Good Morning Mr. Crankypants

I have a cold. It's hovering in that "you're not quite sick but your throat feels weird and you feel generally gross, but well enough that if you laid around watching 'Ellen' and 'Oprah' and Soap Network reruns of 'Dynasty' and 'Dallas' you'd feel guilty" kind of realm.

I am not good at "sick." I get cranky and testy and impatient and am not the most fun to be around. So you are all warned: I'm not feeling well, but I've got a computer and I'm not afraid to use it. Hopefully I won't scare anybody away in the next few days.

I'm going to leave commenting on and open to all for now. I'll just repeat my earlier request: please write your name (or a name anyway) at the bottom of your comment. It's really just because I like to have some idea of who I am hearing from. That's all.

And if you don't, I'll hunt you down and give you my germs.

Home Sweet Home

Enough with the airplanes! I am glad to be home in warm muggy Houston. With a cold coming on, still, not helped by an afternoon in the flying tin can. No plane trips for a month. In fact no trips for a month though I'm pondering a little road trip to New Orleans. But that's practically local.

I should just go to bed but I'm complete caught up in reading Krakatoa (thank you - you know who you are) so I am going to curl up in bed with that for a while, reading and being one with cat.

Travel Day

Another lovely day - I've been quite fortunate with weather. It's sunny and supposed to get up to 60 today, which is amazingly nice for Washington in January. I'm at Cyberstop answering a few emails before retrieving my bag and heading to lunch with an old friend in Arlington, then the airport. It's been a nice visit. For all the things that I grew to dislike about this town, it remains the place where I have the biggest and most solid network of friends in the world. So I expect to be burning up the miles to come back to visit for some time. (But attention, all of you - and you know who you are - visiting Houston is much more sensible in the wintertime, y'hear?)

Now back to reality. The last six months have been a pleasant break from my high tech career, but I'm getting itchy. That doesn't mean I want another soul-killing IT industry job, but it does mean that it's time to pick something and run with it. I've been setting some mental deadlines for myself - whiling away the time is nice, but it's been enough time now that it's also a little scary. So, new year, new life, on we go....

Sometimes a Cigar

I went to see Sideways yesterday. It was a good movie, but after the build-up the critics gave it, I was a bit disappointed. It wasn't a great movie. It had some brilliant moments. But one of the year's best? I don't think so.

I notice today that Andrew Sullivan agrees. (Scroll down a bit, he still is lumping three to five posts into one permanent link.) I got a chuckle out of his comments through. Perhaps it's because Andrew likes to deconstruct the media, but he sees the reaction of critics to the movie as a product of their identification with the main character; movie critics are all neurotic liberal overly-verbal types, so they relate to the main character of this film and praise the film beyond its merits. It sounds almost like a conspiracy worthy of the New York Times to Andrew! I suspect it's just relief at something, anything coming along that doesn't seem to have been written for tenth-graders.

Meanwhile, in DC...

I don't know how happy the New Year is going to be for DC Mayor Tony Williams. Yesterday the three new members of the DC City Council were sworn in. They were all elected, to some degree, out of frustration with Williams' vision (or lack thereof) for the city, including the ball park debacle. It's hard not to see their presence - particularly Marion Barry's return to public life - as a sign that voters in neighborhoods that continue to be plagued by violence and city services in "booming" DC are fed up.

Barry's return will be good for journalists (there will always be something interesting to write about) but probably no one else. The departure of do-nothings Kevin Chavous and Harold Brazil is good news for everybody in Washington.

Airport

There's apparently now free WiFi at National Airport.

So, I've been thinking of changing the blog settings to not allow anonymous postings. I'd been thinking about it for a while, mainly because it makes me a little nuts to get an interesting comment from someone and have no clue who they are, and no capability of responding privately. Also, today I got a nastygram - that in itself is not so bad, although it was a brainless one - but I tend to think people are a bit more constructive when their name, or even a nickname, is attached to what they are posting.

What this would mean is that to post, you would have to to have a blogger.com login. That's free, but if you don't have one, you'd have to go create a login and be signed in to comment.

I'm curious what those of you who comment on my blog think.

Washington DC

What a glorious day to be here! A lovely day with temperatures near 70 - I feel like I bought the weather with me from home. I slept in, had a lovely late lunch/early dinner at a friend's house, then we walked around Dupont/Logan. This is the kind of day that can make me miss DC. Settling in for a nap and then probably going to the movies.

I'm here till Monday, those who know me, feel free to call, have lots of free time tomorrow.

Insane, Ignorant, and Objectively Wrong

First, the insane: the charming folks at Westboro Baptist are thrilled by the tsunami because it killed lots of "fags and dykes," as well as an even worse breed of people: Swedes. (These are the folks who picket funerals of gay people, including Matthew Shephard, with signs reading "____ IS IN HELL.") Just once I would like to hear of a mainstream Christian pastor preaching a sermon about how evil these people are, but I'm not holding my breath.

Now, the ignorant: from an editorial in yesterday's New York Times: "According to a poll, most Americans believe the United States spends 24 percent of its budget on aid to poor countries; it actually spends well under a quarter of 1 percent."

How fucking stupid are our fellow citizens? It's no wonder we see the voting patterns we do when so many people cannot flip the channel from the latest reality show to find out something about what their government is actually doing. They think we spend a quarter of our budget on foreign aid? A people that cannot be bothered to find out things that are easy to uncover about what is happening to their tax dollars don't deserve democracy. A national press that doesn't talk about this more is an embarrassment to the profession of journalism.

Finally, the objectively wrong: most bright people go through their Ayn Rand phase (usually around age 16-19) and then discover that they have a soul and grow up. Others go on be part of the Ayn Rand Institue, and write about why we should not give a penny is tsunami aid. Of course these are the folks who consider volunteerism immoral, so what do you want... but still.

Off to my flying tin can. Again - happy new year!

Incomprehensible

Like everybody else, I've been watching the news and seeing the photos and reading the newspaper articles about the devastation in Asia, and mostly feeling numb horror. Today, sitting reading the New York Times, it suddenly was very hard not to cry reading about it. Maybe it just takes time for something like this to sink in. Maybe it never actually does.

The Times today ran a set of before and after aerial photos of Banda Aceh, Indonesia that shocked me. The contrast - not just the destroyed buildings, but the way the shoreline by the city is just different than it used to be - gave me a sense of the magnitude of this disaster, and how its effects take many forms - the loss of life, the destruction of homes, but also how a the places themselves have been permanently altered.

I can only think that as the survivors struggle for the basics of life in the aftermath, they must feel like the living dead.

I couldn't find a page on the Times site to link to directly with the photos, but if you go here and click the "Asia's Deadly Waves" link in the right column under "Multimedia," you can see them.

Riding the Rails

The New York Times has been diligently writing about the state of our nation's rail system and how dangerous it's become, thanks to poor oversight by the federal government and the carelessness of commercial rail carriers. This is not a glamorous story or one that capture headlines around the country, but it is an important one.

In previous articles they've written about the system in which Amtrak is responsible for paying damages for accidents caused by commercial rail carriers (which means your tax dollars are paying those damages), and poor safety standards of the commercial carriers. In today's article they paint a frightening picture of the state of crossing signals, which often don't work, and whose problems, when reported, aren't fixed.

If you ride trains - or if you drive over train tracks, as anyone here in Houston does repeatedly - it's quite frightening. And it costs lives. (I'll be slowing down and looking more closely the next time I head down Heights Boulevard and over the tracks.)

I wonder when people voted for Bush for "smaller government" if they stopped to think that this is how government shrinks: the rail lines become unsafe. Drugs that kill you get approved by a weakened FDA. Consumer protections agencies don't have the resources to go after wrongdoers. Is that really the "smaller government" they wanted?