perfidy

When Aretae blew through a grand of posts, I was of course curious as to how many posts I've written.  The answer was less than obvious.  I could tell immediately that since the migration to WordPress in 2007, I'd written 142.  (Counting this one, that is 144 now.)  But we've migrated through three CMS platforms in the seven plus years that this blog has been around.  The earliest Blogger posts were rolled into Expression Engine in 2004, so they should be in that count.  But I couldn't get into the EE control panel, so I had no idea how many posts I wrote up to 2007 and the second migration.

With a timely assist from Patton, I was able to use another way to get into a crippled version of the cpanel, and saw that I had written 811 posts.  So, 955.  Wait a minute, though - in seven years of blogging I hadn't even matched what Aretae has written in a year?  That can't be right.  It turns out, for some reason lost to time, there are two Buckethead users in the old system.  So, the number jumps to 1848.  More respectable - considering that I've not blogged at all for months, if not years at a time.

Then it occurred to me that most of the posts written as "The Ministry" were actually written by me.  Assuming 75% of those are mine on the old system, and the seven since we moved to WordPress, that makes about 1915.  I probably broke a 1000 posts sometime in 2005, I'm guessing.  I'm averaging about a post a day, these days, so I should clear the double-M, two thousand sometime in the early part of October.  Post 229 should be it, or close enough.

On the recommendation of Aretae, I went and downloaded Body by Science.  Damn.  Another consensus wisdom bites the big one.  Doug McGuff and John Little show through the magic of science, that most of what you've been told about exercise is wrong.

The basic idea is that only by exercising to failure do you actually convince the body that it needs to be stronger.  They go into rather more detail than that - and convincing detail, backed by studies™ - but that's the essential take-away.  Constant low-energy exercise is just wasted time and energy because you do not fully test your muscles, and you are interfering with the body's efforts to heal after exercise. Also, you put yourself at risk for injury, and you are adding wear and tear that isn't necessary if your goal is increased strength or cardio-vascular fitness.  They go on to say that the distinction between aerobic and other types of exercise is bogus - if you build the infrastructure of greater strength, you are building cardio-vascular fitness.  Separating out cardio merely benefits one aspect of fitness, at the expense of others, and at the great waste of time and effort.

Ten minutes a week, five exercises.  That's a program that I can get behind, and the fact that the authors totally diss on running is a plus point in my book.  Looking back, I was at my strongest after a long summer breaking up concrete.  I think I became strong and fit because I was unconsciously following elements of this program that I never did in earlier exercise programs.  A lot of what I did, day to day, was relatively low intensity effort.  But every so often, I'd have to really exert myself all-out to do something - move a huge-ass chunk of concrete, whatever.  And according to the theories in Body by Science, it was probably that that made me strong.  I had never exerted myself all-out in the gym, and the results were always limited.

Cool.  I am going to add this to my my paleo diet.  I go into work a couple days a week, and there's a gym there, so that will be just perfect.

For those of you without a program and wanting to keep score, here's a short list of consensus views that I now think are largely bullshit:

• Exercise physiology and methodology: exercise to exhaustion with five distinct exercises once a week is more effective in building strength and endurance than any number of hours running, weight lifting, biking or whatnot done in the traditional manner, and reinforces positively with the next item.
• Diet and Nutrition: fat is good and carbs are bad - high consumption of carbohydrates relative to protein and fat is the direct cause of fat people and the associated metabolic syndrome diseases of diabetes, heart attacks, hypertension; and possibly acne in teenagers and who knows what else.  We aren't evolved to deal with carbs, full stop.  Paleo or something like it is therefore the answer.  Best book on this is Good Calories, Bad Calories, by Taubes.
• Modern Cosmology: dark matter is clearly a fudge factor, and modern astrophysicists are clearly ignorant or flat out wrong on the behavior of electromagnetism and plasma.  Magnetic field lines do not and cannot "reconnect," this alone invalidates much of solar and astrophysics.
• Democracy: in the small sense, I think that the explosion of bureaucracy is undermining what good we had here.  In the bigger sense, I'm convinced that the Formalist ideas are on the right track.  If it weren't for a few key problems, I'd be with Aretae on his anarchist pleasure island - my ideal state would be a small monarchy that implemented libertarian policies.
• History: from the idea that the founding fathers were a bunch of whiny crybabies (a view I held long before Moldbug) I moved on.   I think that Velikovsky may have been right, or at least on to something - our understanding of history might be very different from what really happened - and if that's the case, then the geologists and paleontologists might be tragically wrong, too.  Thing is, the sciences take as gospel what other sciences say.  If the astrophysicists say it's been steady state for billions of years in the Solar System, the geologists will believe it, and that influences size of the idea space for their own theories.  They will automatically disregard any theory that conflicts with other theories.  So if the astrophysicists are wrong - which I firmly believe - then everything else can be wrong.  Not necessarily - but what have we ignored because of what we believe?

My daughter grabbed the basket that the wife was using this morning to pick mountain berries. She put two stuffed animals in it, and told me, "I'm picking cats."

When I asked for good books to read, Aretae, Foseti and Isegoria all gave me links to “Books that Influenced Me” posts. I guess I’m a little behind the curve on this one, but here’s my list of books that played a part in making me the sicko that I am today.

• Heinlein; The Bible - My earliest reading started with Heinlein. My mom read an article in the local paper about good books for kids. It mentioned Heinlein, and specifically Red Planet and Have Spacesuit, Will Travel. Set the course of my reading for most of the next 35 years. Heinlein’s Juveniles had a profound impact on my thinking - the value and danger of recklessness; the importance of thinking, the martial virtues and competence. It created a huge chunk of my worldview. I later went on to read nearly every thing Heinlein wrote. The other early influence is the Bible, King James Version. I’ve never been particularly religious, but the language of the KJV is second only to Shakespeare. I used to read Ecclesiastes: “I have seen all the works that are done under the sun; and, behold, all is vanity and vexation of spirit.” This prepared me well for High School.
• Robert Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance; Robert Anton Wilson, Illuminatus / Schroedinger’s Cat - Shortly after High School, and after leaving college for a major in beer and other intoxicants, I was a bit at sea. Pirsig’s book blew my mind - the idea that some random dude on a motorcycle was challenging the entire edifice of western philosophy was just awesome. Later readings made me appreciate the care with which he drew his analogies. This book was the start of my heretical thinking, as opposed to my earlier reflexive contrarianism. Robert Anton Wilson’s books also blew my mind. Or maybe it was the drugs. Still and all, the big pull from these books was how important perception is to reality - that your worldview can control what you see, and that things that don’t fit really are invisible to most people.
• Eric Drexler, Engines of Creation - Amazing book. Convinced me, before I had heard the word Singularity that it was bound to happen. Also made me realize that most sf writers are frighteningly conservative in their extrapolations.  Nanotechnology, AI and biotech will change the world beyond imagining, and any sf that doesn't wrestle with this is not the true sf.
• Shakespeare - I was trapped in a crappy apartment with no money, not much of a job, and a copy of the complete work I picked up for $13 at an antique store. I didn’t read the whole thing, but I read most of it, and read it slowly. Christ, what a writer. No one compares. No one.
• John Brunner, Shockwave Rider; Neal Stephenson, Diamond Age / Snow Crash - John Brunner and Neal Stephenson are in some ways my favorite sf writers - they not only cram their books with great techojoy, they create vivid societies that result from the technological changes. These books changed the way I looked at technology and its implications.
• Paul Johnson, Birth of the Modern / Intellectuals / Modern Times - Many academic historians give Johnson the cold shoulder. But at least one Academic Historian, my dad, loves him and introduced me. I’d been reading history by the truckload since I left high school, but most of my reading was centered on 1600 and before. Modern Times was the history I should have learned in high school - it is a wonderful tonic for the recieved notions of our recent past. These three books put me on a more conservative path to understanding the world, away from the unfocused quasi-liberalism I had absorbed from my surroundings. Unlike Foseti and Moldbug, I never went through a larval libertarian phase before embracing reaction.  Over time, I developed an appreciation of the flaws of Conservatism, and as soon as I found Moldbug ten years later, went straight to the darkness.
• Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs and Steel - fascinating book. I now think that he went way overboard on the geographical determinism - race and IQ have a huge part to play that Diamond discounts utterly. Still, brilliant work.
• V.D. Hanson, The Soul of Battle - really got me going on classical history for starters, but this book, (and Carnage and Culture, too) is a direct opposite to Diamond. Hanson argues that culture is vastly more important than geography. I noticed also that the “West” while having a constant tradition of freedom and individualism was only occasionally democratic. This was the beginning of my questioning why we associate the former with the latter.
• The Writings of Mencius Moldbug - when I first happened upon Moldbug, it was like coming home. I’d built up, over the previous decade, an understanding of the world that had no explanation. Moldbug gave me a philosophical structure that explained things I had already noticed, and thought about. Still feeling the effects of this one. For one, I still resist giving up the faith of my youth, in the inherent goodness of American republicanism.
• The Catastrophists - I hit this one about the same time that I found Moldbug. I read a book by the sf author James Hogan, Kicking the Sacred Chao which details that author’s scientific heresies. Among them was another look at Velikovsky and Catastrophism. I’d read Velikovsky in high school - my local library had his stuff on the shelves - but I read it like science fiction. Hogan convinced me that at the very least, Velikovsky had been the victim of a colossal hit job by mainstream science and Carl Sagan in particular. Since I already knew Sagan was an asshole, that seemed plausible. I started looking into it more, and have concluded that at least some version of the Catastrophist outline is likely, and that the Plasma Cosmology view of astrophysics is almost certainly true. Complete revolution in my scientific and political worldviews in three years!  Electric Sky by Don Scott and Electric Universe by Talbot and Thornhill are the two most accessible.
• Neal Strauss, The Game - I’d read and enjoyed the evolutionary psychology books for years, but here it was put into practice. Strauss is a wonderful writer, and this is an inherently fascinating topic.

I thought I'd share that.  And this, which I just ordered as my bday present to myself:

A small wallet from Saddleback Leather Co.  It's got a 100 year warranty.  Their stuff looks pretty awesome, though I don't think I'll be dropping $300 for the satchel - much as I'd like to - anytime soon.

My other birthday present will be this, in about a week and a half.  But you probably could have guessed that.

I almost inexpressibly happy.  I am floating on air.  I am tingly with joy.  I am so happy, if I saw a congressman, I wouldn't spit on him.

Why? The materialistic and gadget addicted side of Buckethead has been deeply unhappy for much of 2010. Because on the day after Christmas, his dog Kasey gave him an anti-Christmas present. Kasey committed the unforgivable sin of breaking his master's iPhone. Horror!

I was walking Kasey, waiting patiently for him to find a suitable pile of snow to piss on. I realize that this is a difficult process, piles of snow being so different and all. So I was reading something or other on my iPhone and smoking a smoke when tragically, Kasey saw a squirrel or snow weasel or some damn thing and jerked on the leash. Which jerked my hand. Which held the iPhone. Which then wasn't holding the iPhone. The iPhone flipped up, did a one and a half gainer, and did a belly flop glass down on the pavement. 10.0 from the East German judge, but the glass was cracked.

Here's the villain, looking remorseful:

The only thing damaged was the glass surface - the underlying screen and touch sensors were still functional. For about a month, I continued to use the phone while I tried to figure out what course to follow for repairs. Every time I swiped my finger over the cracked glass, I cried a little tear inside.

Apple wanted $200 to fix the glass. "$200!" I exclaimed, "That's the price of a new phone!" "A new, unsubsidized phone is $650," the Apple Store employee helpfully pointed out. Well, that seemed high, seeing that you could buy the glass part for $25 online. Of course, I couldn't get a subsidized phone, I'd used my upgrade to get the one that lay, broken, before me. Mrs. Buckethead is eligible for an upgrade, but wasting her upgrade on a replacement phone for me seemed, well, unseemly. Also stupid, since I was planning on using her upgrade to get me an iPhone 4.0 when it comes out in June.

I dithered on ordering the parts and doing the repair myself. On the one hand, I'm moderately handy with electronics. I've built my own computers. I can repair things. I can make things better than they were before. On the other hand, the iPhone is a $600 piece of magical technology made out of rainbows and leprechaun brains, hand crafted by Unicorns. After deep soul searching and comparing the $50 with $200, I decided to order the parts.

The parts arrived, and I disassembled my phone using custom made plastic prybars and a suction cup. I removed twenty dozen molecule-sized screws. I pulled the screen assembly out of the phone. I disconnected things. The tricky bit was getting the LCD screen out and away from the glass. I removed the broken glass, not even cutting myself. I installed the new glass, reassembled the phone, and proudly turned it back on.

Holy mother of fuck, I broke the LCD display when I twisted it to get it out of the frame.

I cried bitter, bitter tears. It seems that LCD screens do not tolerate twisting, even in small, repair-justified amounts.

I tried not to think about my phone. About as successfully as you can avoid noticing you've amputated your arm. Because, after two and a half years, losing the phone was like losing an arm. I borrowed my wife's iPhone - my original iPhone. But that was like losing an arm and replacing it with one of those creepy hook things. Sure you can pick things up, but you scare small children. I wanted the full 3GS goodness.  I wanted my arm back.

So I looked online again. Some people warned against the online repair shops. Plus, shipping costs yet money. I decided to go with a local repair shop that was "only two blocks from the metro." Turns out, that's actually five blocks, not one of which has plowed sidewalks. And uphill both ways.  But anyway.

Dropped the maimed iPhone off with the helpful and condescending lackey. And three days and $200 later, I have a working iPhone again. And I am whole and happy once more.

This whole experience has been stuffed to the gills with lessons, moral and otherwise.

• One, never trust dogs. The little bastards don't care what you've got in your hand when they see an ice weasel. This obviously has implications beyond iPhones.
• Two, $30 for an iPhone case is cheaper than $250 in iPhone repair costs. You'd think that would be obvious. But it ain't.
• Three, I am completely and unabashedly addicted to my iPhone. I was briefly embarrassed by the extent and deepness of my affliction. But really, why shouldn't I be dependent on something so damn useful? Do you think your dependence on, say, the internet or cars is ridiculous?
• Four, I went down the road my Grandfather always walked, the one that made my grandmother say, "We fix everything twice." I spent $250 repairing the phone, and a lot more trouble. If I'd just gone to Apple I'd have had it fixed sooner, spent less money and wouldn't have violated my warranty.
• Five, I know all I have to do to recapture this feeling is buy an iPad next month.

As is widely known, I am a bit of a jackhole. And on a bad day, much much worse. Hell even on a good day, I barely clear vaguely irritating. So it should be no surprise to anyone that I have a blog that I don't, you know, blog on.

But it may come as a surprise to you, dear reader, that there are actual, real reasons for my bloggy hiatus. Here's one of them:

That darling creature and her two older siblings are cute, adorable, brilliant and exceptional in all ways.  Including being exceptional black holes for time.  A joyful, wonderful black hole, but the event horizon is there nevertheless.  Then there's the staggeringly less enjoyable time sink in my life, the five hour round trip commute.  This, mercifully, is abating - the reason that I've had the time to even contemplate a site redesign, and start writing again, is that I am now back to my ideal state of working at home the majority of the week.

My goal, my New Years and Groundhog Day's resolution, is to write, on average, at least one post a day.  And as an added bonus to you, I will even attempt to make them interesting and entertaining.  And just for Bram, I will post regularly on Zombies, since I was cruel enough not to design a zombie theme for perfidy.

I just got the second highest score, ever, in the world, on the iPhone game Drop7.

602,174 points, bitches. If you have the game you can see it in all it's glory, reveling under the name, "bob" on the global score board.

Also, I got a job. [1. Amon Amarth is the mojo - listened to Tattered Banners and Bloody Flags all the way in, and got the call less than 24 hours later.]

Technical recruiters who cannot speakie de English are annoying. They are also tragically ubiquitous. But that can be dealt with. Speak slowly and clearly, and pray for a good connection so you can hope to puzzle out what they are saying.

But a large subset of the non-English speaking technical recruiter community has absofuckinglutely no social savvy whatsoever, when they're not flat out rude. This drives me bugfuck.

"Hi, Samir, I was calling to follow up on the position we discussed last week..."

"Yes."

"So could you tell me what sort of timeframe we're looking at?"

"I have not received any feedback from the hiring manager."

"Do you have any idea when that might be?"

"Next Monday."

"Thank you."

It's like pulling teeth, and that's a mild example, with all the mispronounced words edited out.

Talking with someone who has no concept of how to use the phone as a communicatio device makes my hair hurt. What little I have left, anyway. This behavior seems confined to a certain ethnic group that I will not mention (Indian) and I am begining to dislike them as much as I hate bicyclists on the GW Parkway, or the damn herring eating Norwegians.

I would think that a company wanting to attract quality personnel would put socially adept employees who speak the language in these positions. But then, I thought that McDonald's would at least put English speakers on the drive through, and look how wrong I was about that.

Festung Buckethead, located deep in the mountains of exurban Washington, DC, is a place of learning and happiness. Between the racks of weapons and food stored for the apocalypse, we manage to set aside a small space for the education of our offspring.

Our oldest is now six years old, and his education is moving past the difficult initial stages of teaching him how to pay attention and not fidget, and moving into real larnin’. He reads, and ciphers; and planning for the furtherance of his education is in full swing.

Mrs. Buckethead, a public school teaching survivor, is in charge of most of this effort, while I make faces around the edges of her real work. Seeing as she is 1) an experienced teacher, 2) vastly more organized and thorough than I, and 3) not distrac… ooh, shiny! Where was I? Oh, those reasons make her stewardship of education planning eminently sensible.

Nevertheless, she condenses the results of her tireless research and analysis into small bite sized pieces that I can easily gum and swallow.

And last night, we had one of these information dumps. She is interested in purchasing the A2 curriculum, which is a more or less an improved version of the Robinson curriculum; the which to use as the basis for our ongoing pedagogical efforts. The original Robinson curriculum was developed by, you guessed it, Robinson. Who wanted to educate his boys with minimum fuss and maximum effectiveness. He was an engineer, not an education Ph.D, so he went about doing this in a way that appeals to my inner geek. By all accounts, it is a fantastic program, and you can get an entire K-12 education package with public domain resources, worksheets, etc., all on a package of discs.

The sad thing is, a lot of the material is not stored in the best formats - books as folders of .tiff files, and the like. So the A2 people rationalized it, and now it's all in .txt and PDF files, which are more suited for this modern internets age.

So anyway, we're looking to drop a C-note on this program. But there are no books, no preprinted worksheets, just ones and zeros. My wife was saying that she’d either be printing whole books out on our hp officejet 5510 - or we’d have to hunt down live books in the wild, and buy, skin, and mount them for our son to read. And it occurred to me that that kind of defeats the whole point.

Do the math: Print cartridges are expensive. Books are expensive and can stub your toe. Right now, we need new print cartridges about every six months. If we’re increasing our printing by a metric shitload, we’d be changing print cartridges at least every other month on the new plan, minimum, and likely more often. Given the way that hp rapes you on the cartridges (the first one’s always free), that’s $500 bucks a year right there. Buying books - public domain books that are available for free on Project Gutenberg, or that are already on our curriculum discs - would add hundreds more dollars - a minimum, according to list, of $250.

It will actually be cheaper to buy our son his own Kindle DX.

We can fit a year's worth of educational reading on the Kindle, and it is maximally portable. The boy won't be tied to the computer, and he won't have to lug around lots of books. And there are bonuses. The Kindle has a built in New Oxford American dictionary, just select a word, and get a definition at the bottom of the page, without having to leave the book you’re reading. That sealed it for Mrs. Buckethead right there - being able to look up words right when you hit them is key. And having the dictionary right there makes that process easy.

Free 3G wireless for the life of the device, and built in access to the Wikipedias. Annotations and notes. Plays audio files. And, since it uses the fancy E Ink technology, the battery lasts for weeks as long as you have wireless turned off. The screen is huge - like ten inches, and font size is adjustable, so the boy will have no problems reading on it. Also, it’s not like a backlit LCD screen, so you can easily read it outside, in the sun. It has 3 GB of storage, so we could put huge amounts of material onboard.

The downside, so far as I can tell without actually holding one, is that file management on the thing is a real pain in the ass. You are encouraged to email your personal documents to the Kindle’s email address, though you can use the USB. And, on the device, all your personal documents are just dropped into one folder, no sorting, sub folders or tagging allowed. We’ll have to manage the files for the boy’s studies on the computer, and move them over in chunks, so that he won’t have to wade through thousands of files to find what he needs.

I looked at some of the other ereaders, and it doesn't seem that any of them match up, on price or features, to the DX.

What I’d really like, though, would be the Primer from Neal Stephenson’s Diamond Age. But failing that, a touchscreen version would be nice - it would make navigation easier. And better file management would probably help. Amazon is marketing this (among other targets) towards college kids, for replacing expensive textbooks. The homeschool market is small but growing - one could probably make some money putting together packages designed to be used with this sort of technology.

On balance, though, one downside does not outweigh many upsides. And it tickles my fancy to think that I will be buying a $500 state of the art electronic book reader to save money. Granted, we’ll still be buying real books, and we’ll still be printing out worksheets and the like - but the volume would be manageable, and the bulk of his reading will be on the Kindle, which means that his education becomes more portable, more convenient; and that means that we can do more of it.

My youngest child seems to be somewhat concerned about her brother's intentions.

To everyone, a merry Christmas.

It is just Christmas now, the little Bucketheads are all asleep. I've just laid out all the presents under the tree, and nothing is stirring, except for me and Willoughby, my Aunt Susie's puppy. We're going to hang out a bit, enjoy the quiet and see if we can bag us some reindeer.

It's strange, now, to see the frustrated anticipation, excitement and impatience on my son's face and remember how I felt. I know I won't be getting the Lego galaxy cruiser, or the Millenium Falcon I once wanted. But watching my children open their gifts will be better still.

My only Christmas regret is this: my mom has decorated her bathroom in a presidential theme. We tease her mercilessly for this, because even though she knows it's silly, she makes her decisions about what should or should not gain a place in the presidential bathroom with great seriosness.

I saw the picture at the top of this post yesterday, and didn't buy it.

I wish all of our remaining readers, and my fellow ministers the best of Christmases, joy, friendship, family and a happy new year.

Oh, and some change and hope.

Did your mama hit you? Then you said it right.

Recently, my son has been exposed (as all children eventually are) to foul language, cursing, swearing, oaths, and the like. Surprisingly, little of this exposure has come from me. As responsible parental units, we have taken a moderate approach in discouraging the boy from dropping the F-bomb and its cousins. We don't freak out, we don't appear shocked and horrified; we just calmly beat the crap out of him, point out that it is impolite to say things like that, and that it is something that we generally don't do. This method has proven to be fairly effective.

The other day, I was watching a zombie flick late in the evening. The boy woke up, and we watched some brain munching for a bit. John pointed out, accurately, that there was a rather copious amount of bad words along with the brain eating. I explained that when people are scared, they often use bad words. (Screenwriters also use bad words when they are frightened by deadlines or being viewed as "inauthentic" or "not edgy.") This led to a discussion of the appropriate use of bad language.

The boy played with the envelope a little.

"Well, I'll just use bad words when I'm scared." No, not really.

"Okay, just when there's a spider." Nope. If it's dark. If my sister sits on me. If mommy doesn't buy me a toy. If I see Brittney Spears. If...

Well, I wanted to watch the rest of the movie. "It's time to go to bed, and not use bad words."

"Well, I'll just use bad words when I'm being chased by zombies."

"Son, you have my permission to use any bad word you can think of, as many times as you want." His eyes lit up with the possibilities.

"But only if the zombies come, and not before." Despair. "Now back in bed."

I was reminded of this incident when I ran across this little gem, from someone who takes a rather opposite approach to swearing for the very young:

For reasons that are not yet clear to me, a lot of parents we know are worried about their children learning cuss words. This is a truly charming display of futility. In the world we live in, even the most sheltered Amish child will have learned enough swear words to cuss like a longshoreman or the Irish by the time it is five.

So I am approaching the issue from a much more realistic perspective. I am not going to waste energy keeping Cordelia from swear words. Instead, I’m going to skip a step and just make sure that she is able to use them in more colorful ways than her schoolyard chums.

If some dirty little sprog says she is a poo-poo head, I want her to be able to call him a “ball-draining cum junkie”. She should be able to deflect all those silly little schoolyard taunts by tossing off a casual “Lick my ass, fucktard.”

And if some boy says she has cooties, I want her to fire right back with “Yeah. Well, we’ll see how easy you say that when my cock’s in your mouth.” This doesn’t make any sense, of course, but hopefully it’ll confuse and distract him enough for her to really put the boot in.

I see this as simply giving her the skills she needs to function in a complex and ever-changing world.

[wik] I realized, just as soon as Johno pointed it out, that my post was mysteriously truncated. In reconstituting the post, I realized that the text at the link is different from the quote above. Sometime between Thursday, May 15, 2003 4:55:06 PM and earlier this afternoon, Jeff Vogel bowdlerized (a bit) his own text. This is the new version on his website:

For reasons that are not yet clear to me, a lot of parents we know are worried about their children learning cuss words. This is a truly charming display of futility. In the world we live in, even the most sheltered Amish child will have learned enough swear words to cuss like a longshoreman or the Irish by the time it is five.

So I am approaching the issue from a much more realistic perspective. I am not going to waste energy keeping Cordelia from swear words. Instead, I’m going to skip a step and just make sure that she is able to use them in more colorful ways than her schoolyard chums.

If some dirty little sprog says she is a poo-poo head, I want her to be able to lash out with an uninterrupted spray of obscenities, most of which will have no meaning to either her or her opponent. The enemy may not understand why he has just been called a “fucktard,” of course, but hopefully it’ll confuse and distract him enough for her to really put the boot in.

I see this as simply giving her the skills she needs to function in a complex and ever-changing world.

How disappointing, and how glad I didn't empty the trash after I deleted the word doc that contained the original.

I am well familiar with the brilliance and technical virtuosity of the guitarist Buckethead. Largely because his fans regularly email me to tell me how brilliant and virtuosoesque that other Buckethead is. I also sit amazed at the apparently stupendous sex appeal of a KFC chicken bucket worn on the head and the effect that it has on impressionable (and no doubt deeply disturbed) young females.

I have learned of another Buckethead, though, and one whose fans will likely never email me. The other day I picked up PJ O'Rourke's Age and Guile Beat Youth, Innocence and a Bad Haircut at a second hand store in a dirty little Virginia town improbably set amidst some of the most beautiful countryside east of the Mississippi. It was shelved, appropriately enough, in the religion section.

PJ, apparently, had his own encounter with a buckethead almost thirty years ago in Marlette, Michigan:

Now motels are always cheery and attractive places, especially when you're sick, and, let me tell you, this particular motel is a monument to the art form. It's run by some semiretarded no-necked bucket-headed member of an Eastern European ethnic type so dim that they were driven to our shores by shame at the comparitive military success and intellectual brilliance of their Polack neighbors. We'd already had one conversation with this oaf:

"We have reservations for six rooms."

"Ve half only six rooms reserfed."

Right, we have reservations for six."

"Dere is no six of yous."

"The other people are in the cars outside."

In dose car? Dat is more dan six!"

"Look we're not all staying here. Only six of us. The rest are staying at the farm."

"Farm? No farm! Ve half only six rooms reserfed." And so on. His particular commetn to me had been, "Ve give you da room wif stuck storm door." ...

Bolted and chained in one corner was a color television set - by "color" I mean mostly orange - with reception as fuzzy as I was, and I lay there all night, too nauseated to sleep, watching movies like Godzilla vs. the Smog Monster and Hercules Unzipped, plus three versions of our national anthem and one of Canada's and four varieties of sermonette (Methodist, Lutheran, Roman Catholic and Total Immersion Baptist Evangelical Church of Christ), and, finally, something called the "Hog-Watch Sun-up Early Rural Feed and Price Pork Report" until I dozed off a little before six, Friday morning. At 6:15, there was a calamitous banging on the door. It was Buckethead, the landlord: "Dis storm door stick, you know!" Then he shoveled snow under my window for an hour.

Patton has accused me of being overly concerned about wasting a scarce natural resource. The category tag. In this, of course, he is completely wrong. Naturally, I could have argued that over-categorizing a post dilutes the utility of tags. And I would have been right. But that wasn't the point. I was attacking him on aesthetic grounds, and just to stick a stick in his eye.

Just to prove that I am not some sort of homo-tree-hugging-enviro-commie, this post, which really is about everything, is tagged with every category we have. And, when I have a free moment, I'll add some new categories, and add them to this post.

So there.

My mom sent me this photo she took when she was up over the holidays. I had to share:

Our baby girl is amazed at her world.

[wik] The Ministry of Future Perfidy reports in late 2025 that that crab still exists, and is still lovingly referred to as, "The Hippy Crab."

I have been absent from posting for some little while now, and resident in the bad blogger seat that I added to the site to encourage my cobloggers to post just a little more often. The irony of this situation has not escaped me, but I can at least offer a reasonable excuse: superstition.

It seems that every time I mentioned, online, the prospects for a house - well, that deal went into the crapper in proportion to the amount of detail I went into. So, I have avoided mention of any real estate dealings, and in fact avoided blogging at all for fear of letting something slip. I must admit I feel some trepidation in even mentioning it now, but we are under contract for this place, financing is in place, and everything seems to be moving forward in a smooth and sane manner. Our new place is not the huge estate that I described in my earlier posts, but it is over four acres, and will suit our needs very nicely.

Giant Robot posts, dick jokes and goofiness will resume presently.

Everything seemed to be going so smoothly. That should have been my clue that everything was about to go balls up. Either that, or I should have known better than to post about something that hadn't happened yet, and was thus subject to the jinx. I am now informed that the land contract issue might be a killer, and that we might not be able to get that property. Land contracts are standard when the acreage involved is more than about ten acres. Land contracts as a rule require 20% down payments. We don't have 20% of $350k. Fuck fuck fuckity fuck fuck.

But, I tell myself, all is not lost. First, we are approved for a mortgage - all we need to do is find a place that is less than ten acres. We can use my wife's idea for the addition to increase the value of the house we buy, sell it in a year, and have enough cash once we sell to put a down payment on a 20 acre plot like the one we want to get now. The plan is not necessarily derailed, and we won't even necessarily lose time. We would, though, have to go through the hassle of buying, selling and moving again.

Also, I have moved into a quick reaction mode in regard to the 20 acre plot - I've talked to the boss of my current lender to see if something might be done. He informs me that it is remotely possible that, by offering more documentation of my resources and history, and writing several begging letters, the underwriter might offer a waiver on some of the restrictions that normally apply. So we'll do that. I've called three other lenders to see if they perhaps might offer something more congenial, and hopefully by later today they will have some positive news.

Having made the decision that we want that particular land, it's a true pisser that we might not get it. And all this additional hassle is to say the least unwelcome. We'll see what happens.

This last Saturday, the Buckethead clan once again traveled up to the Shenandoah Valley to examine the property I discussed in my last post. This time, through careful advance planning, we got to see the interior of the house, and got a much better idea of the lay of the land. The short answer is that the lot suits our needs, and we will be making an offer on it directly. The plan, therefore, is about to kick into gear.

There are some issues, though, as might be expected. The house is on the small side, and has very low ceilings. There are power lines running through the field on the other side of the road, which will limit the number of places that we can site the new house that we plan on building. There are some concerns about septic and water. And the length of the commute will, frankly, fucking suck.

None of those problems are insuperable, though. Since we are planning already on making a (very large) addition to the house, the size is not an issue. The height of the ceilings is harder to get around, but if there are other parts of the house that are more vertically spacious, it might just seem charming. The power lines are a potential problem, but since the part of the lot that is on the other side of the road is still pretty big, we feel that we’ll be able to work around that one. The commute, though - I’m just going to have to take the hit on that one. All of that, along with some information from the county zoning officer (a very nice lady) to the effect that getting a three or four bedroom PERC (percolation test, which determines how many bedrooms you can build) should not be difficult and that we can divide up the property the way we wanted (either through a rezoning, or just by means of clever surveying) means that the house and land side of the deal is all in place.

Which means that something else must be screwed up. And, lo, it is. We are running into some financing issues. This is very frustrating, seeing as I was under the understanding that we were already approved. When the loan guy said bad news, my paranoid mind immediately began obsessing about credit ratings the phrase “you’ll never get a loan, you loser” began echoing in my skull. As a distant murmur, I heard him saying something or other about “land contracts” and “house value.” I almost interrupted him with, “Good Christ, man! What does this blather have to do with my insufficient credit?” But then I slowly realized that he was saying that I had been approved, he’d cut us a check – if we were buying a house.

Which it seems we aren’t. We are now told that when you’re buying a lot of land along with your house, it isn’t the same as a normal house contract. It is instead a land contract, and the mortgage company that had already approved us doesn’t handle those. There are two factors which go into deciding which category a property falls into – one, the proportion of the values of house and land, and the total acreage. We’re about fifty-fifty on the value question, which may allow us to proceed – maybe. However, 20 acres is probably over the line into land contract. We may have to start the financing process all over again with a lender that does do land contracts. We can get it expedited, in which case it won’t affect our timetable, but we may no longer have access to all the nifty options you can get with a normal house loan. Which may or may not suck.

At the very least, though, we were assured that getting a loan isn’t a problem, which is a relief. So, we will likely make an offer in the next day or so, and the plan will be off and running.