friendships, but that's largely just a matter of degree (I sometimes think of the internet as not much more than a giant keyhole to peep through, you get such one-sided and limited views of anything, and anyone).

Anyway, one of the women in the guild got upset last night, because she felt she was always being asked for assistance (quite accurately) and was taken for granted and not properly valued (which I didnt think was accurate, but it's her perception): and her son, also in our guild, was being exalted and praised while she felt mostly ignored. I suspect the feeling is largely an artefact or spillover from whatever it is that is happening in her actual life (you get a lot of that projection on the 'net, it seems), but in the end that hardly matters, from my point of view, so naturally I spent time trying to calm her, and make her feel more appreciated and valued, and encouraged some of the others to try to do likewise.

Just one of those frustrating situations where there's not much you can do, except try your best and wait for the storm to pass. I'll have to wait til tonight, or later, to see if it had any lasting effect.

I must say, one of the hardest bits of the game is simply, many - perhaps most - of the players are teenage boys (or boys stuck in teenage mode despite their age). Man! are they ever hard work. Not that they are all, or always, dreadful, but the proportion of arrogance, ignorance and vicious cruelty is just enormous with them. Possibly the hardest bit for me to adjust to is, in earlier years anyone I encountered on the net was likely to be essentially like me, i.e. another technophile geek. Nowadays they let all sorts of riffraff on the net (just to add my own touch of arrogance!) Overall, though, I must observe: being a teenager looks every bit as appalling as I remember it.

Am I going anywhere with this? Not really, more just blithering on about what's on my mind :)

================================
Totally changing the subject, it still astonishes me how much music reaches in and twists, changes me. For the last couple of years, I've found when I get upset, listening to Astral Weeks just helps me detach myself, calm down, and feel comforted.

If I ventured in the slipstream
between the viaducts of your dream
where the immobile steel rims crack
and the ditch in the back roads stop
Could you find me?
Would you kiss-a my eyes?
to lay me down
in silence easy
to be born again,
to be born again

From the far side of the ocean,
if I put the wheels in motion
and I stand with my arms behind me
and I'm pushing on the door

Standing with the look of avarice
talking to huddie ledbetter
showin' pictures on the wall
whispering in the hall
and pointing a finger at me
There you go, there you go
standing in the sun darlin'
with your arms behind you
and your eyes before
there you go
takin' good care of your boy
seeing that he's got clean clothes
putting on his little red shoes
seein gyou know he's got clean clothes

and here I am
standing in your sad arrest
trying to do my very best
looking straight at you
coming through, darling

If I ventured in the slipstream
between the viaducts of your dreams
where immobile steel rims crack
and the ditch in the back roads stop
Could you find me,
Would you kiss-a my eyes
Lay me down
in silence easy
to be born again,
to be born again
in another world,
in another world
in another time
Got a home on high
Aint nothing but a stranger in this world
I'm nothing but a stranger in this world
I got a home on high
in another land
so far way

so far away
way up in the heaven
in another time,
in another place

A passing observation

Amanda quoted:
He argues that far from being merely angry over the “confusion” over stupid shit like who pays the tab at dinner, men who are lashing out at the broadening gender roles are angry that they’ve lost patriarchal power over women.

Which I found very interesting in light of my rave of a couple of days ago. Not that I disagree - not at all! But it seems to me the same rage and temper tantrums is driving the racist storm, and the republican backlash - simple pure anger and outrage at losing apparently-permanent privilege and power (as to why Republicans would think this is eternally theirs, well, they're right, dammit! and everyone else is not just wrong but sinfully and willfully wrong, so of course they deserve permanent power).

Unfortunately, I dont think there's any diminuation in this outrage likely - the anger may be banked and less obvious, perhaps. The solution, rather grimly, is to outlive them: each generation seems just a touch more openminded and egalitarian than the last one (and that seems to go back a long long way).

Friends

Isn't friendship funny?

One of my friends (who shall remain nameless) remarked at how hard it was to make friends - which was a bit of a surprise as I'd always thought of him as someone with a most complete set of social skills, who didn't acquire more friends from choice, but that's a whole other subject. It did make me recall an observation from some novel - the name and author now fled to the dim recesses of memory alas - of how college/university is where you make all your close friends for life, and then carry them through with you, for better or worse.

I don't know about that, at all. I am doubtless atypical, but I can't believe that that relatively narrow period where you're nearly grown up and still open to the intense emotional tides of teenage years, is the be-all and end-all of fixing friendships. When I read it, it had a certain surface plausibility, but overall, no I don't think so.

I mean, look at those I'd count as good friends now - aside of the beloved dead - a guy I've known since school, a guy who I knew from the Net for 12 years before we ever shook hands, a woman I worked with for 3 months and since have become closer purely over the Net, a woman living in another continent who I met because she's partner to one of my wife's friends, a woman from the Net who I've only met once. From university years, well, no, not so much. And here where I'm living, hmm, not yet - perhaps one is forming with the guy in the next cubicle.

And really, what do I have in common with anything? Next to nothing really for the most part, except for a certain openness, a willingness to listen & talk, and trust.

Part of why I was thinking of this was watching Cat trying to strike up friendships here. It's something she seems to be very good at, at least with other women, and in England she formed quite a few friendships, a couple very strong and solid. Here, it seems much more of a struggle, and I wonder if there are cultural signals she is missing (or I am for that matter).

One of these in particular I think has hurt quite a bit - she found a woman at the quilting shop and struck up what seemed a pretty good friendship with her, to the point that we've had them over for lunch several times & attended one of their parties. After the woman lost her job, she seems to have just dropped Cat like a stone - no calls returned, no contact at all. They ran into each other at the quilting guild & she gave Cat some story about losing her number, so of course Cat gave her the phone number again, and since then, more nothing. You'd think Cat had done something to deeply offend, and may be so, but if it is, she has no clue as to what it might be, & nor do I.

Just one of those mysteries we have to live with, I suppose, like how George Bush got elected (that is, you may someday be able to explain it logically but it will never make sense).

OK, not really going anywhere with this so much as just musing about it all. All I really know is, keep your friends close, and damnation to your enemies*: the rest of the world can look after itself.


*That machiavellian thing about keeping your enemies closer is fine if you're a good hand with a dagger or a poison ring a la Lucretia, but for the rest of us, it's actually terrible advice I think: it's become one of those commonplaces that are trotted out without any thought for what it's actually saying.

All the lies that anyone cares to scream

I am finding the media here hard going.

In England, I was disgusted by the newspapers, which both seemed nakedly prejudiced and determinedly gutter-browed, and were patently willing to lie at the drop of a hat to push whatever barrow they were pushing that week (why is it that hats are so much easier to drop than anything else? are they that cheap and disposable? Is the universal constant of attraction higher for hats?).

Anyway, I more or less got used to ignoring most of the British papers, and relied on the TV, which was superficial but less blatantly bent, and on the Economist, whose biases are fairly gentle and well-known, and I'm used to adjusting for those. Ironically, the paper I probably enjoyed most was the Daily Telegraph, which is ferociously right-wing, to the point of self-parody (plus having the best bridge column of any of the papers).

Over here, the prejudices are at least mostly a lot less open. I except Fox News, which is not so much a TV channel as a permanent paid political announcement in shoddy disguise (and was specifically set up & funded by right wing billionaires to try to ensure their perpetual dominance), and to some extent MSNBC (a cable channel), which spasmodically makes gestures towards what passes for liberalism in this country, & has the only genuinely left-wing shows available, such as they are (of course this is just trying to serve a perceived market gap, not driven by ideology at all).

Of course, America has gone so far right in the last 25 years, that what passes for left-wing here would comfortably fit in the National Party back home, or the UK Conservatives ... but still gets called socialism or communism.

What is even more problematic, and less digestible, is that all the news media* here are now driven totally by the profit motive, without regard to standards, taste, or any slightest interest in truth. This was not always so, editorial opinion & evaluation used to be important, but that has all gone by the board, in the most ruthless fashion.

As a result, any vile and contemptible lies that get uttered, if they are 'shocking' or controversial enough to attract audience, are picked up and repeated into this enormous echo chamber, a dozen, a hundred times, before they are ever examined for any shred of truth: and any discrediting of them is always laggard and partial, and usually overwritten by the next wave of utter preposterous outrage.

This has accelerated enormously since the election last year, which has seemed to drive a tenth of the white population here utterly stark raving mad, so that they believe that anything the congress might do, any law, is a horrible tyranny and vile repression: apparently because the government is run by a black man, and of course he will do all the utterly contemptible and vicious things to them, that they have been doing to his people for the last four hundred years. They are working themselves into such a hysterical flat-out temper tantrum that I wouldn't be surprised to hear of some simply popping off with strokes and cardiac arrests from sheer ill temper.

But, the crazies will always be out there. Lord knows when Bush was in office (I won't say in power), there were certainly plenty of left wing crazies spouting tyranny & revolt and other nonsense.

The difference since the last election is, these crazies get front page coverage, and lead off the nightly news - every damn night! Corrections, apologies, modifications, if any of those even occur they are buried at the back of the paper or broadcast, while the headline is still more poison. Not because the journalists or editors believe it, just because it sells, it makes money.

Even worse, if that is possible: when anyone in the current government makes any announcement or argument, the media will go out and find someone to say the contrary, no matter how ludicrous the so-called opposition person might be (and believe me that can be ludicrous enough to make Monty Python look like a documentary**).

The result seems to be public confusion and dissonance on an unprecedented level. It has raised the level of rancor and bitterness to an unbearable level - and of course, if the Democrats lose the next election, they will not just respond in kind, but raise the ratchet another level again. It's hard to see where that would end, but it can't be anywhere good.

The thing that most infuriates me about it all, is simply that since being elected, President Obama has been pursued a doggedly centrist, limited policy and trying to encourage cooperation and reduce the rancor of politics, but the Republicans are having such a tantrum that the electorate rejected them, simply because their policies demonstrably, indeed spectacularly, failed to work in any dimension, that they are refusing any sort of cooperation, even when it is obviously in the interests of the country and in their own interests.

Oh well, all I can do is keep preaching the sensible, try my best to fight the lies I hear repeated at the office every day, and keep my head straight. I have to admit, its probably worse here than almost anywhere else in the USA, as Arkansas is so crushingly conservative.

Funny, though, before last November, I had the impression that racism in this country had diminished***, whereas all it has done is learned to be less obvious and more spiteful. Oh well.



* I would except the news blogs from that, by and large
** Sarah Palin, Rush Limbaugh, and the preposterous Glenn Beck spring to mind. Beck in particular is so far gone in delusion as to be quite certifiable. Palin, I should add, seems to have gone from serious politician to posturing figurehead in record time.
*** Of course it is, by population, as the white population gradually shrinks in proportion, but that's an awfully slow way to eliminate it.

===========================================================
How apposite - this quote seems to be totally on point:

Washington Post television writer Tom Shales shares an anecdote:

I have a short antidote. I mean anecdote. Years ago I was phoned & asked to be on some news show, this happened a lot in years past, and first I was quizzed on the topic to be discussed. And what I said essentially was that I thought both sides of the argument had validity and that it wasn't a clear cut black&white issue. Bam - that was the end of THAT conversation. They wanted someone who totally adhered to ONE view or the other, not somebody who could see both sides. I think this is a very real problem that results in a lot of yelling where there should be an "exchange of ideas."