Author: Aaron Weber

Flamebait

A complete victory, you have to acknowledge, is impossible. You’ve got two options: compromise, or keep fighting. Keep fighting until … until everyone loses. Nobody is going to win. Winning would mean flattening every building and killing or displacing every single person, and you know as well as I do that’s not victory.

There’s going to be an irredentist movement no matter what, on both sides. But irredentism is suicide, it’s a desire for the impossible victory that will turn to blood-stained dust in your hands. Reasonable, calm voices need to find a way to convince and cajole and co-opt the extremists, siphon them off and take their leadership into positions of power in moderate structures. If you do not, we will all suffer.

Subject: Palestine
Example: Northern Ireland

Friday Nights

By seven on a Friday night, the commuters have left the gym, exercising while waiting for traffic to clear, finishing their three days a week at five fifteen workouts. Weekday nights it’s still crowded at this hour, but not Fridays. The weekday crowd, I’m guessing, doesn’t regard exercise as a suitable prelude to weekend entertainment. Me, I’m waiting for my friends to get out of the X-Men movie before we head over to TC’s for PBR and bad selections on the jukebox.

The music on the Sports Club Network Radio tonight is dance and disco instead of the usual top-forty and alt-rock, and the treadmills and stairmasters are populated by breastless anorexic women and heavyset fortysomething guys. They seem to be punishing themselves for not having anything better to do. The weights, though, seem to be draped with overmuscled, underclothed men who gawk and stare and flirt. For a lot of them, it seems that the gym is the entertainment.

Kissinger Was a Swinger

Swingers, a 1996 movie in which foolish young men try to pick up annoyed young women, is often credited, along with that Gap ad, for bringing swing dancing and jump blues into the mainstream.

It’s also been a strange influence on my life recently, since I find myself… well… in my midtwenties and foolish and hanging out in bars trying to pick up rather annoyed young women. Am I in some sort of a Quarterlife Crisis? Probably not. Just young and foolish and wondering, given a phone number or email address, exactly how long I should wait to call? The goal, of course, being to indicate interest, but not so much interest as to be off-putting.

My friend Dana insists that you should call at most two days later, because otherwise they’ll think you’re not interested and go on about their merry way. But Swingers suggests that the answer is at least four days, and ideally six, if you’re really cool. You have to imply that you’re very busy. After all, if you’re not busy, you’re free, which is to say there’s no cost, which means you’re worthless, because only busy people who are avidly pursued by others have intrinsic worth. Or something.

Liberals are like Red Sox fans

Truthout has a great article about how being a liberal these days is like being a Sox fan: the grinding sense of… well… doom.
It’s all there, in the way the players aren’t quite up to par, in the way the TV pundits smirk. In the way the US votes against human rights treaties. and the fact that everybody knows Bush lied in order to go to war and the secret reports on The Great Tragedy.

“Everybody knows that the ship is sinking, everybody knows that the captain lied… Everybody knows that the game is rotten, old black Joe’s still pickin’ cotton for your ribbons and bows, and everybody knows. Everybody knows, that’s how it goes…. “

Good technology day

All my docs were printing out wrong: the content would be too high on the page, cutting off the running header and sometimes the first line or so of text. I learned how to hack around the DSSSL stylesheets to adjust the top margin, but that only changed the space between the running headers and the body text. Turns out it was a bug in the dvi to PostScript conversion. So, instead of letting docbook2ps handle the docbook->DVI->ps conversion, I run it manually and use the -t “letter” option, and it works right. Sweet.