Texas high school used cage fighting to settle disputes.
Texas high school used cage fighting to settle disputes.
Category: Angst
Oh, Centre, dear.
My alma mater is starfucking harder than ever before for its 2009 commencement speakers. At least when we randomly gave out a DHL to James Earl Jones in 2003, it was to a man who overcame a distinct handicap to become a respected actor. But Jerry Bruckheimer? Really?
I guess this is seen as a way to simultaneously give the students a treat and maybe earn a little donation kickback, in exchange for a piece of paper that nobody seriously believes is worth anything. If it were just Linda Bruckheimer, who actually has philanthropic ties to Kentucky, I’d be fine with it. But when you give someone a degree, even a worthless one, you’re endorsing their career and setting it as an example for students to follow. Spend your lives making hundreds of millions of dollars from empty spectacle without even providing any of the creative energy, kids! Bring the circus; let somebody else worry about the bread.
Nebuchadnezzar
I still haven’t posted about this, have I?
I was supposed to be in this picture. Last September, I got my acceptance letter to Clarion South 2009, which I’d resolved to attend way back when I was still in London. I leapt about with glee, of course, and then set out saving enough money to defray the cost.
I failed, and in December I withdrew my application.
So there’s that story! Maybe in 2010 I’ll be in a position to reapply; maybe not. I am quite sure that whoever got my spot made good use of it, and I hope the short fiction economy survives long enough for me to read the results.
“I cannot fucking believe this is allowed.”
The unlooked-for side effect of my generation’s financial crisis has been, for me, that the world of finance is suddenly quite interesting, and worth learning about. There’s nothing like open-mouthed horror and blind panic to inspire autodidacticism. I still know very little about how finance really works, of course, but the punch line is that most financiers apparently didn’t either.
In that vein, I recommend one of the most darkly hilarious articles I’ve read in a while.
I am a hacker’s anus, Bob.
I worked a phone bank last night, for the second time in my life and the first time for a political candidate. (If you know me you already know which candidate. If you don’t, see if you can guess by the side-street parked car count: two Priuses, two Fits and a Yaris.)
Cold-calling is hard for anybody, but for an introvert it’s pretty awful. My stomach ached on the way home, and stories like the one about the man who told me he wasn’t voting because of the apocalypse didn’t really make it better. And I was calling people in Oregon, man! A battleground state this ain’t.
So why did I do it, and why am I going to go back? Because of a stubborn faith in Leonard’s concept of vote multipliers and a corollary syllogism of my own devising: that memory is fluid, that people are self-centered, and that therefore vote multipliers affect both the future and the perceived past.
Voting for a winner confers a perceived, and perhaps even deserved, ownership in the winner’s subsequent successes. This is why incumbents get re-elected, and why politicians who abandon campaign promises can ride them out for a while before their approval ratings begin to drop. We take credit for what we’ve done right, but don’t like believing we chose wrong.
My candidate’s going to win the election, and I think he’s going to lead us toward better things; but the more people vote for him, even in long-decided states, the more lasting support he’ll have, and the more he’ll be able to accomplish over the next eight years. It’s not just that I want to be able to look back at a positive change and say that I was part of it. It’s that I want to nudge other people from apathy into agency, and let them see that it is good.
I believe Leigh-Anna has the only public documentation of my aborted ponytail
All of Highlander is on Hulu, apparently.
Oh, tortured adolescence! I hadn’t missed you at all.
Tech Tip!® Minute
Remember, dear reader and also future Brendan, an attribute that’s hyphenated in CSS is camelCapped in Javascript! So background-image becomes style.backgroundImage. For no real reason except psychotic, alias-hating adherence to meaningless language conventions.
While I’m at it, ROLLOVER HIGHLIGHT IMAGES ARE GODDAMN POINTLESS. Nobody cares about them except graphic designers who have never written a web page, and even they ignore them on every site but the ones they themselves mocked up.
(Yes, I know rollovers need not make use of Javascript. These two blurts are only sort of related.)
Punch line!
I don’t even LIKE jeans
Yesterday, for my job, I implemented some web-marketing stuff that included me actually typing out the following text, which... well, I don't want to reproduce it for fear of google, but I've rot13ed it below; click the button to read it.
Where was I entering this marketing text, you ask?
A MySpace page.
It's not like I was pretending I hadn't sold my soul long ago. I just hadn't realized it was going so cheap.
White pepper is awesome. Also, this is sort of about faith
I’ve reached the point, in my autoeducation as a cook, where I no longer really measure spices or indeed many liquids. This is great for saving time and for not having to rinse a measuring cup every time I need a quarter-unit of something. It is less great when something I make turns out well and I want to write down the recipe for the future. “A bunch of white pepper,” I find myself writing. “Like, as much as a good cook would put in but then also some more.”
If I could always trust myself to make the same judgments based on words like that I wouldn’t have any problems, but I have no faith in Locke and therefore I am not even sure I’m the same person who started this post, much less the one who cooked a pretty good spaghetti nonbolognese earlier tonight. Also it is probably going to be unhelpful in my inevitable cooking blog.
The (thoroughly hidden) point I wanted to record here is that I’m kind of a good cook now? I’m still working in a very small range, but I keep trying new things and they keep turning out pretty okay. I think cooking is, like kissing and biking, essentially a matter of confidence. The food will believe you’re in charge if you act like it.
I learned to cook spaghetti in ten-gallon vats, almost exactly ten years ago, when Jeremy Sissle got me a job at Fazoli’s. He was also the one who trained me on pasta-cooking rotation. We got to the end, and he hauled out the hose, sponges and soap. “Turn on the hot water,” he said, “and fill the bucket, add about this much soap, and… I mean, you know how to clean stuff.”
I still recite that sentence to myself in scary and uncertain places. It sounds stupid, but I did know how to clean stuff, and remembering that snapped me out of the standard lost-and-seasick feeling that everybody gets from new jobs. (At least, I assume everybody else gets it too.)
The other half of my cook-with-confidence mantra was posted by Kevan, years ago, in a comment on Leonard’s site: “I’ve only recently stopped… expecting food to be an inedible, inert, black lump of Syntax Error if I get something slightly wrong.” It’s so true, and such a perfect encapsulation of the way programmers approach other disciplines: raised by severe machines and math problems with one answer, we expect frustration as a punishment for the smallest mistakes (and indeed, with computers, that often remains the case). But once you realize that the notion of discrete measurement is a consensual hallucination, you find the world a more interesting place. Screw Locke. I’m glad I’m not the same person I used to be.