Author: Aaron Weber

Thanksgiving Agenda

So far I’ve read “A Short History of Nearly Everything,” which is quite good. “Motherless Brooklyn” and “A Mathematician Reads the Newspaper” are still to go. I’ve got a couple of pieces of writing started, neither of them very far but not negligible either. I’ve taken the Mini out for a drive (a good time– reverse was a little tricky to find– on the other euro-style shifter I’ve driven it’s push-down-and-go-left, but this was just a pull off to the left, but there wasn’t some sort of trick aside from it being quite a lot further left than first. At any rate, I managed to have some fun turning around in a gravel driveway as I let out the clutch a little too fast and displayed just how much torque there is in that engine… by this point both my parents have managed to fall in love with it, so it looks like neither my brother nor I will get our hot little hands on it after all.) Lastly I’ve walked my grandmother’s dog for her quite a bit.

My parents’ friends Pat and Peter are visiting and I’m looking forward to talking with Pat a little more about finance; she’s quite knowledgeable about economics and business, and I’m curious what insights she might have into the software industry. Tonight’s discussion revealed the depths of my father’s loathing for the pharma industry and its stock-market-driven stupidity; his dislike of things can be quite contagious as you might know.

My brother and I shared our favorite sayings of his: never turn down a job you haven’t been offered, the fish rots from the head, assholes come in all shapes and sizes, there are cheats everywhere– some are rich and some are poor, never attribute to malice that which can be explained by incompetence, the difference between an entrepreneur and a bureaucrat is that an entrepreneur says “nothing ventured, nothing gained” and a bureaucrat says “nothing ventured, nothing lost.”

In all it’s been really, really good. I feel a lot more relaxed and happy than I did just Wednesday. Tomorrow looks like exercise, possible leaf-related chores (amazing how you can forget about this sort of thing in an apartment) and more dog-walking and visiting with grandmother.

SIN IS NOT A CRIME

Get it into your head: SIN IS NOT A CRIME.
Married couples not having children is not a crime. Despite what Antonin Scalia might want, the horrific sins of masturbation and fornication are not crimes either. (Another note on Scalia and the criminality of sin here.

Honestly, people. What kind of dumbasses have we got on the court? Of all the noncriminal acts in the world, of all the violations of basic principles of freedom, what kind of idiot would ask the US government to keep tabs on what people do when they put their hands down their pants? What’s next, criminalizing armpit-scratching? Oh, I know! Let’s make it a crime to take the Lord’s name in vain, and to disrespect your parents! Let’s make lustful thoughts a misdemeanor, and wet dreams a felony akin to movie-pirating (3 years) or rape (5 years) or smoking marijuana (10 to life). We’ll use eyeball monitoring cameras to tell when someone is distracted by an attractive body across the way, and gait recognition to tell when boys are trying to hide erections. Yeah! Yeah! It’ll be just like Giblets says!

Meat and Anti-Meat

So the right is concerned about queer and/or vegetarian subtexts in film, but it looks like the very manly, carnivorous sport of cockfighting is in a steep decline. If they’re so opposed to the gentleness of Hollywood cartoons, why don’t they get out there and support them some cockfighting? Or is cockfighting also kind of gay, like maybe it’s something that can be relegated to the cock-fighting cock-pits of Penisland.

Sound Fundamentals

Housing prices in the SF area are edging higher still— at least until interest rates rise. In MA, however, housing starts are way up this year, and there should be a flood of new condos near public transit in the next 12-18 months as mills in Lowell and factories in Lynn are converted– not to mention the half-dozen churches the Catholic Church is closing down and selling off to pay for the molestation settlements.

Well, maybe I should just move to Penisland. I mean, Pen Island. For pens. Of course.

No More Anonymous Sources!

Journalists are trying to avoid anonymous sources these days, but in this article — about intellectual property ethics, file trading, and wire fraud — they seem to have forgotten to inform those sources that they now publish names: “Yeah, I’ve turned away from file-swapping and started fleecing companies like BMG, said Jill Beady, a senior at the Eastman School of Music, who asked not to be identified.
Update, moments later: apparently a joke article.

Saturday Saturday Saturday!

At one this afternoon I was at the Boston Book Fair and also the print fair, where Megan and I looked at, for example, an eleven-thousand dollar first edition of Dune. We got a 19th century print from Japan, but it was, let’s say, in the three-figure range. Closer to the two-figure range.

Then, on to The New England Motorcycle Expo, which had a decidedly different tone. As in, The New Jersey Bikini Team was there. I got to sit on a twelve thousand dollar motorcycle. They didn’t let me sit on the twelve thousand dollar copy of “Valley of the Dolls,” I’ll tell you that much.

Plus, the lemonade stand at the book fair had a sign about not going near books with lemonade, whereas the lemondade stand at the motorcycle fair had a sign about how for two dollars extra you could have your lemonade with vodka in it.

Finally!

Finally! The mp3 file of my brother’s late-night phone messages!

This has been delayed because I almost never boot to the Windows partition, which has legitimate mp3-related software.

Those of you who still use Windows: Contact me and let me tell you why you should use Linux, or consider the OGG FORMAT or both.

At least you’re using Firefox and not IE, right?

Songs of the day: Axel F, which is Pete Goodall’s cell phone ringtone, dammit, you son of a bitch. And “99 problems.”

Also I should note the long-overdue addition of Kristy and Pat to the left hand nav, for those of you who don’t just read this through some sort of RSS aggregator.

Today at a bar I asked a stranger if she respected someone less if she found out they worked in marketing. She said, as long as they market something worthwhile, no. What do you think of headhunters? And I got halfway through rolling my eyes before I realized she and all her friends were headhunters, and so she and her friends nearly killed us all and pickled our heads. Instead we raised glasses and said “cheers” and laughed. It was OK. Downtown bars are like that.