NaBloPoMo

There’s no point in lying: I like technology. I like it a lot. I’ve had access to e-mail for [long enough to be embarrassing] years and remember when “the internet” was something that only connected geeks at universities to each other.

I like my DVD player and my iPod (OK, I love my iPod with a passion that borders on fetish; why is an entry for later). I wish the industry would settle on a recordable DVD format so I could go out and buy the right box and finally step up to TiVO and not having to deal with which tape contains which episodes of Lost. And if I could get away with it financially I’d buy a new computer every two years the same way some people buy new cars.

I was the kid they built interactive museum displays for in the 1970s, with the buttons and the lights and the things to push to make the kiosk tell you if you knew your history or not. And yes, I can proudly say that I once had time on the mainframe at U.C. Berkeley (reference above: e-mail for long enough to be embarrassing).

All of this is part of the reason why I am so damn ambivalent about the self-check out stations that are appearing at big box (Target, Home Depot) and grocery stores in my area.

They’re gadgets all right, with the scanner and the scale and the touch pad to enter your “bonus card” number if you’re like me and you leave the bonus card in the checkbook or some other obscure place. The self-checkout station at the grocery store have an incredibly small footprint, maybe four feet on a side, nice LCD screens, scales and scanners at various heights recognizing that people come in all different sizes.

What they don’t recognize is that people don’t want to bend all the way over and pick all of their groceries up off the ground in order to run them by the scanner, and that when one bag is full the idea of putting it on the floor is, well, sorta repulsive when you consider what they actually use to mop the floor in most commercial establishments.

Essentially, there’s no place to put the hand basket that you are most likely using if you’ve resorted to the self checkout station and if you have items that require more than one bag, well, tough. Unless, of course, you’ve used the self checkout that has the belt like the regular checkout.

Theoretically there will be a bagger at the end of the belt packaging up your items for you to take away (after all, baggers are cheaper than cashiers and keep the payroll down). In practice you need to think ahead to make sure your 2 liter of carbonated beverage doesn’t crush your bunch of bananas as there will be no bagger at the end and you’ll have to do it yourself after you’ve finished scanning and paying. And, quite possibly, you’ll have to dodge the items belonging to the person behind you to do it because once you’ve started scanning the damn machine demands that you put the items on the belt and starts it running no matter what since there’s no sensor at the end to tell it that, no, really, there are items already down there waiting to be bagged and maybe, just maybe, it ought to run the belt, say, half-way down and then stop so the person who just paid has time to bag her items before other stuff gets there.

This is the reason I think engineers and MBAs should be required to use every single item they would like to put into play in a public arena. Perhaps then they would see the little things that annoy those of us who have to use these fixtures on a regular basis (tell me why, someone, if 90% or so of the world is right handed it would ever be a good idea to put the little machine through which you swipe your credit card on the right side of the platform on which you are supposed to balance your check book to write your check if you’re paying by bank draft? (if I’m right handed, my right hand needs to go somewhere as I write, right?)) Believe it or not, there are entire associations (here, here, and here) devoted to the design and development of these horrible machines. So why don’t they work better

I include the MBAs in this because, frankly, I find self checkout machines insulting. Am I getting a discount on my purchases for doing a job that the store is too cheap to pay a cashier to do? No, I am not, yet they cleverly trade on the time myth (i.e.: that you will “save time” by doing this) but the reality is that the machines are so regimented and persnickety that when interacting with a human being who hasn’t been trained to use the machine, one who is already frustrated by lack of customer service and random non-availability of items at the type of store likely to have one of these machines, that more often than not they require some sort of human intervention by someone who has a special card to scan and reset the machine when it gets flustered. So, basically, when the machine goes into panic mode you stand around waiting for someone to show up and help you anyway saving absolutely no time whatsoever.

Don’t you just love the way corporate America is pushing more and more of its business responsibilities off onto the consumer yet continuing to raise prices? Like I said, the revolution happened, it just happened in :60 bites and we did not win.

The office building at my new job is something of an a monstrosity: three floors above ground and three “below” because it is built into a hill where the windows for the below ground offices look out the back of the building onto Rock Creek Park.

Today one of my coworkers called me into his office and pointed out the window. Following his indictor I saw there perched in a tree an immature Broad Winged Hawk.

She was absolutely stunning. (I say immature because of the coloring and she because of the size; among birds of prey the female tends to be larger). Just sitting there, cleaning her feathers with the full realization that she is, in fact, the master of her universe and if you’re a mouse, vole, or rat you’d better watch out.

Sometimes nature gives you a little gift. This is one of those times.

Oh, and I did I mention they’re predicting 70degF for a high today? Nice.

Two things from yesterday evening, one as I prowled the halls of the local elementary school to find the auditorium in which I was to exercise my franchise (in other words: yes, I went and voted; there, happy now?)…

1) Why don’t we call it landfood? Seriously, people…if everything that we get from the sea that we eat is called “seafood” why don’t we call all the stuff we grow and raise on the ground “landfood?”

I confess I think that this thought is a side effect of knowing several people who live on islands (because as you know, on an island [everybody chorus!] if you didn’t bring it, it ain’t there).

2) What’s my obligation to protect from identity theft someone who hasn’t lived at my address for more than 10 years? The woman of the couple TGF and I bought our house from received one of those “You are pre-approved! Here, please, steal my identity thank you so much!” credit card applications in today’s mail.

Under the law, since it is a certain type of mail (not quite bulk but also not first class either) I’m not obligated to forward it (nor would the post office be able to do so). But am I obligated to open it up and shred the contents? No, I have not yet achieved the holy grail of office supplies which means I’d have to open the envelope to get rid of the sucker.

Sure, shredding the application and the rest of the effluvia would be a kind thing to do, a responsible thing, but just because it is those things am I required to do it?

Oh, and as a random side note: I turned over 1,000 miles on the odometer on my “new” car yesterday. I use the word new cautiously as while, yes, it is a single owner (me) vehicle I’ve had it since the end of January. Is it any wonder my last car was 16 years old and had less than 60,000 miles on it when I traded it it?

Not profound thoughts but still, they got me a blog entry, didn’t they?

It has long been understood that history is written by the winners. Those who emerge from a conflict victorious spend reams of paper and gallons of ink describing the bravery of their forces, the Herculean efforts necessary to overcome a vile, corrupt enemy who deserved to be soundly thrashed on the battlefield.

History is not always accurate.

I’ve spent a good portion of my life fascinated by the culture of America in the 1960s. For the record, while most historians probably would not agree with me, I am of the firm belief that the American period commonly thought of as “the Sixties” began November 22, 1963 and ended April 29, 1975 (these dates were very specifically chosen; ask if you don’t know why). A properly trained historian will tell you that “the Sixties” has its seeds in whatever movement and political party power combined to get John F. Kennedy elected President. This, too, is a simplistic view.

In some ways part of the allure of that particular period in history, not just in America but in places like Paris, London, and Prague, is that it was a time of great upheaval, of social and political change unlike anything we’d ever seen before. True, much of that change began with the Montgomery bus boycott in 1955 but much of it was an affront to the basic tenants held by many of the church-going folk who supported Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s efforts to secure equal rights for Black Americans.

Free love, drug culture, the sexual revolution (began in 1960 with the approval of the pill and still hasn’t ended as far as I can tell) had several loci a major one being the neighborhood known as The Haight in San Francisco.

Cheap rooms in huge 19th century Victorian houses, available because of a downturn after World War II, made The Haight a haven for poets, musicians, druggies, and those more interested in grooving on the universe than working for their living. Culturally The Haight meant art, self-expression, and freedom from the strictures of mainstream society, a place where you were as likely to find a bong for sale as you were whole grains, soy, and sprouts. It meant alternatives to the nuclear family and being a wage slave. It meant a life that was tangential to the expectations of mainstream culture, that took what it needed from the culture and molded it into something usable while discarding the rest.

The hippies, free love, commune culture all bumped up against changing social ideals: that free speech was a right belonging to all Americans, including those under 18, that all the people affected by the decisions of government had a right to help decide who would be making those decisions through the electoral process (though we still haven’t cured the “you can be drafted but you can’t buy a beer” (no, being able to drink on Post isn’t enough) problem, though).

Perhaps I’m being too naive, too blinded by myth – most war protestors didn’t actually burn their draft cards and a lot of the anti-war sentiment had more to do with not wanting to die in a muddy jungle 14,000 miles from home than it did with the fact that we didn’t belong in Vietnam (or that starting a land war in Asia is about as dumb an idea as invading Russia from the west in October) – to see that the history that has been written about that time ignores what came after it.

The revolution, when it came, was indeed televised. We just didn’t notice because they did it in the spaces between plays during Monday Night Football.

Reference:

1. Gil Scott Heron: “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised,” The Revolution Will Not Be Televised, Bluebird RCA, 1974.
2. Haight Ashbury, Wikipedia

To say that Todd Gitlin is a controversial, polarizing figure is, well, clearly within the realm of understatement. His opinions on media and society stretch from his tenure as President of the Students for a Democratic Society through his most recent book on activism. And while I don’t always agree with him, his piece in the most recent issue of Dissent magazine is a way of looking a politics that I’d yet to consider.

Of American politics Gitlin writes:

A crucial asymmetry has opened up in the relationship between parties, focused on interests and power, and movements, focused on ideals. In the early 1960s, the conservative movement set out to take over the Republican Party, warts and all, to convert it into a conservative party. Over the next decades—with the decisive enthusiasm of the Christian right—the movement succeeded.

In considering “the Left” he writes:

Liberal idealists and movement activists do not control the Democratic Party. Many disdain it as fatally corrupted by corporate financing. The movements have gone their own ways for decades, fighting their own issue campaigns. “The left establishment,” as the peerless political reporter Thomas B. Edsall puts it in his new book, Building Red America, “has placed a far higher priority on specific, narrow legislative and policy goals, on grassroots demonstration projects, on ad hoc victories, and on culturally inflammatory initiatives that expend moral capital, than on building political power through Democratic Party victories.” This is not the mentality of an army, but of an assortment of militant interest groups.

The question arises for me: at what point do you give up ideals to achieve the goal?

Virginians go to the polls tomorrow to vote on a measure that will amend the Commonwealth’s constitution to ban same sex couples from procuring any of the privileges according married heterosexuals. It would define marriage as being between one man and one woman and would go even further preventing Virginia from legally recognizing any relationship that seeks to “approximate the…effects of marriage.”

Supporters of said amendment say they are concerned about “activist judges” but when put with questions about how this amendment would affect the rights of unmarried heterosexual couples these same supporters are confident that those same judges will be able to correctly interpret the laws.

Intractable stupidity demonstrated for your pleasure.

Yet, groups like HRC and NGLTF insist on continuing to force the word marriage when polls have consistently shown that upwards of 50% of those surveyed were in favor of civil unions (which, by the way, would confer under the law to homosexuals all the privileges that marriage confers on heterosexuals).

So what’s more important: the ideal of acceptance (um…because being able the ride in the front of the bus completely wiped out racist attitudes about Black Americans) or the rights themselves?

Personally, I probably won’t vote tomorrow. DC is so heavily Democrat that most of our elections are decided in the Democratic primary. I’m also not entirely convinced that the system is worth saving.

Cross posted in abbreviated form at Amphetameme