Month: February 2004

a new Technorati plugin

chaotic intransient prose bursts: An evolved Technorati plugin:

An evolved Technorati plugin

Adriaan is prolific, to say the least. I hope to try this plugin in place of the one I have been using, if he can assure me it won’t block pages from rebuilding when the Technorati server is busy.

From his caveats, I note the the server will kick back a message that your API key is wrong when in fact the server is busy. Surely, that can be worked around (compare the ctime and mtime of the technorati files and make an educated guess as to whether it’s changed lately?). In any event, if the plugin will just let pages get rebuilt, that would be fine.

crossing from urban to rural

On a ride today, from bustling Kenmore, at the northern end of Lake Washington, to Marymoor Park, at the northern end of Lake Sammamish, I was surprised to see a coyote cross the trail as I rode through the farmlands of Woodinville and Redmond. I had heard there were some encroaching on the various outlying areas, but this was the first one I have ever seen. I had always thought they were more nocturnal or at least were most active in the dawn and dusk times. Of course, a February day in western Washington can feel like one long dusk, so perhaps they’re out all the time right now.

redefining marriage

The more I read and hear about this, the more clear it becomes: how have I missed the obvious? Marriage is about procreation, about having children, of course, something same-sex couples can’t do. If I’m reading this correctly, defending marriage means making sure only people who can conform to “nature’s norms” can be married (we’ll leave out the documented instances of same sex relationships in the wild). No one should be allowed to be married unless they already have children, which means they indulged in premarital sex and are therefore unworthy of marriage.

So no one would get a marriage license at all: we’d all get “Learner’s Permits” that are redeemable for the real thing once we demonstrate our procreative prowess. Then we could claim to be married. Childless couples are unraveling the fabric of society by claiming to be married but ignoring the true meaning of it. Older couples who marry for love and companionship? No deal: we may have to devise some special class for them. If they have children from a previous marriage, perhaps that will suffice, but if that marriage ended in divorce, what then? Have they let the side down?

The more I look at it, the less sense it makes. If you take it at face value and work out who can be considered “married” it becomes a reductionist exercise where you may end up with no one . . . . marriage will be some unattainable goal for anyone.

I got mine

$13.86 in payback from the CD price gouging cartel just arrived by uniformed messengers of the Federal Government . . . .

Now, to go blow it at the iTunes Music Store . . . .

evil, evil, evil. and stupid

209.91.207.161 - - [24/Feb/2004:09:02:55 -0800] "HEAD /movabletype/ HTTP/1.0" 200 0 "http://blog.johnkerry.com" "StarProse Referrer Advertising System 2004"

This is just dumb: referer spamming doesn’t work if people don’t expose their logs. And by posting about it, I’m possibly ratcheting up their PageRank.

Still, while the old adage “bad press is better than no press” may be true, is this a good idea, especially if the people you’re annoying might represent a voting bloc that will voice its irritation more than any other?

now playing: Walk On from the album All That You Can’t Leave Behind by U2

30 miles, all upright

Took a 30 mile ride today, from Kenmore to Marymoor Park. Managed to get back before the rain and wind, thank goodness. Made it in less that 2 hours and was cruising along at 20 mph for some of it with a cadence of 100+ strokes/minute. Never done that before . . . . here’s why.

I took a fresh look at this whole cleat and pedal business and discovered that the idiot who installed the cleats should have moved them further forward: there are two options and they were in the wrong one. Since the idiot in question is the person most likely to benefit from fixing this, I did, and it made a huge difference. So no single-vehicle accidents today, and a generally more enjoyable, more efficient ride. More power, better performance, it was all good.

The new cleat position allows for more torque when I want to release from the pedal, and it’s so far been a fool-proof operation.

I plan to knock out a couple more rides before I attempt the Chilly Hilly this Sunday, and perhaps work on some climbing, since that’s an aspect of this I’m weakest at.

now playing: Ultra Violet from the album Achtung Baby by U2

defense of marriage? from what?

I have been hearing about little else but this issue these past few days, with it coming to a head today when the president endorsed his plan to enshrine discrimination as the law of the land.

Hyperbole aside, is this the most important issue he or his staff can come up with? How ’bout . . .

* The stagnant economy

* Iraq and it’s future: when do the troops come home?

* Afghanistan: are we sure democracy has taken root there?

As for a defense of marriage, I’d feel a lot better if the folks doing the defending had a better track record themselves. My guess is a lot of them are probably more experienced at marriage than I am, with more than one to draw from. (An interesting statistic would be how many elected representatives have successfully defended their own marriages.)

What about the millions of “traditional” marriages that are dissolved each year? How do we feel about that? Are we to believe that committed same-sex couples are going to do a lousier job of staying together and working through their problems that those who have the support of our societal mores? Or could the case be made that if they have stayed together without benefit of clergy and state protections, they may actually do a better job? If unmarried couples break up, there are no statistics, no legalities, and no stigma. Yet look at the folk who have been taking the plunge in San Francisco: they don’t look like they’re doing this on a whim.

According to national vital statistics data for 2000-2002, and a very few minutes work in Excel, we find that the rate of divorces to marriages is around 40% for those periods. Does anyone care about those numbers? Does anyone think that permitting same-sex couples to enjoy the same legal rights as everyone else is going to make things worse?

All they’re looking for is the same legal protections and rights the rest of us enjoy. The proposed amendment won’t prevent anyone from having a relationship: it will prevent them being able to make decisions as next of kin, to share in property after the death of a partner, to share benefits conferred as part of employment by a partner, little things like that. Have the people who think this issue is worthy of tampering with the Constitution considered the ramifications of this? Or is punishing people who are different all this is about?

The rhetoric seems to miss how deprecated marriage has become in recent years: some states have gone so far as to insist that aspiring celebrants complete some basic instruction in order to be licensed. In the face of that kind of disregard/apathy, how is expanding the definition of marriage going to weaken the institution? It sounds to me like we should welcome any attempt to take it seriously, no matter who makes the offer.

I guess the best thing about this is it should ensure the incumbent is a one term president, but I wish there was a less hurtful way to go about it.

now playing: Shane, She Wrote This from the album Television by Television
Continue reading “defense of marriage? from what?”

are terrorists teaching your kids?

Education Secretary Paige calls teachers union “terrorist organization”:

WASHINGTON (AP) — Education Secretary Rod Paige called the nation’s largest teachers union a “terrorist organization” during a private White House meeting with governors on Monday.

I need to find out how the NEA is represented at my school: the whole thing smacks of the McCarthy era: “are you now or have you ever been a card-carrying member of a terrorist organization?”

welcome to the echo chamber

EmptyBottle.org: Echo and the Bunnymen

Perhaps it’s time to retitle my weblog . . . . guilty as charged.

of course, I have been thinking about this differently. I have been thinking about it as voting or adding one’s voice to the choir. If the big city newspapers don’t want to address an issue (like if the president of these United States has been playing fast and loose with the truth on his military service), we self-publishing cranks can and, I think, should.

This echo-chamber notion and the whole “death of distance/corporate cronyism” meme are overlapping here.

mistakes were made? have we heard that before?

Weekly Review (Harpers.org):

More than 60 prominent scientists, including 20 Nobel prize winners and 19 winners of the National Medal of Science, denounced the Bush Administration for its systematic distortion of scientific facts for political gain; John H. Marburger III, the administration’s head of science and technology policy, dismissed the report and said that it was politically motivated. President Bush’s Council of Economic Advisors decided to move the official start date of the last recession from the generally accepted March 2001 to the fourth quarter of 2000, when Bill Clinton was still president. Health and Human Services officials admitted that a report on racial and ethnic disparities in health care was altered to make it seem more upbeat. “There was a mistake made,” said Secretary Tommy Thompson. The Bush Administration began to back away from its predictions that the national economy, which has lost 2.5 million jobs since Bush took office, would add 2.6 million jobs this year. It was noted, not for the first time, that George W. Bush could be the first president since Herbert Hoover to end a term with fewer American jobs than when he started, and the president’s chief economic advisor suggested that fast-food jobs might need to be reclassified.

A whole of fact cooking going on there . . . . the thing I dislike most about this (other than the fact it’s all true) is the link to Hoover: it’s a shame that a great humanitarian who did so much to repair the damage of the Great War is only remembered for the Depression, as if it was his fault.