The Village

my rating:

For his next movie, I think M. Night Shyamalan should do another kiddie flick.* Not because I think he's run out of ideas for his trademark suspense dramas, but because I spent much of the time I spent watching The Village simply wondering what "the twist" was going to be this time.

The big twist in The Sixth Sense was so effective in part because most people (at least opening weekend) didn't know to look for it. The twist in Unbreakable worked because he gave so few clues outside of the conventions of the genre subtext he was playing with. And the twist of Signs was less about defying expectations as it was about how everything actually and suddenly fit into place. For The Village Shyamalan had to do a triple reverse twist with a backflip.

The setup of the film demands some kind of explanation: an Amish-like community lives isolated from the outside world by "those we do not speak of", monsters with whom the villagers live in an uneasy truce: the people don't venture into the woods, and TWDNSO don't enter the village.

So are they real? If so, what are they? Having seen his earlier movies, thoughts of dead people, of super villains, and of aliens cross through the viewer's mind. Knowing that we're guessing, Shyamalan withholds vital information from us. He even postpones a key revelation scene from us, to be shown later as a flashback. He hints at answers, but they can be misleading. And even when we think we know, he starts making us doubt that we're right... or maybe we were, after all.

This is why I think Shyamalan's painting himself into a corner. We're so prepared for subtrefuge from him, that he has to resort to multiple misdirections.

But anyway, it still works very well. Nearly-30-year-old Joaquin Phoenix is a bit old for the role he's playing here. I don't care how sheltered and innocent your society is; someone his age is not going to be regarded as "not yet a man" like his character is here. He'd also have to be 2/3 his actual age to avoid a plot hole (about which I won't elaborate). But that's nit-picking.

Some people are going to be disappointed that the final explanation doesn't necessarily require a complete re-interpretation or re-examination of the events of the film; it merely answers the questions. So the ending isn't quite as dramatic in that sense. But the movie is suspenseful and it's thoughtful... two characteristics usually missing from "horror" films. (Nathan didn't want to see this one, because it's "scary". But he's looking forward to Alien Vs. Predator. Go figure.)

* Yes: "another". Just before he became famous for spooky twisters, MNS wrote and directed a light-hearted coming-of-age movie called Wide Awake, and he also wrote the screenplay for Stuart Little.

George W. Bush in Grand Rapids

One of the reasons George W. Bush came to speak in Grand Rapids following the Democratic convention was his confidence that he'd find an enthusiastic audience to address here. And for the most part, I'm sure he did. But you'd never guess that from this photo that appeared in The Grand Rapids Press.

Motive, Opportunity, ...

The thought has occurred to me that maybe God wants me to kill George Bush. After all, why else would he have given me two good opportunities to do it?

(I'm kidding, of course. Sure, it's in poor taste, but so is the Bush presidency itself. Geez, you Homeland Security folks have no sense of humor!)

The first one was back in 1992, when George Herbert Walker Bush visited a small liberal arts college in West Michigan, just days before losing the election to Clinton. At the time I was an employee at the college, with my office in a building just yards from where the president would be standing for his speech. We were advised that the Secret Service would be checking the building ahead of time, but I could have found any number of places to stash a small firearm. I also had access to any number of dorm rooms with a view of the podium. Just one shot and the will to take it....

Instead, I went to Washington, to (among other things) participate in a protest in which we encircled the White House several times with red ribbon (like the ribbons then being worn as a symbol of AIDS activism). I was probably one of a small number of people involved who not only knew that the president wasn't at home, but where he was: back at my place. That knowledge took a little of the satisfaction out of it, but I consoled myself that I was in Washington, taking action, while Herbert took refuge in one of the "safest" urban Republican counties in America.

I got another chance at killing George Bush yesterday. The scenario was similar: in the wake of the Democratic primary, George the Lesser came to a safe city to address a crowd he could count on to love him. The venue was the fieldhouse of the college where (until a couple months ago) I was an employee with full access to the facilities. With some advance planning, I might have pulled it off.

Instead, I happened to quit that job, taking a similar job nearby. So I was in the neighborhood when the president showed up yesterday. There were protestors in the street nearby, but I was working and didn't feel that simply adding my body and voice to them was worth the trouble of getting the time off from work. I feel a little bad about that. But I like to think of it as discretion... maybe even self-preservation.

Back in 1992, I was torn at first when I discovered that my plans to go to Washington would prevent me from being on hand to protest Herbert's appearance. His contempt for people with AIDS, his contrived invasion of Iraq, and a hundred other reasons have led me to hate the man. This was Republican territory, and I was in a special position to get attention; I would have had to do something. In all seriousness, I wouldn't have tried to kill him; that's quite frankly something I don't think I'm capable of doing. Probably not even in circumstances of war, and certainly not with premeditation.

But I'm sure I would have done something that would have - at the least - gotten me fired, and perhaps arrested. Earlier that year, I managed to get permission from the college to be present at a live televised "town hall" meeting with Herbert (on closed-circuit video from another location with an in-person audience), and wore a t-shirt under my button-down shirt that had a photo of two male soldiers kissing, with the line "read my lips". I was going to expose it to the cameras, but they never pointed at me. I carried a "Wars Don't Make Us Great" sign at the Grand Rapids 4th of July parade that Herbert (and a tank and troop carriers) appeared in that summer. So I meant business. Being unable to safely protest at that speech, but being able to instead do something productive in Washington made me feel better.

I feel the same kind of hatred for Junior as for his father. I want that man out of the White House, and I'm willing to do many things to accomplish that. Even compromise my high ideals and accept John "Good Enough" Kerry as the alternative. But, again, not to actually kill him.

(For one thing, that'd make Dick Cheney president, and the American people would promptly bend over backwards to ensure that he stayed there for another four years, out of a combination of sympathy for the Republican party, and a fear of "changing horses in mid-stream" during time of war. Kerry would have to either withdraw from the election or be tarred and feathered for "taking advantage of" the assassination.)

So joining the protesters down the street, and merely waving a sign and shouting at passing cars, probably would have just frustrated me. A rationalization, I suppose, but that's what gets me through the day sometimes.

Just Another Democratic Party

The TV networks hardly carried any coverage of the Democratic National Convention this past week. I didn't watch any of it. I did hear snippets of the speeches on NPR the following mornings, and glanced through the articles in the newspaper the following afternoons.

I don't blame the networks for not bothering, because this wasn't really a party convention. It was a party. I'm not that old (no, really, I'm not) but I can remember a time when things actually happened at these events. Like in 1980, when there were the negotiations between Ford and Reagan over the former president being the vice presidential candidate, and Ted Kennedy's challenge of President Carter for the Democrats' nomination.

I vaguely recall that the state-by-state roll call of votes used to have some drama to it, because the outcome wasn't already pre-determined. This was especially true of vice-presidential nominations, which might have to go to a second or third vote as deals were made and votes switched or candidates dropped out. Not a very little-"d" democratic way to select a vice president, but at least it's better than the current system where the choice is made by the nominees for president, from a list culled by their staff. (Hell, G.W. Bush even managed to pull Dick Cheney out of right field - someone most voters had never even heard of, and even the delegates had never even considered - and the party dutifully nominated him.)

There used to be fights over the party platform, whether it would reflect the right or left wing of the party, try to go for centrist and opportunist voters, etc. Some of the agenda for the party, including not just the president (if elected) but their leadership in Congress, would be determined.

But, no, we already knew who the presidential nominee would be. That had been decided by media coverage of the primaries. ("No, it's not going to be Dean; we've decided to start calling Kerry the 'front-runner'.") Everyone already knew who Kerry's choice for vice-president was, leaving the delegates to rubber-stamp Edwards. We even knew who all the speakers would be, so there were no surprises like Reagan's remarks after losing to Ford in 1976. If there was a platform voted on, I didn't see a word about it. Even the speeches were all screened by the nominee's staff.

Which is probably why I found myself (to my surprise) most enjoying the sound bite I heard on the radio of Al Sharpton and the quotes of him I saw in the paper. To be blunt, I generally consider Sharpton to be a buffoon at his best, and he can come across as a sensational and divisive racist at his worst. I was glad to have someone speaking for the black community sticking in the race, but watching his campaign for president this past year has reminded me how much I miss Jesse Jackson. But he was the only convention speaker I heard who actually inspired me with what he had to say. Among all the "mainstream" rhetoric laced with military overtones, nationalist themes, and empty slogans, Sharpton talked with conviction and enthusiasm about how the Democratic party stands (or stood) in contrast to the white puritan patriarchy of the Republican party.

One article I read in the paper talked about the contrast between Sharpton and Barack Obama, casting the preacher as "the past" and the Senator-apparent as "the future". Maybe Obama does represent the future of race in American politics and that could be a good thing, but I'd have to argue that Sharpton still represents "the present". This is still the nation of racism, injustice, and a personally invasive government that Sharpton describes. The news media made more of the fact that his speech went over his allotted time and deviated from his script, than of what he actually said, but at least by breaking the rules of the convention he got some of his message across. And gave me something to bother writing about regarding the convention.

The Manchurian Candidate

my rating: Nathan's rating:

Maybe if it weren't for the political angle of the whole thing getting in the way, I'd give The Manchurian Candidate three stars instead of two. But it did, so I did.

Denzel Washington and Liev Schreiber did a great job with their roles, and Meryl Streep was better than a lot of other actresses would have been with the cardboard role she was given. And there was some tension in the plot that often kept me on my toes. But it was pretty obvious before long how it was going to end.

And then there's the political angle. Or lack thereof.

The movie is about a "sleeper", a man who's been programmed by The Enemy, first to be the perfect candidate to get into the White House, then to "wake up" and Do Evil on their behalf. In particular, we have a decorated war hero who gets nominated for vice-president by the challenging party, with the aid of his Senatorial mother and the backing of Manchurian Global corporation. Coming out in the summer of a presidential election makes it very "timely".

But it also jumbles it all up in an attempt to be non-partisan. They never mention either major party by name. There's a line in which they describe what parts of the country the presidential challenger is going to carry, which maps pretty well to the Democrats' base, the guy that Schreiber displaces in the veep slot on the ticket is something of a liberal, and they are the non-incumbent party. I guess that makes them Democrats. Which means Schreiber is John Edwards? Except that he's a combat veteran, which makes him John Kerry. But he got put on the ticket by the connection of his political lineage, which makes him George W. Bush. Or do the connections to a corporation that gets all sorts of lucrative government contracts make him Dick Cheney?

I suppose you could argue that this genericity reflects the current state of American politics, and you'd be right. But the notion that Manchurian Global would need to program - rather than buy - a president, and by the same token could be thwarted to any meaningful extent by stopping that, makes that angle seriously naive.

If you don't care about any of that, you might enjoy this movie as a kind of emotional thriller. Like I said, Washington does a fine job as a former Army captain unraveling under the growing suspicion that his former buddy has been tampered with. But it didn't work for me.

This Song is Your Song

If you've been paying attention to the popular infotainment media lately you're probably familiar with JibJab and the animated version of "This Land Is Your Land" that they did, in which candidates Bush and Kerry attack each other and each claims that, "This land will surely vote for me". It's what passes for mainstream political satire these days, taking neither side and glossing over any real substance. But it's cute and it's funny.

And it's the subject of a lawsuit.

It seems that an outfit called The Richmond Organization is suing JibJab, claiming that the duo's use of Guthrie's tune and the filked version of his lyrics violates their copyright on the song. JibJab's defence is that their little music video is parody, and that protects it from copyright infringement suits under the doctrine of "Fair Use".

But where it starts getting dodgy is the question of what they're satirizing. The "Fair Use" doctrine says you can copy and distort something for the purpose of satirizing it, but that doesn't mean you can copy it for the purpose of satirizing something else. So the question isn't whether JibJab is making fun of John and W, but whether they're making fun of Woody's song.

I think they are. Sure, the presidential candidates are the main target, but even if it wasn't at the forefront of their minds, they're making a commentary on the original song as well. "This Land Is Your Land" was intended as a populist anthem. It was written as an answer to Irving Berlin's "God Bless America" (Guthrie's original title for it was "God Blessed America") written from Guthrie's perspective as a socialist. In the current political system it's no longer "your land" and "my land" but Kerry's or Bush's. JibJab's version points that out. They could have based their song on "Yankee Doodle" or "When Johnny Comes Marching Home Again" or "Disco Duck" (the sort of thing Mark Russell has made a career of)... but they chose Guthrie's anthem, for the irony of its message in the current context.

Probably the greatest irony in this case is the fact that a copyright suit is even possible. Guthrie had no use for copyright. In one of the lyric sheets that he used to send free of charge to anyone who asked for them (selling sheet music was a major source of income for songwriters in those days), he included the following notice: "This song is Copyrighted in U.S., under Seal of Copyright # 154085, for a period of 28 years, and anybody caught singin it without our permission, will be mighty good friends of ourn, cause we don't give a dern. Publish it. Write it. Sing it. Swing to it. Yodel it. We wrote it, that's all we wanted to do." He probably would have committed it to the public domain except that his publisher wouldn't have touched his material with a 10 foot pole if he'd done that. Sure, the writer was doing the equivalent of telling his fans to "steal this song", but at least this way the company technically still had ownership of it.

Which was a mistake on Woody's part. Because 28 years was just the beginning. Since then the U.S. Congress has repeatedly extended the terms of copyrights, and some 60 years later, when Woody's been dead more than three decades, that copyright is now owned by some corporation that makes its living by licencing the compositions in their portfolio of copyrights. And they're under no legal obligation to adhere to Guthrie's obvious stated wishes. So they're suing JibJab, for doing precisely what the composer had invited us all to do.

OK, maybe this isn't exactly what Woody had in mind. He probably figured that people would keep to the original lyrics, mostly. But I think he would have approved of this use. He'd probably snarl about how gutless the jibjabs at Bush and Kerry were, but he'd appreciate the fact that they're making fun of these two corporate candidates, both far to the right of Guthrie's own politics.

Woody never would have approved of what TRO is doing. Not only do we have that old copyright statement to tell us that, we also have the original lyrics of the song. The song went through several revisions, and Woody himself apparently toned down and later dropped the version I'm about to quote, but his manuscript of the original lyrics includes the following verse, which he followed with a slightly-changed chorus:

Was a high wall there that tried to stop me
A sign was painted said: Private Property,
But on the back side it didn't say nothing.
That side was made for you and me.

I wouldn't go as far as Woody appears to be going with this, challenging the whole concept of private property. But I love the cleverness with which he questioned it, and I admire him for doing so, because I think our society treats it as far too sacrosanct. Like in this suit.

By any reasonable standard (and certainly by Guthrie's expectations) "This Land Is Your Land" should be in the public domain by now. Expurgated or not, it has become part of our cultural legacy, and anyone should be able to use it without getting permission or paying royalties to some corporation that happened to get its legal mitts on a copyright that Guthrie never really wanted in the first place.

This song is your song, this song is my song,
From the fields of Texas, to the streets of Boston.
For the right-wing nut jobs, and the liberal sissies,
This song was made for you and me.

UPDATE, 25 August: The pretended owners have backed down, following the introduction of evidence that the song was published in a songbook in 1945 whose copyright was not renewed (back when that was required). They still claim that the 1956 copyright they were suing under is valid, but that's a bit preposterous, since you can't copyright a song twice... and if they really believed it, why would they (the party with the deeper pockets) be giving up?

PATRIOT Abuse Isn't Science Fiction

Just in case there was any doubt left about whether the so-called USA PATRIOT Act would be used far beyond the advertised goal of fighting terrorism, here's the latest example to come to light.

The operator of SG1Archive.com (a fan site dedicated to the sci-fi TV series Stargate SG-1) has been charged with "criminal copyright infringement and trafficking in counterfeit services". He may or may not be guilty. Let's assume for the sake of argument that he's guilty as hell, and has been operating a large scale business pirating Stargate programs. Let's assume that MGM (the show's producers) are just doing what their stockholders would demand by asking the FBI to go after him. And let's set aside the question of whether copyright law treats folks like him (fans who feel they're helping to promote the show) fairly, since that's not the critical point here.

Now let's look at how the government went after him. The search warrant used to raid his apartment cited his international network of fellow fans as evidence of a vast conspiracy. The FBI wrecked some of the equipment they seized, either through malice or incompetence. And the kicker is that they used a provision of the USA PATRIOT Act to obtain financial information about the accused from his internet service provider. For that record, that's the "Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism" Act.

Maybe if this guy had been involved in terrorism, or some other criminal activity that posed a danger to people, this violation of his privacy would be justified. I'm not opposed to giving the police the tools to do their job. But for giving away copyrighted stuff from a TV show without permission? That's ridiculous. And one more reason for the prompt repeal of the USA PATRIOT Act and removal from office of those who wrote it and voted for it.

Web Mail from a Squirrel

Call me old-fashioned, but I've never liked web-mail. E-mail and the World Wide Web are two different applications (which both happen to run on the internet), and they shouldn't be confused. I never really liked the way Netscape bundled their mail client with their browser (they should be separate, like IE and Outlook, or Firefox and Thunderbird, or pick and choose the two of your choice). I've never seen a web-based mail interface that didn't suffer from the clunky page-based nature of the web. If I'm reading my mail, I want an actual mail client.

I still feel that way. But I've been playing with web-mail this weekend, and I like what I hath wrought.

I've always provided e-mail aliases for my web hosting clients. I'll happily forward fred@flintstone.com to your local ISP account, and that works nicely for most people. But I've got a new client who wants an actual e-mail account on my server, separate from his home e-mail. Talking him through the process of configuring Outlook or whatever other mail client he might have to access my server was something I wasn't looking forward to. Easy enough to do in person, not by e-mail or by phone... and he's in Arkansas.

So I punted. I went with web-mail. I did a little research online and found SquirrelMail, a PHP-based web-mail system that uses your existing SMTP and IMAP services, your web server, and about 5 minutes of setup to give you your own web-mail system. It's free (in both senses of the word) under the GPL, and works on both Unixy systems (OS X, Linux, BSD) and Windows.

It's nice. This would have been rather handy to have when I was on vacation, as a way to check my e-mail from the web browser in the local internet cafe, where I couldn't install and use a real mail client. It's still web-mail, so it's still clunkier than, say, Mozilla's Thunderbird or Apple's Mail.app, but it works. And it gives the client what he wants, with zero out-of-pocket expense, and just an hour or two of time to tweak and customise the code to work exactly like I want it. Just another demonstration of the fact that anyone who tells you that "open source" software is too risky to trust your business to it, is someone who has never bothered to take advantage of what it has to offer.

Missing Links in Understanding

The other day a co-worker and I were messing around with Mac OS X. An opportunity for a pun came along, and I jumped at it. It was about Darwin (the name of the Unix core that OS X is built on) and some directory links that hadn't been copied yet; I called them "Darwin's missing links".

The coworker then went off on a tangent about how evolution makes no sense. "Why are apes still apes?" he challenged. "Why aren't there any half-evolved animals anywhere?" he demanded. My mind was occupied by operating system arcana and my strained attempts at social banter, so I mostly just stammered and tried to turn the subject back to our shared interest in Apple's computers.

I don't know this guy well, but he's never shown any evidence of being a fundamentalist religious nutcase who can't stand the fact that "God" isn't mentioned anywhere in most discussions of evolution theory. And it dawned on me later that his main problem was just that he simply didn't understand what he was talking about. Evolution makes no sense to him, because he's missed the whole point of what "natural selection" is and how it works.

Rather than re-opening a touchy subject with a co-worker (and risk actually bringing religion into it, at which point I'll undoubtedly say things I'll regret), I'm going to do it here.

The key point that many people seem to miss is that evolution is not some inexorable process of change, with some kind of destination in mind. It tends to look that way from where we sit, looking at those "ascent of man" posters, especially when overlaid with a veneer of "man is the pinacle of creation" egocentrism. Popular entertainment like the X-Men perpetuate this misconception by suggesting that mutants are "the next step in human evolution"... as if that next step were pre-ordained.

It's not. If the environment that humans live in were to stay the same for the next hundred millennia, there would be no next step in evolution. It wouldn't be needed. Humans are already pretty well adapted to our environment, so there'd be no particular survival advantage in them changing. Alligators and sharks, for example, have existed in pretty much their current form for ages (literally), because their basic environment hasn't changed much. They didn't need to adapt, so they didn't.

Our distant ancestors were a different story. Whether it's because their environment changed and they had to adapt to survive in it, or because some random variations made it possible for them to move to a different environment, they evolved to fit in that environment. The ones that didn't, died. That's what natural selection is all about: survival of the fittest.

Note that "fittest" doesn't mean "best". It's not an absolute that says "smarter is better" or "stronger is better". It all depends on the context. The dinosaurs flourished because they were "fittest" for living in the prevailing habitats. Brains weren't that important, but size apparently offered some advantages. Ergo, a lot of stupid, big dinos were among the "fittest". Then they died off, because there weren't "fit" to live through the climate changes following a big meteor strike, and especially not through the later Ice Age. Some reptiles were, and they survived. A lot of mammals were, and they thrived.

So to answer my coworker's question: apes are still ape-like (rather than becoming human-like) because being an ape has been a great way to survive in the jungles of Africa.

The whole concept of being "half-evolved" is jibberish. If something isn't properly adapted to its evironment, it's unfit. It doesn't survive. So every living species is, by definition, "fully evolved"... for their current environment. I assume he was wondering why there aren't any species halfway between homo sapiens and homo habilis. That's kind of like asking why nobody lives halfway between Grand Rapids and Milwaukee; sure Milwaukeans are suited to living in Wisconsin, and Grand Rapidians are suited to live in Michigan, but nobody's very well suited to living at the bottom of a huge lake.

Likewise, there's no environment left on earth for which homo erectus (a decendent of habilis, and ancestor of sapiens) is better suited than we are. The ancestors of apes stuck to the trees and continued to dominate that niche. They got bigger, and somewhat smarter (modern chimps have bigger brains than the earliest hominids), but they didn't change as dramatically as humans because they didn't need to. Meanwhile, the ancestors of humans apparently moved on to riverbanks, seashores, and dominated those areas. As they adapted better to live on the ground and walking upright, they took over more parts of the world, until they got where we are now.

Evolution theory doesn't explain all of the evidence we've uncovered, and there's some that even contradicts it. But if you know what the theory actually proposes, and understand what "natural selection" and "survival of the fittest" are really about, objections like my coworker's fall apart. He's not arguing against evolution, but against an uninformed parody of evolution. Which is all the more reason it needs to be taught in schools: so an intelligent, reasonable person such as he can reach an informed conclusion whether it's sound or not.

Another Vanishing Majority: Protestants

Most people are aware of the fact that the "white" majority in the United States is gradually coming to an end. Due to a combination of factors (greater immigration from non-European areas, differing birth rates) non-hispanic white people will become a minority of the total U.S. population before long.

According to a new study (a news article about it here and the published report in PDF here), the same thing is happening to Protestants. They're down to 52.4% of the population, compared to 62% a decade earlier (which used to be a fairly steady number). And since the data for this report was collected 2 years ago, the percentage might already be below 50%.

This decline isn't because people are leaving mainline Protestant denominations for more trendy churches. This survey defines "Protestant" very broadly, including Mormons, and New-Age-y churches that still call themselves "Christian" even though (the study's author admits) they might not have anything to do with established Christian theology.

Immigration is a factor here as well, but the main factor seems to be people personally giving up on Protestant Christianity, and fewer children being raised to believe in it. The survey shows a declining number of people who were raised Protestant that still believe in it (from 90% to 83%). And perhaps the most important statistic: the younger the age group they looked at, the fewer Protestants there were.

Some of that could be attributed to lower birth rates among Protestants (they're allowed to use condoms, after all, and some denominations accept abortion). Some could be the result of people in the survey identifying themselves as generic "Christians" instead of being specific enough to be categorised as Catholic or Protestant.

But then there's the figure for "no religion". Over the same timeframe that the Protestants dropped by 10%, the number of people reporting that they didn't have a religion went up by 5%, to 14%. That's now 1 person out of 7. I guess you're more likely to run into a "practicing" agnostic on the street, than a homosexual. The number of people who said "other" (which includes Muslims, Buddhists, anyone who just said "New Age", and anything else) is up from 2-3% a decade ago to nearly 7%. That's 1 in 14. Add these groups together, then throw in the Jews (a fairly steady 2%), and you're nearing 1 in 4.

This doesn't do much to contradict the theocrats who proclaim that the United States is "a Christian nation", because the percentage of Catholics is still about 25% and they're staying steady. So at the very least Christians in total have a lock on a supermajority for a while yet. "They" will still outnumber "us" by more than 2:1.

But that's a bit like saying that if you combine "whites" with "hispanics" that you still get a majority. That's not a majority, it's a coalition. Heck, Protestants have been something of a coalition-majority all along, dominating the rest of us only by the Bapitsts and Methodists and Lutherans and Presbyterians putting their theological and cultural differences aside to establish their common values as the law of the land.

As you look at the Protestant coalition, with its Mormons, Unitarians, Metropolitan Community Churches (gay/lesbian evangelicals), quasi-pagans who incorporate Jesus into their worship to make it more comfortable for recovering Christians, and so on... it's an increasingly diverse crew. They disagree not only about theological matters that rarely intrude upon secular life, such as baptism, communion, and the means of salvation, but social issues such as abortion, the role of women, environmental protection, the death penalty, the legal status of gay and lesbian couples, and many others. They're a contentious, often-fractured coalition.

My point in writing this isn't to gloat that "they" are a declining majority. I'm a bleached-in-the-wool white guy, and my race is one privileged-for-now soon-to-be-minority group I'm stuck with. I'm in the minority under a whole bunch of factors, and I'm OK with that. But this is part of an ongoing trend in American society that will have to have repercussions.

We're becoming increasingly a truly pluralistic society. A coalescence of coalitions. Presidents can't get elected by just appealing to white voters. Or just to Protestant Christians. Or "liberal" or "conservative" or "populist" or "libertarian" voters. They need to appeal to diverse populations.

(I think you can make a pretty good case that even "women" are no longer the slim majority they once were... and not because "men" have eclipsed them. With more people self-identifying as "gay male" and "lesbian" and "transgender" - and with measurably different attitudes to go with that - the number of "real men" and "real women" is each down into the 45-49% range.)

This need to cater to diverse pluralities isn't necessarily a Good Thing. The Democratic and Republican parties have responded to it by trying to be all things to all people. Or more to the point, they're both trying to appeal to the same people, hoping to build coalitions that include the various subgroups of our society who are most likely to vote, or who have the cash they need to fund their elections. So Democrats take positions that appeal to the barons of Wall Street and suburban housewives, and the Republicans are trying to figure out what they can offer to urban black people and rural hispanics. Each party is trying to turn itself into the same "centrist" ruling coalition government, of the sort that parliamentary democracies often form.

One key difference is that these other democracies have more flexible political systems. They actually have multiple parties, from which coalitions can be built - and discarded - as needed by the times. The United States used to have that. (A total of 6 presidential candidates received electorial votes in 1872, and as recently as 1912 the Republican candidate placed 3rd in the presidential election.) These trends toward pluralism may help to bring that back. If not, we'll be stuck with two increasingly interchangeable parties representing the same interests.

I'm hopeful that as Americans get more used to the idea that everyone is in the minority, that we might learn to spend less time trying to impose our values on each other, and cooperate more. Coalition members have to keep the interests of others in mind, whereas majority members can just do what's best for them. That's not just rude, it's also bad government.

Another Dead Kid

If you live in a city of any size, odds are you've seen a story like this one. Heck, if you live in a small town there's still a pretty good chance you've already had one, with different details, but the same basic story. The headline reads something along the lines of, "Local Man Killed in Iraq". Here's the opening paragraphs of such a story, from today's The Grand Rapids Press, about a kid from the local suburb of Wyoming, Michigan:

Like many soldiers sent to fight in Iraq, Army Pfc. Nicholas Blodgett had more than one reason for joining the military.

"He couldn't find a good job when he got out of high school. That's when the economy went into the dumps," recalled his father, Wyoming resident Robert Blodgett. "And so he joined up."

Having covered "who" and a bit of "why", the article goes on to explain "what", "when", "where", and "how". The details really aren't that important; it was another attack by the Iraqi resistance. Then there's a quote from Nicholas' mother:

"He knew it was dangerous, but it was something he wanted to do," Rita said.

Yeah, right. With all due respect to Private Blodgett, he had no clue how dangerous it was. I work with a bunch of guys his age, and their sense of "dangerous" is... dangerously underdeveloped. Hell, "dangerous" seems to be an item they place in the "plus" column when deciding whether to do something or not.

You'll notice that two of the three reasons reported for his enlistment were really the same: He needed a better job. The article explains elsewhere that he was working two jobs - in a deli and a Pizza Hut - at the time he decided to join the Army. It also mentions him helping out at his high school after he graduated, another hint that maybe this guy couldn't find anything more productive to do with his time.

As for the other reason listed... wanting to serve one's country isn't the same as wanting to do the bidding of one's chief executive. Sadly, our invasion of Iraq is against the best interests of our country, so all the idealism of kids like Nicholas is actually being betrayed.

Look at the person in that picture. He looks like a boy playing "soldier". There isn't a responsible store clerk in a 50-mile radius who'd sell him cigarettes without checking his ID. But we put a weapon in his hands and sent him to risk his life, just so the president could show his dad that he loves him by finishing his war for him.

Unfortunately, Nicholas will never get that kind of opportunity. He only got as far in his growing-up process to show his dad that he can make an important decision on his own, despite the old man's misgivings. "Do I personally agree with us being over there? No. It's a lot of political games," said Mr. Blodgett. Too bad Nicholas was too young and impressionable to understand that.

Addendum: Information about the other people sacrificed for the invasion and occupation of Iraq is available here. Private Blodgett is at the top of the page as the most recent... for now.

Naked Pix

OK, here's an interesting site: NakedPix.Us.

Just for the record, I did not stumble across this site while Googling for naked pix. Honest!

On one hand, it's pretty self-explanatory what it's about. On the other hand, it's not. Either way, it's... enticing.

Magic Survives

I've never believed in magic, at least not since I was old enough to understand that the guy in the top hat wasn't really sawing the woman in half. Even though this position has often put me out of step with my Christian and Pagan family and friends. I'm a rationalist.

But a spark of magic endures, and I'm willing to make room for it in my life.

Right now I'm sitting on my front porch, as twilight is fading into darkness. And as I look out across my yard and across the street, I see examples of this magic. For an instant here and an instant there, I see the flare of a firefly. And I can't help feel there's something magic happening.

I know that there's a perfectly rational biochemical explanation for what I'm seeing. I don't remember any of the details, but I've read an explanation of what causes a firefly to light up like that. It's quite sensible. But it's still magic.

I can imagine how people of previous eras saw fireflies. Particularly if you were to look at them without any understanding of bioluminescence, or even without knowing that they're insects, it'd be oh so easy to imagine them as tiny faeries, or some other magical phenomenon.

But even knowing otherwise, as I watch these sparks of light blink to life and just as quickly fade away, I still feel a similar spark of the giddy wonder that gripped me when I first saw them as a child, or that must have inspired my scientifically challenged forebearers. That something so small can shine so brightly, even for just moments at a time, is still startling. That it can do so without benefit of alternating current, alkaline batteries, or even NiMH rechargeable cells is still amazing. The fact that such things still exist here on a busy street, in the inner city, during the 21st century, is comforting.

And the simple beauty of it... is magic.

Al Gore Invented the Internet... or not

They say that if you repeat a lie often enough, it becomes "true" and that history is written by the winners. We have yet to see how that'll work out for this whole "Saddam Hussein was supporting bin Laden and had weapons of mass destruction that posed an immediate danger to the United States" bit. But it annoys me that it seems to have worked for one of the Republicans' lies of the 2000 campaign. Even liberals are repeating it (like in a recent cartoon by Ward Sutton, which lampooned Bush by camparing him to Gore). So are techies who damn well ought to know better what Gore actually did, and what he said about it. As a techie, a liberal, and most importantly a believer in truthfulness, this offends me.

For the record: Al Gore never claimed to have invented the Internet.

This claim was a deliberate misrepresentation of what Gore actually said. The lie was started by a conservative journalist and Bush partisan, and the factually-challenged wire services and entertainment media picked up on it. Wired magazine in particular was responsible for propagating the misquote and then "refuting" it with a series of counter-arguments, half of which didn't even contradict the supposed claim.

What Gore actually said was, "During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet." And you know what? He did.

Back in the early 1980's, when most Americans' concept of "network" meant "ABC, CBS, or NBC", Gore was one of the first members of Congress to recognise the value of computer networking technology, and to push for further funding to develop it. He continued to do so as Senator, not just voting for it or following along and adding his name as co-sponsor to the bills to fund high-speed nationwide internetworking, but drafting the legislation himself. That's "taking the initiative".

Later as Vice President, Gore popularised the idea of the internet as an "information superhighway", a phrase which has since become annoying from overuse, but was pretty forward-looking in the 1990's. Considering that his father was partially responsible for the modern interstate highway system, you can understand why that metaphor appealed to him. He personally pushed to get federal agencies to set up web sites, including a demo of the then-new White House site with links to departments that weren't online yet, as a not-so-subtle prod to get them moving on developing their own sites.

It's true that the roots of the internet go back before Gore first ran for public office. But that's like pointing out that the telegraph is over a century old. People who know a little bit about the ancestry of the internet, who remember bang paths, shared "hosts" files, and backbone segments run over intermittent dial-up connections, like to show off this knowledge about just how old "the internet" really is. Heck, I get some pleasure from people's puzzled expressions when I tell them I've been using e-mail for over 20 years. But ARPAnet <> the Internet, certainly not the internet as we know it: an ubiquitous, publicly accessible infrastructure for recreation, commerce, and free expression. That's what Gore took the initiative to create.

Robert Kahn and Vint Cert are two of the geeks who really did invent much of the technology we now know as "the internet", most importantly, the transmission control protocol and the internet protocol (better known as TCP/IP) that serves as the foundation of it. They were privy to much of the behind-the-scenes bureaucracy that provided its funding, allowed its expansion into more academic research departments, which brought it within reach of students, and involving technology companies, which planted the seed for commercial use of this nascent internetwork. And they have stated that Gore's claim was... true.

You can accuse Gore of choosing his words poorly, and giving himself the greatest possible credit for being involved. Inserting the phrase "providing the legislative and financial support to enable" into his boast would have made it more difficult to twist his words around. But no one with a solid grasp of the English language and a little common sense could think that he was really claiming to have invented it in his spare time between floor debates and fundraisers as a Congressman.

It took malicious and incompetent journalists to fuck that up.

Put a John in the Oval Office

In what passes for political insight in the entertainment media, my local newspaper commented about Sen. Kerry and Sen. Edwards having the same first name: John. Which, after a few days fermenting in my subconscious, emerged as a great unofficial campaign slogan for the Democrats:

Put a John in the Oval Office

And Flush the Turd That's There Now

OK, that's not exactly insightful, either, but it amused me.

Amature Spelling

I recently saw an article online in which the author had consistently spelled the word commonly used in contrast to "professional" as "amature". He got a bunch of spelling flames in response, and responded by admitting that he hadn't been sure of the correct spelling, and had used Google to confirm his guess. Seeing "about 3,500,000" hits for it, and no "Did you mean amateur?" query from Google, he assumed he had it right.

All he'd really done is confirm that millions of other people don't know how to spell the word, either. He also learned that Google.com is not Dictionary.com. Google has a great system for catching typos and common spelling mistakes. I admit to using it myself a few times to confirm the name of a celebrity or a foreign city in the news, figuring that hits for devoted fansites or published news articles were confirmation enough. But Google's point of reference isn't what's correct, rather simply what's popular.

The thing is, he also confirmed that (in all likelihood) it won't be too long before "amature" does make its way into dictionaries, and will eventually be an accepted spelling. Just because so damn many people (will) use it. It's already happened with "donut", and "thru" seems to be well on its way toward being acceptable in casual usage. Spelling is maleable over time.

It still bothers me, though. I don't mind "thru"; I'm already prepared to drop the phonetically superfluous o, g, and h myself. But there's value in retaining the traditional spellings of words like "amateur". In this case, it gives you a clue to the root meaning of the word: if you know some French or a little Latin, or even another latin-derived language such as Spanish or Italian, you can recognise it as meaning "one who loves". Without that lexical clue, one is likely to think of an "amature" as just an arbitrary bunch of sounds, that happen to refer to one who isn't "professional"... completely missing the underlying point that they do whatever it is they do out of love for it. A meaning is lost, and the English vocabularly is weakened.

OK, so language is maleable as well. Words change their meaning, too. The written word evolves. But just as modern evolution theory describes periods of massive change in the flora and fauna of our world, I suspect the internet is serving as a catalyst for some punctuated evolution in our language, including a massive die-off of words (and the spellings that help give them meaning).

For the first several centuries of the written word, only a small percentage of the population had access to it, particularly the production end. It's only in the last couple centuries that the cost came within reach of the middle class (not coincidentally the same era in which the American Independence movement codified "freedom of the press"), and it's been only in the last century that the lower class got its hands on it to any significant extent, with photocopiers, laser printers, and now web sites. This has been a Very Good Thing in terms of social justice and all that. But it's quite a different matter when it comes to communication.

The same people who used to ensure that only the "correct" viewpoints and ideas got into print also ensured that only "correct" spelling and grammar did. My middle-school English teacher gave us grades for both "content" and "mechanics", and these editors evaluated the latter as well as the former. So if you did a fair amount of reading, it would be material that was not only "appropriate", but also well-written. It would be organised. It would have self-contained paragraphs. The sentences would all have subjects and verbs, and they'd agree in number (singular/plural), tense (past, present, future, etc.), and person (first/second/third). The professional editors would even ensure that "amateur" was spelled correctly. Subsequently, that well-read person would more readily learn all these protocols of communication, and be able to use them competently in his own writing.

But now that the gatekeepers are being overwhelmed and bypassed, there's a flood of (to be blunt) badly-written nonsense being put on screens around the world. Kids are growing up doing most of their reading online, from message boards and chat. People in countries where English is not the native language are learning it by reading the same kinds of sources. Then they're turning around and generating text modeled after what they've been reading. Like the author mentioned above, writing "amature".

There's a very old fable about a society building a great tower, but who suddenly began speaking different languages and could no longer communicate, so their efforts failed. The modern telecommunications industry is full of similar tales, about protocols that were fragmented and fractured, to the point that communication was no longer possible. ASCII extensions used by Apple mapped to different letters on IBM PCs. HTML generated by Microsoft FrontPage doesn't render properly in Mozilla or KHTML browsers. An Instant Messaging client used for AOL won't work with Yahoo's or Microsoft's. Et cetera.

On the other hand, protocols that are maintained and adhered to have kept things working smoothly. The whole infrastructure of the internet (TCP, IP, UDP, ICMP, DNS, SMTP, HTTP, etc.) works only because nearly everybody uses it correctly. Material packaged in Flash, PDF, or RTF will be presented consistently regardless of whether the recipient is using Mac OS X, Linux, BSD, Solaris, or even Windows.

But when I start having trouble figuring out the meaning of a message that's supposedly written in English (and believe me, that's definitely started happening), there's a communication breakdown in progress.

I don't have any solution or strategy in mind to deal with this problem. The French have an agency dedicated to protecting the "purity" of their language, which is just wrong in so many ways. The genie's out of the bottle, and I wouldn't want to put it back even if we could, because it would mean re-disenfranchising people who deserve to be heard. Maybe a concerted effort to promote real literacy - not just functional reading ability, but also writing - would help, but that'd be like the boy sticking his finger in the dike at best.

I have to admit that some of this is the frightened fretting of someone who sees one of his own skills being marginalised. I'm a writer. I have excellent spelling skills. (I started using British spellings many years ago, just for the kicks of keeping it interesting.) My vocabulary is extensive. I know how to build an essay, from the clause level all the way up to the organisation of ideas. I often use technically improper grammar, but when I do so, it's intentional; I'm trying to make my writing more conversational. Like right now. I fear all that is becoming obsolete.

Fortunately, I don't make my living at writing, at least not to any significant degree. I don't need to worry about losing my job in the coming linguistic revolution, because I am not a professional writer.

But I still care, and I still worry. Because as a writer, I am an amateur.

Van Hagar

To my surprise, I went to a Van Halen concert last night.

OK, I knew ahead of time that I was going. One of my friends won a pair of tickets from a radio station a few weeks ago, and invited me to go to the concert with him. I've never been a fan of the band and I've never given him any reason to think I was, so I figured he was having trouble finding someone who was willing/able to go. And I'd already admitted I had no plans for that evening, so I had no graceful way to decline. So I went.

I won't make any cracks about how old the band members are. In fact, they all seem to be in fine condition, especially the Van Halen boys. Alex (the drummer) and Eddie (the guitarist) both performed shirtless, and are in considerably better shape than I. Woof. They certainly put a lot of energy into their performances. Most of the band are pushing 50 (vocalist Sammy "I Can't Drive 55" Hagar is 55), but they clearly aren't ready to push up daisies. Even bassist Anthony Michael Hall was pretty wild, and bass players are always the sedate guys in the band. They all seemed to be having a lot of fun and glad to be back on tour again, especially Eddie, who (my friend told me) had a brush with cancer a few years ago.

The show suffered from a compulsion that most rock performances have, but especially the metal/hard-rock genre: turning the volume up high enough to hurt. We were sitting on the far end of the arena from the stage and speakers, but I still felt the music as much as I heard it. I put in ear plugs, which helped, but... why the fuck should a person have to use earplugs to listen to music? That's like having to put on sunglasses to watch a movie.

I've got nothing against loud music, as such. I was into punk and hardcore back in the day, and that's stuff you just can't play quietly. I get that. But this need to push it too far, then push it even past that, is the kind of the thinking I normally associate with shallow-minded 15-year-olds. And I didn't see any of those at the concert (though I suppose a lot of those present were, back when Van Halen's first albums came out).

Likewise with the musicianship. When Eddie or Alex took the spotlight, it was all just "look what I can do with my equipment" (a mindset understandably typical of the aforementioned 15-year-olds). Don't get me wrong: they're good at what they do. But what they do...? Alex's extended drum solo was (like most rock drum solos) mostly devoid of, y'know: rhythm. It was all about beats: how many drumheads he could hit per second. Eddie's guitar solos rarely touched on, say, melody. It was about how many notes he could squeeze in ("look, I'm picking the strings with both hands!"), or other guitar tricks, like fiddling with the reverb controls and picking up vibrations from the speakers instead of actually picking the strings, or using a bitless power drill to drive the guitar's pick-ups. Sorry, Eddie, but I think Jimi Hendrix took that whole concept to its logical conclusion back before you guys got your first recording contract. It's played out.

But from time to time, on a few of their popular hits, and especially reviving their cover of the Kinks' "You Really Got Me", the band hit a groove and simply rocked. Those were the parts of the concert I enjoyed, and they made the event worth my while.

Of course, getting to see it free of charge helped. I can't imagine spending $70 per person (and more for those with better seats) for it. My friend said they were selling concert t-shirts for like $50. With concerts becoming obscenely expensive, record stores becoming irrelevant, the RIAA trying vainly to tighten its stranglehold on ownership of the recordings, the tedium of all the corporate-packaged music, and the centrally-programmed homogeneity of radio stations across the country, I figure there's gotta be another revolution brewing (like happened with bebop, rock, punk, and rap). But that's another topic for another day.

Forget the Fourth, but not the Fireworks

I just got back from the fireworks downtown.

As a sign of the times, there was a scare a month or two back when radio behemoth Clear Channel, the company that normally pays for most of the cost, backed out. Ignore the Chamber of Commerce press releases; the U.S. economy is still in bad shape. But there was enough support from the community, which created a donation-based non-profit to put on a show... though you could tell it was done on a smaller budget. In particular, the "grand finale" lacked the sheer how-many-more-of-these-are-they-gonna-shoot-off scale of prior years'.

For the record, I haven't been able to really enjoy the Fourth of July in over a decade. The President's father gets the credit for that, by starting our first war with Iraq. It wasn't just the war that alienated me (which it did), but also the aftermath, in which the American media got down on its collective knees to enthusiastically fellate anyone who had any connection with it, brushing the whole question of whether it was a "just" war and whether we had "won" under the rug they were kneeling on.

The straw that broke this particular camel's back was when the elder Bush visited Grand Rapids and turned our Independence Day parade into a flag-waving display of military force, with lots of uniformed soldiers and - I shit you not - a fucking tank rumbling through the streets, like some kind of twisted parody of a Soviet May Day parade, or the crushing of the Tiananmen Square demonstrations. Meanwhile all the local sheep patriots waved their flags and some bimbo on a float with an amplifier sang some kind of anthem worshipping our beloved troops and... whatever cause they'd been sent over for. I stood on the sidewalk carrying a piece of posterboard that said "wars don't make us great"... and got heckled ("yes they do!"), sneered at ("thanks for ruining the parade") and even threatened. Which convinced me that the average American (or at least the local variety) has the intellectual sophistication of a turnip. I may be a United States citizen, but I am not an "American" in that sense of the word.

But I still enjoy a good fireworks display. The noise. The bright lights. The artistic beauty of them.

When I was a kid the family always went to the fireworks over the little lake in one of the suburbs a few miles from our house. Since I moved back to the city as an adult, I've usually gone downtown for the bigger display there. I've lived within a couple miles of downtown since then, so it's always been either a moderate walk or a short bike ride away. I located a green spot (the lawn surrounding a playground) on one of the hills overlooking downtown proper, that has a pretty good view of the 'works, and I've gone there every year except the one I was out of the country that day. At least from where I watch, there are no stomach-churning stars and stripes flapping in my face. No nationalist anthems being played (at least within earshot). No fucking tanks. Just an amiable polyglot crowd, a view of the downtown I've always thought of as "home", and a bunch of pretty explosions. As long as I think of "America" in those terms, I'm OK with it.

15th Anniversary

By coincidence, this year is a bunch of milestones in my family. My parents will be marking their 45th wedding anniversary, my big sister's been married for 20 years, and my little sister's 15th is coming at the end of the year. The vacation we recently went on together was (in part) a joint celebration of those events.

It also would have been my 15th anniversary. Today.

Andy and I never got married (even unofficially), so like many not-fully-committed couples, we marked time based on our first date. It was a date (the day and month) that turned out to be easy to remember: the 3rd of July.

The date itself was also memorable in other ways. For one thing, we didn't kiss. Not because I'm "not that kind of girl" or anything, but because Andy had a throat infection. Nothing serious, but Andy took "safe sex" very seriously, so mouth-to-mouth contact wasn't an option. I suppose I could have kissed him {ahem} elsewhere, but I'm not (or at least I wasn't) that kind of girl. Instead, at the end of our date (which we spent walking around downtown Grand Rapids, with me showing him the sights... both of them) sitting in his car, holding hands. Which was by far the most intensely erotic hand-holding session I've ever experienced. And a lot more friendly than just shaking hands.

That was a very long time ago. I was a young man of 24 years, and Andy was only a kid, just turned 20. He'd been around the block a few times, dating-wise. I wasn't a virgin or anything, but he was the first person I seriously "dated" (meaning that we spent time together, fooled around frequently, and both saw it as a developing relationship). In the time since then I've lost a bit of hair, gained a bit of weight, and gone through a lot of experiences.

One thing that makes this particular anniversary significant is that it marks a kind of double milestone: it means I've spent about as much time after Andy as with him. It's hard to put an exact date on when I "lost" Andy, because the process took several months, beginning with his brain hemorrhage and ended with his father decreeing that I couldn't see Andy any more. But in the middle of that, I flew down to Georgia to visit him at his father's house in January 1997, and marked the 3rd as our 7.5-year anniversary. It was on that visit that it became evident to me that Andy wasn't going to recover to any meaningful degree. It's been 7.5 years since then.

I've known for quite a while that this would happen, that those 7.5 years - which seemed so vast and loomed so large at the time - would eventually dwindle into a small fraction of my life, a long time ago. This is the first time I've had to face the fact that it's already happened.

I do still count those 7.5 years as very important, life-changing ones, and Andy was the largest factor in those changes. He affirmed me, challenged me, and enriched me in ways no one else has. He got me to open up to another person like no one before had managed. I wouldn't be the person I am today without him, and that's a very good thing.

My life didn't end when I lost Andy (and a good job and another good friend) that year. Although I've sometimes quipped that the good part did. I've often worried that I'd never get over losing Andy, and that I'd spend the rest of my life miserable. Which hasn't really happened. There's been a lot that sucked about the past 7.5 years, but not all of it. I got a second college degree (and learned a lot of neat stuff in the process), I got to know some interesting new people, and I now have a job that I'm enjoying almost as much as the one I lost in '97.

I'm alone again, and it seems likely that I'll stay this way. But it's not as bad as I thought it would be, and it's definitely not as bad as if I'd never actually been in a relationship. I can respect myself better knowing that I was (apparently) worthy of a boyfriend, that someone really did love me that way. So it really is better to have loved and lost, rather than never being in love at all. It means that being alone is now a choice, not simply a failure.

I still miss him. I wish he could have been with me on that trip to Alaska... or even just to see Spider-Man 2. I sometimes wonder how my life might have been different with him in it over the past 7.5 years, and here with me today. And I wish we could actually celebrate 15 years together tonight. But we can't. So instead I'm simply going to celebrate the 15 years since he held my hand and changed my life... forever.

Because I *Still* Can

Last week I posted an article on my log from a cruise ship off the coast of Alaska. Just because I could. Part of the reason I could was the wireless technology the cruise line had in place, but the other part was the self-sustaining server I had back here in Michigan, equipped and configured to handle just about anything, unattended. Short of a failure of my ISP (which would be up to them to correct) or a half-hour-plus failure of my electricity supplier, the server would stay online.

Well I'm currently in the middle of a power failure of more than half an hour. But since I'm here, I can deal with that, too. The UPS on my server and router kept it online as long as the UPS battery held out. The server then shut down, gracefully, as I'd configured it to do. Since I wanted to get back online right away, I had to go get the generator and fire it up. It's a small unit, just a kilowatt or so maximum output. For the record, it's a Yamaha EF1000/S, which uses inverter technology to put out a smoother power curve than your typical budget-priced Chinese-made generator. The more sine-like output is healthier for computers, and the inverter approach also improves its efficiency.

Even so, I'm running the power through the UPS, to help "clean" it further, and also to conveniently distribute it to all of the devices that are plugged into the UPS. Those are: the server CPU (not its monitor), the router/firewall, the hub that server and router use to communicate, and the SDSL adapter that provides my connection to Covad, Speakeasy, and the world. The server's monitor is an LCD, which doesn't draw much power, so I probably could run that off the UPS or the generator without losing too much "live" time, but so far I'm sticking to just essential gear.

So how am I typing this entry? A laptop, plugged into the same hub as the router. Sitting on the porch, with the generator for the server purring next to me. The battery life on my iBook is only 4.5 hours (with the backlight turned down), compared to an estimated 12 hours on the generator (without refueling), but if I have an outage that long, I can presumably find someplace to go to recharge it (much like I can refuel the generator).

You may think I'm a bit of a freak for having an actual generator, but I come by it honestly. A year and a few months ago my part of the state was hit by an ice storm that coated everything with ice, bringing down tree branches all over the place, and power lines along with them. Between the difficulty of making repairs under such conditions, and the sheer number of local power lines down, it took over three days for the power on my block to be restored.

I didn't freak out about it - I like to think that I've gained enough wisdom and maturity to accept things over which I have no control with a modicum of grace, and I'm not the kind of TV or Web junkie who can't live without it for a few days - but I was frustrated at my inability to keep my own web site and mail server online. So I invested several hundred dollars in a generator.

(Ironically, although the heat to my house is natural-gas powered, the motor that pumps the hot water around the house is electric, and over the course of those three days, the temperature inside gradually crept down to around 40F. While the temperature in my freezer crept up to match it).

I've only used the generator a couple times since then (including this one), and in both cases the power came back in pretty short order. In fact, the power has come back on since I started writing this, about an hour after it went out. Being offline for that long wouldn't be any big deal in the greater scheme of things; I've voluntarily taken my systems offline for that long just to futz with them. But that's kinda the point: to be prepared for something worse than what you actually experience. And it's nice to know that I can stay online that long... and longer. In fact, as long as the downtown SBC office (where Covad's gear is located) has power (and I have yet to experience a situation in which they did not), and there's a gas station somewhere within driving distance that has power for their pumps (and short of a failure of the local grid, that's unlikely), I can keep GodsExBoyfriend.com online indefinitely.

And I plan to.