It's Only A Paper Rose

Brian's comment: "You know, sometimes I think we should have stayed in Alaska."

...but first, I wanted to describe something funny I saw earlier. We were on our way to the bank to finalize some loan paperwork, and standing across the street were a couple of dudes protesting - one had a shirt with Obama's picture on it captioned "Dictator for Life" (which really makes me think he doesn't understand any of those three words, but whatever), and one had an anti-health care reform sign. Anyway, we went inside, and when we came back out, there was an elderly black lady with a walker standing next to them. I couldn't hear what she was saying, but she was gesticulating pretty strongly, and the two dudes were looking distinctly uncomfortable. Ah, the joys of freedom of speech. It goes both ways, folks.

As those of you who follow either my Facebook page or Brian's blog probably have figured out, a confluence of factors inspired us to go new-used-car shopping.  It wasn't the best time to do so financially (we were upside-down on the loan for the Audi, and didn't have a lot of liquid assets for a down payment), but the negatives of keeping said Audi were starting to stack up: it was coming up on some pretty serious maintenance at the 100K mark, and as we've already discovered several times, maintenance on that car was significantly more expensive than on less esoteric models.  Plus, we don't have to worry about ploughing through snow berms anymore, and it only gets about 15 mpg with all the city driving we do around here.  Ouch.  

Since a goodly percentage of the used cars in Arizona seem to be located in Phoenix, we decided to drive up there over the weekend to try some of them out.  It's about a three-hour drive from Sierra Vista, not bad when you're doing an overnight trip (although our hotel experience wasn't as restful as we'd hoped), and that gave us plenty of time to test-drive the several cars Brian was interested in.

I won't bother posting a rundown of everything we tried, especially since Brian already did a far more detailed one than I would. I will, however, state for the record that Phoenix was far nicer than I thought it would be. I'd heard it referred to in the media as aiming to be "the Los Angeles of the Sonoran Desert", which seemed to me to be rather an odd goal, given that the one good thing about Los Angeles was the beaches, which they're simply not going to have here. But on the whole, I'd say it was rather nicer - I was actually able to differentiate between the neighborhoods, and it didn't feel quite as hugely overcrowded and barren of human kindness and charity as LA did. Admittedly, I might be responding more positively to Phoenix because we had a GPS device, which were far less common in early 2004 when I visited Los Angeles, which is a nightmare for anyone like me with a poor sense of direction and a phobia of getting lost - see above re: undifferentiated neighborhoods. Also, we weren't there in midsummer, which probably has something to do with our generally positive experiences as well.

(Note to tygenco_x: sorry we didn't let you know we were in town, but almost all of our time was taken up by test-driving cars, eating, and sleeping - plus it was sort of last-minute. We'll be back at some point, though, so I promise we'll get that lunch date in sooner or later.)

Ultimately, we found a pretty good deal on a 2006 BMW 330i, which I love because it's slightly smaller than and gets half again the gas mileage of the Audi, and Brian loves because it's got a really impressive engine, and we both love because it was one of maybe three in the Arizona area that has heated seats. (I completely understand why most people don't bother with them in the desert, but they're rather nice on chilly mornings, and we're kind of spoiled on them.) Additionally, it has one of the few sound systems I've come across that actually is slightly more impressive than the one in the Audi, and Brian says - it's a stick shift, which I still need to learn - that it drives like a dream. Even from the passenger seat I can say that the ride is a really nice balance between sporty and smooth. Plus the sport seats have adjustable side bolsters, which I dig way more than might be reasonably expected. And (quite importantly, as we've learned) it's a fairly common model of car with no turbochargers and an engine that's supposed to be dead easy to work on, so it shouldn't be too expensive to maintain.

On the whole, though, I'd say what thrills me most about it is how happy it makes Brian. He's wanted a BMW for a long time, and finally being able to afford one makes him pretty seriously happy. (Sign #348 that he's a good husband: He was feeling a bit self-conscious, parking it next to the beat-up little del Sol that cyranocyrano gave me. "Don't you think people might think that your husband's a controlling jackass who won't let you have a nice car?" I laughed and assured him that I would tell people I was perfectly happy with the del Sol, because it was a convertible and because it was free. I'm sure eventually we'll be able to get me a nicer car too, but for right now I think the del Sol's perfect for me. Plus, it was free.)

The other important discovery we made on our trip (aside from "don't stay at the Bell Road Red Roof Inn until they fix their wireless service and mattresses") came in the form of an Irish-style pub in the university district of Tempe that went by the name of Rúla Búla. See, when Brian and I first started dating more than five years ago (eep!), we used to go to a place called Doc Water's in Juneau. While not an Irish pub per se, it had a similar atmosphere, as well as the best burgers and fish 'n chips either of us had ever experienced. Sadly, a year or so later they came under new ownership, and the food went rather downhill. Eventually they closed, but ever since then Brian's been on a quest to find a place that makes a burger as good as Doc's did in their heyday. And after sampling many a burger at many a restaurant (ranging from greasy spoons to some quite nice places), we finally found it. Bonus - their fish 'n chips are equally excellent as well, and they make a fantastic lamb stew. Plus, they're an Irish-style pub, so they have both Guinness and Smithwick's on tap. Highly recommended to anybody who might be in the area.

On a more personal note, I'm working on making friends with a girl I met via Craigslist (believe it or not) - her name's Liz, and while we come from rather different backgrounds, so far the chemistry's been pretty good. (And she's cute!) She's coming over for corned beef tonight, so here's hoping things continue to go well - she seems pretty neat and it's nice to have someone other than Brian to chat with.

Also, happy St. Patrick's day to the Irish, non-Irish and wannabe-Irish in the crowd. :)

I'm a bit confused here. I mean, if Glenn Beck is despised by people on the left or in the center because he's a paranoid, lying scumbag who's off his rocker, and people on the right don't like him because they think he's a careerist phony...

...who is it that's actually listening to him?

(And who do we petition to get them shipped to Mars?)


*Full title: "An afternoon thought; or, If You Rant About Politics On Cable Television And Nobody Believes You, Do You Still Get Ratings?"

Obama: "No one should go broke because they got sick."

I applaud our President for attacking the health-care issue head-on, and especially for calling out the liars who have been spreading misinformation about the health care reform efforts in order to prey on people's fears. Whether or not his effort will have any effect remains to be seen, and I'm sure plenty of other blogs will pick apart the rest of his speech for any possible meaning or contradiction, so I'm not going to go into that here.

But I would like to express my utter and total amusement at his choice of words. How hard do you think it was for him to stop himself from saying, "If you agree, please post this as your status for the rest of the day"?

So the rumor mill has it that Dick Cheney, Angel of the Bottomless Pit of Governmental Cronyism and Lord of All That Is War Profiteering, was not only in town a few days ago, but used a paltry percentage of his Halliburton-gotten gains to buy a house here on Douglas Island. I have no idea if he'll actually be living here, but given his fondness for staying in Undisclosed Locations, a house on an island in Southeast Alaska that's completely cut off from the major road system does seem a likely candidate.

Obviously the rumor mill wasn't specific as to which house that might have been, but I've come up with a pretty foolproof plan. See, I'm thinking I'll invent a little gizmo called a Demon Finder. It'd work kind of like a Geiger counter, except that it measures the free-floating particles of villainy in the air. Up until now there wouldn't have been much use for it locally - there are a good few folk in town who've become moderately wealthy by committing petty evils like building and renting out poor-quality housing or running no-tell motels - but I'm pretty sure the amount of pure, unrefined turpitude left by Mr. "I'm very proud of what we did" would drown out those remora fish in a second.

So, who's up for a good old-fashioned angry-mob-raising? I'm pretty sure Don Abel's has a supply of pitchforks, and we can improvise some torches. Given Juneau's plethora of musical talent, we might even be able to get a chorus to sing "Kill the Beast" - any volunteers?

...Yes. I would vote for this. If only because it would make C-SPAN far more entertaining (not that that takes much):

The NYT has a story today of a Frenchman's "harrowing escape" from Muslim extremists who'd captured him.  I've only been skimming bits and pieces in between working, but a couple of things stuck out:

1.)  He "escaped" because his captors failed to lock the door to his cell and then went to sleep.  No, seriously.  (Admittedly, tiptoeing past heavily armed folks liable to shoot first and ask questions later probably counts as "harrowing", but still.)

2.)  This bit:

Mr. Aubrière insisted emphatically, several times in an excited voice, that his half-dozen heavily armed captors treated him like a gentleman, never hitting him, always feeding him and making sure he had plenty of water.

“They were young guys, but good guys,” he said.

He talked about what he ate — “spaghetti, rice, meat from sheep, you know, the normal Somali stuff” — and how he trained for weeks in his cell, cranking out push-ups and walking for hours back and forth, always barefoot, “to toughen up my feet.” To kill time, he read the one book he could get his hands on, Dan Brown’s “Deception Point.”

“I read that book eight times,” he said. “I hate this book now.”

I'm sure his situation was far better than any number of other political prisoners around the world, but seriously, dudes - you hold the guy captive for more than a month and give him one UND EXACTLY VUN book to read, and it's a Dan Brown novel?  That probably counts as cruel and unusual treatment in and of itself.

The good, or at least less-sucky: Between getting married and Brian turning 25 over the last year, our auto insurance has gone down almost $250 per six-month premium. So that's nice, even if it's still a mandatory large expenditure. Sigh.

The wince-inducingly awful: Word is the health insurance industry as a whole is rejoicing - not only is it looking like healthcare reform as a whole is going to bring them millions of new customers (including government subsidized lower-income people), but the one bargaining chip the government had planned in order to keep them from taking complete and total advantage of their customers (the creation of a public option to compete with the private sector) is losing support, and there's talk of only requiring them to cover 65% of costs on cheaper plans. Jesus H. Christ on a cracker. I didn't honestly think things could be any worse than they are, but pass this "reform" and the poorer folk are going to be even more screwed - not to mention the taxpayers who'll be subsidizing their worthless "plans". But the insurance industry gets richer, so everybody who matters wins!

As a sidenote - I particularly love this bit: "In the first half of 2009, the health service and HMO sector spent nearly $35 million lobbying Congress, the White House and federal healthcare offices, according to data from the Center for Responsive Politics." And how much of that $35 million came from/is going to be offset by denying paying customers' claims for bullshit reasons, thus sticking them with even more bills?

I dunno about you guys, but I'm headed straight to the city of Headdesk in the great, time-honored land of Political Demoralization. Anyone else want to come along?

I wrote this as a reply to a syndicated column in the newspaper today regarding the distressing rise of comparisons to Nazism in political discourse today. I'm reposting it here, because I think it's something we should all seriously think about.

Back in the early days of the Internet, comparisons to Nazism as an insult for some trivial offense were so common that an idea spread to combat them. Referred to as "Godwin's Law", it stated that in any argument, as soon as someone brought up Hitler or the Nazis they lost and the discussion was over. This idea came about in large part for the reasons Mr. Pitts describes - because the evil that the Nazis perpetrated was so vast that trivializing it for the sake of an argument was an insult to the millions upon millions of their victims.

Godwin's Law was (and is) necessary because, in this new world of cyberspace where people were represented by strings of characters, participants had little reason to be civil to each other during arguments. Sure, there was a certain level of social conditioning, but once people realized the true extent of their anonymity they had no reason to pull punches - there was nobody to make them take real-life responsibility for their words, and they couldn't see the hurt they'd caused in the other person with their remarks. So in many places discussion on the Internet devolved into vicious, nasty, personal attacks against people with ideas others didn't like. (Sound familiar, Empire board members?) Godwin's Law, and a few other basic rules that are nameless but equally universal (don't post personal attacks, don't "troll" - post inflammatory statements specifically for the purpose of getting a rise out of people, etc.) began to be enforced on various boards, sometimes unofficially by group members, sometimes officially by moderators. While there are still dark corners of the Internet where flamewars continue, in most places online discussion stays on a certain level of civility, because the alternative is chaos.

Here's what scares me. As stated above, nastiness was a problem in the early days of the Internet due to anonymity; in the real world, people remained at least moderately polite to each other because they could be taken to task for their words. But now, the level of discourse among people in the real world is quickly degrading to early-Internet levels. People call in about Nazism on talk shows as if they've never heard of Godwin's Law (which, to be fair, they may have not), pundits make completely false declarations without offering any supporting evidence whatsoever, normal people interrupt town hall meetings (which are supposed to be a forum for rational discussion) to scream about how Obama wants to kill your grandmother, etc. Once upon a time you didn't want to be known as the guy who was on television (or YouTube) saying all that crazy conspiracy stuff; these days, people wear it as a badge of honor.

What's changed? I honestly don't know. Certainly our celebrity-obsessed culture has done its fair share of encouraging behavior like this; when your entire goal is to be recognizable, there's no such thing as bad publicity. Undoubtedly, the aforementioned pundits and the billionaire neoconservatives bankrolling the town-hall protests share some responsibility as well, for encouraging extremist thought. Perhaps even the Internet has played a role - it used to be that you didn't want to offend people who lived near you, but now that literally anyone can go online and find a subset of folks who think exactly like them, their ideas are reinforced and their motivation to avoid stepping on others' toes is reduced.

Whatever the reason, we're rapidly becoming a nation of trolls starting flamewars over politics. How ironic would it be if the moderated Internet became the last bastion of rational, civilized argument?