Both-Sideserism (Thumb On The Scales Edition)

     New York Times: "Joseph Biden may be too old to serve second term, should drop out of election now."

     Also New York Times: "Donald Trump may be too great a threat to the republic to serve second term, voters must decide."

     But, hey, apparently neither one of them has eaten barbecued dog like RFK Jr., who absolutely swears that he would never, ever eat human flesh and never has, and that's the honest truth as far as he remembers.

General Advice

      Sometimes -- not every time, but sometimes -- the reason your life is a shitstorm is because everywhere you go, you sling shit.

It's My Birthday Again

     I thought I had gotten that out of the way last year, but here it is again.

     Most people's birthdays are fine with me.  Mine is not.  A time for agonizing reappraisal, for looking back and seeing how little I have done, how terribly short I have fallen of my goals.  I do not enjoy it.

Cognitive Dissonance In America's Richest Bedroom Community

     I'm not kidding about either one; Mom X, by virtue of the power of annexation, lives in Carmel, IN, the wealthiest little city in the nation.  As it happens, her corner of it used to be a collection of shacky little houses, dog runs, and pickup trucks mostly up on blocks, with a name you'll still find on maps (Homeplace) but lacking incorporation; but by the Sixties, they'd thrown up some nice subdivisions outside the auto-body-shop and greasy-spoon core of the un-town, and that's where Mom and Dad X came home to roost[1] in the mid-1980s.

       Enter the Nineties, and the Highway 31 corridor that formed the western boundary of Homeplace sprouted office towers like feral hemp springs up in a northern-Indiana ditch.  By the Noughties, hospitals and medical centers followed and these days, from about 91st street to well past 131st, there's a great big wall of suit & stethoscope voodoo lining the highway like a City of Gold gone wrong.

     Now comes Your Heroine, struggling with the electric monstrosities of an induction cooktop and a Keurig[2], squinting northwest out the west-facing kitchen window at the arc-welder glare of--  The rising sun?  Well yes and no, too:  the good old sun still rises in the East, even in this howling, savage-haunted wasteland, and reflects most harshly from the glittering mirrorshaded office tower a block north and two streets over, and right into Mom X's kitchen window.

     But I swear to you, for just a moment the entire Earth spun and swung, unmoored beneath my unfamiliarly slipper-socked soles.
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1. Hey, didn't I just use that already?  Ah, well.  It was entirely true for Dad: a brisk walk back to the center of the community took you, until they pushed it over a few years ago, to the little brick house where he, a half-dozen brothers, on sister and a few cousins had grown up, while a walk about as far in the other direction reached the more-rural corner where once has stood the house in which he was born.  Mom X lived on the good side of the tracks in Carmel proper, a bit too far to walk, and only since Jr. High.  But the place is certainly well within their teenaged watershed, for all that it was a woodland back then.

2. I'm sure that's also the name of a city in Turonistan, where Turk Turon once served as Mayor, Chief of Police, Dogcatcher and restaurateur.  (Hint: avoid the "catch of the day.")

Boot Failure: Brain

(Q)uit, (R)etry, (G)et more coffee:__
  

I'm Deeply Unhappy

I don't know why.  --Well, I know part of why: I really dislike the hap-hap-happeee Holiday Season.  It's pretty much stress, fear and loathing from Thanksgiving onward, followed by two months of crummy weather, nerve-wracking driving and cabin fever.  And all the sinus/migraine trouble winter weather brings on.

     Every year, I stumble into winter promising that if I get through it, one of these damn days, I'm gonna make something of myself. Not doing too well with that.

A Posinegative?

     The good thing about two bloggers sharing office space is you bounce ideas off one another and get little bits of funny repartee to quote.

     The bad thing is that sometimes you're one another's Person From Porlock.  (I think we each only just barely got our stately pleasure domes decreed today!)

Confession

     Sure, the song says, "It's the most wonderful time of the year."  For me, the "holiday season," Christmas especially, is an absolutely terrible time of the year, in which my only goal is to get through it with the least possible amount of unpleasantness.  Frikkin' ghastly.

     I do try to buy kewl gifts for the younger family members.  Kids expect that and none of their parents are especially well-to-do.

     But I gotta tell ya, if I didn't have family and friends, I'd ignore the whole thing.  It's a nightmare, a constant invitation to maudlin maunderings from too-related persons best kept at arm's length or unwanted drama in uncomfortable circumstances.  My motto is "show up, shake hands, shove off," hopefully before getting sucked into any who's angry at who, carping that family member N is manipulative and who Y may or may not be sleeping with.  Gah.  You can't even keep track of them all without a program, of which there isn't one.

     Work isn't much better, with social-climbing parties and "secret Santa"ing and plenty of pressure to Officially And Publicly Help The Poor.  Damned if I will if I gotta pray on streetcorners to do it; oh, I'll help 'em, but not any way I'll talk about or even post here. That's between me and them, a matter of beneficence, not boasting.

     (Just to make the season better, my car messed up yesterday, darned near got me killed on my way to work by stalling in the middle of a street I was crossing and cost me just shy of $400 to get back running, that after turning down the replacement catalytic converter [$$$!] and "fuel injector service package" [$$$!] in favor of new spark plugs & related.  Had to explain to the poor chap that no matter if "it was throwing codes," his service plan would effectively total my car and I'd prefer to address the problems one step at a time.  -- Relatedly, the good mechanic at that place is MIA, replaced by a guy who struggles to print an invoice.  Not goin' back; if the car does need more work, I'll at least go to a place where they'll BS me with more finesse.)

    

Do Not RUN

10 TIE ME KANGAROO DOWN
20 MATE
30 GOTO 10
40 END

Just promise me the offspring won't be allowed to run wild. Kthxbye.

(Cybrus suggests an expansion, thusly:
10 ON (KANGAROO = DEAD) GOTO 50
20 TIE ME KANGAROO DOWN
30 MATE
40 GOTO 10
50 SKIN KANGAROO
60 TAN KANGAROO HIDE
70 INFORM CLYDE
80 HANG ON SHED: KANGAROO HIDE
90 INFORM NED
100 END
I have to point out that if you encounter an immortal kangaroo, you're still stuck in a loop. Also it requires a non-standard version of BASIC.)

It has been suggested that this is cleaner programming:

DO UNTIL KANGAROO = DEAD
TIE ME KANGAROO DOWN
MATE
LOOP
SKIN KANGAROO
(...identical to beta s/w from here to END...)

Hallo, Brain?

[SFX: Alarm clock beeping]
Brain? Brain? Are you there? Are you awake?
::incoherent mumbling::
Brain!
::Whazzit awreddy? Y'up?::
Damn thing. I think the carburettor's clogged. Paid good money for it, too.

Here's a poster to tide you over, readers. I've gotta go have a little talk with my brain; it seems to think it's got the day off.

I Blame CNN

I came to -- it felt more like that than waking up -- with Tam sitting on the foot of my bed and CNN blaring on my TV.

I blame my present soul-searing headache on that.

The TV had gone off at the usual time on the usual channel and The Lodger, in a kindly mood, had come in to turn it off, thought for some reason to see what the commigentsia were thinking (so to speak), changed the channel to Ted Turner's jellybaby and got drawn in by the awfulness of it all.

I returned to full consciousness in time to have my eyeballs tugged out by a push-zoom from a handheld camera moving from the "anchor" (a leaden thing that was preventing motion) to a diminutive meteorologist; this move was followed up by the same handheld staggering across the set to end in a shot of the weatherlady from a vantage at least a foot and a half higher than the top of her head -- a shot they held she proceeded to relate the weather with the usual Ritual Gesturing, accompanied by a disconcerting amount of cleavage. I'm not at all sure what the point was -- drawing in the male viewership, perhaps? -- but as the overture to a headache, it worked all too well.

I've gulped coffee and I'm gonna go cook something. Maybe that will help.

Annoyance

I really want to like Ka-Blam Digital Printing: kewl website, useful FAQs and about half the price of, say, Lulu.com. And they'll even take my hand-hewn .TIF image and turn it into a shiny paperback cover!one!

Update: Finally heard back and constructive criticism it is too. Yay! Like I said, I want to like them. My cover art's low-rez, which is what happens when you screencap a PDF to make it into a TIF via, ohgawd, MSPaint. Help? Need me a 300 or 1200 dpi TIF preversion.

...That is, they could if they would. But they won't lift a finger even to say, "Get lost!" This, I find frustrating. Their Message Center is the sole and only way to talk to 'em and even that would be okay -- except they don't reply. Nothin'. Not even dialtone.

Further Updates in blue:

So right now I'm stuck going to have some with a suboptimal stock-Lulu cover design and a price that I'm not happy with. But supposedly I have some real proofs in the Ka-Blam pipeline (with a somewhat blurred cover 'til I gin up better art) and should be seeing them before the heavyset B&E man makes his red-suited rounds. Didja hear the rumor he used to be a bishop?

Yeah, I'm not so sure about even that. I doubt any story they tell me about him after the first big one turned out to be untrue. And I would be happy to be proven wrong when I'm starting to doubt online printers that look too good to be true, too. I wonder if FedEx/Kinkos Office does the smaller sizes? (Yes. Costs run a bit above Lulu)

Seasoned Sounds

Ah, the modern, all-purpose, inoffensive carol:

Dashing through the Stuff
In some kind of open Thing
Oh, what joy we'll know
Oh, what songs we'll sing!

Generictime, Generictime, Generictime is here
Filled with joy
And goodwill
And general Holiday cheer!

To the stores we'll go
Making registers ring
How we'll spend and spend
We'll buy most anything!

[Chorus]

We won't offend a soul
(Should we have used that word?)
A cultural black hole
Come on and join the herd!

[Chorus]

It's A "Medium," All Right

Readers may remember the popular TV show, "Quantum Leap." Every episode, our intrepid meddler hero ended up a short-term tenant in someone else's body, needing to correct something in that person's life.

Okay, if you can overlook the meddlesome others-know-best idea, it's a cute notion. It got good ratings, too.

...Only it turns out, it wasn't all that original. On the other hand, it was cribbed from a trio of geniuses: the Marx Brothers were (almost) there first, with Deputy Seraph, "in which Chico and Harpo were angels whose job was to possess people for brief periods of time: bringing two lovers together, exposing a criminal, and so forth." Sound familiar? --Oh, and Grouco is their boss, the title character.

Alas, Deputy Seraph never got past a few minutes of film to frame the pilot. A routine medical check prior to insuring the actors found Chico had advanced hardening of the arteries; he got a downcheck on insurance and the show never got off the ground. Two years later, he was gone.

The idea, however, must have still been in the air a few decades later....

If there is anything new under the sun, Hollywood's already working on sequels followed by a remake. You have heard they're reshooting the Wizard of Oz from the original MGM script, haven't you?

(Just to take the edge off, at this link you'll find about 45 minutes of Chico and Groucho in their radio program Flywheel, Shyster and Flywheel, giving the legal profession the full benefit of their skills).

IMPD: It's Raining Wheels

...'Cos they keep falling off. Originally reported as "impersonating an officer," it seems a fellow gave a...dancer....a ride home the other night; he made advances, she demurred...and he flashed a badge and relived her of her ready cash!

And now, it's come out he might have been an actual city policeman. And it's IMPD saying so.

I'm tired of these stories; I'm tired of them turning out to be worse than they look at first glance. This is still only (only?!) 2 or 3 percent of a police force I'd like to think is as good as any in the nation.

But it's time they started doing a better job of policing their own. Looky here, IMPD, you are us. You are citizens, subject to the same laws and held to even higher standards. Please start acting like it.

Tam'll have links later, and I'll link to her posting.

Meanwhile, much like Sinead O'Conner vs. the Pope, IMPD keeps on fighting the "real" enemy. Oh, well-played, sah, well played indeed.

Fatheads.

Think we could swap PSH, er, PSD Frank Straub for Sheriff Ken Campbell for even a year? Or would Boone County sue us? Hey, Frank, you could maybe at least ask him for some advice on HowIt Is Done.

What A Mess

I only commented on it in passing when it happened: a nasty altercation between police and a (corn-fed) 15-year-old boy, Brandon Johnson, that resulted his arrest, looking like an ad for a good, old-fashioned beating and a whole bunch of local police with egg on their face. After a hearty round of investigations, demotions and/or exonerations, officer Jerry Piland emerged as the source of some of the worst late hits; IMPD Chief Cielselski sent him home and recommended termination and there was much recrimination all 'round. The gears of justice ground on and the Police Merit Board unwrapped a decision from around the axles yesterday: by a vote of 6-1, they cleared officer Piland and he'll be keeping his job.

Ask me about it and I'm forced to admit I don't know. I wasn't there. When you see someone really beat up after an encounter with The Law, it generally means the responding officers lost control; the difficulty comes when you have to distinguish between losing control of the subject, the situation -- or one's self.

I do know we're left with a mess and one Officer Piland and his friends didn't help by high-fiving and hugs after the hearing cleared him, and local media made worse during the Mayor, Public Safety Director and Policice Chief's "Please don't hate us, we wanted him fired" news conference by juxtaposing it with footage of the post-hearing celebration and still shots of young Mr. Johnson's bruised, bloody and swollen face.

Yeah. Great choice. --Look, riots may be juicy to cover but some of use actually live in town, okay? Scurrying down the freeway to the 'burbs after inciting hostility is not responsible. If you want to cover both sides, get out there and cover 'em.

I have yet to pick a side. PSH -- er, PSD Straub and Chief Cielselski are promising more and better training but this may have been a battle impossible to finesse. A strapping teen-ager, boiling angry as his brother is being arrested and what looks to have been not enough LEOs on the scene until things were well and truly muddled is a receipe for having to throw someone overboard at some point -- either the police stage a strategic withdrawal at the scene (requiring inhuman restraint and superhuman insight), cause is found to charge the young miscreant with something serously serious (it wasn't), or one or more of the officers involved gets pilloried. The Police Merit Board wasn't going along with that and they spent 24 hours just hearing everyone's story. They have a lot more information than I do and it's likely they are right on the facts -- and wrong on the bigger picture.

The only sure thing is, there' s no right answer left, only damage control. City government is in full CYA mode and the rest of us? Outraged statements from family and clergy notwithstanding, this would be a damn good time to practice smilin' at everyone and sayin' "Please" and "Thank you" a lot. Maybe we can't all get along -- but most of us can, most of the time.

...And it might be time for IMPD to get serious about house-cleaning. From the top to the bottom.

White-Knuckle

Everyone has something that creeps them out, I suppose, and mine is travel.

Trying to process why, I've found two things that contribute, though I suspect they are related:

First, I do not cope all that well with the unfamiliar; it takes me days to start to be comfortable in a new place. The family vacation of my youth, based on making at least 500 miles a day by car and rarely spending a week in one place, was a sublimely disorienting and unpleasant experience. Closer to home, even large stores space me out; through the years, I'll pick one location on the Target/Wall-Mart axis for all my big-box shopping, and even then, I'm pretty dazed by the time I get to the checkout. (Sports stadiums are a nightmare, especially with a crowd in them. I do reach my target heart rate pretty quickly....) Our recent BlogMeet at Claddagh? It wasn't 'til the walk back out that I really had a good look around at the place. "Vacations" I have been able to make a short trip and stay in one place for an extended period of time, it's not been so bad; but the bulk of those were tech schools, and by choice, my routine didn't include sightseeing.

Second, driving. The freeway has never been my favorite, but it's getting worse. Maybe it was the series of minor wrecks in '06, '07, and '08, which respectively messed up my right knee and wiped out two (nearly disposable, I admit) '02 Hyundai Accents, but I have become risk-averse behind the wheel to a terrible extent. I recently had occasion to put in about 30 miles on the freeway, in the dark, at speeds in the 55 to 65 mph range, and I had to keep reminding myself to loosen my grip on the wheel: I was holding on so tightly, I was getting hand cramps. Some of that's got to be from still driving a tiny Accent, this one in worse shape than its predecessors, as opposed to, say, the used '81 XJ-6 my ex and I owned; older Accents are entirely adequate city cars but on an interstate, they feel very fragile. I've not been able to afford contact lenses since I bought this house (in hindsight, a very bad idea, given the way the economy and housing prices crashed afterward) and with eyeglasses, my peripheral vision is essentially non-existent; without a lot of conscious effort, merging traffic can come as a surprise. (It's amusing to me when the better sighted remark on how much I look around, trying to keep track when traffic is merging in from all sides -- they do it, too, but their visual field is a lot wider).

Whatever the reasons, I hope to avoid any travel that's not absolutely necessary. Maybe it broadens horizons for most people, but it narrows mine.

Venerable Flackville?

I do not believe it. Popped up on Google Maps: Indianapolis has a neighborhood called "Venerable Flackville."

Srsly.

I have no idea how I could have lived here most of my adult life and missed it until now. You'd think there'd be a sign.

Placeholder

Um. Got nuthin', or not much. Tam and SB took off for brekky and the Indy 1500 Gun Show at, like, quarter til oh-dark-hundred. As I was at that time possessed of C) no cash and B) a hammerin', one-sided headache, complete with stabbing pains in my left ear* and A) an overabundance of "sleepy," I did no such thing.

Here I am, an hour left to get to the bank. Prolly shower and off to Cladddlhoeaught (cough, cough, cough) (It's a beautiful language and some of my ancestors spoke a closely-related one, but it does things to my throat) or whatever they call it, after.
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* Before offering sympathy and/or medical advice, stop. I get these things. They are, according to the very best medical help I could buy, multiple specialists, lotta tests and fancy imaging, not a symptom of anything. There is no drug that will end them. Ibuprofen will take the edge off, though sometimes it requires an hour or so; stronger drugs can do more but at the cost of seriously horrible side effects and/or addiction, so they're out. I complain about my headaches because there is no fixing them.

Dear AT&T.....

Let me put this as sweetly as I can.

If you quarter-witted marketing whizzes* don't stop trying to shove your damnable cable-TV-like service down my throat, I'm gonna cancel every last blasted service I get from you.

Seriously, I've seen your 'verse. I don't like it.

You're already the providers of my landline, cell phone and high-speed DSL, which by my count is at least one and possibly three services too many. Even if I liked the silly-ijit-box channels you want to sell me in a degree of rez and compression that hurts my eyes, I would be disinclined to hand any company a total monopoly over my media access, and especially not to AT&T, the "we spy on customers for the Feds" outfit.

There's no tellin' how many forests you have hewn down, how much oil, carbon black and aniline you've slathered onto thick, high-zoot chrome-coat paper in a futile attempt to sell me on a service I don't want, couldn't afford and would not, in any case, care to lease from you.

Y'all leave me alone and cease stoppin' up my mailbox with that crap. When I call in to pay my bill or ask howcome my cell phone service is so blamed spotty, I do not want a sales pitch for the dubious and tawdry wonders of your flavor of cable TV.

It's souring me on your company. And I was already lightin' up litmus strips that way.

Look, I need you for tip & ring POTS, 'cos I like old phones and you are the primo guys for that DC & dialtone jazz; after all, you invented it, or maybe snatched it out from under Elisha Gray. The other services, they sell on streetcorners, often nicer than the versions you offer.

So back off. I'll toss ya out and make my own dialtone if you keep pushing.

No amount of marketing can sell a service the customer does not want and even finds loathsome. But it'll lose you customers, toot de sweet.

Slimeballs.
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* As in "whizzing" or "to have a whiz." And I don't mean speedy motion.