If you find yourself having to travel a long distance, I highly recommend going by bike. At least, as opposed to swimming. Swimming takes a long, long time, particularly if you have to breast-stroke the entire thing due to a complete inability to front crawl more than 10 yards before getting out of breath.
Saturday was an early morning. I had set my alarm for 4:30, but actually managed to awake about 10 minutes before that, which gave me time for a leisurely breakfast. Note: I don’t know what birds do at 5am, but they certainly are noisy doing it. It sounded like some kind of ornithological prison riot outside, and we had all our windows open to save on AC costs. I left at 5 and headed over to Brian’s house to retrieve him;
If you find yourself having to travel a long distance, I highly recommend going by bike. At least, as opposed to swimming. Swimming takes a long, long time, particularly if you have to breast-stroke the entire thing due to a complete inability to front crawl more than 10 yards before getting out of breath.
Saturday was an early morning. I had set my alarm for 4:30, but actually managed to awake about 10 minutes before that, which gave me time for a leisurely breakfast. Note: I don’t know what birds do at 5am, but they certainly are noisy doing it. It sounded like some kind of ornithological prison riot outside, and we had all our windows open to save on AC costs. I left at 5 and headed over to Brian’s house to retrieve him;
If you find yourself having to travel a long distance, I highly recommend going by bike. At least, as opposed to swimming. Swimming takes a long, long time, particularly if you have to breast-stroke the entire thing due to a complete inability to front crawl more than 10 yards before getting out of breath.
Saturday was an early morning. I had set my alarm for 4:30, but actually managed to awake about 10 minutes before that, which gave me time for a leisurely breakfast. Note: I don’t know what birds do at 5am, but they certainly are noisy doing it. It sounded like some kind of ornithological prison riot outside, and we had all our windows open to save on AC costs. I left at 5 and headed over to Brian’s house to retrieve him;
If you find yourself having to travel a long distance, I highly recommend going by bike. At least, as opposed to swimming. Swimming takes a long, long time, particularly if you have to breast-stroke the entire thing due to a complete inability to front crawl more than 10 yards before getting out of breath.
Saturday was an early morning. I had set my alarm for 4:30, but actually managed to awake about 10 minutes before that, which gave me time for a leisurely breakfast. Note: I don’t know what birds do at 5am, but they certainly are noisy doing it. It sounded like some kind of ornithological prison riot outside, and we had all our windows open to save on AC costs. I left at 5 and headed over to Brian’s house to retrieve him;
I hate daytime running lights, although for a somewhat contradictory reason. I certainly think it’s a grand idea for people to have lights on, particularly in fog and rain when they might not otherwise think of it, but the problem is that daytime lights aren’t bright, and usually they don’t turn any lights on in the back of the car. So a person gets into the car, fires it up, notes that their daytime lights are piercing through the fog sufficiently, and then drives off, not thinking a whit about the fact that they are virtually invisible to traffic behind them.
This is insanely dangerous; I was once travelling up I-95 on a Sunday morning in heavy, heavy fog. There was little traffic, but even my speed-demon self was driving a careful 50mph (as opposed to my normal 65+), but that didn’t keep me from nearly destroying a family in a Honda who were driving no more than 30, with no lights on whatsoever. They were completely invisible until I nearly rear-ended them.
I should start with the following caveat: everyone should be allowed to do their own mourning, in their own way. So if getting through September 11th requires you to listen to horrible Lee Greenwood songs* and wear an American flag shirt and assign blame, I shan’t stand in your way. Personally, I spent the day participating in two healing religious services, even though my skepticism about the existence of God remains strong. But you gotta do you, boo.
I’ve heard a lot of argument about whether the 9-11 perpetrators “won.” I guess it depends on your perspective; if you look at it from the specific standpoint of the guys who flew the planes, well, they’re dead. Not much winning to be found there. If you look at it from the standpoint of Al Qaeda, they are reportedly weaker than they’ve ever been, and it seems like a Predator drone is killing the #1 or #2 guy in that organization about every other week. But if you look at it from the perspective of America, well, let’s just say there don’t seem to be any winners. Let’s break it down:
- Safety. This has two actual components: actual safety, and the feeling of safety. By way of example, if lots of people in your town got concealed carry permits and started hauling around roscoes, studies indicate that your community will safer (or at least have less crime, which is admittedly not EXACTLY the same thing). But do you FEEL safer, knowing that everybody’s armed? Probably not.
So first, do you feel safer? I don’t, particularly, although I also know the answer to the other question. If you think that the extra measures at the airport, the Department of Homeland Security, and various wars and police actions make us safer, well then I guess we must be safer, right?
Here’s the problem, though: given the number of folks who sneak across the border every day, how hard do you think it is for a determined person to get into the United States, particularly if he only intends to stay long enough to make himself a bomb vest and blow up a shopping mall. I’m still amazed it doesn’t happen every other week (like it does in the various countries we’re attempting to democratize). I don’t think we’re one whit safer than we were 10 years ago. Possibly less so, since as a country we’ve made a cottage industry out of blowing up other people’s actual cottages, which seems to piss them off a great deal.
- The economy. We all know it’s for crap right now, and as long as the Republican Party has a say in governing the country, it’s likely to remain so. And admittedly, the failures that kicked off the current recession were not 9-11-dependent. I wonder if the bottom might have been a little shallower if we hadn’t had to drop trillions on defense, though.
- Prosecution of perpetrators. This has been completely screwed up from the beginning, and isn’t getting better, because we treat 9-11 as a declaration of war. I’ve got news for you: a couple thousand guys living in caves in Pakistan can’t declare war. They are not a nation-state. What they can do is commit crimes, for which they should be prosecuted and punished. If you can’t get to them because they’re being shielded by the country they’re living in, that’s another matter; I didn’t have much of a problem with going into Afghanistan for this reason, and it sucks pretty bad that we can’t go into nuclear-capable Pakistan to do the same thing.
This has all been said before, I’m obviously not breaking a lot of new ground here. But I still feel like elevating terrorists to the level of an actual country by declaring a “War on Terror” emboldened them a hell of a lot more than any war protest. Terrorists are criminals, no matter their aims. Treat them that way.
*I posted on Facebook about how much I hate “God Bless The U.S.A.” I stand by it. It is completely insipid, and painfully manipulative.
If tomorrow all the things were gone, I’d worked for all my life.
And I had to start again, with just my children and my wife,
I’d thank my lucky stars, to be livin’ here today.
‘Cause the flag still stands for freedom, and they can’t take that away.
You probably wouldn’t have healthcare, of course, so good luck with that.
I listen to a fair amount of podcastery while working, often relistening to ones that I like. One such podcast is Ricky Gervais’s appearance on Desert Island Discs, a UK program in which famous folks are brought on to talk a bit about their lives, and given the premise that they’ve been stuck on a desert island with no hope of escape, the 8 pieces of music (along with a player of some kind, obviously) they’d like to be stuck with, along with one luxury item (frequently a piano).
I’m not even remotely famous, so it’s unlikely I’ll ever be invited on, so at the risk of copyright infringement, I’ll simply list mine here, although I’ll spare you the biography because nobody wants to read about how I was brought up by wolves in the Ardennes or graduated from the University of Helsinki in 1788 or once got in a fight (consisting of little but attempting to knee each other in the balls) with a fellow 5th grader who is currently part of Ben Folds’s touring band.
(Some of those facts are true.)
I’ll do my list in rough chronological order. Since the idea seems to be to pick individual songs or singles, I’m only allowing myself individual movements of larger works.
- Messiah – Handel – final movement, consisting of “Worthy Is The Lamb” and the closing Amen. If I were allowing myself to pick an entire work, I’d take Bach’s B-minor Mass, but it’s hard to pick just one movement of that to listen to. Messiah is also a great work start to finish, but I could easily listen to just the last movement every Christmas Eve while drinking fermented coconut milk and, probably, weeping uncontrollably.
- The King Of Love My Shepherd Is – Sir Edward Bairstow. This is very nearly the pinnacle of English choir music. Occasionally I get out the score and play it at the piano while my children are screaming. It doesn’t make them stop, of course.
- If These Walls Could Speak – Jimmy Webb. I think that Amy Grant and a few others have covered it, but they suck. The recording I have from Webb’s “Ten Easy Pieces” album from the mid-nineties is heart-breakingly beautiful, and deceptively difficult to play.
- Little Secrets – Passion Pit. I’m not particularly into electro-pop, but I heard their song “Sleepyhead” on a podcast and said hey, I like that. I was a little concerned that the lead singer’s high pitched wailing would grate on me, but I splurged on the album, and Sleepyhead’s not even the 6th best track. “Little Secrets” is the song I put on when I’m going for a fast run, or lifting a heavy weight, or working at my desk, or cooking bacon, or snoozing in front of the TV. It’s the Swiss Army Knife of pop songs. And Michael Angelakos’s voice is the pimp’s limp.
Fair warning: it’s about to get Political all up in this.
I realized over the weekend the problem with the Republican Party: it calls itself conservative, and yet it’s no more conservative than the average pinko commie socialist, at least if you judge by the current crop of Presidential candidates. They couldn’t care less about small government or minimal regulations, except insofar as it helps big business. (I’d like to be able to exclude Ron Paul from that statement, but can’t, for reasons that will be made clear shortly.)
Sure they want to cut taxes (for the wealthiest Americans) and shrink entitlements (for the poorest Americans), and they say they don’t trust government. But that’s not true; it’s just that they disagree with progressives over what they trust government to do. They don’t trust government to provide a safety net, education, or important research funding, but they sure as hell trust government to do the following things:
- Decide which drugs are legal or illegal without any scientific basis whatsoever
- Monitor the uterus of each American woman to ensure that any fetuses that are conceived are carried to term
- Prevent as many people as possible from getting access to the things that make sex safe and non-procreative
- Spy on everyone of Middle Eastern descent to make sure they aren’t up to something
- Decide who is allowed to marry whom
- Engage in “nation-building,” aka invade other countries with little or no provocation
(And isn’t interesting how quiet the Ron Paul campaign has been on the first two issues?)
The question for both parties isn’t the size of government; they both want it pretty big. Progressives would like to see large entitlement programs; the Republican Party (which I refuse to call “conservative”) wants to see a massive Defense system and plenty of moral control. Liberals, of course, are more than willing to actually fund their government, via a fair progressive tax system. The GOP, despite all its screaming about deficits and bankrupting the country, wants to cut taxes without making any serious effort to shrink the largest spending programs.
