I'm Gonna Need a Bigger Plate

Got a lot going on right now, good and bad. I got a new job, but for now all I can really say about it is that it's not pizza delivery. I don't think I'd ever mentioned on this blog before that I'd spent the last several years delivering pizzas. I'd made an oath to myself when I started this blog that I'd never discuss it until I was finally done with it. Not really out of shame...well, Ok, partly out of shame, but mostly because I didn't want to think about the job when I wasn't actually there. Maybe somewhere down the line I'll relate some amusing anecdotes of my time there, but for right now I got other fish to fry.

In a similar vein, I don't want to discuss this job just yet. In large part because it's still new. I don't want to say anything that I might look back on with regret once I've made some decisions about how this job fits in with my goals in life. I don't want to count my chickens before they've hatched.

There is one really big decision I've got to make, and fairly soon. Friends and family have been telling me for a while now that I should consider a career in Allied Health, otherwise known as Medical Technician. And I have to admit it does sound very appealing. The thing is, if I do decide to pursue this career path, it will mean going back to school for a few more years. I'm not against the idea, I'm only a year out of earning my A.A. after all, but fitting it into my schedule will be tricky. Taking classes on-line is an option for several of the courses, and I'm no stranger to taking on-line classes. But there's going to be a lot of Lab work involved in this degree program, so I'd have to seek out classes that fit in with my work schedule.

Times like this I wish I didn't have bills to pay. If I could just ignore my financial obligations, I could focus on going to school full-time, like most college students do when they're fresh out of High School. But, no use crying over spilled milk. I have to play the cards I've been dealt, especially since it's in large part my fault that I have no real career at this stage in my life.

Well, I took a first step in this direction today. I hustled over to Triton College, spoke to a counselor, and found out what I have to do in order to be able to pursue an Associate in Applied Science in Diagnostic Medical Sonography. Fortunately, I have a little over half of the preliminaries covered already, through courses I took getting my Associate in Arts. I'm gonna go onto Triton's website now, and take a look at when the classes I need to take are offered, and try to work out a schedule. I haven't made any decisions yet, but I'm gonna do my homework so I have everything I need at my fingertips to ensure I my decision is an informed one.

-Long Days and Pleasant Nights

Resident Evil: Retribution

I have a friend who lives down by the South Side, who will often take a 45 minute trek up to where I live so we can hang out. He does this without complaint, and this week I decided to return to favor by coming down to him. He suggested we go see a movie, which was fine by me. He looked up what was playing, and gave me three options.

One of the movies I'd already seen, and the second I had zero interest in seeing, so that left the third one, Resident Evil: Retribution. I had mixed feelings about that, but I was in the mood for a movie, and it was the only thing that I was even remotely interested in seeing.

I think a good way to describe Retribution would be to say that it's an fairly good example of how a poor director can single-handedly destroy a film. During the movie, my friend commented to me "Couldn't they find any good actors for this movie?" I said back that I recognized many of the actors in this film, and had seen them in other projects, and they're not bad actors. The problem was that they were receiving bad direction, making their performances flat and wooden.

I can't call myself an expert on this sort of thing, but I have done a bit of (community theater level) acting, so I can say with some confidence that the performance and actor gives is the result of a number of factors, and the instructions given to him by the director are a large part of that, especially if the director is the tyrannical sort who micro-manages every aspect of a performance. I don't know if Paul W.S. Anderson is that type of director, but there must have been some sort of creative control being exerted on set to explain the performances I saw in this film. Also telling, the best performance of the movie was handed in by star Mila Jovovich, who just happens to be married to the director. I'm guessing she was given more free reign in her acting.

The script was also weak and tumescent. I was going to say that the blame can't fall fully on director Anderson's lap for that, until I checked IMDb and saw that he's credited as the screenwriter. So nevermind my attempt to spread the blame, it's all Anderson's fault. I guess the movie had a plot, in that there were a series of events which occurred in chronological order. Except for the opening credits, which for some bizarre reason was the ending of the third movie, run backwards and in slow motion.

There were two things about the plot/narration that got me. Anderson doesn't seem to have grasped subtle ideas like "Show, Don't Tell," so large chunks of the movie were literally characters looking directly at the screen and explaining what was happening to the audience. It was ok, if clumsily done, in the opening when Alice (Jovovich) was catching the audience up on the events of the last three movies. What got me, though, was when the main bad guy of the movie, an evil computer AI that looked like a young girl with a British accent, explained to the viewers exactly what she was doing whenever the action cut to a different set of characters. I guess he was trying to make it look like the girl was issuing orders, but instead it looked like she was talking to herself. Especially since everything she said was also written on the screen as she said it.

And as a quick side note, how cliched can you get in your bad guy character? Anderson managed to cram Creepy Child, A.I. Is A Crapshoot, and Evil Brit into one package. Me, I would have kept going. Given the girl an Evil Laugh while she slouches in an easy chair stroking a kitty cat.

The other thing about the plot that confused me is the way it's paced. The movie felt like it was supposed to be a lot shorter than it was. My thought was that Anderson had come up with this as the movie's first act, and then after a couple months, realized he had nothing else, so he stretched that one act out into three.

Then there were the costumes. Now, I'm not going to claim I am offended by the sight of sexy women jumping around in revealing clothing. On the contrary. And I know that having said sexy women in movies tends to increase ticket sales. But there's eye candy, and then there's pandering. Some of it I could kinda understand; Alice didn't choose the outfit she's running around in, she just grabbed the first clothes she found. Why someone had specifically laid that bondage gear out for her is another matter, and one I'd rather not inspect too closely.

And then there's the outfit Ada Wong is wearing in the movie. Ok, I get it, that's what she wore in the fourth game. But am I really supposed to believe that when setting out for a rescue mission, she decided to wear a cocktail dress? That's like if I put on a tuxedo to go bail a friend out of jail.

As for Jill Valentine's clothing, she looks like Zero Suit Samus. So much that I have to wonder if it was done on purpose. And here's a disturbing though I just had: she was put in that outfit by a computer AI who looks like a ten-year-old girl. That's just wrong.

So, in conclusion, don't bother seeing Resident Evil: Retribution. As I said to another friend earlier today, "sexy women in hot clothing is not enough to excuse the rest of the film." Also, there wasn't a whole lot of Retribution going on in the film. It's rarely a good sign when the film's title is a random assemblage of words.

-Long Days and Pleasant Nights

I wonder if this happened in the French salons of the Enlightenment?

I was looking up a certain Youtube video that's been on the news lately. I won't say which one, the trollish moron who made it doesn't deserve recognition of any sort, and the title of the video will mean nothing in a couple weeks, anyway.

I don't know if you've ever tried looking for a video on Youtube a day or two after making international news, but it's next to impossible. Youtube is a microcosm of the Internet, and like the Internet, it's a vast echo chamber, with everything repeating back on itself, and dropping in fidelity each time. In other words, by the time I went looking for the video, it had been redacted down into hundreds of bite-sized clips, as well as a countless number of copycats and fakes. There were probably a few Rick Astley videos crammed in there, as well.

I found one video that I thought might be the right one, since the title and the length of the video matched what I'd read in the news. So I checked it out, and found it to be an even more poorly-produced piece of garbage than I'd expected. I also couldn't make sense out of the dialogue, as people seemed to be responding to other people's internal monologue. About then is when I spotted a comment saying the original dialogue had been overdubbed.

It was the comments more than the video itself that got me. People had written freaking essays, paragraphs and paragraphs of stuff about the video. And most of it was commenters arguing with each other on topics peripheral to the subject of the video itself.

This isn't the first time I've seen anything like this on Youtube, either. It makes me wonder who these people are, and what they think they're accomplishing. Does user mcpeepants92 type out a comment refuting the claims made in Absolute Undeniable Proof Of Young Earth Creationism* thinking to himself "This is really gonna set the record straight once and for all."

Youtube

It's like some kind of infinite recursion.The guy who made and posted the "Absolute Undeniable Proof Of Young Earth Creationism" clearly thought he was ending the argument forever. Unless he was actually parodying those kinds of people, but for the sake of this argument let's assume he was acting in earnest. So, he posts this video, and he says to himself "There, that'll shut up all those Evolution morons out there."

Then someone else comes along. Maybe he's a troll. Maybe he's in a bad mood. Maybe he's a die-hard Evolutionist with more opinions than good sense. Maybe he's just bored. Either way, he comes upon this video, watches it, and says to himself "This cannot stand."

So he leaves a long comment to the post. One so long that even the OP is saying "tl;dr." And the whole time he's thinking to himself "Hah, this will put that guy in his place."

But astonishingly, "that guy" doesn't roll over and play dead. And even if he does, there's someone else out there who agrees with him, and is willing to take up the torch. He might write out a rebuttal to every point in the comment, but he's more likely to latch onto one part of it and go off on a tangent about it. And away we go.

In a way, I guess it's good there's places like Youtube for these people. It keeps them and their whackjob opinions out of general circulation. Or rather, it gives them an outlet, so they're less likely to assault co-workers or strangers on the street upon whom to deliver their manifesto. If they want to see themselves as Diogenes, let them do it in the privacy of the Internet, where they're a lot easier to ignore.

-Long Days and Pleasant Nights

*I am not a believer in Young Earth Creationism** so don't bother arguing about it with me.
** I also don't want to hear your arguments for Young Earth Creationism.

I wonder if that pic was taken at the local YMCA?

Some recent troubles I had with my health insurance have motivated me to start looking around for different health care options. I've considered looking for a different company or changing the deductible on my current plan. But I also decided to look into what the State will provide me.

Of course, anything involved with the government is going to be a snarled morass of bureaucracy. Especially when it's at the State level, or at least when it's at the Most Corrupt State In The Union level. I eventually did what I always end up doing at any government website; I started clicking links at random until I saw what I was looking for.

Take a look at this screencap of the page I eventually found myself on. Not at the two definitely-heterosexual men posing suggestively in the photograph, but rather at the link I've circled.

I think I saw these two at the Cook County Clerk's office applying for a Civil Union. In those same shirts.

Why the hell does a website about medical plans for men have a section where men aren't supposed to go? Am I missing something here? And I'd like to point out that I didn't add that Venus symbol, it was already there.

So I clicked it, and there was, I kid you not, the words "WARNING: ONLY FOR WOMEN" in bold red letters. I was then that I realized what was going on. They're using the old Forbidden Fruit ploy. Tell someone he can't do something, and he'll just wanna do it all the more.

I read a bit more, and the page was telling women about why they should be worried about men's  health. What the reason it boiled down to was "Men are too stupid and lazy to worry about their own health, so you better do it for them." That piqued my ire at first, and then I realized that was the whole point. They were trying to piss me off, so I'd be like "I don't care about my health? I'll show you!"

Just one more bit of evidence that the basic assumption behind all politics is that normal people are complete morons.

-Long Days and Pleasant Nights

How academic debates flare up

There's people out there that other people call word or grammar Nazis. Linguists get mad at his pigeonholing, and not just because of the reference to fascism. Language, they argue, is the most effective means humans have devised to communicate with each other. While most animals can communicate basic concepts such as "danger here" to each other, humans have developed the ability to explain abstract concepts to each other.

At this point biologists step forward and point out we don't know that other animals can't communicate as effectively as we can. Linguists respond by politely asking the biologists to shut up, they're trying to make a point here.

Anyway, where were we? Oh, right. The point of language is effective communication. If people are using a word incorrectly, then they are not communicating effectively.

But, Joe Sixpack points out, even if I'm using this word wrong, so's everyone else. So they all know what I mean.

Linguists, who are beginning to lose patience at this point, resist the urge to stamp their feet. Everybody being wrong in the same way doesn't make them all right, they say. Before Columbus, everyone was wrong about the world being flat. Doesn't mean the world was flat.

Hang on, say logicians. Your counterargument doesn't apply. Language is a human construction, plastic and evolving, while something like the shape of the Earth is solid physical fact, and no amount of rhetorical prowess can alter it.

At this point historians, who happened to be passing by and caught the tail end of the conversation, come storming in. Dammit, they shout, we're so tired of hearing that. Look, nobody in the 15th Century thought the Earth was flat. Pythagoras proved it was round over 2,000 years ago. Columbus thought...

Look, look, linguists say, we're getting away from the original point, which was...

No, by God, historians say. It's time the record got set straight, and we're gonna...

Come on, linguists say, the story about Columbus and the orange and all that are in the collective unconscious by now. You can't...

Oh, say historians, so now you're psychologists?

Did someone mention us? Psychologists ask.

Stay out of this, everyone else yells.

Keep this in mind next time some reactionary calls Universities a breeding ground for sedition.

-Long Days and Pleasant Nights

Joliet Prison Blues

 Yesterday, when I went into work, I was told that one of the other guys who work there was in jail. Not a whole lot was known, and there's still a lot of unanswered questions about what went down, but this is what seems to have happened. Two nights ago, on the 3rd, he got in an argument with his girlfriend, and somewhere in there, the police got called, and he was arrested on domestic abuse charges.

 Now, I'm not going to claim to know what happened, but I do have a couple suppositions, based on the personalities of those involved. I don't know either one of them terribly well. The guy has only worked there for a few months, and the girlfriend only shows up a couple times a week, usually drunk. The guy, who I'll call Steve, is a pretty laid back guy. Not like pothead laid back, he's just a "grin and bear it" type. The girlfriend, as far as I can tell, is drunk most nights. I've heard rumors she spends her days hanging out at bars and getting older men to buy her drinks, but I don't know that for a fact. All I can say for myself is that she gets drunk during the week an awful lot.

 I'm not saying that he didn't hit her, I'm just saying I think it's more likely she got pissed at him and decided to call the cops on him. What I will say is that when I heard that Steve was in jail for domestic abuse, my first thought was that she had hit him in a drunken rage, and the police had arrested him because he was the guy. I've read that some States have a law saying that when responding to a domestic disturbance, they always arrest the man, even if he's the one who called the police. I don't know if Illinois is one of those States, but I wouldn't be surprised if all States respond that way regardless of what the law says.

 For some reason, my work became the information hub regarding all this. The place seems to be some kind of drama magnet. We get a lot of people who can't seem to get their act together, and for some reason when the major stuff goes down, half the time it happens at work. The other half of the time, it somehow gets dragged there. In this case, one of my co-workers suddenly became the guy to call to find out what was going on with Steve. He was just as mystified that as the rest of us, since while we all get along with Steve, I don't think any of us would consider him a friend. He's a co-worker, and while I drive him home sometimes, that's pretty much the extent of it.

 I picked up a few things from this co-worker, stuff which makes the whole thing even weirder. Steve's girlfriend was denying she called the cops, and had no idea where Steve was being held. She seems to have washed her hands of the whole affair, like she had nothing to do with it. Well, as I said a couple times at work today, somebody had to have called the cops, and the list of suspects is pretty short. But to hear her talk, the police just randomly wandered into their house and arrested him.

 My unfortunate co-worker, the one everyone was going to for information, decided to track him down, and finally found he was being held at the courthouse on California and 26th, and was awaiting bail. The amount set for bail was $750, which seems a bit high to me, but then, I have no idea how these things work. My boss, who for all his faults is pretty damn decent at heart, agreed to loan Steve the bail money, interest free.

 The only thing was, we had no way to get it down to him. So we called his sister, and got her to post bail. Her reaction was a little weird. She had been calling and calling, trying to find out what happened to her brother, but when it came time to actually help the guy out, she got reticent. Eventually, she came down to get the money. My boss even threw in a little extra just in case. She wrote and signed an IOU to keep everything on the up and up. We told her that she had until 7 p.m. to get down there and post bail. After that, he'd be sent upstate to sit in jail until his court date, and he'd be stuck there until the 16th. She looked up at the clock, and seeing it was 5 o'clock, said she'd wait about an hour so she wouldn't get stuck in traffic. That seemed a bit cold-hearted to me, but it was her brother, and her decision.

 When we spoke to Steve on the phone, we told him that his sister would be coming down with the bail money. Worried that he might do something stupid, like try and talk sense into his girlfriend, we also told him to go straight home, and call us when he got there. He lives with his sister, so that seemed pretty cut and dried to me.

 Unfortunately, that's not what happened. We got a call from the sister a couple hours later, saying that she was sitting in the back of a squad car herself. It seems that when she went to the courthouse and put her purse in the X-Ray machine, she forgot to take her pipe out of it first. So she got busted on a possession charge. The law in Illinois regarding possession has changed recently, so she got a fine instead of being arrested, but the cops refused to let her back into the courthouse to bail her brother out. So she came back to my work and returned the money.

 My boss was long gone by that time, which is fortunate for her. He's got a temper, and if he had been there, I'm sure he would have been furious. My boss' son was there at the time, and all I can say is I'm glad that I wasn't around when my boss found out what had happened. Course, as far as I know, his son still hasn't gotten around to telling him what happened. Though I imagine my boss started getting suspicious when Steve never called to say that he was safely back at home.

 Speaking of Steve, I can't imagine what's going through his mind. The last he'd heard from anyone, his sister was on the way to bail him out. Instead, he got shipped off to jail. I feel bad for the poor guy, especially since I don't know if he even deserves any of the crap he's being put through. I'll probably never know the whole story, but I do know we're gonna be short-handed at work for a while.

-Long Days and Pleasant Nights

In the far, far future of the year 2000

By now, those old "the world of tomorrow" films and articles have not only become a joke, but a joke so old no one is even telling it anymore. You might remember them, though: confident assurances that by now, we'd all have jetpacks and videophones and food pills. Granted, to a certain extent, we do have those things, just not the way they were imagined by our forebears. We got jetpacks, but they either suck, or are real expensive. We've had the technology for videophones since the 30s, it's just that the average person is too vain to actually want to use one all the time. The list goes on.

I recently found a reprinting of a list of predictions made in the year 1900, about what the world would be like 100 years in the future. What surprises me about the list is that they actually got a lot of stuff right. They also got a lot of stuff way wrong. But what surprised me the most is that all the predictions I read were either pretty damn accurate or laughably off. There weren't many near misses. As an example of guessing correctly, they state that the average height of an American in 2000 will be one or two inches taller than in 1900. In 1900, the average man was 5'9". Today, the average height for an American male is 5'10". As an example of falling short of the mark, they also thought that the average human lifespan in 2000 would be 50 (as opposed to 35 in 1900).

Below are a few highlights, along with some comments by me. Anyone wishing to read a transcript of the full text can find it here.

There will probably be from 350,000,000 to 500,000,000 people in America and its possessions by the lapse of another century.

Not bad; as of the 2012 census, the population of the US is about 314 million. Of course, this article also thought that Nicaragua and Mexico would be part of the US by then, so they were probably taking those countries' populations into account as well.

Automobiles will be cheaper than horses are today.

I'm not sure how much a horse costs these days, but I wouldn't be surprised if they're more expensive in the long run, at least if you live in an urban environment (and bear in mind that in 1900, cities were only starting to be the most populated parts of the country). The rest of this prediction goes on to say that automobiles would replace the horse-drawn vehicle in every echelon of society, which of course it did. Though they also state that a trip from the suburbs into the city would cost a penny. I doubt a bus or a train could be considered that cheap today, even after adjusting for inflation.

Exercise will be compulsory in the schools. Every school, college and community will have a complete gymnasium. All cities will have public gymnasiums.

This one surprised me. I mean, intellectually, I knew that those old one room schoolhouses of our grandparents time didn't have gyms, but it never occurred to me that they didn't have gym class.

Cities...will be free from all noises.

This is the end of a prediction about how all motorized traffic will be either above or below ground level, and mostly enclosed. For those readers who are fellow Chicagoans, think the El and Lower Wacker Drive, everywhere. Course, the article also predicted that no one would live in cities anymore by 2000, everyone would be in the suburbs, and cities would be more like industrial/economic hubs than anything else.

Photographs will be telegraphed from any distance. If there be a battle in China a hundred years hence snapshots of its most striking events will be published in the newspapers an hour later. Even to-day photographs are being telegraphed over short distances.  Photographs will reproduce all of Nature’s colors.

Granted, color photography was a pretty safe bet, even in 1900. But it's pretty impressive that they were able to predict instant communications before the advent of computers, let alone the Internet. As a side note, does anyone know when we stopped hyphenating "today" and "tomorrow?" I see that all the time in Victorian literature.

In other news, I read Victorian literature. For fun.

 No Mosquitoes nor Flies.  Insect screens will be unnecessary.  Mosquitoes, house-flies and roaches will have been practically exterminated.

It should be noted that we actually did try to do this. And we would have succeeded. Fortunately, we figured out that pests like mosquitoes and flies are integral to maintaining our ecology before we stamped them out.

Peas as Large as Beets.

 This and the two predictions after it discuss gigantic produce. I'm not sure why people in 1900 would have considered that desirable. Maybe it was their answer to world hunger?

There will be No C, X or Q in our every-day alphabet. They will be abandoned because unnecessary. Spelling by sound will have been adopted, first by the newspapers. English will be a language of condensed words expressing condensed ideas, and will be more extensively spoken than any other.

Funnily enough, I made the same prediction about the letters C, X, and Q, and for the same reason, though I also included Y in the mix. According to notes I've compiled for a novel I plan on writing one day set in the 27th Century: "The alphabet consists of 32 letters: 15 vowels and 17 consonants (the letters c, q, x, and y have been removed)." Sometimes, I think it would be nice if English were phonetic.

Russian will rank second.

I'm not sure what the second most-spoken language on Earth is right now, but I'm gonna guess it's Mandarin, just based on how many Chinese there are.

A university education will be free to every man and woman.


Ah, it must be nice to be so idealistic.


Poor students will be given free board, free clothing and free books if ambitious and actually unable to meet their school and college expenses.

 Scholarships, anyone?

 Medical inspectors regularly visiting the public schools will furnish poor children free eyeglasses, free dentistry and free medical attention of every kind.

If you listen carefully, you can hear the sound of Republicans screaming "SOCIALIST!" in the background. And before you claim that there was no such thing as socialism in 1900, The Communist Manifesto was written in 1848.


Wireless telephone and telegraph circuits will span the world. A husband in the middle of the Atlantic will be able to converse with his wife sitting in her boudoir in Chicago.

 Holy crap, it's like they actually saw into the future there. Except for the boudoir part. I'm not even wholly certain I know what a boudoir is, let along what that man's wife is doing in it.

Ready-cooked meals will be bought from establishments similar to our bakeries of today.


Though nowadays you don't even have to get out of your freakin' car. Course, the people who wrote this article thought the food would be delivered to your home via pneumatic tube. This was the height of technology back then, and let's be honest, it's still a pretty cool idea even today. That's probably why they appear in Futurama.


Oranges will grow in Philadelphia.

 To be fair, you probably can grow oranges in Philly today, given materials and patience. It's just, who'd want to?

Strawberries as large as apples will be eaten by our great great grandchildren for their Christmas dinners a hundred years hence.

 Man, they just will not let go of the giant fruit thing.

Melons, cherries, grapes, plums, apples, pears, peaches and all berries will be seedless.

Well, most of the items on that list have seedless varieties by now.  They forgot bananas, though. Did they already have seedless bananas in 1900? Hell, did they have Cavendish bananas at all in 1900?

There will be no wild animals except in menageries.

 Hard to imagine that was ever considered to be an ideal situation, rather than a desperate last resort, eh? For those of you wondering, "menagerie" is an old-timey word for "zoo."


The horse will have become practically extinct. A few of high breed will be kept by the rich for racing, hunting and exercise.

 I'm not sure if I'd call the modern horse "practically extinct," but they were on the nose about the rest.

Rats and mice will have been exterminated.


See my previous comments about mosquitoes and flies. 

-Long Days and Pleasant Nights

More on Germany

I decided to go and look up a bit of info about the part of Germany my cousin and her family live in. Germany used to be several different countries, so I figure there's probably cultural and regional differences throughout.

They live in or around Frankfurt. According to Wikipedia, Frankfurt is in Hesse. That sounded vaguely familiar to me, so I followed the link to Hesse, and saw it's also known as Hessia. And I was like, "Ah, that's why it sounds familiar. The Hessian mercenaries during the Revolutionary War." So, that means all I know about the area so far is that George Washington slaughtered a bunch of them in their sleep after his famous midnight crossing of the Delaware River. Hopefully they're not still bitter about that.

Deutschland? Jawohl!

I don't normally use this blog to discuss current events in my life, good or ill, but this is a fairly major one that I wanted to share. About a week ago, my mom gave me the idea of going to Germany to visit my cousin Tami and her family. This is the same cousin I went to visit in Boston a couple years back; I think I mentioned that here before. Her idea is to cover half the air fare as my birthday present this year.

We still have to contact Tami and work out the logistics of the trip, figure out when would be a good time for them, etc. But if we manage to pull this off, it will be the first time in my life I've been outside the continental United States. So, as you can imagine, this plan holds some appeal with me.

I'd be going alone, which would also be a first for me. I like alone time as much as the next guy, but when I'm going on a trip, I like to have someone with me, be it friends or family. But of course I'd be staying with family once I got there, so it'd really only be on the plane that I'd be by myself.

My only real concern is that I don't speak a lick of German. For all I know, my cousin will be the only native English speaker around. Her husband Denny speaks English just fine, and her son Noah's English is about as good as any four year old's, but that's about it. It's probably not that big a deal, except that if I feel like striking out on my own for a day, I'll probably spend most of the day saying "Excuse me, do you speak English?" everywhere I go.

But, with that one caveat, I still want to do this. I haven't had a real vacation in at least a year, and I've always wanted to go to another country. So, I'm gonna get in contact with my cousin and see what we can't iron out together. So I'd better practice saying one of the few things I can say in German: "Ich bin ein Amerikaner."

-Long Days and Pleasant Nights

There's a little black spot on the Sun today...

I'm a little upset I didn't get to see the Venus transit today. Especially since it was due to lack of preparation on my part. It was a beautiful day today, with a clear sky. If I had gotten even so much as a pair of welding goggles to wear, I might have been able to see it. As it is, all I can do is look up pictures of it.

Oh, well, I guess I can just try and stay alive until the next one in 120 years.

-Long Days and Pleasant Nights

A shocking move that surprised no one

Well, after nearly a week of waiting, the Syrian government has announced the results of its careful and exhaustive investigation into the recent massacre in Houla. Amazingly, the government has determined that they had nothing to do with it! This announcement by the Syrian government, on the heels of repeated claims by the Syrian government that they were not to blame for the massacre, has sent reverberations throughout the world. The bold claim "We didn't do it" has obliterated beyond any shadow of a doubt the thousands of eyewitness testimonies that the government was responsible.

The thing I like best about this is that the Syrian government only kinda pretended to investigate the massacre. They released their results less than a week after the attack. I mean, I know that on television a week is an ungodly amount of time for an investigation to last, but this is real life, folks. Also, I love how they're blaming it on "terrorists." The only way to get more vague than that is to say the attack was carried out by "people with weapons."

I imagine the so-called investigation went something like this.

"Good morning, President al-Assad."
"Good morning. I'd like to find out who was responsible for the massacre in Houla."
"Very well." <stands up> "President al-Assad, are you responsible for the massacre in Houla?"
"No."
"Alright, then. Do you know who is responsible?"
"Terrorists."
"Any specific group? Maybe the name of a supposed lead..."
"Terrorists."
"Awesome. I'll prepare a press release for Thursday."

Included in the press release were a number of other things that the Syrian Government has announced they are not responsible for. Here's a partial list:

Global Warming
Josef Mengele
The Exxon Valdez crash
The Book of Mormon (editor's note: the list does not specify whether they mean the holy book, or the musical)
Those little white flecks you sometimes get at the corners of your mouth
Childhood obesity
The oppressive government in Syria
The Moon Landing
The death of Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain
Tuberculosis
The 1945 bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki
The career of Flavor Flav
Mosquitos
Beatlemania
Josef Stalin's mustache
1984 (editor's note: the list does not specify whether they mean the book, or the year)
The Pasteurization process
Formica
The fall of the Roman Empire
Maple trees
Pens with no ink that people refuse to throw out
Friedrich Nietzsche's mustache
Poor television reception
The Second Punic War
 Season Six of Saturday Night Live

-Long Days and Pleasant Nights

Jim Crow Flies Again

If you live in North Carolina, you may have noticed that the streets are a little safer tonight. For who knows how long, a sinister presence has darkened the State, putrefying everything it touches, and leaving none safe in its wake. Families have been destroyed by this invisible monster, and countless lives have been ruined. But now, the citizens of North Carolina can sleep a little easier, knowing that by the very skin of their teeth, disaster has been averted.

Not a whole hell of a lot has changed, has it?

I'm referring of course, to gay marriage.

Yes, that's right. Next to gay marriage, terrorism is a minor inconvenience. Soaring health rate costs are but a trifling affair. All those people with no jobs should be grateful that at the very least, two people of the same gender they've never even met won't be able to build a life together.

Can you hear me, Homosexual Agenda? You'd better run and hide back in your college campuses and the liberal media. The people of North Carolina have spoken loud and clear. They've said, just like in the 50s, that hate is alright, as long as it's leveled against a target they've deemed acceptable.

Some have said that there's nothing wrong with gay marriage. That if two people love each other, that's all that should matter. Apparently those people have some misguided idea that marriage is stable, and that the institution can withstand the pressure. But fortunately, the people who voted for this Amendment know differently. They understand fully the shaky foundation that heterosexual marriage is built upon. They know that the concept of marriage cannot possibly continue to exist if we start allowing homosexuals to join in on it. We have to stamp out gay marriage now, before people stop seeing marriage as something a man and a woman must suffer through, and start thinking of it as a bond between two people who love each other.

But don't think the fight is over, my friends. Reactionary homophobes in North Carolina may be celebrating their victory over decency and goodwill tonight, but they know that tomorrow the battle will resume. For, you see, gay marriage might now be unconstitutional in their State, but that hasn't changed the fact that gay people are still allowed to draw breath. It's not enough to stop gays from marrying. It's not even enough to cure them of their crippling affliction. The problem with a cure is that there's sometimes a relapse. So, in order to make sure that the threat of gay marriage can no longer darken our landscape, we have to make homosexuality a capital crime. And no slaps on the wrist for first-time offenders. We all know what they say about those people's wrists, and if we break it by accident, they might sue. And there just might be some namby-pamby bleeding heart judge out there willing to award damages. We have to stamp this out once, and for all.

And after we're done there, we can start doing something about those damn minorities, like we tried to do half a century ago.

-Long Days and Pleasant Nights

Wait Until Dark

I read this article today about one Chen Guangcheng. He's a Civil Rights activist in China who for the last year or so has been under house arrest. He managed to escape house arrest recently, and is allegedly hiding out in the U.S. Embassy in Beijing.

Of course, the Chinese media is being tight-lipped about the whole thing. But the American government is being just as quiet about it. It probably has something to do with the fact that Secretary of State Clinton is heading down to China right now for talks with their government. They don't want this possible political exile to overshadow the whole thing.

Here's the thing about this that kills me, though. Chen is blind. A blind man managed to slip unnoticed out of his heavily guarded house and elude Chinese authorities. I mean, that's like something out of a movie. I can only imagine the verbal berating the guards got over that. "You let a blind man escape!?!" I know the Chinese censor just about everything out of habit, but I almost can't blame them for keeping mum on this one.

Well, as Damon Wayans once said, "Never underestimate the power of the handicapped."

-Long Days and Pleasant Nights

One Car, One Spot

Pet peeves are those little annoying things that niggle at you when you encounter them. To be a true pet peeve, it has to be something minor that you encounter often. For instance, genocide is not a pet peeve. That guy in your office who always greets you with "Heeey buddyyyy" in a rellay grating voice, that's a pet peeve.

My pet peeve, or at least the one I'm most aware of, is people who take up more than one spot when parking their cars. I work in a strip mall that contains a convenient store and a laundromat, and people seem to think that just because they're not going to be there long, they can just park their cars however they want. They'll go right down the middle of a painted line, or they'll be sloppy and leave the car at a drunken angle in the spot so parts of it are hanging into two other spaces. They usually don't even bother to straighten their tires.

Even more annoying in it's own way, though, are the guys who manage through Herculean effort to squeeze their car into only one spot, but are off-center in the spot. So they're only using one spot, but if they happen to be too far over on the right, anyone trying to park in the spot on the right won't be able to open his car door enough to get out. On the other hand, idiots who park too far to the left can have the same thing happen to them. I sometimes do this on purpose just to let them know what I think of their poor aim.

My job involves driving in and out of the parking lot several times a day. Which means I have to park my car in the same lot many times, so I find myself hampered by these people a lot. At least once a week, I witness a situation where two cars pull out of the lot, and suddenly five spaces are opened up. Usually after I've had to park my car on the far end of the lot from my work.

Then there's the guys who take up several spots because their vehicle is so friggin' huge that it's physically impossible for it to fit in one spot. Hey, pal, you live in an urban environment. Can you explain to me why you need a truck that can tow 20 tons of lumber across 100 miles of dirt road in the middle of one of the largest metropolitan areas in the world? Besides your obvious self-esteem issues, that is.

I don't drive a small car. I have an SUV. Some call it a truck, and it does have plenty of storage space, but it's not a truck. I manage to park, every single time, right in the middle of the spot, and without my ass hanging out into the lot. It's not hard. Sometimes I have to back up and fiddle with the steering wheel to make sure I'm lined up correctly, but that only takes a few seconds. If your life is so packed that you can't spare 5 seconds to be a decent human being, then it's time for a serious re-assessment of your priorities.

And speaking of those enormous trucks, it kills me whenever one of them slows to almost a dead stop to cross railroad tracks. My friend, that vehicle you're babying was designed for rough terrain. Mountain passes, dirt switchbacks, gravel. Trust me, railroad tracks are not going to damage that thing. "Yeah," you might be saying, "but that off-road suspension is hard on the kidneys." In that case, let me remind you that you are crossing over railroad tracks. Vehicles that make yours look like a Matchbox car move across them all the freaking time. By slowing down, you're spending more time on the tracks, thereby increasing the likelihood that one of those nigh-unstoppable engines of doom will be trying to occupy the same space as you. What's more important to you, your comfort, or your life?

And to those who think I may be over-dramatizing the danger, I'd like to point out that people die on the tracks in my area every year. Some by trying to outrun a train, but just as many have died because they were moving slowly (or in at least one mind-numbingly stupid incident) or at a full stop on the tracks.

In short, get over yourself.

-Long Days and Pleasant Nights

But I swear it was in self-defense

I noticed it's been a long time since I last posted anything here. I was reminded of a story recently, one that I haven't recounted here, and I thought I'd talk about it now.

Back in High School, there was this guy I considered my best friend. We remained friends for several years after graduation. I won't get into details, but I will say that I'm not friends with him any longer. I was in a real bad place mentally for a long time after High School, and I eventually realized this guy was the cause of all my problems, and I stopped hanging out with him. He never forgave me for it. I never wished any ill of the guy, and I still don't now. My only hope was that I never saw him again.

I don't want to name any names here, but I can see my story is going to get confusing if I only use pronouns the whole time. So, to protect the innocent, I'm going to use fake name from this point on.

A couple years after I stopped hanging out with Abe, my friend Bob asked me if I could do him a favor. He was friends with this guy Carl, who was dating a girl I'll call Alice. Bob was certain that Alice was cheating on Carl with Abe, but Carl didn't want to believe it. Bob was insistent, however, so Carl said that if Bob could prove that Alice was cheating on him, he'd dump her right then and there. Through random chance, Alice happened to live only a block away from me.

One fateful night, Bob was at my house, and I was getting ready to drive him home. I was in my early twenties at the time, and Bob was too young to drive, so this was a normal occurrence. On this particular night, Bob told me the whole story about Alice and Carl, and he was determined to get evidence that Alice was secretly seeing Abe. I should point out that Alice was even younger than Carl and Bob, and that Abe was my age, so if they were seeing each other, it was not only immoral, but illegal. This is why, despite the fact that I didn't want to get anywhere near Abe, I agreed to help Bob out.

Bob had me drive past Alice's house, and he spotted Abe's car outside. He saw this as his opportunity. He asked me to pull over so he could sneak around to the back of the house. I asked him what his plan was, and he pulled out a disposable camera and explained that he was going to get a picture of the two of them together. Then he got out of my car, camera in hand, and made his way to the back of the house.

He was gone for a while, long enough for me to listen to almost the entirety of "Damage, Inc." on my car stereo. I was just starting to get worried about him when he returned with a faint smile on his face. I asked Bob what had happened, but he only said that everything was fine, and asked me to take him home. I did so.

On my way home, I drove past Alice's house. As I said, we're practically neighbors, and it would have been out of my way to drive around her place on the way back to mine. to my surprise, there were police cars on the block, but I didn't think anything of it. At least, not until I drove past the squad cars, and saw that Abe was talking to them. I still didn't think anything of it until I saw Abe point me out to the cops as I drove by. Less than 100 feet away from my house, they pulled me over.

The next thing I know, I'm being asked to step out of my car. The cops ask me the normal questions, I.E. "Where are you going?" I explained I was going home. They asked where home was, and I pointed to it and said "The yellow one right there."

That seemed to put them off their stride. I guess hardened felons like me usually don't have houses within line of sight. They recovered quickly, however. They handcuffed me and stuck me in the back of a squad car. When I asked what was going on, they acted astonished that I didn't know, and informed me that I was an accessory to battery. I told them I had no idea what they were talking about, and they acted like they'd heard that one a million times, which they very well might have.

Abe, for his part, was enjoying all this immensely. He walked past the squad car I was sitting in, waved to me, and apologized. To this day, I have no idea what that was about. He wasn't, and as far as I know, still isn't mentally stable, so the apology could have meant anything. "Sorry I had to get you arrested," or "Sorry I lied to these cops that you committed a crime," or for all I know "Sorry I knocked over your lunch tray 5 years ago in the cafeteria." Whatever the meaning behind it, he did nothing to inform the cops that I had done nothing, and there was no reason for me to be sitting handcuffed in the back of a cop car.

Eventually, one of the cops got into the car, and asked me where Bob lived. By this point, I was wondering just what exactly, if anything, Bob had done. But I figured it'd be a good idea to be cooperative, so I said that while I didn't know Bob's address, I could direct them to the place.

We drove to Bob's house, and the cops all parked in front of it. I should mention at this point that I was living in Elmwood Park at the time, a suburb of Chicago. There were a good four or five squad cars involved in this, probably because it was the only interesting thing happening in the entire village.Anyway, they all parked, and got out of their cars, including the cop ferrying me around.

They all scrambled up the front porch, shining their flashlights in the windows, no doubt hoping to spot a gambling den or prostitution ring in the front room. They rang the doorbell, and waited. From where I was sitting, I could see that the light to Bob's bedroom was on. But since the window to his room was around the corner from the front door, only I saw it go off after the bell was rung. I wondered what that could mean.

Bob's mother came to the door in her bathrobe, it being the middle of the night. I couldn't see or hear what was going on from where I sat, but after a few minutes she broke off from the police and strode towards the car where I was. My window was down, and as she approached I could see she looked very distressed, and clearly was as in the dark as I was. She asked me what the hell was going on. I told her I had no idea, that I was going home, and that Abe...

I got no farther than that. As soon as I said Abe's name, Bob's mother flew off the handle. She knew Abe well enough to guess that something hinky was going on, and that he was framing Bob and me for something. She stormed back to her house, shouting that she was going to press charges on Abe for messing with her son, while the cops tried to calm her down.

I was even more confused than before, since it seemed that the cops hadn't found Bob at his house, even though I had dropped him off there maybe ten minutes earlier. The police were also confused, and the ones who weren't trying to talk Bob's mom down came to me and asked me again where Bob was. I told them I had no idea, that I had dropped him off here. As I said this, I had a fleeting image of him hiding in the basement for God only knows what reason. I kept that thought to myself.

The police were at a loss, and it seemed that they decided that they had to do something, so they took me to the police station. The officer who was driving the car I'd been put in took me into the station, and to the holding cell in the back. He cuffed me to the wall, and had me sit on a stool while he went through my pockets.

I carry a lot of stuff in my pockets, and a few of the items confused the officer. One of them was a small plastic object, L-shaped, with a canister at one end. He asked me what it was, and I told him, truthfully, that it was an emergency asthma inhaler. He looked at it doubtfully, then asked "Will you be needing it?" I told him that I didn't know, the whole point of it was that I had it on hand in case I had an attack. He stuck it in a paper bag with the rest of my belongings, and told me that he'd leave the microphone to the front desk on so that I could shout for it if I needed it. I considered pointing out that if I had an asthma attack, shouting for help wouldn't be easy, but I didn't want to try his patience. Besides, I was pretty sure I wouldn't need it.

The officer pulled out a couple sheets of paper and started reading questions off it. I guess it was some legal thing they had to do before locking anybody up, so I couldn't try and sue them or something. I don't remember most of the questionnaire, except for one part. His eyes fixed firmly on the papers, and his pen poised above them, asked me if I'd ever attempted suicide. I told him I hadn't. Still without looking at me, he asked me if I was considering suicide at the moment.

I couldn't help it. It seemed that all the tension of the last half hour had come to a head, and I couldn't take it anymore. The absurdity of the question in my situation was too much to take. I felt something break like a soap bubble inside me.

I started laughing. I laughed as if the question was the punchline to a joke he had spent the last 10 minutes carefully and expertly setting up. I laughed as if we were two guys in a bar sharing a pitcher, and not a police officer getting ready to throw someone in the tank.

The cop stole a quick glance at me as I laughed. Not a worried look, it was something between "answer the question" and "I know, it's a stupid question." I managed between chuckles to say "No," and he jotted the answer down on the paper with the grave solemnity of an undertaker making funeral arrangements.

We went through the rest of the questionnaire, and then he was ready to put me in my cell. He informed me that I had to remove my belt. I also had the choice of giving him my shoes, or my shoelaces. They were really serious about the suicide thing. I figured that taking off my laces was more trouble than it was worth, so I gave him my shoes.

Once I was safely behind bars, the cop asked me if I knew where Bob was. I said that I had dropped Bob off at his house, and I had no idea beyond that where he could be. Privately, I was wondering what the hell Bob was up to, and how he was hiding from the cops. I decided that I could try and help him buy some time, in case was cooking up some way to get the both of us out of trouble. And for about the umpteenth time, I wondered what I was supposed to have done.

I found out later that Abe had fed the cops some cock-and-bull story that Bob had beaten Abe up, and that I had either helped, or stood back and watched. It was the classic "my word against yours," and the police therefore had no interest in my claims that I had no idea what was going on. I hadn't even seen Abe before he fingered me, let alone aided and abetted while Bob jumped him.

So, the officer asked if I had any idea where Bob might be. I said I didn't. He asked me to think about it. So, I figured that if they were going to be that way, I'd lead them on a wild goose chase. I thought about the farthest away house I could that was still in Elmwood Park, and told them they might want to try Dan Smith's house. The officer didn't even ask for the address, but walked out. Dan's house, it seemed, was well known to the Elmwood Park Police Department. Considering some of the stuff that I know happened there, I'm not surprised.

Before he left, the officer reminded me that the microphone to the front desk was on, so that I could call for help if I needed it. Then he left, and I was all alone in a concrete and steel cell. Standing in my socks as I was, my feet got cold quick. Since there was no one else in there with me, I stretched out on the lone bench. To stave off boredom, I sang to myself. I was about halfway through the first verse of "I Shot The Sheriff" before I remembered that whoever was in the front of the station could hear me. I decided I didn't care. For all I know, they found it as morbidly appropriate as I did.

I don't remember what time it was when I was thrown in the cell, but it was before midnight. I sat in there until well after dawn the next day. It seems that about seven in the morning, Abe came into the police station to file a formal report, and finally admitted that I hadn't been around when the "crime" was committed. With nothing to hold me on, the police let me go. To their credit, they were nice enough to drive me back to my car. I moved it up a few spaces, parked it again, and went home. I was asleep in my own bed moments later.

I awoke several hours later to the sound of my phone ringing. I answered it, and it was Bob. With no preliminaries, I asked just what the in the hell had gone on last night. He seemed surprised, and asked me what I was talking about. I informed him that I had just spent the night in jail because of him. He was shocked. He'd just come back from the police station himself, having found out that they were looking for him. No one, not the police, or his mother, or anyone, had mentioned that I had been behind bars while they looked for him.

The full story, as it turned out, was this. Bob had gone around to the back of Alice's house, and spotted her and Abe kissing. He snapped a picture. They hadn't realized he was there until the flash went off, and then Abe jumped Bob. Bob was still holding the camera in front of his face, and Abe swung at it, breaking it against Bob's face. Bob retaliated, and the two scuffled briefly. As Bob made his retreat, Abe shouted that Bob had attacked him. Bob pointed out that Abe had swung first. Abe said he was going to press charges, and Alice said she was going to back his side of the story. Bob ignored them and returned to my car, whereupon I drove him home. He figured they were both full of hot air, and so hadn't told me about it.

No sooner had I dropped Bob off at his house and rounded the corner, when another friend of his, Edgar, had pulled up. He had been on his way to Denny's, and seeing Bob, had pulled over to see if he wanted to come with. Bob had agreed, and the two of them headed off for coffee and male bonding while I rotted in a cell. Needless to say, I was rather peeved to find that out.

The only real good thing about all this is that I have no police record. They never actually booked me, just "held me for questioning" or some other folderol. I wasn't officially arrested, or accused of a crime, so my record is clean. There might be a piece of paper in some file folder in the police department with my name on it. Then again, it might have been thrown out years ago. Either way, I'm clear of it.

And it does make a nice story to tell people. "Hey, did I ever tell you about the time I got arrested?"

-Long Days and Pleasant Nights