A Citizen of Earth

October 6, 2008

Holy Shit!

I just read a New York Times article about a report in the new issue of Science.

It relates a vital clue to religiosity! It’s so darned obvious once you hear it.

The story shows two random-seeming collections of scratch-marks, and asks if you see any sort of pattern in them.

The thing is, according to research, people who feel out of control of their lives are more prone to see patterns.

The story relates this to Wall Street traders wearing their lucky shirts to work during uncertain times, or deep-sea fishermen who reportedly have more rituals and superstitions than fishermen who work near shore.

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October 4, 2008

Letters to the Future: 2

Hello to the year 2010!

This is really a letter to myself, but it’s here because it seemed the best place for it. But it’s to you, too, you people of 2010 and beyond, so you’ll know how I felt back here in the past. I guess I want you to realize that we had our passions just as you do, and they sometimes drove us to … extremities.

I just quit my job. Walked out.

Was it a good choice? Well, it’ll be a while before I know, I guess, but right now … it’s good and bad.

Really bad, in a way. I mean, seriously, deep-shit bad.

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October 2, 2008

Lee Pulls the Trigger

This is a true story.

It’s about 1990, and a friend of a friend is gettin’ married in a few days.

We work at pack stations and ranches up and down the eastern slope of the Sierra Nevada mountains in California, and on this night we’re all dressed up in our go-to-town best – jeans, western shirts, White packer boots, satin wildrags and our best felt hats – intending to meet up in Bishop for a night out. Not exactly a bachelor party, but something like it.

I roll up at the ranch where Russ works and Russ and Lee are there waiting. I’m the designated driver because I’m not much of a drinker, but since I have a tiny Toyota pickup, we’re going in Russ’s truck, a big old 1966 Chevy pickup.

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September 19, 2008

Our … President

They’re calling it “America’s worst financial crisis since the Great Depression.”

“On Monday, the Dow Jones industrial average dropped 504 points, its worst drop since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. But Bush did not address the nation that night.

“Instead, he held a state dinner for the president of Ghana. Gratin of Maine lobster, late-summer corn pudding, ginger-scented farm lamb and graham cracker crumble with cocoa pod shell was served. Eleven members of the cast of ‘The Lion King’ came down from Broadway and performed. It was quite a bash. The Washington Post described President Bush and Ghanaian President John Kufuor as ‘ebullient.’ ”

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September 18, 2008

Sarah Palin: Radioactive Girl

Good things are happening right now: The news media has finally, finally, FINALLY grown a set, and is asking the McCain and Palin camp some hard questions, and demanding answers.

For Palin, the shit just keeps flowin’ on down. I can’t believe the kind of stuff I’m reading about her, on a daily basis.

McCain and his “soul mate” are goin’ down hard.

And oh, yeah, Palin’s post-election political career in Alaska? Toast. Even a conservative speaking career may be out. Conservatives will wake up on Nov. 12 and find themselves in bed with the ultimate Coyote Date, and will chew their own arms off to get away from her.

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September 11, 2008

Email on 9/11

This is from an email I sent out this morning, the anniversary of the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

The main part is the “Questions on the Anniversary” at the bottom. The “special note to friends” at the beginning was intended to be a tiny little side note, but grew into the not-so-tiny thing it is. Email begins:

I couldn’t resist sending this around, mostly because when I woke up this morning, the first thing I thought of was how much mileage Republicans and conservatives have gotten out of the Sept. 11 tragedy.

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September 10, 2008

Turning Tough Into Tame

Last time I started a new job, as a copy editor at a newspaper, after a number of years as a senior editor at magazines, I was faced with a lot of new experiences. New software, new workflows, even new ways of writing headlines.

For instance, whereas the magazines all used story headlines referred to as “label heads,” such as “The Joy of Skiing Cross Country,” newspapers use “sentence heads” or “subject-verb heads,” like “Skiers Find Joy in Cross Country Skiing.”

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September 10, 2008

Questioning Authority

I got into a little email dustup recently with some people over McCain and Palin. In reply to some of the glowing testimonials to Gov. Palin that had been sent me, I made the point that she has been the governor of Alaska, an entire state with fewer people in it than the single city of San Francisco, for less than two years. And if that so-called “executive experience” was so great, then former New York Mayor Rudi Giuliani, who for eight years ran a city with 12 times the population of the entire state of Alaska, should REALLY be something special. (And frankly, I would much rather have Rudy Giuliani a beat away from John McCain’s 72-year-old heart than Sarah Palin.)

I got back this:

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September 8, 2008

Goodbye to Chrome.

I picked this up from StupidEvilBastard, which he found at Beyond Binary:

The auto-suggest feature of Google’s new Chrome browser does more than just help users get where they are going. It will also give Google a wealth of information on what people are doing on the Internet besides searching.

Provided that users leave Chrome’s auto-suggest feature on and have Google as their default search provider, Google will have access to any keystrokes that are typed into the browser’s Omnibox, even before a user hits enter.

What’s more, Google has every intention of retaining some of that data even after it provides the promised suggestions. A Google representative told CNET News that the company plans to store about 2 percent of that data–and plans to store it along with the Internet Protocol address of the computer that typed it.

In theory, that means that if one were to type the address of a site–even if they decide not to hit enter–they could leave incriminating evidence on Google’s servers.

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September 4, 2008

Shiny: Google Chrome

I’m trying out Google Chrome, the new web browser.

So far, I’m a little bit iffy about where it puts the bookmarks folder, but it may be that I’m doing something wrong.

That said, I LOOOOVE the simplicity of the browser window — the lack of that cluttered “everything and the kitchen sink” that takes up so much real estate in other browsers. I love the tabs that you can peel off into new windows. I love the top-bar where you can park your most-used web addresses. I love the ease with which you can create a new tab, just by clicking on the little plus next to the existing tabs. I like the combined URI and search window. I love the way the browser works with you once you start typing into that window. And the opening window that has 9 icons of your recently visited sites? Wonderful. And so far, it seems really fast.

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