Ursus Pacificus

Well, here it is, the end of Day 2, and I’ve made it to Tulsa, OK in one piece. The car is in one piece, too…. which is good.

Last night I made it to Columbus, OH (well, Grove City if you want to be nitpicky about it) and stayed at the “new” (read “most likely rehabbed”) Travelodge there. I was up and out by 6:30 AM and on the road. What thrills!

On the way to Tulsa… oh, the things I’ve seen… “Jesus” billboards all through Ohio, Indiana and Illinois… and I stopped in Effingham, Il (My dad and I stopped there in Nov of 2002, and had an absolute blast… see, Effingham… F—ingham… get it? We got gas and ate at the Denny’s… Oh, the fun we had… So I had to revisit it… and, then, as I was getting back on the highway… A GIANT FSCKING CROSS… just like the one in Groom, TX. I got a little bit of video of that… out of sheer incredulity. TWO giant crosses! What luck!

I couldn’t post from Columbus because, as much of a geek as I am, I forgot to pack an Ethernet cable. D’Oh! The Travelodge was supposed to have wireless… and it did, but only in the lobby. Crud!

…and it turns out that big-box office supply chains are harder to find in the Midwest than Jimmy Hoffa… so I still have no Ethernet cable.

Fortunately, the Days Inn at Tulsa West has in-room wireless… hence, this blog post.

I have a few short videos (mostly state line crossings, and the occasional roadside oddity) that I plan to post soon, but maybe not tonight, as I am wiped out, and need a shower. I’ll try to at least yank them out of the camera tonight.

Tomorrow, I’m off to Socorro, NM!… More later!

With a brand new tattoo, and a car full of crap, I’m just about on my way. Eeek.

Yes, that’s right. A new tattoo. I’ll put a picture up a little later… It’s not much to look at now

Thanks to everyone who’s supported and encouraged me on this crazy trip.

Next stop: Lovely Columbus, OH. … well.. Grove City. Close enough.

More later….

It’s International Talk Like A Pirate Day.

Avast! Scurvy Dogs! Booty! Yardarms! Grog! Wench!

…and don’t forget the Beer Volcano and Stripper Factory in Pastafarian Paradise!

Arrrr!

RAmen

If you have 45 minutes to kill, and you haven’t done it already, watch Sarah Palin’s acceptance speech.

Sarah Palin grunts. During most of the reaction shots, she’s making little vocalizations… unintelligible mumbles… I just wish the camera would stay on her while she’s doing it.

Either the techs who put the podium together didn’t secure a cable somewhere, or, more likely, she can’t stop hitting the podium. You keep hearing this “poom, poom”

OK, so she’s a creationist whack-job… I can overlook that. Well, no, I can’t. But, that aside, I don’t really think I can vote for someone to be a half a heartbeat away from the oval office who can’t stop muttering or thumping the podium.

She kinda reminds me of a younger, female Dick Cheney… which is creepy.

The base page for my month-long road trip has lots of new info on where I’m planning to go, what I’m planning to see and like that.

Maps! Dates! Standing on a corner in Winslow, AZ!

Also, I snagged a new JVC hard-disk camcorder for the trip. Pretty sweet! Video tape sucks!

This Business Week article is actually about HP’s efforts to make their MS Windows PCs differentiated in the marketplace and/or (maybe) offer their own slicked-up version of Linux for consumer use (a la the Apple/FreeBSD relationship).

That’s the point of the article… one paragraph up from the end, there a little blurb about MS unveiling something this coming October, which will allow a user to:

…start a Power Point presentation from her home computer, store it on the Net, and then pick it up from her office PC. Windows’ ubiquity makes the software “very practical,” says Bill Veghte, a Microsoft senior vice-president.

wow. You mean like.. SFTP or SCP? … like this?

scp me@my.domain.com:/home/me/file.odp ./

Say, that is groovy!

…of course, she could also just save it to a thumb drive.

Those Microsoft guys are so clever… what’ll they think of next?!

Just saw the new four minute and thirty second Microsoft ad (with Bill Gates and Jerry Seinfeld)… and … I have to say… While it doesn’t have much of a story, the characters are utterly one-dimensional, and nobody is a better person by the end of it… It’s almost completely inexplicable… I mean, it makes Jaws: The Revenge seem… almost worth watching… In spite of this, it does a pretty good job of showing how pointless, obtrusive, out dated, out of touch and unwelcome Microsoft products have become over the years. …although I don’t think that was the aim. Have a look:

[Bummer. The video got pulled from YouTube. If it shows up again, I'll stuff it back in here. --ed]

The father says, “I’m so disappointed in the both of you.” The little boy chimes in “You guys are so dead.”

Really… What more needs to be said?

September 19th is National Talk Like A Pirate Day. It’s one of the high holy days for us Pastafarians

Speaking of things holy, I recently was involved in a discussion with some folks about online dating sites. One of my complaints is that some sites, particularly eHarmony, don’t acknowledge atheism as a world view with at least as much merit as, say, Christianity, and they’re perfectly content to lump the “non-religious” or “other” along with the positive, strong atheists. I took exception to this, stating that there is a vast gulf between “non-religious” and atheist.

One of the participants in the discussion (let’s call him “Arlo” for the sake of convenient reference) didn’t understand the distinction. Arlo’s position was that “you have to accept another person’s faith”.

No, I don’t.

If a person’s faith is inconsistent with reality, then it is false. I am under no obligation to accept false things.

I told Arlo that a person can believe whatever he or she likes, but if that belief is inconsistent with reality, then said person is going to be seriously disappointed at some point.

That made Arlo very uncomfortable, and he asked to stop the discussion of religion. I obliged.

My point about the dating thing is that if person A (call him Al) is seriously dating person B (call her Betty), then Al and Betty need to be able to agree on some basic things, in order to reliably agree on more complicated issues. If Betty believes that there are no gods, heavens or hells, and therefore all religions are at least misleading, and Al believes in the Abrahamic god and the inerrancy of the Christian bible, then they’re likely to disagree on a great many issues which ultimately are founded in those beliefs. In a society where the curriculum of public education, the direction of the highest court in the land, and the general mode of discourse are determined (at lease in part) by “the mob”, it is disquieting to Betty that Al is more a part of the problem, than part of the solution. Similarly, Al is aware that Betty votes, and while she is in the minority, the minority she’s in seems to be getting louder every day.

At some point, we all have to live together and cooperate (on some level). That doesn’t mean that Al and Betty need to be at each other’s throats day in and day out over common household decisions. Al’s a Christian and Betty’s an atheist. Neither of them can genuinely accept the other’s world view without being untrue to their own.

I was once involved in an unnecessarily long email conversation with someone I met on Match.com. She was a Christian. She was also a biochemist. To me, this is incongruous. Biochemistry is a science. Religion is not. I asked her (early on) how she reconciles her career and her faith. She said she didn’t think she had to. Uh. Yeah. She told me how tolerant she is, and then asked me if I would sit in a church with her and hold her hand at her father’s funeral. Well, the whole hand-holding thing is predicated on me being in a serious relationship with her, which is highly unlikely based on our differing opinions on science, religion, and death, thus the point is moot. She obviously hung up her lab coat and intellect on adjacent pegs on her way out of the lab at the end of the day.

A big part of dating compatibility, I think, is rooted in the ideas at the foundation of a person’s world view. Certain consequences naturally follow from certain fundamental ideas. Sure, the fine-grained detail might lead one to think that Evangelical Christianity and Fundamentalist Islam are radically different, but… they’re not, if you can view them side-by-side with the appropriate level of abstraction, viz:

• Both believe in an invisible, capricious, all-seeing, all-knowing, all-powerful god.
• Both believe in the inerrancy of an ancient text purportedly written by one or more people of dubious objective credibility
• Both believe theirs is the one true faith, to the exclusion of all others
• Both believe that heresy and apostasy are punishable sins
• Both believe that their god is directly involved in the day-to-day workings of everything seen and unseen.
• Both believe in eternal reward for the righteous and eternal punishment for the wicked.
• Both believe in the idea that the practice of science is bad and/or wrong, but use the products of that practice to spread and enforce their doctrines and injure or kill their opponents
• Need I go on?

It is conceivable (however highly unlikely) that a Christian and an Muslim could live happily together with minimal friction, provided they proceed from the “different names of god” assumption… that they really believe the same basic ideas, and the details are trivial.

It is so unlikely as to be virtually inconceivable that an atheist and a Christian (or Muslim or Whatever) could live happily together because the atheist discounts the founding premise of the Christian’s (or Muslim’s or Whatever’s) world view.

So, at the end of the day, I still maintain, you can believe whatever you like, but if your beliefs don’t line up with commonly observable objective reality, you’re setting yourself up for disappointment.

RAmen

So I dumped eHarmony a few months ago. I tried letting them know how I felt by email, but they weren’t accepting emails… so I posted an open letter on my blog, back in July. Since then, I’ve been getting occasional emails, saying, “We’re sorry. You’re really awesome, and if you gave us another chance, you’d come to love us. Please come back!”

I’ve marked these emails a spam and ignored them.

Now, they’ve apparently taken my lack of interest as a sign of interest. I’m getting snail mail from them.

“Dr. Neil Clark Warren” sent me a “personal letter” telling me that eHarmony has improved, and they’re MUCH better at matching now. Oh, yes, they’ve certainly got it right, now! They’re so serious, in fact, that they’re willing to give me 50% off for three months. Whee!

OK, Neil… Clark?… Warren…? I’m only going to tell you this one more time. Stop writing me. Stop emailing me. I’m not interested. I’ve met someone through another site, and I’m quite happy. You never listened to me, and you treated me like a piece of meat. What you’re doing is called “stalking”. It’s not going to win me over. I don’t like you, and I’ll never like you. Leave me alone.

As some of you may already know, I don’t watch TV. As a result, I didn’t see John McCain’s RNC acceptance speech live. Just saw it yesterday on the web. I’m stunned. I was going to do this whole manual word-count thing, because I was amazed by the number of times he used the word “fight”. Fortunately, the BBC has done it for me. They have the full text of McCain’s speech, along with a “tag cloud” which lists, by frequency, the most commonly used words in the speech.

…and the top five are:

1. country: 25
2. fight: 22
3. Americans: 16
4. work: 15
5. government: 13

At number 13 is “fought” which appeared 9 times.

“War” comes in at #19 with 7 uses.

If you take “fought” (9 uses) and “war” (7 uses) as meaning essentially the same thing as “fight” (22 uses), and I don’t see how you can’t, then McCain’s primary focus seems to be conflict (38 direct references).

“Peace” got comparatively little play: 5 mentions, along with “school”, “health” and “love”.

While he only mentioned “god” outright 5 times, he certainly danced around the subject a lot more.

He said, “I hate war. It is terrible beyond imagination.” OK, John, I’ll give you that. Would it not be better, though, to focus on promoting peace instead of promoting conflict? 38 direct uses of words meaning conflict, versus 5 direct uses of “peace”… That seems to me to indicate that John McCain may think war is terrible beyond imagination, but there are worse things, and given the choice, war ain’t so bad.

He finished his speech this way:

I’m going to fight for my cause every day as your President. I’m going to fight to make sure every American has every reason to thank God, as I thank Him: that I’m an American, a proud citizen of the greatest country on earth, and with hard work, strong faith and a little courage, great things are always within our reach.

Fight with me. Fight with me.

Fight for what’s right for our country.

Fight for the ideals and character of a free people.

Fight for our children’s future.

Fight for justice and opportunity for all.

Stand up to defend our country from its enemies.

Stand up for each other; for beautiful, blessed, bountiful America.

Stand up, stand up, stand up and fight. Nothing is inevitable here.

We’re Americans, and we never give up. We never quit. We never hide from history. We make history.

Thank you, and God Bless you.

That seems to sum up his position. Allow me to simplify further:

“The only way to get, do, or achieve anything is to fight for it. In any fight, if there’s a winner, there’s at least one loser, and we’re not going to be the loser.”

It’s pandering to the juvenile, schoolyard mentality. Nobody wants to be a loser!

It’s the same bullshit they do to you in boot camp. Some guy comes in and talks about a buddy of his who sacrificed his limb or life to save the platoon/troop/ship/company… get you all worked up about how great that is, then they play some patriotic drivel, like “God Bless The U.S.A”, and haul out a flag for everyone to touch together with tears streaming down their faces.

Let me tell you something. Whether you lost the fight, lost your arm, or lost your life, you still lost.

Sure it’s good to care about something beyond your self. McCain’s speech treats the United States as a giant superorganism: a “self”. His slogan is “Country First”. By substitution, that means “Self First”… not your self, though… the country’sself. Not humanity first. Country first. Self-sacrifice for the glory of the state. Sounds like Stalin-era Collectivist propaganda to me.

Where’s my vodka ration?