Entries from January 2005 ↓

It’s recently been brought to our attention that January 24th has been declared the most depressing day of the year. This according to a British psychologist, who came to his conclusion by conducting one of those stuffy ivory-tower studies that use “data” and “metrics” and “techniques” to come to their conclusions. Frankly, we at Doodleplex have had it up to here with science’s unhealthy preoccupation with the “scientific method”, its obsession with “facts” and “truth”. If this great country’s leaders used truth-based reasoning in their policy decisions, do you think we’d be fighting this glorious war in Iraq right now? Hell no!

So we decided to conduct our own study, using some basic, gut-level assessments, mixed with a few simple tests. Nothing fancy. Just good old-fashioned common sense. Here is our procedure:

1. Find a colleague, friend, or family member.
2. Say something random and apropos of nothing. If randomness is not your strong suit, say something odd. If you can’t do odd either, say this: “There are tiny raccoons in my eyeballs!” The object here is to get the subject’s mind off of his own mental state by ensuring that he’s alarmed by yours.
3. When your subject is off guard, say: “Are you depressed!” Say it very loudly. This may shock him into telling you the truth.
4. If the subject says “Yes,” then mark him down as probably depressed, because he’s probably lying.
5. If the subject says “No,” then mark him down as depressed, because he just said he was.
6. If the subject says nothing, then mark him down as depressed, because he’s clearly too depressed to talk about it.
7. If you’ve determined that the subject is depressed, lean back and study him for a long time. Squint your eyes. Nod occasionally. Take notes. After ten minutes of total silence, come up with a number between one and one hundred, using a gut-level assessment. This is the subject’s depression score for the day.
8. Repeat for 365 days.

At the end of the study, compare the subject’s depression scores for each day of the year. Find the highest score. If one or more days have the same score, then go back to the subject and ask him which of the candidate days he thinks he was most depressed on. If he doesn’t answer, scream incoherently. This will dislodge his unconscious emotional memories, from which he will be able to extract an answer.

And there you have it. We have decided to perform this study on two or three different people, in order to get a good statistical sampling of the world’s population. Unfortunately, we’ve had difficulty getting the subjects to cooperate, especially after the first week or so. Many have obtained restraining orders from judges, or threatened us with violence. A few have actually employed violence. We think this is because they are depressed, and are considering modifying their daily depression scores to correlate with the severity of the beating we receive.

Although our study is in its infancy, we have already determined that the 24th is not, in fact, the most depressing day of the year. The head injury we received on the 27th is far worse than the minor fracture we received on the 24th.

Take that, Ivory Tower.

Tom Friedman continues to be annoying. I used to really enjoy his columns, but they’ve lately become a series of mushy paeans to high ideals, glops of centrist palaver spiked with dumb aphorisms. They taste like rice cakes, but aren’t quite as satisfying.

His latest effort is called “Read My Ears,” and it counsels Bush to really listen to those crazy, old world Europeans when he visits next month, because, and I quote:

Listening is also a sign of respect. It is a sign that you actually value what the other person might have to say. If you just listen to someone first, it is amazing how much they will listen to you back.

Good Lord. Is this the best that the New York Times editorial page has to offer? Vacuously obvious admonishments? Of course listening is a sign of respect, and of course Bush won’t be listening to a word anyone has to say to him for the next four years — he’s way too far into messianic zeal mode, and is only hearing what he wants to hear.

But the column did have this to say, which I found interesting:

Let me put this as bluntly as I can: There is nothing that the Europeans want to hear from George Bush, there is nothing that they will listen to from George Bush that will change their minds about him or the Iraq war or U.S. foreign policy. Mr. Bush is more widely and deeply disliked in Europe than any U.S. president in history. Some people here must have a good thing to say about him, but I haven’t met them yet.

This isn’t particularly surprising, but it’s sad to hear it stated so unequivocally, from someone who’s spent the last couple of weeks interviewing actual Europeans. It’s going to take a generation to undo the damage this guy has done to our country.

Yesterday, I called my friend C to check if we were still meeting at his house at 9:00. It took a while to find his number, and, when I did, I wasn’t really sure it was the right one. This, I keep telling myself, sort of explains the ridiculousness that followed.

He picked up on the first ring and said: “Hello?” I paused, and said nothing, because, I swear to god, he sounded exactly like my brother. I didn’t know what to make of this, because I clearly hadn’t called my brother, and my brain just couldn’t handle the anomaly. I think a normal brain would have said “Hey, weird, C sort of sounds like your brother,” and gone about its business. But my brain screamed “Sweet mother of God!” And shut down.

I don’t know why it shut down. This wasn’t, by most reasonable standards, a very stressful situation. But shut down it did. So, for a good five seconds, I said nothing at all, opening and closing my mouth over the receiver like a dying fish gasping for air. C said hello, again. Another five seconds of dead air ensued. And then I gathered myself and squeaked, desperately: “Who is this?”

C, polite as ever (but now sounding slightly amused) said: “It’s C. Who’s this?”

And that broke the spell. My brain lurched into motion, and I apologized profusely and got off the phone as quickly as possible. It was very embarrassing. C did not mock me when I got to his house, although he would have been well within his rights to do so.

There’s something very wrong with my brain. I don’t know what it is, but I need to get it fixed. Soon.

Last night I finally succumbed to the siren song of progress and upgraded this site to MovableType 3.15. It was a three-hour endeavor that involved much gnashing of teeth, pulling of hair, and uttering of maternally-unsanctioned swear words. But, as you can see, it was well worth the effort!

Well, maybe you can’t see. I certainly can’t. It kind of looks the same to me.

But! This is a vast improvement over last night’s state of affairs, when it looked quite different: specifically, it looked like a blank, white page, the kind of blank white page that has absolutely nothing on it. And, although I admired the spartan, minimalist beauty of that design, I immediately suspected something was amiss.

More teeth-gnashing and curse-spewing occurred, and, eventually, I succeeded in making the site reappear. Here, I found my ten years of experience in the software industry absolutely invaluable: who else but a highly-trained software engineer like myself would know to press the reload button, over and over again, until something better started happening?

I have to admit, though, that the site does seem to sporadically disappear, for no good or apparent reason. Again, I don’t think that this is intentional — I really doubt that “Sporadic Disappearance” would have made it onto MovableType’s feature list. Or, if it did, it would almost certainly have been dressed up in marketing-speak: “The New Site Scrubbing© feature ensures that your blog will periodically get a good, clean new look, absolutely free of charge!”

So. Things aren’t quite working.

I hope to have all bugs expunged soon.

Some sage wisdom from Bram Cohen, the creator of Bittorent:

[Bram] doesn’t care if he sees TV live, doesn’t subscribe to basic cable, and already sits at a computer all day long. The only shows he watches are those he buys on DVD. He particularly loved the first season of Paris Hilton’s The Simple Life. “You can watch that show for six hours,” Cohen says, “and your brain is still empty.”

I instantly respect this man.

Here’s a transcript of an IM conversation I had with my brother today. It’s chats like these that get me through Monday mornings, and make the prospect of hurling myself out the window slightly less attractive.

Lapsed Cannibal: I’ve just discovered that my windshield’s cracked.

Karim: Really? A rock?

Lapsed Cannibal: I don’t think so.

Karim: An iiiiiiiiiiiiiisland?

Lapsed Cannibal: I blame Bush. I know he’ s behind this somehow.

Karim: Definitely.

Lapsed Cannibal: I don’t blame you at all, though. Not a bit.

Karim: Good.

Lapsed Cannibal: Well, maybe a little.

Karim: Crap. What gave me away?

Lapsed Cannibal: The footprints.

Lapsed Cannibal: And the lead pipe near the car.

Lapsed Cannibal: With the note that said: “I am Karim. I broke your windshield. Here is my phone number.”

Karim: I guess there’s no such thing as a perfect crime.

Lapsed Cannibal: Maybe if next time you don’t also provide the number of the local police station.

Karim: Well, how are you supposed to contact the proper authori…oh, I see. Okay, I’ll give it a shot. Maybe tomorrow at about 1am. I’ll break the windshield on your other car. Okay?

Lapsed Cannibal: Um. Maybe you should do a test run on your car first. It’s a Honda, after all, and they probably use the same windshields.

Karim: You know what I did yesterday?

Lapsed Cannibal: No.

Karim: I’ll tell you then.

Lapsed Cannibal: Wait! Is it star-trek related?

Karim: No.

Lapsed Cannibal: Poop-related?

Karim: Not really.

Lapsed Cannibal: Proceed.

Karim: I left my car running for 20 hours.

Lapsed Cannibal: Whoah. Why?

Karim: Just wanted to warm it up.

Lapsed Cannibal: Huh.

Karim: It’s really warm now.

Lapsed Cannibal: Is it a warm pile of useless metal?

Karim: It was until I walked to the nearest gas station and walked back with two gallons of gas.

Lapsed Cannibal: I’m not going to lie to you. I’m confused.

Karim: After running for 20 hours, it ran out of gas. Piece of crap. So I had to schlep my way through the frozen tundra this morning to the Mobile and get more gas.

Lapsed Cannibal: No, no, I got that. What’s confusing me is the “why” part.

Karim: Well, that’s a complicated question.

Lapsed Cannibal: It’s a word consisting of three letters.

Karim: Exactly.

Lapsed Cannibal: Three.

Karim: Not four or five. Certainly not two. Three. Are you with me?

Lapsed Cannibal: I’m going to have to say no. Maybe if I rephrase the question: how did Bush cause you to leave your car running for 20 hours?

Karim: I was distracted by the snow he created.

Lapsed Cannibal: Ok! Good enough. Maybe I’ll ask you again when you get back from Planet Crazy.

Karim: Yes. The squirrel screams loudly in the moonlight.

Lapsed Cannibal: Only when it’s funneling distemper lozenges.

Karim: I think you’re starting to understand. Excellent. The nutter butters are back. Seek the frosty.

Lapsed Cannibal: BE the frosty! Poop! Engage!

Karim: We are of one mind now.

Lapsed Cannibal: I wonder if Picard said “Engage!” when he proposed to that doctor babe.

Karim: Good question.

“Alice. My love. My life. Don’t leave me.”

“I’m going to the bathroom, Bob. Jesus.”

“Each moment we’re apart is an eternity, a dank, bottomless well of unremitting misery.”

“Yeah. Well. Don’t forget the meeting at 3:00.”

“A meeting of our hearts, our minds, our souls.”

“A meeting about the JC Penny account.”

“Ah, JC Penny. Sweet memories! It’s where we first met.”

“We met in my office. Where I hired you. It’s also where I fire people.”

“Ah, yes. I remember it well. The air alive with the sweet scent of saffron, the light shining upon your face. I remember thinking that I had died and come into the presence of an angel.”

“Are you drunk, Bob? You’re drunk, aren’t you?”

“Promise me your eternal love!”

“What?”

“Promise me your eternal …”

“No.”

“Your eternal like, then!”

“No.”

“Your eternal grudging tolerance!”

“I’ll think about it.”

“Alice, my seraph, my gleaming child of heaven, if you do not promise me that, that at least, I will hurl myself out of this window. I shall do it now, as you watch, lest you doubt my sincerity, my desperate ardor!”

“That window?”

“Yes, that one. I will fling myself through it, to my death!”

“We’re on the first floor.”

“Indeed!”

“So you wouldn’t be throwing yourself out of the window, really. You’d sort of be stepping out of it.”

“Yes! To my death!”

“You can’t step out of a first-floor window to your death.”

“To my possible bruising!”

“So you’re saying you’d endure a possible bruising for my love.”

“A nasty, visible bruising, yes! Also, I may pull something!”

“Bob.”

“And there may be insects out there! I could be set upon!”

“Bob.”

“Yes, my life?”

“I’m married. I have children. You annoy me. I have to take a piss.”

“Yes, my sweet.”

“And then I have to go to a meeting.”

“Of course, my angel.”

“So get out of my way.”

“I shall be here, awaiting your return.”

“If you are, I’ll fire you. And then I’ll call your wife.”

“I understand. Goodbye then, my love. Or, should I say, au revoir?”

“Goodbye’s fine.”

From a wonderful column by Richard Cohen in today’s Post, about the contortions required to exclude gay people from society these days:

Homophobia has become entrenched because gays have become the personification of modernity, particularly changing sexual mores. So much of cultural conservatism has to do with sex — abortion, marriage, sex education, celibacy — that it makes sense that those who are the most outré, the greatest taboo breakers of them all, are the most loathed. This is why it is important for social conservatives to insist that homosexuality is a choice — a casual one, at that — and not something determined at birth or shortly thereafter. That valuable piece of ignorance justifies homophobia since, in America, you can no longer hate what someone is, only what they have become. The element of choice is as essential as it is fictitious.

Exactly. It’s getting harder and harder to discriminate against people, but we’ll always find a way.

In today’s Slate, Chris Suellentrop makes the point that there is a real debate to be had on the merits of privatizing social security:

Here’s what a straightforward discussion of the philosophy behind the Social Security system would look like: Democrats support welfare for old people, on the grounds that it creates a safety net for capitalism’s losers, who might otherwise live in poverty. Republicans oppose welfare for old people, on the grounds that it reduces incentives to work and save, it gives the government too much money to spend, and it makes people overly dependent on the government for their retirement. That’s an honest debate. Let’s have it.

Right. Exactly. And I tend to believe that the ravening horde of privatizers would lose that debate because, as laudable as the opposing sides’ points may be, they just can’t compete with the specter of our twilight years darkened further by the shadow of poverty.

However … the article also mentions that a poll of this country’s younguns — a sector of the population to which I no longer belong, alas — shows that while only 19% of them believe that there’s a pressing social security crisis, 60% like the idea of private accounts. One can only hope that this is because they don’t yet know that the Bushies see privatization as one step in a process that includes massive benefit cuts to the program. They come not to praise social security, but to bury it.

So the real weapon in this battle is information: its effective use, on our side, and its effective suppression, on theirs. Which is to say, the bad guys have spray-painted their black hats white, and someone needs to call them on it.

We’ve had our dog for almost three years now, and, although he’s calmed down a lot since he first howled his way into our quiet lives, he’s still, despite our best efforts, a pain in the ass. The battleground of our Beagle War is strewn with the bodies of our attempts to control him.

We took him to group training classes, in the first early, hopeful days, but spent so much time keeping him from eating the other dogs that we didn’t get much out of it at all.

We sought some unofficial advice from a dog therapist, a friend of a friend, who suggested that we try patience and love. Our dog sniffed at patience and love, looked at us quizzically, then ate them. And pissed on the rug. Next.

We tried positive reinforcement: lavish praise for the slightest feints toward obedience, copious treats, visions of a fields of snausages, acres of discarded table scraps, awaiting him in the afterlife, should he follow the true and righteous path. No dice.

We tried negative reinforcement: stern admonitions, rattling coins in empty soda cans, pinch collars, subsonic blasts of punishing sound. No dice. He just glances up from whatever carnage he’s wrought, his mournful gaze seeming to say: “Look, you’ve already cut off my balls. What else do I have to fear?”

So it was a relief to find this article, from some guy who has lots of pets and seems to know what he’s talking about:

There’s nothing approaching consensus about who or what a good trainer is or which training theory people ought to embrace. Yet the underlying premise of most obedience classes is that a dog can be trained and socialized in just a few hours. This is almost never true, and it’s the kind of expectation that leads people to feel like they’ve failed when it’s more likely they’ve been misled. It requires an estimated 2,000 repetitions, behaviorists say, before most dogs can fully learn a behavior. If you’ve told Ellie to “sit” 1,000 times, and she complies half the time, you haven’t failed, and neither has she. You’re both halfway there. Training also requires that we understand the animal nature of dogs, their love of rules, ritual, food, and reinforcement. Let dogs be dogs—it’s an honorable thing to be. Because many owners prefer to view their pets as soul mates, therapists, ethereal beings, even mind-readers, we give them too much credit, make them too complex, muddying our communications.

Of course, we’re in the three-to-four thousand repetition stage, but our problems are compounded by the fact that our dog is (1) a pound-puppy, twice over, and therefore naturally skittish and insecure; and (2) a beagle. Beagles are incredibly stubborn dogs, and not at all susceptible to ratiocination. Our vet says they’re essentially noses with four legs, governed almost entirely by the sweet siren song of scent. You can’t train a beagle to stay when there’s something yummy-smelling over the next rise. And there’s always something yummy-smelling over the next rise.

But still. There’s hope.