Lexicography Watch

Hydrogenated oil
became
Trans fat.

Question for discussion: Why?

I Hate Jonathan Swift

I am pretty sure I know the difference between Sunni Muslims and Shiites. Shiites believe that the rightful caliph is a descendent of Muhammed's daughter, while Sunnis, I guess, have no particular opinion. Or maybe they do, but it's definitely not the same guy the Shiites think. I'm not sure if there are any other major doctrinal differences.

Doctrine only tell us so much, though. I could tell you that the difference between an Anglican and a Catholic is that Catholics obey the Pope, whereas Anglicans obey the king and his archbishops. That doesn't tell us what Anglicans and Catholics are like, though. Why do they (did they) hate each other? What stereotypes do they have about one another? I know, of course, that there is lingering resentment over Henry VIII, the Spanish Armada, the Gunpowder Plot, the Glorious Revolution, and the Stuart pretenders. Anglicans consider Catholics treacherous and chaotic, and Catholics consider Anglicans dictatorial and usurpy.

But this is not something you could learn just by looking at the doctrine. I guess you could infer, if you were clever, that loyalty to a foreigner is something that would bother patriotic people who are not so loyal. But in the Shia-Sunni case, it's never made explicit. People with different religions, even religions as slightly different as Shiism and Sunnism, seldom get along very well, but they usually don't loathe one another either unless something is up.

Is it all just resentment over Saddam Hussein? That doesn't explain why the two factions have been fighting for thousands of years. I guess you could just chalk it up to a cycle of reprisal, but my original question remains. What do Shiites and Sunnis really think of one another? I'm sure each group considers the other "barbaric" and "heretical" and other generic evil terms. But if you have an enemy faction, you can't just leave it at that. In World War II, Americans had very particular things they hated about the Japanese, things that couldn't just be applied to any enemy. What does your average Shiite think of Sunnis? How are they different from him?

For that matter, how different are Shiites and Sunnis? Do they wear different clothes, or eat different meals? At least the Hutus looked different from the Tutsis. If Sunnis and Shiites are no more than Littleendians and Bigendians, then things in Iraq are even worse than they're saying. How do you get identical twins to stop hating each other?

Gentlemen, Start Your Pandering

Yes, friends, Mitt Romney has a MySpace page. I'm sure you're asking why, but when you consider the horribly low amount of effort that went into it -- why not? Lots of other presidential hopefuls have one too, but I think Mr. Romney's is my favorite. The mostly blue and white background image melds perfectly with the blue and white text. He is interested in "public service, of course" (of course!) and his favorite TV program is "all the local news stations." Who likes local news?

His favorite movies are revealing. He thinks Han Solo shot first. This MySpace is "so that more people can learn about me and my ideals." What does it say about Mitt Romney when he says the hero of the most popular movie of all time was a cowardly backstabber? As George Bush says, agree or disagree, you know where he stands.

Also note that he belongs to the group "~MITT ROMNEY FOR PRESIDENT 2008~". He hasn't announced his candidacy to the Old Media yet. Should we take this as a sign? "Mitt Romney for President -- I designed my own MySpace in 5 minutes"

Time

Science has done it again. They've taken a perfectly normal concept, and pushed it to the bounds of unbelieveability. There was a happy time when a second was something that happened every 1/60th of 1/60th of 1/24th of a day. And a happy time it was, when they cured smallpox and wrote Paradise Lost.

Then, as I understand it, the French Revolutionaries gave us the metric system, and decided that from here on out, seconds would be defined in terms of years. Never mind that, for the layman, there is no point whatsoever in relating seconds and years. They are different realms of experience, and even though you can say so-and-so many seconds are in a year -- why would you want to? Unless you're studying things that take a long time, and things that take a short time, and comparing them, it just doesn't come up.

Needless to say, that was considered insufficiently arcane. After a bunch of switches, the International Bureau of Weights and Measures now defines a second as

the duration of 9,192,631,770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the caesium-133 atom.This definition refers to a caesium atom at rest at a temperature of 0 K.

You can't do this to me, IBWM. Don't rearrange the referents behind my back. If I'm going to keep talking about seconds for the rest of my life, I would like to be talking about something where I know what the hell is going on.

Seconds are a familiar concept, okay? They're a perfectly normal, human, everyday length of time. It's like science has conspired to turn the second into something as monstrous as possible. Caesium is a liquid metal that explodes on contact with almost anything. And at zero degrees Kelvin too, a temperature which it is actually not possible to reach. They couldn't use, say, a carbon atom at 72 degrees Fahrenheit?

I don't even know what "hyperfine" means. Whatever. It means scientists, as usual, are being irresponsible with our language. Look here:

*Tick*

That's a second. Somebody tell the IBWM.

It's the "Crammed" that Gets You

I wish I could paint, because I have some really good ideas for rendering this in my mind's eye.

A Canadian man who could not figure out how to deal with his girlfriend's feverish 10-month-old daughter put the baby into a freezer to cool her down, a local newspaper reported on Friday... The Canadian Broadcasting Corp. said the mother found the girl crammed into the freezer alongside ice cubes and hamburger meat.

Note, ice cubes. Not ice cube trays, but ice cubes.

Saddle Point Intersection

Saddle points are common. As you know, a saddle point is -- not to be nerdy -- a point where if you go forward or backwards, your path slopes down, and if you go right or left, your path slopes up. All true mountain passes are saddle points, and I am sure you can notice dozens of saddle points in your own home, even as you read this. (If I am ever an 8th grade math teacher, this will be one of my homework assignments).

So how come road intersections are never saddle points? Admittedly, intersections are seldom steep, and motorable saddle points are seldom steep -- but sometimes they are. Usually though, two roads meet such that one road is level while the other goes up, or one road goes up to the right while the other road goes up to the front, or something like that. Sometimes two roads meet on *top* of a hill, and then all four tributaries run down. Of course, the opposite never happens (the intersection would flood) but that's not a problem with saddle points, which are locally flat.

Why so few saddle point roads, then? There are cases when a saddle-point intersection is the only road configuration that makes sense. Imagine two hills, with a pass between them. There is a city on top of each mountain, and a city on each side of the mountain range. Any sensible engineer would build a road over the pass, and then a road down from each city, to meet at the pass. Like magic, saddle point road.

When you come to think about it though, intersections like these probably have their greatest application in epic fantasy literature. Think of the symbolism. The hero arrives at an intersection. Two roads go up into the twin mountains, which represent opposite, exclusive fates he must decide between. One road descends into the (symbolic) plains. Or, he can go back and return to the land of his birth. He stands considering as the sun sets in the west, over one of the roads. When dusk has almost faded, he makes his choice. He sets out -- but in which direction?

End Part II -- The Cup of the Ancients

Questions That I am not Sure How to Answer

In the past, I have wondered such things as, "What's the farthest anybody has ever run at one time," and, "What's the hardest mountain in the world to climb?"* These are questions with clear, well-defined answers, answers which are obviously of great interest to lots of people out there, but I have no idea how to get there from here.

What's even worse, even if the Head Librarian of the Internet did know the answer, how would he classify it so that curious parties could look it up themselves? These are little bits of trivia that fit in no known encyclopedic category. You could classify them under "fun facts," and I'm sure someone has, but that provides no help for looking them up. Even using all my internet tricks, I don't know how to find the answers. (I still don't know the answer to the running question. On the other hand, I found out that the hardest mountain in the world to climb is none other than K2. Completely by accident, I found it out.)

I mention this because I have been wondering: Do any US Congressmen smoke? And if not, who was the last smoker in Congress? I'm not talking about port and cigars with the captains of industry at Delmonico's, but just everyday cigarettes. I know smoking is no longer "cool", and congressmen have to stay carefully on top of the latest trends to remain in office (that is why you never see Senators playing with Tamagotchis anymore), but smoking is also a really hard habit to quit. If there was a representative who smoked ten years ago, he's not likely to have stopped. Unless his district suddenly swung against tobacco in the last decade, cigarettes just aren't a voting issue.

Perhaps all the congressmen who used to smoke have simply retired for other reasons. They presumably have worse health than the average lawmaker, so maybe they all just died. Still, it's hard to believe that nobody who smokes has been elected to take their places. You wouldn't expect the representative from Asthmatown, CA to smoke, but in some parts of the country, smoking must be a regionalistic sacrament. Am I supposed to believe that the congressmen from central Virginia and North Carolina don't want to support their hometown industries? You might as well expect to see a congressman from Jamaica who didn't drink rum.

So assume there are legislators who smoke. Where would you find them? They don't list it on their webpages. It's hard enough to find one who smokes at all; we can't expect them to be proud of it. On the other hand, their websites don't say, "I don't smoke" either. Probably they don't want to alienate the nicotine vote. Google turns up nothing for "congressmen who smoke," so there's not some black list on an anti-smoking website somewhere. I only have so many tricks. Typing congressman and smoke into a search engine just produces pages of anti-smoking blather. Is it safe to assume that if a representative writes anti-smoking press releases, he doesn't smoke? I don't know.

I guess I'm going to have to shelve this wonder for the moment, and hope the answer comes to me in time. In the past few months, I unexpectedly discovered that one congressman writes raps, and that there is such a thing as Second District Trivia. Who knows what tomorrow will bring? The future is bright, my friends, and the facts are just around the corner.

Diplomatic Language

Since the days of Leibniz and Molotov, "diplomat" has dropped off as a profession that hopeful mothers want for their sons. Nobody studies at Princeton to become a diplomat. Everybody who's anybody would rather be an investment banker. But diplomacy is as important as ever. Yes, there are fewer countries than in 1648, but far more than in 1900. Someone has to do the negotiation, so I'm sure there are still ambassadors (and not the fake, political appointee kind) somewhere.

If there are, is diplomacy still messed up? Presumably, the main requirement in becoming a diplomat is the ability to recognize your country's interests, and go for them, whatever it takes. Getting confused, flustered or fooled is positively the worst thing you could do as a negotiator. In a country of 300 million, I am sure a thousand people possess the character necessary to make excellent diplomats.

Then why are diplomatic language and manners so, well, diplomatic? Assuming the opposing side's foreign office is as well trained as yours, they're not going to be swayed by flattery, euphemism, embassy dinner parties, insults, nasty language or even being spat on. These are intelligent people, right? When you're conducting public diplomacy, of course, all bets are off. When Bismarck published the Ems Dispatch, he knew the effect it would have on the French public. But the public can't be expected to understand diplomacy. Foreign ministers should know better. Don't they mentally strip the flowers out of the flowery language?

It's all just words people. Keep your eyes on the prize.

Suspension

I think one of the biggest things to decide, when you are being suspended, is what facial expression you would like to be photographed with. Would you rather go with the meditative one, so that everyone will say "what a singularly deep young man this deep young man must be," or the nonchalant one, like oh, hello, I didn't expect the press. Luckily, most young suspenders have this resolved for them, as they naturally default to the "stupid" expression.

Further thoughts: they don't seem to like to talk about how much it hurts, and they probably wish that the thesaurus had more entries under "ritual" than just "rite". It will bring me censure, but I'm going to go on the record and say that suspension is dumb.

What Can You Say

I'm overwhelmed. The war in this man's psyche is no longer subconcious. It's, like, superconcious. I can't believe he's not aware of it.

But seriously, seeing something like this makes me sad. There are dozens of things you can say, all of them as intelligent as anything else. They have probably all been said already, by people who are cleverer than me. I'm going to take a different tack, and say that I think this is sweet and nice. Like Congressman Major Owens (who will rap his last rap as this congress ends) this is a man who has put himself out there in public with absolutely no self awareness.

Sure, he makes little jokes, as the captions of his fashion photos. But they're the kind of jokes your father might make if he found himself in that position. They don't suggest that he understands the full, sublimated horror of what he is doing. Like here. (Because I am a creep, I am also going to take the opportunity to poke fun at his cats, which are actually A) a weasel and B) a computer printout of a cat.)

Most of these dolls have ugly leers, but some of them seem to have pensive or rueful expressions. The bored dolls are certainly less ridiculous, dressed up and posed. But actually buying one, mindful of what you're buying it for? That's just wheels within psychosexual wheels. But there I go. Making fun of someone like this is nothing but the psychic mugging of an unarmed man.

So, as we back off shyly, let me just note that if you bought a Real Doll, you could probably have a lot of fun using it to play practical jokes, using a video camera to capture people's responses to a motionless, leering person. But is that pastime any cleaner, from a Freudian perspective? One way or another, you're not going to spend thousands of dollars on a fake woman unless you have "issues". The owner of this webpage is no worse than the rest of us, and that is absolutely the last I am going to say about him and his Doll Coffeeshop.

Zip

Okay, so I was reading this article, of irrelevant content, and it had this unsurprising line:

And there is no evidence at all — “zero,” “zip,” “nil,” experts said — that combining three or more drugs is appropriate or even effective in children or adults.

First I thought, let's try to be more creative, New York Times staff writers. Those strings of negative adjectives are yawn. But then I noticed that it was the experts were saying zero and zip and nil. And the way they phrased it, it sounds like they found one expert who said zero, one expert who said nil and one expert who said zip.

That last expert is on to something. When was the last time you heard "zip" all by itself? Where does it even come from? It's time to rehabilitate this forgotten adjective.

• I have zip to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat.
• Zip man is an island.
• Thou shalt have zip other gods before Me.
• Senator, I served with Jack Kennedy, I knew Jack Kennedy, Jack Kennedy was a friend of mine. Senator, you are zip Jack Kennedy.

Thanksgiving: Stupid?

Of all the American holidays, Thanksgiving occupies the biggest space in our culture without having anything much to occupy it with. I don't know that for sure, of course. Even Christmas or Easter have very few traditions that are common to all Americans. Christmas has something with Santa and Jesus and presents... but beyond that, you're free to insert your own, weird, old-country heritage. Thanksgiving is a relatively recent, secular holiday. There shouldn't be people who celebrate Thanksgiving in unusual ways, any more than there are people who celebrate the 4th of July in unusual ways. If you celebrate it, you're celebrating it as an American, with traditions that should be open to anyone and endemic in our culture.

And what do I see? On Thanksgiving people cook a turkey and eat it, often with their families. Sometimes they watch football, but they were going to do that anyway (or not, if they are like me). There's also the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade, which I am absolutely certain that nobody watches. The president pardons a turkey, too, which always seems to be the highlight of George Bush's year.

And-- and that's about it. Not that all this doesn't make Thanksgiving a more special day than usual, but no more unusual than any Sunday. People eat a big meal. Everything that happens on Thanksgiving happens on Christmas too, and more. Thanksgiving, like Flag Day, is a strictly inferior holiday. But lord how it is hyped. Do we really need 5 days of newspaper comics that are all about how much this character loves turkey? Unless it's a big holiday like Christmas or Halloween, the comics page usually doesn't start with the jokes until the day before.

Thanksgiving has become the official holiday of fall, even where other seasons don't get their own holidays. Look at any children's fall clip-art collection, and there it is: Turkeys and Pilgrims and cornucopias, like autumn was just a big run-up to Thanksgiving. It's just not a big deal, my friends. Turkey doesn't even taste good. It tastes like soap.

Targeted Toward Murderers Who Love Their Children, Apparently

Interesting trend in billboards burst into my consciousness yesterday. There was a billboard in a nearby slum that said, "Seven to 10 is a long time to wait for Daddy." It was a message asking people not to commit murder, as a public service announcement!

I don't know if that approach has been tried before, but I think it's worth a shot, especially considering the huge number of billboards around here, and the incredibly low rents they charge. If the murder thing doesn't work out, they can always cover them in flypaper and try to control the mosquito/gypsy moth population. Who knows? They might even catch some murderers that way.

Wikipedia on Recent History

Remember, Wikipedia is the people's encyclopedia, so its opinions are definitive:

• 2006 is the current year, however many fads and trends have filled this year.
• 2005 was another prime year in the decade.
• In 2004 the United States was facing a divided election and hurricanes.
• 2003 was an excellent year of the decade.
• (2000): The new millennium brought in new hopes of a better future and even more successful era than the 1990s. It was time to say goodbye to the 20th century.
• 1998 was the year of the soccer mom.
• 1996 was considered a great year of the 1990s.

In the future, our children will learn about this decade. We faced divided elections and hurricanes, but we had some great years anyway.

The True Mold Will Bring You Life...

Whereas the false mold will take it from you.



Choose the petri dish Jesus Christ drank from at the Last Supper.

Periodic Table of the Nerds

Did you know there are people who collect the elements? There are others, but this guy is the main one. I'm not sure what the attraction is. Mostly, it involves buying lumps of transition metals, which you put on your shelf, and they sit there, heavy and gray. Some of them rust, and some of them do not. Typical description: "It's a nice enough metal, but not distinguished in any particular way from others around it that are cheaper, stronger, and more stable in air."

Then you have the elements like beryllium and fluorine and rubidium, which have to be kept in sealed glass ampoules, which can never ever be handled, because if you break them we'll all die.

Finally, you have the elements that are really hard to get, which you can't get, which you can only get in tiny amounts, and which are probably monitored by the FBI. If you want a sample of technetium, fine, but you're just going to keep it in a lead box, while it tries as hard as it can to give you cancer. Is that a rewarding hobby? It is to some people.

If I were an element collector, I would collect only the elements that didn't fall into these categories. Those are the fun elements. You can cast sulfur on your kitchen stove. If you explode sodium, the residue will attract butterflies. And apparently he hates white phosphorous and refuses to keep it around (possibly to protest US imperialism?)

Finally, we receive this dispatch from the front. A friend of his tasted all the salts of chlorine. Conclusion? Table salt is the only one that tastes good. It is bold men like these who push the boundaries of our knowledge outward.

Free Saddam!

Or something. I'm not sure what Human Rights Watch wants here, other than "a ridiculous emphasis on due process." Seems counterproductive. This can only result in Saddam being lynched by a mob of angry parents, then coming back as a ghost to murder children in their dreams. Bad idea.

Idea for Easter Greeting Card

Heavy Industry

People are always telling you to do what you love, and the money will follow. I could see how this maxim was useful if you were starting a restaurant, or a bookstore or a string quartet or something. There are millions of people who would love to do each of those things. It even makes sense that people would go into software, or airplane manufacture, or construction. I can imagine the appeal of seeing an airplane that you built yourself (with the help of thousands of employees.) It probably brings tears to your eyes, if you're that kind of person.

On the other hand, there are some industries where you have to wonder, why would anyone bother? This applies to foundries, industrial farms and container shipping, but take chemical plants as an example. Someone has to produce all the boron or chloromethane or whatever. But what's the incentive? I took this passage almost at random from Wikipedia:

A mixture of one part ammonia to nine parts air is passed over a platinum gauze catalyst at 850 °C, whereupon the ammonia is oxidized to nitric oxide. As the gas mixture cools to 200–250 °C, the nitric oxide is in turn oxidized by the excess of oxygen present in the mixture, to give nitrogen dioxide. This is reacted with water to give nitric acid.

You don't have to read that if you don't want to; I guarantee it is real boring. I suppose it's possible to find things like that interesting (but only barely), but it's a long way from that to setting up a factory in the Mississippi Delta and making nitric acid by the ton. I'm not even sure how you would if you wanted to. Suppose you have a big fondness for sodium hydroxide. What's the first step? Buying the huge vats and electrodes and consoles? Getting a license? Is there licensing? Where are you going to get the countless million dollars that you need? If I were a banker, you would be laughed out of my bank.

And even once you get the factory set up, what's the payoff? Well, obviously, money, but you would have to be a ridiculous miser to think that any amount of money was worth the sheer hassle. People hate chemical companies. Everyone needs methyl isocyanate, but nobody likes to think of all the Bhopals that go along with if. It gets worse, too, because heavy industry is the most likely to face A) government regulation and B) unions. That's probably how it should be, but dealing with the EPA and the shop steward must suck all the remaining joy out of business.

Of course, I'm exaggerating. Nobody starts factories nowadays. Not only is America being deindustrialized, but all the remaining factories are controlled by corporations. Dow Chemical is the one who has to deal with the government and the purchase orders and the teamsters, not you. And because they're a big corporation, the annoyance is diffused, and everyone's job is bearable. But those corporations had to start somewhere. Am I supposed to believe that Abraham DuPont got his start making nitric acid at home, before he worked up enough money to buy a factory? (He sealed off the linen closet in his bathroom. That was the nitric oxide closet, and then he ran a garden hose from the keyhole into the bathtub, and bottled it with a dipper and funnel. His wife thought it was exasperating.) Maybe getting into business was easier back then, but it couldn't have been much easier.

And if it *is* true that setting up a chemical company now is too much trouble, well, that's kind of sad too. There's a monopoly in the NaOH market, but nobody can be bothered to break it up. And our industrial economy is built on this ossified basis? William Jennings Bryan almost said it best:

Burn down your cities and leave our chemical plants, and your cities will spring up again as if by magic; but destroy our chemical plants and the grass will grow in the streets of every city in the country.

Tonight's Wikipedia Sentence

"Named after a rather tall man with crazy curly hair, Gabe Night consists of games, beer, and fun."

Molasses

In the Uncle Remus stories, molasses is the big treat. As I remember, Brer Rabbit etc. ate a considerable amount of it over the course of the saga. I guess we are supposed to infer that molasses was popular in the postwar South. Most people don't question that, because hey, molasses is sweet, and you can make cookies with it.

But have you ever tried pure molasses, right out of the jug like these characters seem to prefer it? I was curious once, and had a teaspoon full. I was sick for the rest of the day. I can still taste it now, and it is making me sick to write about it. There was so much sulfur, and so much iron in there, that I am surprised they didn't precipitate out and leave a coating of grit on the bottom of the bottle. It was like taking "treacle and brimstone." It was like eating matches and nails, or coal smoke. It was horrible.

I suppose it's possible that the Uncle Remus characters were eating unrefined molasses, something that was mostly sugar syrup. But considering how poor they were, I bet they couldn't afford anything better than ooze. Moreover, I would assume the incentive to the sugar factories was low. Selling high-grade molasses would hardly be cost effective. But if I were so poor that I couldn't afford sugar, I would positively rather go the rest of my life without sweets than drink molasses.

Question for Discussion: How is brer pronounced? Is it pronounced like a shortened brayer? Or is the E pronounced as a short E, or a schwa? None of those sound like the way an actual person pronounces brother. This is why we need to ask WWI veterans what Victorians sounded like, while there's still time. Their dialect writing just does not match up with any dialect I ever heard. See also Mr. Dooley.

Sharing Needles

You always hear that one of the likeliest ways to spread HIV is to share needles. It probably is a convenient way, if you were interested, but why would you think it was a good idea to share needles in the first place? Junkies are probably stupider than average, but you would have to be very stupid indeed to reach adulthood without hearing that used needles are dangerous, or at least reasoning it out for yourself.

So why do heroin addicts share needles? When they congregate for a heroin session, do only one or two people remember to bring their hypodermics? Probably so, especially because needles cost money, and every spare dollar that a junky gets is likely to be spent on heroin.

I wouldn't let them use poverty as an excuse, though. It may be a bad idea to reuse syringes in more than one person, but couldn't each person just have his own syringe, that he used again and again for months at a time? He could keep it in a sophisticated case with his monogram on it. Like a cigarette case. That would be stylish, and if there's one thing addicts are short of, it's style. Reusing your own needles wouldn't cost any more than borrowing from somebody else, either. Not in the long run, at least. Which is what you should be concerned about, because when you are into heroin, you are in it to win it.

Liberty Dollars

Completing our daily examination of crackpots (Tommy Thompson is so a crackpot, even if he may seem boring) let us have a look at Liberty Dollars, the official currency of people who refuse to recognize the jurisdiction of US courts.

It is printed by Bernard von NotHaus, formerly of the Royal Hawaiian Mint. I have no way of telling whether that is his real name, but I bet he keeps his real name secret. Then, when they implant the Verichip tracking device, it will be completely fuddled.

The Liberty Dollar is favorably referred to by such leading lights as the Idaho Observer, who probably moved to Idaho because when he lived in New Jersey, people laughed. Another member of his circle is this guy, who writes at length about "Geocaching", which is a fancy word for burying your money so that the revenuers can't get at it. And there is this dude, who advertises "Simple Orca Solutions 2000", to be paid for in Liberty Dollars.

Naturally, there's a campaign to get retailers to accept the Liberty Dollar, but I can't see it catching on, if the flakiest merchants are the face of the movement. I don't know about you, but I'd prefer to spend my REAL money on meat and potatoes, and buy my serotonin and BioElectric Shields with fake fiat money. It seems more appropriate that way.

The American Liberty Dollar website has a store of its own, selling exactly one product, and it's not Liberty Dollars. No, it's a hat and shirt combo. Very nice, but you are hardly going to get rich on kahki tees. We are trying to build a new economy here.

P.S. Milton Friedman died. I think we should all use the Liberty Dollar in his honor, starting... right now.

The No Verichip Inside Movement

Speaking of Tommy Thompson, it looks like he's a Verichip hypocrite. He wants other people to get them, but he won't himself. I don't think I blame him. I bet it really hurts when you smash the part of your hand that has the Verichip in it. This is exactly the kind of product that you would expect people to get upset about, and sure enough. Interestingly, there are no websites that oppose it from a Christian Revelations perspective. I guess this is because they thought it would be too obvious.

So, back to No Verichip Inside. They oppose Verichips because -- we'll let them say it:

The We the People will not be Chipped - No Verichip Inside Movement, is based on the irrefutable fact, that we believe in mankind's inalienable human rights that are absolute and can not be debased, nor perverted.

I guess it's just "one of those things." They say they need a Mandarin Chinese translator, I guess to spread the word about Verichips in China. Because, you know, Verichips would be the one thing that tips China into totalitarianism. Like, they might force all the Tibetans to get one, and then they would know if they were in Tibet, or elsewhere (stirring up trouble no doubt.) Pretty nightmarish.



Second, please note, in their animated GIF, this still frame. Nazi peanut butter? I hope you will join me as I say, "Yes, please."

Finally, Wikipedia says that the 16-digit number stored in each Verichip is "chosen by the user." The No Verichip Inside Movement has it all wrong. Freedom is the freedom to choose your own 16-digit number. When that is granted, all else follows.

Electioneering

Tommy Thompson is apparently running for president. We know this because he said he might, and as ABC reported, he has made "four trips to Iowa in the last six weeks." Really, making any trips to Iowa in any time frame should be a giveaway that you are running for president, because, come on, Iowa. He's from Wisconsin so maybe he has relatives there, but I don't think that's the kind of trip they're referring to.

But what kind of trip do they mean? Lots of politicians have books ghost-written for them, so they can discuss them at the Dubuque Borders and pretend that they aren't necessarily running for president. I don't think Thompson did. Is he just travelling around the state, giving speeches from bandstands, because the issues move him so deeply that he can't hold it in? How is the former governor of Wisconsin and all-around nobody going to draw a crowd in Iowa? Like absolutely everybody in the Midwest, his signature issue is ethanol subsidies (the fuel kind, not the good kind). Maybe he's really eloquent. You could probably retool the Cross of Gold speech by just changing "ethanol" for "silver". I would go to hear that.

If he's not giving speeches, what is he doing? Dropping in on people? Like walking up and down the main street of Des Moines and shaking hands? There is probably no way he could *arrange* to meet Iowans without looking transparently stupid. Even in January 2004, surprising people in diners and chatting with them was just not bearable. It would probably just make him look like a lonely billionaire, or something, to be introducing himself to strangers in October of 2006.

Yeah, I know what the real business is. He's probably giving little speeches to little groups of big men in little rooms about how much he favors ethanol subsidies. I guess the support of industrialists is important when you're trying to win their caucuses, but I am not clear on the exact mechanism of how. I suppose I have a lot to learn about politics, but I still hope he can work a reference to the crown of thorns in there somehow.

Better Flags

The American flag is not a very good flag. It has a picture of the sky on it. I didn't think the sky was one of our national symbols. Try saying it: "Each state is a star in our national sky." Does that sound like something an American would say? Let's try not to confuse the themes of our national narrative, people. The thirteen stripes are bad too. They're supposed to represent the original thirteen colonies, but it's not like those colonies are considered special in any other way. They don't each get an extra Senator. Each state ought to be honored equally for its decision to join the union. Back when the nation was founded, of course, the thirteen stripes stood for all thirteen states, but as we added more states and added more stars, we did not add more stripes. "F" for inconsistency. Also, the flag is so awfully busy. With that in mind, let's look at some redesigned Old Glories.

First, there's the option of just removing the stars. They do clutter it up, and you can still imagine the blue field as a night sky, if you believe the founding fathers were Zoroastrians or something. Just, like, an overcast night sky. I think this one is my favorite.



Or, because there are no longer 50 stars, and something has to be 50, why not 50 stripes? This was not my idea. It looks better than I expected, but too much like clothing. One problem, of course, is that either the top or bottom stripe has to be white, which might look strange. Also, the 7/6 ratio of top height to bottom height has to be abandoned, so it's a little lopsided. This has 27 short stripes and 23 long ones. Looked at from a distance, all the stripes seem to blend together, so why not...



A pink flag? I put the stars back, because a flag that's just pink and blue is a little dull. Even so, it might look better with fewer stars. Other than 13 and 50 though, what number is symbolic of America? They're nice colors, but I don't think it will ever catch on. Adoption of this flag is probably on the homosexual agenda somewhere.

Subject: Hunchback

Edward DeBono is looking for love. I think. Actually, I have no idea what he is talking about here. It might be a personals ad. If it is, it's certainly no less then we would expect from Mr. DeBono. He's so sweet and frank. I would answer his ad myself, but I don't think he swings that way.

On the other hand, he says, "This is not a matrimonial advertisement," so perhaps his motives are not as pure as we thought. Sorry ladies; he's not the marrying type.

The Breakfast President

Finally, in keeping with today's spirit of World War One, let us pause, and reflect on how Woodrow Wilson's head is shaped just like a canister of coffee:



This has to mean something.

How to Feel Like a Big Man

To feel big and important, all you have to do is consider. As I said above (below), in ten years, all the First World War veterans will be dead. If you're as young as I am, you're pretty certain to outlive every last one. All the Germans of the world couldn't do what you're about to. For extra macho, pantomime holding a machine gun in a few years as you read reports that the last veteran is dead (Will that make the newspapers? I hope so.) Ehhehhehhhhehheh!

I guess some people would consider it melancholy that even great soldiers like those all die eventually, but not me. The more great, heroic, legendary people die, the better I look in comparison. Augustus? Charlemagne? Napoleon? In at least one sense, I am greater than all of them put together, and pretty soon I'll outrank the entire American Expeditionary Force. Not a great triumph; as we established above (below), they're not well remembered. But when you consider that all you have to do is keep pulling air into your lungs and you're automatically better than General Pershing, it makes you feel pretty special.

It gets better of course. If you're reasonably young, you stand a very good chance of outliving every WWII veteran, too. Audie Murphy has nothing on you. And if you're lucky, you might outlive all the Vietnam veterans. Beyond that, it gets sketchy; are Gulf War survivors even worth outliving? Maybe it's just sour grapes, but it feels like these past 30 years have just been full of anti-heroes and bores. Who cares when George Bush Sr. dies? Honestly, if I died now, I would have outlived 99% of all the great men who ever lived. If I die at seventy-five, I bet that number goes up to a hundred. We're living at the end of history, folks.

Great War

Today, they had a special on NPR about World War One veterans. It was mostly about how they are the "forgotten veterans,." They are awfully old and mostly dead, so they seem justly forgotten, until you realize that you can't think of one piece of 1960's popular culture that refers to WWI veterans. So yeah, forgotten.

The special involved finding surviving veterans and interviewing them. The questions were all very boring, the kind of questions you could probably find good answers to in a book. "What was it like being drafted," and "How was it being in the navy [during this completely non-naval war because we couldn't find enough army veterans]?" Those aren't interesting questions. Obviously what is interesting about these people is that they are really old. In 10 years they'll all be as dead as every other Great War veteran, and what will we have gained? I think the interviews should have consisted of two questions: What do you hate most about the modern world, and what did Victorian people's voices sound like? Now that's reporting.

Shaving

Oh boy, another quizzical either-I'm-doing-something-wrong-or-you-are blog. I'm pretty familiar with the concept of shaving. You scrape a razor across your face, and the hairs that stick out catch on the razor blade and are destroyed. So just briefly, a couple of shaving questions.

Number one, what's shaving cream for? Does it make the hairs more prominent and hence more shaveable? I would think it would make them less prominent, as it raised the level of the hairless skin to the level of the hairy skin, and made everything smooth. If it's to soften the hair and make it easier to cut, well I've never noticed that hair did anything but break when you ran a razor over it, soapy or not. Sometimes I shave my face wet, and sometimes I shave it wet and soapy. Usually I shave it dry, and that's when I'm happiest. Nobody likes having a wet face.

Second, who cuts himself shaving? It's something that seems to happen a lot in popular culture. And then you put little bits of paper towel over the bloody spots, and go on with your day. I have never ever cut myself shaving. I've shaved with really sharp razors, and with razors that were 2 years old. The 2-year old razors didn't shave very well, but they didn't cut my face either. I know Henry David Thoreau's brother died from a shaving accident, but he was shaving with a straight razor. Straight razors can get going any which way and slice you from all angles. Everyone today shaves with a safety razor (except the people who shave with electric razors, but even they're not dumb enough to cut themselves, right?) Unless you jerk the razor sideways, how can you cut yourself with it? I hope nobody's face is so craggy that dragging a razor across it causes the blade to slice into the crags. I know mine isn't.

Finally, speaking of cutting yourself shaving, I have a Hygeine Tip for you. If you have a pimple that is painful, but too unformed to do anything with, just shave it off. Take the top of the pimple right off with a razor blade. This is likely to lead to skin infections, scarring, and a huge scab, but if it feels so good, how can it be wrong?

"Tell me more!"

If you love me, you will get me Electoral College Graduate for Christmas.



I don't know what the disclaimer button does, but there is no greater proof of friendship than funneling Government Contracts. "We use a cat to represent third-party candidates because everybody knows that cats are independent." Brilliant, old chum!

Inspiration Struck

I only have MS Paint, but when I saw this headline, I knew what to do.

Newspeak

Now to return to a world where modern medicine is true, let's express how annoyed I am by "good cholesterol" and "bad cholesterol" and the whole media. We're adults. We can understand modifiers other than good and bad. High-density and low-density, maybe? If you're going to talk to us in this weird newspeak, how about spreading it to some other areas? I would like to propose the following terms for adoption:

• Earth, other planets with atmosphere: Good planets
• Mars, etc: Bad planets
• Dracula in coffin: Good Dracula
• Dracula in England: Bad Dracula
• Supernovas: Bad stars
  
• Marbles stuck up somebody's nose: Bad marbles
• Marbles, elsewhere: Good marbles
• Smallpox in laboratory: Good smallpox
• Epidemic smallpox: Bad smallpox
• Quicksand: Bad sand

Cholesterol

The newspapers need to append little layman's descriptions to scientific words. Science is leading the country by such a wide margin that if they don't, nobody will know what they mean. The big pair these days is "good cholesterol" and "bad cholesterol". Those designations follow every instance of "HDL" and "LDL" in every newspaper. I bet Word auto-corrects it for you.

Why does this remind me of the four humors ? Do good cholesterol and bad cholesterol affect your mood differently? This is the modern age. Maybe people with high levels of good cholesterol post videos to YouTube and take lots of digital camera photos. Or bad cholesterol makes you talk on your cell phone all the time and browse Facebook. It's already known that high levels of LDL give you heart attacks. Wikipedia says low levels of cholesterol cause "depression, cancer, and cerebral hemmorage," so clearly it is important to keep these humors in balance too.

If we operate on this 6-humor model, what medical treatments are there? We already had fasting, bleeding, purging and enemas. (Can you lower your phlegm levels by blowing your nose?) Obviously you can lower your Bad Cholesterol levels by dieting. That's a technique that has been known since the nineteenth century, although they did not know how it fit into the humor framework. I'm not sure how you lower Good Cholesterol levels. Perhaps normal dieting reduces your Bad Cholesterol levels and Atkins dieting reduces your Good Cholesterol levels. That would explain how they both got inexplicably popular at the same time; they work on different humors. On the other hand, maybe the way to treat high Good Cholesterol levels is something else. Candidates include spinal taps, nose picking, or Q-tips.

"Mania"

A short story, AKA the fictional case study in my old psychology textbook:

Larry has been high as a kite for two weeks, and he loves it. He is on top of the world. His plan is to reorganize the United Nations so that he can eliminate war and world hunger. He has written out his plans during the night, when others are sleeping. The night, in many ways, is the best part of the day for Larry; that's when he can get all of his ideas down on paper. There are fewer distractions, and his pen practically flies off the paper. Occasionally, his inspiration almost seems divine, and he has to tell someone. Like last night he called a friend, at least a former friend, and tried to tell him about his plans for eliminating war. Larry wouldn't let him interrupt or get a word in, so he hung up. Larry flew into a rage. He kicked down the door, and started running, running to his friend's house. It didn't matter that it was two states over. He figured he should be able to get there by 6 A.M., and then back for his noon appointment with the local paper. Larry plans to get his ideas published in the paper.

Larry only ran a couple of blocks before his super marathon was diverted. He saw two stray dogs eating from a garbage can. After rounding up those two dogs, he spent the rest of the night chasing down stray dogs and cats and putting them in his apartment. They would be the first inhabitants of the animal shelter he would build outside the city this weekend.

At daylight, Larry decided to stop chasing dogs. He wanted to get a shower and breakfast before going to the paper. At the diner, Larry started talking to the man sitting next to him at the counter. Larry's speech was just being pushed out of him. His ideas were pushing his speech out, faster and faster; he was really "on." The guy next to him was getting a little nervous and looking for some place else to sit when Larry decided to buy everyone breakfast. He caught the waitress's eye, and she came over. Larry then hopped over the counter, pulled her in close with his arm around her waist and announced to the diner, "Folks, I am buying you all breakfast. It's on me, and the tip, little lady, that's something special -- you get me. I am taking you to Vegas for the time of your life." That's when the cook called the police.

This has possibilities.

Election 2006

Things I would like to see more of in victory speeches:

• Secret police arresting the (anti-establishment) candidate, never to be seen again
• The candidate proposes marriage to someone in the audience
• The ghost of the defeated opponent, whom only the candidate can see
• Obscene gestures
• The speech as normal, except instead of cheering supporters, it's the candidate's teddy bears
• A massive cerebral hemorrhage, and the candidate dies with a huge smile on his face

Things I would like to see more of in concession speeches:

• "The Jewish mercantile interest, which has worked secretly against my campaign from day one"
• The candidate announces that you had your chance, pulls out a remote, and detonates a hidden bomb
• The candidate tells his supporters, "you let me down. I trusted you, and you didn't come through for me."
• The candidate, giving his concession speech to a completely empty hall, except for the TV cameras. Echo a plus
• Sobbing
• The candidate, stinking drunk

Election Day

In honor of Election Day, we examine an electoral myth. Is John Murtha's district, PA-12, really shaped like an "upside-down Chinese dragon"? Where I come from, those are fighting words, so:



Original district. Looks nothing like a Chinese dragon, right-side up or not, right? But wait! A few slight modifications, and:



And... perfect! Look out Sharon, PA! You're in severe danger of a wealthy and auspicious apportionment process.

Don't Vote

The internet is clogged right now with people telling you to vote on Tuesday, especially if you live in the US. It is a scientific fact that, even more than voting yourself, urging other people to vote makes you a goody-goody. Not only are you assuming that you know more about politics than average (vain), you're assuming that other people's good-citizenship is in your hands, like you're standing between them and anarchy.

I'm going to break with the chorus and tell you, please don't vote. There are so many good reasons not to. First, there is virtually no chance your vote will make a difference. Most politicians run in enormous constituencies, and one vote has never decided a race since "Landslide Morton" in 1839. To think that your one vote will decide a race? Vanity. And even if your vote did technically tip the count in favor of the other candidate, a close result like that would be litigated to death, and the winner would be the one with the best lawyers or rioters or something.

Second, you should really only vote if you think you know more about politics than the median voter. Of course you probably do think that -- most people think they know more than most people about most things -- but be honest with yourself. Half of all voters aren't. In an ideal world of course, only the single most savvy person in each constituency would vote, but let's try to approach that figure as nearly as possible.

A corollary is that I shouldn't want you to vote. I naturally think I know more about politics than average, which means that everyone else on average knows slightly less about politics than average. Therefore, I don't want an arbitrary "other" person voting. Of course, it's another story if you don't live in my congressional district. (It's the long skinny one.) Then by all means vote if you feel like it, because I trust my readership to be smarter than average.

Still, there's something presumptuous about asking people to vote. How do you know they share your political affiliation? What if they like Lyndon LaRouche? Or Vermin Supreme? I guess people who like the same things are slightly more likely to support the same candidate than average, but you're probably not helping much in any event. Even more sickening is the thought that they don't care, that they just want to improve turnout regardless. This is kind of like saying you want to improve the wheat harvest, but if rats eat the surplus, that's good too. At least you did your agricultural (civic) duty by raising crop yields. Get a more useful goal. Raising voter turnout will only serve to get the least interested, least engaged, least knowledgeable citizens to the polls. Do you really want them controlling your future? Vox populi est vox dei, but there's something to be said for most people being kind of dumb when it comes to politics, too.

If you want to look at it this way, you can think of not voting as an act of charity. If you live in a district of N voters, staying home will give each of your neighbors 1/(N-1) extra votes, and all you have to do is keep your opinions to yourself. A Guy Fawkes Day bounty indeed. I don't know how someone got the idea that it was not only acceptable , but positively virtuous, to tell other people "here's how I think our government should be run. I know best, and I want to tell you all how to run your government." In normal life, that kind of behavior makes you a jerk. Modesty never hurt anybody.

Meanwhile, anything that begins "if you don't vote, you have no right to complain," or "people died for the right to vote" is beneath contempt.

Leg Room

To hear people talk, leg room is the biggest reason they don't fly any more. Upgrade to first class to get more leg room. Argue your way into the emergency exit rows to get more leg room. Walk across the Atlantic instead of flying to get more leg room. I think people are just using this as a "safe" explanation for why they hate to fly. Myself, I hate the security guards, who are like policemen but without the probable cause, and the fact that I have to wear my coat (if it's cold out) in the 80-degree airport, because it's too bulky to do anything else with, making me sweat like a cocaine smuggler whose condoms have just burst inside his stomach.

But when it comes to leg room, I must be missing something, because I have never suffered for lack of leg room, and I say this as the possessor of the longest legs I know. Oh sure, my legs have gotten cramped from sleeping in a little bed, or from just being seated for ten hours in a row. Anybody's would. But are airplane chairs very uncomfortable? When I sit in an airplane seat, my knees don't bump the chair in front of me, even if the owner has reclined it (in which case it's more of a can't-breathe issue). I can fit my feet well under the chair in front of me, without hitting my shins on the bottom. In short, I can place my legs in any "normal" leg position with perfect comfort. Either I have so much leg that I have left behind common paradigms of leg room, or most people are just whiny.

I have a feeling that what most people are talking about is their legs *falling asleep* on long trips. This happens to me too, especially because I am thin and all the arteries are close to the surface. Definitely not a problem of leg room though, and only a problem because you're sitting in the same place for so many hours, whether airplane or swively office chair. If you want to get up and stump around the cabin between Hawaii and Australia, I don't think anyone is prepared to stop you. You don't just have to sit there and complain.

I Am Definitely Not Going to Get an Answer to This Question

Suppose I have a hat with X slips of paper in it. All the slips have a different number printed on them. I have no idea how many slips are in the hat. It could be one or it could be a trillion. I draw a slip out of the hat, and read the number, then put it back. Then I repeat Y times, until I draw a slip I have drawn previously. What is the expected value of X, given Y?

I tried to solve this with the probability equations I know, but I got nowhere. On one hand, it's probably unsolveable (If X may be any whole number, that gives us a big spoonful of infinity.) On the other hand though, similar problems *do* look solveable. For instance, consider the problem where I have the same hat, and just keep drawing numbers. Eventually I have drawn A times and have drawn A - B different numbers. Then (surely) we can say something about the expected value of X given A and B. (e.g. if B is zero and A is large then X is most likely A, right?). Or maybe not and I am tricking myself.

Would it help, in the original problem, if we said X was definitely less than a trillion, and equally likely anywhere within that range? Probably, but for real world applications, that's unrealistic, and we certainly don't always know what the distribution of X is. So my gripe is: Drawing the first repeat number after Y tries certainly seems to tell us *something*. So how can we walk away with no more of an idea about X than we started with?

They Liked 'Em Fat and Boring

This site is slightly fun, if only to remind yourself: Yes, "War" was the most used word in the 1863 State of the Union address. Once you've made sure that all your historical ducks are in a row, you start to wonder why they bothered. Either you do know the pressing issues of each time period, in which case nothing here comes as a surprise, or you don't, in which case you are probably not the kind of person who would be interested to learn that "Appropriations" was the most used word in the 1834 SOTU.

It is handy, though, to confirm my belief that late 19th century politics were really really boring. Take a look at the 1893 State of the Union address. Biggest topic was imports, followed by ships, pensions, Indians, exports and June. Minor issues include acreage, arbitration, bullion and widows. There were lively people, like Bryan or Sherman or Roosevelt (but more like Harrison or McKinley or Cleveland i.e. stuffed shirts), but the issues were pure yawn.

All you Marxists out there can tell me that I'm wrong, that the Pullman Strike and the Homestead Massacre and free silver tell a stirring story of the noble masses and the evil industrialists. There may be people who have their passions stirred by Union Tales, but those people are now completely senile, as unionization sinks past weaponizing space in the list of compelling issues.

It is probable that economic issues were a big thing in the nineteenth century because there were so many very poor people. I can certainly understand how that makes deflation an important issue, but I can't understand how that makes it an interesting one. It takes a huge calamity like the Great Depression to make economic issues interesting to me. Today's economic woes put me to sleep. I don't want to say I'm more curious than the man on the street c.1892, but how interesting could he have really found monetary policy?

Moreover, it's not like interest in economic issues correlates to how well the economy is doing. At least, not in recent history. The common man has been doing progressively worse since 1970, but pocketbook issues haven't made any headway. Just the opposite; they've been replaced with social issues, because social issues are not boring, whatever else you can say about them.

So how did people find the time to care about money stuff? Had they just not invented social issues? There was prohibition and women's suffrage and xenophobia; those were pretty advanced in the 1890's. (Xenophobia was a voting issue but I never heard that the other two were.) Was there just nothing else to care about? Did they romanticize union problems as the Fair Prince Eugene Debs versus the Wicked Ogre Grover Cleveland (or vice-versa!) and then vote on that caricature? Or were they just smarter than us, and more attuned to their interests? I think if I had lived back then, I would have thought "Jesus Christ someone try to legalize abortion or illegalize cocaine already." I am a child of my times.

Schroedinger's Cat

Resolved with democracy:

Completely Unbelievable

Schroedinger's Cat gets my vote for best thought experiment of the century. It's so simple and stupid and vivid, and the responses to it are so lame. (Ex: "When an observer opens the box, he becomes entangled with the cat, so observer-states corresponding to the cat being alive and dead are formed, and each can have no interaction with the other." One of these is a universe where scandal results, when a congressman is discovered entangled with a dead cat.)

You can read some more of the attempts to explain away the entirely reasonable conclusion, that there never was any superposition, the nucleus either emitted a particle or it didn't, and the cat is definitely either alive or dead. Like absolutely everything else, those explanations are at Wikipedia, and they are far out.

Why are we so afraid of the simple answer? Quantum mechanics is bunk. I know, I know. Superposition is a well-observed phenomenon, double slit experiment, well-oiled theories and all that. But the people who believe in this tenet of quantum mechanics seem to get science completely backwards.

Everyone thinks that you go where the evidence leads you in science, but that is obviously not true. We need to start with some unquestionable beliefs to make any headway at all. For instance, we believe that we exist, our colleagues exist, that the inductive principle is true, and that our experience has something to do with what is going on out there. If Smith performs an experiment, there is no way the experiment can lead Smith to conclude that he doesn't exist. That is a core belief, and Smith has to assume that his instruments were broken, or that thugs broke into his laboratory and rewrote his figures. The conclusion that Smith doesn't exist is completely unbelievable. Note that it might actually be true, in a vague philosophical sense. But it is a conclusion we cannot reach from within science.

There's a pretty good case to be made that superposition is completely unbelievable. Superposition, if you got this far without knowing, is the theory that tiny objects can be X and at the same time not be X. I will leave it up to you to determine just how false this claim whether this claim fits in with the ones above, especially since it is irreconcilable with classical mechanics. Try applying the superposition principle to your own life sometime and see how far you get. "Being self-inconsistent" used to be the very definition of falsity.

Surely you agree that if quantum mechanics weren't a theory about incomprehensibly tiny and unfamiliar things, that nobody would give superposition a moment's thought. If Newton had "proved" that gravity functioned by an inverse square law and an inverse cube law, he would have been laughed off the stage. As above, it may just be "true" that atoms can decay and not decay at the same time. But before we can adopt such a radically inconsistent belief, we have to rule out literally everything else, and that includes "God did it".

So here you have two theories. One postulates a world that is forthrightly and obviously inconsistent, in the full meaning of the term. The other (my theory) is that everybody's measurements are wrong, or the world's scientists are insufficiently creative at explaining away the paradox. One and only one of those theories contradicts itself. Sure, the first theory is simpler, but simplicity is only supposed to be a tie-breaker in science, right? Adherents of the first theory don't even seem to care that it's inconsistent. They think if they are loud and proud enough, everybody will be too scared to bring that up. Maybe they've forgotten, themselves, but they really should think what they're getting into. Consider Schroedinger's Cat a reminder.

Hamlet Smokers

One more smoking thing. You're right, there's nothing creepier than a non-smoker who thinks about smoking a lot, but I don't see you having so many big ideas on your blog. So until you can get as far as I have without going to the cigarette well again and again, don't complain to me. Besides, I like the way it smells.

Reading the comments on that petition, or reading anything else these days, you see my favorite stock character, the regretful smoker. "I started smoking when I was ten and now I can't quit and I hate it every day and I wish I could quit and don't start."

These people apparently have the idea that there's nothing sexier than looking conflicted, perhaps from watching too many Hollywood thrillers. I dislike them for several reasons. First, if you really wanted to quit, you could. Unless you literally have no control over your limbs (sleepwalker, paralytic, puppet), your cigarette-smoking behavior is subservient to your desire. It is impossible to be able not to smoke, and to want not to smoke, and to smoke.

What I suspect they mean is: "When I'm full of nicotine, and full of dopamine, and not suffering through withdrawal, I can imagine never smoking again. When nicotine levels start to fall, I start to want to smoke." To translate this into "I wish I could stop smoking," however, displays a pathetic unreality: "I wish I always felt as good as I do when I'm drugged without having to suffer for it." You might as well eat a big expensive meal, then when the bill comes at the end, cry because you have to pay. You knew what you were getting into when you started the meal, and just because your desires are stated after dessert, that doesn't give you justification to denounce your hunger retroactively.

Moreover, I don't want to hear about your internal conflict. Other people don't bare their wounded consciences, you know. We didn't get to hear about how Lynndie England knew that tormenting those prisoners was wrong and that she shouldn't take photos but gosh did it feel good to make them grovel and kids; don't join the army. And we certainly didn't get to hear Ken Lay's internal dialogue, although it probably just would have sounded like a lot of oinking.

So why do smokers think we want to hear their Pilgrim's Progress? Perhaps the idea is to make themselves sound like fussy babies, the better to scare kids away. And maybe people like this are better role models for public health than Humphrey Bogart. (Lives saved by collective American whining: Ten) But gosh if they aren't making this a sorry place to live. I don't think I want to know that so many people in America hate themselves for what they've become.

If you want to quit, that's fine, but do it. Then you can become that other favorite character, the messianic ex-smoker. If you're going to keep smoking though, please smoke with a full heart. Inhale your cigarettes enthusiastically, like they apparently did in the TV ads that I have never seen. If I ever take up smoking, even if it becomes my personal demon, I'm going to pretend to love it. I'm going to prosletyze to kids, and recommend brands. If people think you don't have convictions, what are they going to think of you? Another flip-flopping Massachusetts liberal, they'll think, and you know how that comes out.

What Do You Think?

Remember back in 2004, when they took that poll? Of course you do. It was the one where about 70 percent of Republicans thought George Bush supported the Kyoto protocol. Lots of Republicans thought George Bush supported a lot of minor popular liberal positions (which those Republicans themselves supported.) Democrats laughed ruefully at that one. I guess some of them thought they could score big political points that way, but of course they were wrong.

I bring this up because it is really hard to tell what preposterous beliefs people have unless you bluntly ask. Someone might go his whole life quietly believing in flying saucers, but never have to elaborate on his belief. After all, when was the last time you said that you didn't believe in flying saucers? It is not considered nice to try too hard to find out what other people believe.

Which is too bad, because I'm pretty sure we'd find out some scary things if we tried. Try reading this petition by Miss Christina Halven (8th grade). I know she's only 13 or so, but there are also hundreds of comments on her petition by people who are presumably allowed to vote. Skim through the petitions, and tell me what you think of my theory:

Many people, I can't say how many, believe that A) All the nicotine in cigarettes is added to cause people to become addicted to them. B) Formaldehyde and other "chemicals" are the chief dangers of smoking cigarettes (the Canadian government requires formaldehyde warnings to appear on some cigarette packages). C) The second biggest danger of smoking cigarettes is the tar and other hydrocarbons.

And the trouble is, unless you take a poll, a very carefully worded poll, you will never know if people believe these things. Maybe my theory doesn't fit anyone, but anti-tobacco advocates are just really inarticulate. So how about it Gallup? Something to relax with after the election. Honestly, the only thing that would be more jolly than a frank look at American opinions about cigarettes is those anti-smoking PSAs. Are they supposed to be as much fun as they are? Either way, life is good.