Russellings

09:19 pm - Time Declines Further

Dear Editors of Time:

I remember the mid-1980s, when desktop publishing made a huge variety of fonts available to the masses, and everybody felt compelled to use them all — from Aardvark to Zulu — on every term paper, brochure, poster, and letter to mom that they spat out of their spiffy new laser printers. That was about the same era in which Time decided it wanted to be able to use color on every single page in the magazine.

Well, the rest of us eventually developed some design sense, but it appears from Pages 60-61 of this week's issue (2012 May 28) that you guys still have your rainbow fixation after all these decades. Furthermore, it looks like you got a deep discount on a bunch of blank WHAM! BIFF!! BAM!!! KA-POW!!!! stars from some going-out-of-business comic-book company and were desperate to use them all up before they went bad.

Has it never dawned on you that the one place in your magazine where people are really interested in content — you know, actual words — would be the book reviews? It's frequented (I know this may come as a shock) by people who actually like to read. Sadly, this year's summer-books section continues a long, tragic decline in Time's ratio of text to square centimetres. And in 2012 it seems to have crossed the cotton-candy threshold and now comprises more empty space than substance.

As a long-time subscriber to your publication, I wish you well in your quest for the Newbery and Caldecott Medals, but it would sure be nice if every now and again you'd come up with something for those of us who still read it for the articles. Or maybe consider celebrating your 2nd century with a more appropriate name.


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anoesis [an-oh-ee-sis], n., a state of mind consisting of pure sensation or emotion without cognitive content

11:41 am - A Pome for My Prez

11:01 am - This Means War!

This essay was prompted by a Cap Times editorial entitled "Scott Walker’s war on teachers". I am a political opponent of Gov. Walker and loathe what he’s doing to Wisconsin in general and education in particular, but I had finally had enuf of the world’s most abused metaphor and shot the following off to the editor:

I know the Cap Times largely abandoned paper a couple of years ago. Did y'all throw out your thesauri at the same time? Here's what mine suggests as alternatives to "war": "conflict, warfare, combat, fighting, (military) action, bloodshed, struggle; battle, skirmish, fight, clash, engagement, encounter; offensive, attack, campaign; hostilities; crusade, movement, drive"
 
Have you noticed that everybody in America is concerned about the economy and unemployment and the deficit but nobody is talking about the $2,000,000,000,000 we've thrown down the twin ratholes in Iraq and Afghanistan? Do you suppose the American economy would be any better off if we'd spent that $2,000,000,000,000 here at home instead of destroying buildings, countries, and people in central Asia?
 
But no, those are just more wars, and wars are trivial things, a dime a dozen, not a cause for horror and revulsion. Heck, we've got wars on mosquitos every summer, wars on French fries in the school-lunch program, wars against lipstick on pigs (literally true); how bad can a couple of wars be that we can't even see?
 
Nobody who's ever been thru an actual war would ever mistake any of these phony wars for the real thing. But hardly any Americans have been thru actual wars, so we're stuck with this cheap knock-off of the term that you journalists have overused to the point where we're completely desensitized to it. We're reduced to pointing out how much wars cost, because people understand money, when the mere occurrence of the word "war" should suffice to make any civilized person blanch and prepare to puke.
 
War — like slavery, rape, and torture — is an awful, awful, awful thing, and we should always recoil from the mere prospect of it, to say nothing of the reality. Sadly, you and your ilk have leached it of its horror thru misapplication and overuse. You are the perfect exemplars of what George Orwell warned against with NewSpeak. When it is literally true that "War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.", then language has lost all meaning and the ideal of a well informed citizenry being able to govern itself is doomed.

11:07 pm - What the SG SHOULD Have Said

I'm not a lawyer, but I've had lots of experience at both the high school and college level as a debater and a debate judge, and I was appalled that the Obama Administration's solicitor general let himself get suckered into the broccoli trap. You will recall that this was a hypothetical question posed by one of the justices, along the lines of "You contend that the government can require people to buy health insurance because it's good for them. Do you also believe it can require people to eat broccoli because it's good for them?"

And the idiot actually tried to answer it! Furthermore, he went thru more contortions than an Olympic gymnast trying to point out how, no, he certainly would NOT require broccoli consumption.

I would've marked him way down for falling for an obvious snare like that. Here's what he SHOULD have said:

"First off, I have no idea why you're asking me. It isn't my opinion that matters. I have no power to force anybody to do anything.

"Second, even if I DID have such power, I know virtually nothing about broccoli or its health effects and am certainly in no position to render a spot judgment — little better than a guess — on it today.

"But finally, and most importantly, that's not what we're here to talk about. If Congress thot that eating broccoli was sufficiently important to the nation that everybody should do it, they would have passed a law to that effect. It would have been a POLITICAL judgment, which is what the legislative branch is all about. Instead, we're here talking about health care, which Congress DID make a political judgment about, and which they decided was so important to the general welfare that, all things considered, THIS was the way they had to go about it. If they ever make the same judgment about broccoli, I'll be back here again to answer your question, with much better preparation, but for today it's simply an irrelevancy. That wasn't what Congress agonized over for the better part of 2 years, and I'd rather talk about what they DID do than what they might have done."

I fear that the Obama Administration was ill served by this particular advocate.

11:47 pm - That Deep, Personal Relationship with Jesus Christ

"I have a deep, personal relationship with Jesus Christ."

Do you gag as much as I do at hearing this pious crap?

I've known my sister for over 6 decades. Altho I live in Madison, WI, and she lives in Denver, CO, so we only see each other every couple of years, I can tell you:
 • how tall she is.
 • what color her eyes are.
 • what color and how curly her hair is.
 • the different kinds of prescription drugs she takes, and what for.
 • which parts of her have been operated on.
 • which colleges she attended.
 • what jobs she's held.
 • what cities she's lived in.
 • what her hobbies are.
 • the names and breeds of the various dogs and cats she's had thru the years.
 • her favorite sports teams, and which one she has season tickets for.
 • the TV programs she watches regularly.
 • that it's her on the phone just from the sound of her voice.
 • her att¡tude toward eating meat.
 • whom she voted for in the last presidential election.
 • what kind of medical care she wants in case of a terminal illness.
 • her favorite color.
 • and about 50 other things.

Now that's a personal relationship. Could any of you Bible-thumpers manage even half a dozen comparable answers about your "deep, personal friend" Jesus? And, even assuming your overwrought imagination could in fact gin up a few stabs at them, what are chances that they'd agree with any other equally deluded True Believer? OTOH, you could ask any of my sister's other good friends about the above characteristics, and they'd give you the exact same answers I would. That's because my sister, unlike your Jesus, is real — a 3-dimensional, flesh-and-blood, living, breathing, real-world human being, with a life, preferences, substance, and history.

So, Mr. or Ms. True Believer, let's say you're walking across library mall one day, you see your good buddy Jesus in a crowd of folks ahead of you, and you holler "Hey, J, dude, wait up!". Would he?

Let's not kid ourselves. This would never even happen because there's no way you'd be able to pick Jesus out of a crowd. Heck, you couldn't pick him out of a 1-person lineup. You wouldn't know him if he walked up to you on the street and handed you his business card. (In fact, it would tickle me pink to see your reaction if somebody actually did exactly that.)

So we both know exactly what your claim to have a "deep, personal relationship with Jesus Christ" is. It's bullsh¡t. You know it's bullsh¡t. Everybody else knows it's bullsh¡t. The only reason you keep on repeating this bullsh¡t is because it's the slogan of the club that some con artist or charlatan has suckered you into believing you really want to be a member of. All you have to do is keep repeating the magic bullsh¡t phrase "I have a deep, personal relationship with Jesus Christ" and you can keep going to the club meetings. (Provided you keep paying the dues, too; let's not forget what's really important here.)

But don't think that repeating that phrase is going to win you anything but contempt or possibly some degree of pity from anyone with a functioning brain. All you're really demonstrating is that you don't know diddly about real relationships or the way the real world really works. You are, in short, a pathetic dupe. And full of bullsh¡t, to boot.


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"Atheism is not a religion, it's a personal relationship with reality." — Dr. Dave, 2010 July 1

01:01 am - Timing the Recall Election

You've gotta figure that the Wisconsin GOP is popping champagne corks tonight as they see the calendar proposed by the Government Accountability Board for the recall elections. June 12. All the college students will have scattered to the 4 winds for summer jobs, vacations, study abroad, etc. Those who took the time to register in their college towns for the May 15 primary won't have lived the requisite 28 days in their new location by June 12, and how many of them will have a clue about either (1) re-registering at their summer municipality on May 16 or (2) applying for an absentee ballot from their college municipality prior to June 5?

Meanwhile, the other big group of victims of the GOP voter-suppression law, the elderly, will be involved in family vacations and summer travel. The Fitzwalkerstanis don't have to prevent all of them from voting to make a difference, just hold down the turnout in that demographic by 10-20%.

Yup, looks like the Republicans managed to stall the whole proceeding just long enuf. Gov. Walker got those extra 20 days to challenge petitions and didn't even try to use them. All he really wanted was the time. Absent that 20-day delay, the recall would've happened on May 22, and the State Street victory party would've still been going full tilt on Memorial Day.

There should be little doubt left in anyone's mind which side is committed — nay, habituated — to gaming the system to subvert the democratic process.

Well, we knew all along that they were going to outspend us. But they were never going to outnumber us, so now it comes down to education and organization. And we've got the teachers and the librarians. Yay, good guys!

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If we liberals really hated America, we’d vote Republican.

08:46 pm - About Those "Union Bosses"

Voice of the People
The Capital Times
tctvoice@madison.com

I am writing today because I finally ran across the one-too-manieth occurrence of the phrase “union bosses” that tipped me over the brink from annoyance to outrage.

Here are things that a real boss can do: hire you, fire you, promote you, demote you, reassign you (including to a different city), tell you when you can or can’t take vacation days you’ve supposedly “earned”, tell you what to do during half of your waking life, make you pee in a cup, change your pay, publicly ridicule or belittle you, tell you what kind of clothes you can or cannot or must wear, order you to work overtime (regardless of what other plans you may have had), make you listen to their jokes (including the racist and sexist ones), and ignore you whenever they feel like it. Your only recourse? Quit.

How many of those things can a union leader do? None. None of them. Not a one.

As Bob Black wrote in The Libertarian as Conservative (1984), "Your foreman or supervisor gives you more or-else orders in a week than the police do in a decade." Conversely, union leaders never give you an or-else order. That’s because they work for you, not the other way around.

Union leaders come from the rank and file, not from on high, are elected by the union’s members, and continue to be responsible to them. Can you imagine the look on the face of a real boss if you were to stroll into his office and announce that you intended to run against him for ownership of the company next year because you thot he was doing a crappy job? Yet that’s exactly how it works with unions. They’re democracies, not monarchies.

In brief, any time you hear some right-wing hack mindlessly parroting the phrase “union bosses”, you can safely assume that either their brain isn’t engaged or they don’t have one to begin with. And feel free to ignore everything else they have to say, too, considering the source.

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A banker, a tea-partier, and a union member are sitting at a table with a plate of a dozen cookies. The banker takes 11 cookies, then turns to the tea-partier and says “You should watch out for that other guy; I think he wants more than half of your cookie.”

09:20 pm - Can Money Buy Respect?

Can money buy respect? The question isn't prompted by what Mitt Romney is asking of Republican primary voters but rather is occasioned by the release of the AMPAS list of nominees for Best Picture of 2011. Here they are, in alphabetical order:

The Artist
The Descendants
Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
The Help
Hugo
Midnight in Paris
Moneyball
The Tree of Life
War Horse

Woody Allen's Midnight in Paris made the list, but it's about as far from a conventional SF time-travel movie as you can get. Otherwise, it was a shutout for science fiction and fantasy.

Perhaps it goes without saying that the genre does better in the ghetto category Best Animated Feature Film:

A Cat in Paris
Chico & Rita
Kung Fu Panda 2
Puss in Boots
Rango

notable in part because this year's Pixar entry, Cars 2, didn't make the cut.

Now let's look at what ordinary theater-goers actually like, as determined by the most pragmatic measure there is: money. (Note: Some of these films are still in release, so this isn't the final word for 2011, but it's not going to change a lot.)

1 Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2 WB $381,011,219
2 Transformers: Dark of the Moon P/DW $352,390,543
3 The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn Part 1 Sum. $280,288,438
4 The Hangover Part II WB $254,464,305
5 Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides BV $241,071,802
6 Fast Five Uni. $209,837,675
7 Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol Par. $197,800,131
8 Cars 2 BV $191,452,396
9 Thor Par. $181,030,624
10 Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows WB $178,667,811
11 Rise of the Planet of the Apes Fox $176,760,185
12 Captain America: The First Avenger Par. $176,654,505
13 The Help BV $169,598,523
14 Bridesmaids Uni. $169,106,725
15 Kung Fu Panda 2 P/DW $165,249,063
16 Puss in Boots P/DW $147,744,777
17 X-Men: First Class Fox $146,408,305
18 Rio Fox $143,619,809
19 The Smurfs Sony $142,614,158
20 Super 8 Par. $127,004,179

Notice the difference? Here it's easier to count the movies that aren't SF or fantasy (#4, #6, #7, #10, #13, and #14).

In fact, the dominance of genre films at the box office is nothing new. For the past quarter-century, even tho the individual entries keep shuffling around, SF&F movies have represented at least 80 of the top 100 money-makers of all time. Here's the current list.

I would never argue that popularity invariably equals quality, but surely one wouldn't expect them to be mutually exclusive. Yet look at the overlap: The Help. Period.

SF&F may pay the bills in Tinseltown, but it still has to use the back door.

10:35 am - Stop SOPA/PIPA

In solidarity with other freedom-minded websites that have gone dark in protest against the draconian SOPA/PIPA legislation, I am not posting anything today.

Oh, wait ...

Dammit!

02:37 am - Season's Greetings

 
Have you heard that some people are taking offense at being issued the "wrong" kind of season's greetings? For pity's sake, people, nothing to get all snippy about. It's not at all hard. Here's the short course:
 
If you know somebody is a Christian, say "Merry Christmas". If you know that they're Serbian, like my mom's side of the family, say "Khristos se rodi" (or "Joyeux Noël" or "Felíz Navidád" or whatever the appropriate ethnicity is). If you know they're Jewish, go with "Happy Hanukkah". If you know they're Wiccan, say "Blessed Samhain". If you know they celebrate Kwanzaa, say "Joyous Kwanzaa". If you know they celebrate Festivus, say "Happy Festivus".
 
And in all other cases (that is, when you don't know), go with "Happy Holidays" and you can't miss.