tweak, tweak, tweak

Posted on May 9, 2002 by joe

I have been tweaking like a madman, getting all the thousands of style properties just so, adding and renaming selectors, removing them and adding them back again, adjusting declarations and values, screaming, throwing coffee mugs (well, only one), and alternately weeping and beaming.  I haven’t even begun to attack… oh, hell, I can’t remember anymore what I haven’t gotten to yet.  I am just simply exhausted.  So is my ftp server and my modem (oh!  I can’t wait til I get DSL again?soon, very soon). 

We are all going to take a break.  I am going to eat food I do not need to eat.  I am going to watch a happy movie, like Shrek or Toy Story, while I indulge in comfort foods.  Eventually I am going to go to bed and entertain erotic delusions and go happily to sleep.  Then I am going to get up early and drink strong coffee, and eat my last piece of gourmet fudge, and I will come back to this, my isolated little riskless world of recalcitrant clients and vanishing servers, of style sheets and templates and colors and text. 

…and words.  That’s the final product, after all, isn’t it?the words.  And I think they all look pretty good right now, even if I do say so myself.  ‘Night.

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deep link, or die

Posted on May 7, 2002 by joe

Terreus has a compelling posting regarding deeplinking, and the beancounters’ and lawyers’ progress toward preventing it. 

I say if a site does not want deeplinking, then they should write a script to prevent unauthorized access to their sites.  Otherwise everything on the web is (and should be) fair game.

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how to love

Posted on May 6, 2002 by joe
Update: success.

The [Durham Catholic District School Board] has said it supports Hall’s right to be a homosexual but that it does not support “a homosexual lifestyle.”

Of all the hypocrisies of the religio-sexual Catholic church, this one is made of the flimsiest tissue of illogic and rationalization.  I am not sure if I am more insulted by the seething hatred which this line of bigotry pretends to cloak, or by the bigots’ patently disengenous effort at concealing their contempt.  “We love you, we just hate what you do.”.  I guess they think that immunizes them against the hatred which they hold so dear.  Go on, keep hating me, I want you to.  Because I know your hate will kill you.  And if I loved justice like I say I do, I should feel bad about that. 

You would think that the Catholic church would have a little discretion in the tame matter of allowing a high school boy to take his boyfriend to the prom?I mean, it’s not like they’re going to be having sex in the rectory, they’re just going to be dancing at a prom.  I can’t resist:  It would appear that the Church will overlook a priest fucking him, but won’t allow his boyfriend to hold his hand.  There, I said it.

However, these sex-abusing priest scandals rocking the Catholic church right now are just a flash in the pan.  Anyone who has close friends who attended seminary has heard about how handy it can be for a young man to be sexually versatile.  It can help a great deal in gaining good grades and promotion.  I don’t know why we pretend to be surprized about that, it is a not uncommon theme in our culture; Madonna once said that losing her virginity was a career move.  Why should we think this would be any different among the men and boys of the altar? 

Probably because it is worse among them.  Men are pigs, according to a current maxim, and absent a woman’s longer view of sex?which tends to include consequences, emotional and otherwise?men-on-men sex can quickly become a runaway chain reaction.  And the conditions, which arguably have helped promote the recently revealed abuses, such as exist with an all-male clergy, all-male religious orders, and an all-male Magisterium, have all been in place for hundreds of years.  This crisis has been in the making for a long time.  Recent headlines and lawsuits represent a very superficial flash restricted so far to the extreme fringes of promiscuity and abuse among priests.

This does not mean the blaze will get worse and consume the Church; the Catholic church has a thousand years’ experience in controlling public opinion and squelching scandal.  What this does mean is that religious ministry will lose a sizeable chunk of its already narrow philosophical base under the guise of hunting monsters. 

Most of the priests I have known are gay, and many were sexually active (with peers, not children).  In my experience these men undeniably gave more compassion and humanity to their ministries than did any of their scared-straight counterparts.  They gave me faith.  Once upon a time, I believed that real genuine love (not sex) and complete acceptance were a part of religion.  I believe this no more.  But these men also gave me a faith?and this faith I keep?that genuine love and complete acceptance are a part of me.  Sadly I cannot thank you all by name here, and sad is it too that we cannot relive those days of high holy hell-raising together, in the 80s, when our church felt so joyful and wholly alive… 

Fanaticsm will rise and fall, bigots will ascend and be cast down, boys will go to proms with boys (or not), and what we call love will continue to be spoken in either froth-mouthed rages, or gentle sincere whispers.  But the choice will always be ours. 

We can learn a great deal from a fresh-faced seventeen year-old in love, but will we?  The choice will always be ours. 

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culture of the gun

Posted on May 5, 2002 by joe

A Massachusetts State Trooper shot and killed a man who was threatening suicide.  Of course, I wasn’t there, and it does seem too easy to take pot-shots at the cop after the fact, so until today I didn’t.  But today I read of a riot in which police officers suffered terribly?huge lacerations, concussions, and broken limbs?yet none of the rioters was killed. 

No jokes about showing up to a gunfight with a knife.  No jokes at all; this isn’t funny though it is grotesquely absurd.  Did Trooper Wildgrube sustain any injuries?  Did he tear or soil his uniform in this conflict that left a man dead?  I could see the use of a semi-automatic .357 with hollow-point bullets if they were in hand-to-hand combat, and the trooper was within range of the knife’s lethal potential.  I could even almost understand a cop in body armor firing a gun at a crazed man charging homicidally at him with a knife.  But Mr Twedt was, by all accounts, a remarkably harmless fellow who was distraught, depressed, most likely angry, and at the moment he was shot, he was coated like a ghost in white fire-extinguisher powder.  I wonder, did those two hollow-points raise a puff of dust when they hit the pathetically powdered suicidal man?

Forgive my brutality, but the use of lethal force opens you up to that.  And that is as it should be when police officers start using overwhelmingly lethal force as if it were a television remote control, when they do not like what they see and can’t deal with it in any way other than to just shut it off. 

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Nash recovered without meds

Posted on May 3, 2002 by joe
Most Americans are unaware that the World Health Organization (WHO) has repeatedly found that long-term schizophrenia outcomes are much worse in the USA and other ”developed” countries than in poor ones such as India and Nigeria, where relatively few patients are on anti-psychotic medications. In ”undeveloped” countries, nearly two-thirds of schizophrenia patients are doing fairly well five years after initial diagnosis; about 40% have basically recovered. But in the USA and other developed countries, most patients become chronically ill. The outcome differences are so marked that WHO concluded that living in a developed country is a ”strong predictor” that a patient never will fully recover.

This is what we want; rape in the embrace of a self-seeking capitalism, in exchange for the promise that it will not kill us?not right away.  The myth of medication makes no one well, least of all those whom it makes rich.  Restoring humanity to the societies of the world will take a long time, but restoring humanity to ourselves can be accomplished immediately.  You just have to really want it, so much that you are willing to turn your back on the homicidal rapist who wants to keep you right where you are.

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Mayday, mayday…

Posted on May 1, 2002 by joe

Anarchy means “without government” and anarchists believe that people live more fulfilling lives without the coercive pressure of authority. Of course most people don’t trust authority. How many of us have a good word to say for politicians or bosses, or even think they do anything useful?  Most people would more willingly rely on friends, neighbours, relatives and work-mates than on the managers and politicians our rulers tell us are essential to run our lives. In anarchist societies people make decisions for themselves and co-operate to meet each others’ needs without the obligation of toiling to benefit owning and controlling elites. The common misunderstanding that anarchy is no more than hopeless chaos ignores the fact that most people throughout most of history have lived outside of a dominant authority and have fought against attempts to subjugate them. When society breaks down it’s because co-operation itself has broken down under pressure from the poisonous doctrine that you have to trample other people in order to survive. Anarchy means freedom and co-operation.

I think I am an anarchist.  Oh, my. 

I guess I have always accepted the recieved notion that anarchy and peace were mutually exclusive.  I am now beginning to develop the opinion that peace without anarchy merely represents order within the prison yard.  True peace is, I think, serenity within the natural freedom which exists prior to ‘administered freedom,’ which is what we define as freedom today.

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Israeli arrogance

Posted on April 29, 2002 by joe
Israel says it will only cooperate with a UN investigation if the following demands are met:

? Military and terrorism experts should be made full members of the investigating team

? The Israeli government should decide who the investigators can talk to and which documents it can review

? The investigation should not reach any conclusions

? The evidence it gathers cannot be used in any war crimes prosecution

Israel’s demonstrated arrogance and disrespect for international law is tantamount to an admission of guilt.  What is it that the US does not want to see here, since we seem to be ignoring the blatantly obvious?  Are we in denial that the US favorite in the Middle East has become a monster?  If they were strangling the flow of oil to the West, instead of strangling the life out of an insignificant nation, there would already be US troops in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. 

The truth is that we do not care if Israel commits war crimes against Palestinians. 

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Apartheid in the Holy Land

Posted on April 29, 2002 by joe
Israel will never get true security and safety through oppressing another people. A true peace can ultimately be built only on justice.

Archbishop Desmond Tutu

A synopsis of Dr. Tutu’s remarks from his keynote address Occupation is Oppression, given in Boston at the Ending the Occupation conference on April 13, 2002, can be found at the Guardian.  Also check out this article in The Christian Science Monitor.

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suffer the little children

Posted on April 23, 2002 by joe

Tell me please, once again, what exactly it is that makes these children evil.  Objectively speaking, I think it is grossly unreasonable of us to expect that these children will do nothing during their short lives in response to these injustices. 

If we want to continue to do nothing about the crimes committed against them, we should by the same token do nothing about the crimes that they commit.  This is absurd, to be sure, but it is certainly less absurd than what we do currently: cultivate for only one group of people the humane compassion that is rightly deserved by all people.

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server logic

Posted on April 23, 2002 by joe
generating page(s)…

Look familiar? 

I hate to complain (no, that’s a big lie, I love to complain, so here goes…).  I’ve been watching the above little graphic for an hour.  And during that time I waxed reflective about the magic of push-button publishing.  You see, Blogger has several (at least) major pieces behind the magic.  For example, there is one piece which keeps a database with all my precious irreplaceable pearls of wisdom.  This is where they go when I push the ‘Post’ button.  There is another piece that takes those posts from the database and transfers them to my web-server, which was originally the most fascinating aspect of Blogger for me.  It was cool to do something on a blogger web page, and have the results emerge on my website. 

That’s the gimick that got me hooked, and before long, I was assimilated into the blogger community.  However, as I am wont to do from time to time, my affections eventually wandered; I began seeing Greymatter in furtive little trysts, and adolescent explorations.  We met in the safe and hidden confines fo my webserver, ftp-ing the nights away.  I revealed nothing to my faithful friend, blogger.  But it didn’t work out.  Greymatter is one hot piece, (of software), but things got complicated, and I guess I wasn’t in it for the long haul.  The mysterious ones are the most attractive, but they require the greatest committment.  I just wasn’t at that place with gm.  Except for just one more fling I had with gm, it has been blogger and me for the past two years.

It wasn’t really one thing only that led to this.  It never is.  There’s a malaise, a general lack of novelty, a challenge, passion, and payoff that is just not there anymore like there was when me and blogger began.  It’s not actually over yet.  Though I no longer love blogger we are, you might say, still co-habitating.  But I am seeing another program.

MovableType, apart from having a cool name, isn’t ‘out there’ as much as blogger; he stays home, on my server.  He’s more accessible than Greymatter.  He does it for me.  With blogger, depending on what interface I am using?editBlog page, the blogThis popup, or the API products, to name a few?there is at least two servers involved in that process apart from mine, more likely there is a chain of blogger servers, any of which can (and do) go down from time to time.  And when a server goes down on me, it is nothing like when that happens in a human relationship.  It does NOT make me happy.  It really comes down to simple logic (don’t we always say that when we are about to break someone’s heart?).  The fewer opportunities for failure between me and a published page, then the more likely I can publish when I want to. 

If, or when, I finally do leave blogger, those will be my reasons.  I will miss the tempermental servers; I have grown kinda fond of their antics.  And I will miss the connection to the blogger community, though that will turn out to be, I think, less of a loss than I now anticipate.  I won’t be gone and neither will they, but still, moving-on is hard.  And if there is any consistency to my fate, once it is over for good I will realize like a hundred times before that I was nuts to leave, and that it was the best thing I ever had.

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little tiny screams and moans

Posted on April 22, 2002 by joe

It is truly cuckie here.  Cold like winter, and wet, well, …like winter.  Isn’t this after easter already?  I mean, didn’t I see pastel bonnets weeks ago?  I know I saw bonnets…  It. Is. Not. Supposed. To. Be. Cuckie. At. The. End. Of. April.  (!)  Jeesh.

And this bronchitis…  I try to take a nap, and with every exhalation, I hear at the very end, tiny old men, in my chest?hundreds of them?making little tiny screams and moans.  They sound so sad.

I can’t even focus on a blog entry.  I sat down hours ago to record the tremendously insignificant events of my day.  A simple task.  Instead, I ended-up with that flag rant!  It was like, my scanner just d-r-e-w my face to its glassine surface?and to the impossibly bright light thereunder?as inevitably as gravity draws a meteor to its brilliant demise.

So, I went to my bankruptcy hearing today.  It is called a ‘meeting of creditors.’.  It seems to me that there are never any creditors at these things.  There were at least five bankruptcies being processed in the hour that I was there, and not one creditor.  Not that I am complaining.  But I wish I knew that earlier.  I was a wreck worrying.

It’s a slick process.  One guy from the US Bankruptcy Court, the Trustee, is there sitting in the front of a big room at a huge table.  He has a tape recorder, and a cell phone.  He asks if you have read this or that form, and asks if you understand it.  He does this for about a dozen forms.  One scary thing: He asks if you have read the notice on the door of the hearing room, and do you understand it.  That notice, in giant red letters, says something about firearms and weapons not being allowed in the hearing room.  I don’t know what I would have done with my sawed-off had I inadvertantly brought it.  There’s no court officers, and just this little guy at a big table with a cell phone.  I wonder if getting you on tape saying that you have read and understood the firearms prohibition somehow makes you more culpable than if you just walked in and blew someones head off without making any such statement. 

He then rattles through a pro-forma interrogation of the petitioner, and schedules the case for discharge of debts two months later.  There’s no robes, and not even many suits.  It was scheduled at 10:30 AM.  I woke up sick as hell, crawled there, sat waiting for my lawyer, and trying to keep quiet the old-man chorus in my chest.  My lawyer was representing three of the five petitioners at the 10:30 session.  Bankruptcy law is apparently a brisk business. 

I walked home, changed clothes, and shivering, I put on my little cap and sat down to write a simple blog entry.

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Flag

Posted on April 22, 2002 by joe

This is my answer to all the blind American nationalism.  I have nothing against generic nationalism, the gentle kind, sans bloodlust.  But blind nationalism ala USA says I’m better than you because I’m an American.  I find that nauseatingly juvenile.  Maybe I’m just being contrary, I mean, some of those cheap, shredded, filthy plastic flags that hang pathetically off nearly every car antenna were put there by moderately well-intentioned people.  Placed with the same ubiquity and ‘mindfulness’ as the antenna standard are the flag bumper stickers and flag window decals, which number at least twice the population of this country.  Where is the nationalism in flying a disgracefully neglected, dirty, torn US flag?as do most of the businesses where I live?  It seems everybody wants to appear patriotic; perhaps this obsession with patriotic appearances is ebbing.  One can only hope.

Maybe it is just a matter of taste, but I am gagging on the overstatement.  This flag saturation is pernicious; it seems to implement the particurlarly emetic slogan of George Bush, “You’re either with us or you’re against us,” implying that my choices are to be either an American, or a terrorist.  It implies that I, flagless, possess suspicious intent, questionable patriotism, and perhaps I even have treasonable designs.  As a mere mark to signify one’s concurrence with the prevailing tribal mood, I suppose it works.  But this mindless flag-plastering fails miserably to promote anything, least of all the flag.  The US flag symbolizes a living nation that has historically defended the individual’s freedom to act contrary to the majority’s sentiment; it represents a brave nation that more often than not, and at grave cost, has sought justice; and despite everything, the United States flag flies over a young nation that once made a revolutionary assertion to the world: human rights preempt state’s rights.  The flag represents things about my country which I describe now more with hope they might resume, rather than assurance that they persist.

These US flags, in their proliferation, seem to represent something warlike, inhumane and divisive.  I won’t sport one.  I’m not with you, Mr. Bush.  But I am not against America. 

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Dear Diary,

Posted on April 21, 2002 by joe

Hi. 

Hello.  So, you’re going back to work today?

Yup.  It’s hard to go back, after so many days off, but it’s only for today.  Then I work Tuesday and I’m off again Wednesday.

They’ll want you to work OT on those days off.  Everybody is sick, the place is falling apart…

No.  I’ll Just say no.  I may be going back, but I am still sick.  Hell, I was wheezing and gurgling and coughing constantly; I couldn’t even breath enough to keep my lips from turning blue two days ago.

You thought you were going to die, didn’t you. 

Yah.

You’re still scared of it, dying I mean.

Hell, I could die any minute.  I just don’t want to die not being able to breathe.

You just don’t want to die.  And it’s not because you want to live, it’s because you’re scared to die.

Well, …yah.

Work on that.  It’s no way to live life.

Yah, I know.  Hey thanks, I gotta go.  See ya,

joe.

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webserver stats

Posted on April 20, 2002 by joe
  
reqs: search term
----: -----------
  10: story
.  7: true
.  2: with
.  2: sister
.  2: is
.  2: aids
.  2: chainlink
.  2: burgwinkel
.  2: fence
.  2: bike
.  1: children
.  1: dildo
.  1: why
.  1: seat
.  1: of
.  1: brother
.  1: aunt
.  1: joe
.  1: living
.  1: that
.  1: dealing
.  1: in
.  1: firefighter
.  1: sex
.  1: semen
.  1: all
.  1: chocolate
.  1: masturbate
.  1: caffeine
.  1: sugar
This week’s search terms, courtesy of analog.  (Strung all together, it’s quite a story!)  
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the insignificance of killing boys

Posted on April 20, 2002 by joe

This line was tagged onto the very end of an article in The Guardian. 

Elsewhere in Gaza and the West Bank, the Israeli army shot dead seven Palestinians, including two boys, nine and 14, during a curfew, and two gunmen said by Israel to have been trying to infiltrate a Jewish settlement.

Say what you like; it was accidental, the boys shouldn’t have been where they could get killed, or children can be suicide bombers, too.  Select whichever line suits your audience.  The fact is that young men and boys are the targets in Israel’s crusade to dominate Palestine.  Especially boys.  Israel has been cultivating a taste for homicidal rage within the ranks of its military for decades, and it is using those killers now to quash any base for future dissent from or resistance to their almighty will.  Why is it virtually always Palestinian boys that are killed this way?  I don’t know why the girls are not savored targets, as are the boys, but I suspect in the Israeli military’s cold calculations, the girls don’t count as much. 

Apart from and exceeding the outrageousness of Israel’s boy-murder spree, is this world’s blas? lack of interest in the news of such atrocities.  Sure, Baby Bush is calling for an investigation into the alleged crimes at Jenin.  Big deal.  His call is disingenuous; Bush seeks only to rehabilitate the image of his most significant ally in the Middle East.  And I fully expect the investigation will distribute the blame (if any) not based on real proof or the real culpability of the parties, but instead will dole out the blame in exact inverse proportion to the amount of power each party holds.  The powerless Palestinians will be blamed the most for the Jenin massacre; the hot headed Israeli’s will get a little blame; and the Americans, of course, will get none.

And after all the posturing, theatrical incredulity, and histrionics, we tack on to the end of the story, almost as an insignificant aside, they murdered two more little boys.  And now for the weather…

It is all business as usual, imperial egos, money and power.  And though it feels like it will never change, it will.  Indeed it will.  Not in our current lifetimes, certainly, but when humankind grows-up a little more, and a little more, and a little more, things will be better.  I understand well the despair and rage of suffering beneath cavalier cruelty and breathtaking injustice.  And when facing one’s own destruction at the hands of another, ignored by a world that apparently could care less, I know how tempting and seductive it is to choose to go out in a blaze?or an explosion, taking some of that world along?rather than die quietly. 

I don’t know what part is played by such outrageous passions in the growing-up of the world; and it is not our place to know.  But it is our place to care, and care deeply, tearfully.  We should not ignore our anguish at these events?but I believe we will.  Until another life.

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