Cross on a Pentagon

James Dobson doesn't like Barack Obama's politics or religion. Gasp.

Read the CNN article if you're inclined. This is not man bites dog news. As usual, Dobson and Obama are both making statements about religion that are less daring than they're made out to be, and as usual, though Dobson is my brother in Christ, I wish he wouldn't speak on my behalf so fervently.

It usually feels a waste to pick apart these sorts of things -- most of the time I don't even mention them here. This is what blogs are for, I suppose, an opportunity for one to be eloquently opinionated. But I get worked up for about 12 seconds, and once I sit down to write, I realize that the topic is so ultimately petty that I can't bring myself to spend the discipline to spell out why. I don't want to spend a lot of time pointing out the particulars of dumb things.



Instead, I want to highlight a comment from the article that probably played to Obama's audience pretty well (an audience that I am peripherally part of), and an idea that no one will likely pay meaningful attention to:

He [Obama] also called Jesus' Sermon on the Mount "a passage that is so radical that it's doubtful that our Defense Department would survive its application."

He didn't say he'd work to do anything about that, mind you. His words seem calculatingly political there. But if a U.S. president would act on making the DoD conform to the Sermon on the Mount, I'd follow that person through heatwave and hail.

The Stonecutters Have Relented!

My green nerd and my late adopter are at war over the subject of this Businessweek article, The Electric Car Lives:

An electrified people's car for the 21st century, the Ox is a preview of Think's next-generation production vehicle, due out in 2011. Roughly the size of a Toyota Prius, the Ox can travel between 125 and 155 miles before needing a recharge, and zips from zero to 60 miles per hour in about 8.5 seconds. Its lithium-ion batteries can be charged to 80% capacity in less than an hour, and slender solar panels integrated into the roof power the onboard electronics. Inside, the hatchback includes a bevy of high-tech gizmos such as GPS navigation, a mobile Internet connection, and a key fob that lets drivers customize the car's all-digital dashboard. Pricing has yet to be announced, but the company's current vehicles cost less than $25,000.

They drop the $25,000 price tag to make you salivate, but that's the alleged price for their current European offering, the City, roughly the size of two refrigerator boxes stapled together. Also, according to their Web site, the price is 20,000 euros, which, at press time, equals $31,200.

The Ox will be bigger, and contain doodads, which will surely drive up the price. My WAG is a $40k car at launch, which is not "people's car" money. It probably won't become that way by 2011 either, when the Ox is planned to go into production.

They claim they'll be profitable at 10,000 vehicles a year. If this does what they say it will do, they should have no problem selling 10,000 in their first year. I'm more interested in, say, Ox #100,000 when they've worked out the first generation bugs, and economies of scale have lowered the price.

An Ox will likely not replace Groovy. But maybe it will replace Groovy's replacement.

Fjurthermore Makes, The World Takes

Fjurthermore has now reached the vital population of 50! My original house has been replaced by a 10-story apartment building, and the town boasts five paved roads.

With hard statistics such as these, you'll be inclined to agree that our yeti hideaway is ready for the sweet urban kiss of industry.

If you would like to bring your industrial business or franchise opportunity to the Warmest Little Cold Town on Earth!tm please follow this link:

http://fjurthermore.myminicity.com/ind

Of course, regular population is also welcome. Remember, the more often you stop by, the sooner you see whatever pithy one-liner I've decided to amuse visitors with.

Make travel reservations today!

New Dog Blues

We ended our foster period with Merit about three weeks ago. She kept biting Dylan out of what we think was a combination of jealousy and anxiety. We wound up keeping the dogs separate all the time.

It was hard. It meant separate walking, separate feeding, separate rooms for their crates... it was a lot of effort. It wasn't working out.

One day, not long before we took her back, she was loose, and bit Dylan again. I tried to break them up, and got my hand chomped. M and I spent the afternoon in the emergency room. I'm fine by now -- my chronic nail biting does worse damage -- but I spent a week as a righty.

That was my bad judgment. Stick your hand in a blender, and you can't blame the blender for what happens. However, the shelter wouldn't see it that way. If we told them Merit bit our dog and me, and then tried to return her, she would be put down within the hour.

That wasn't acceptable to us. We'd rather have lived with the craziness than let that happen. But "live with craziness" is nobody's Plan A.

Luckily, the volunteer we fostered her from in the first place still had a kind spot for Merit. She already has two dogs, but took Merit in anyway, and really worked to get her adopted. She did stuff that didn't even occur to M and me.

Tonight, the volunteer emailed me and told me that a couple in Allentown had seen Merit on the Web and just today came down to Philly to adopt her. They're cool with her anxiety issues. One of them works from home, so somebody would be there with her. They don't have kids or other pets. They want a high energy dog. It sounds ideal for lil Knothead.

I'm thrilled for Merit! This is so plainly a better deal for everyone, that I can't be unhappy about it. But I am sad. I like dogs. I've met lots of friendly dogs, but rarely one that I click with. She was a dog who liked me back.

I hope she likes Allentown. I hope they take her for runs. I hope, if we're ever up there and happen to see her -- like you imagine happening, but you know never will -- that she remembers me with the same affection.

Step Across

Having bounced around so many jobs for so many years now, I’m constantly learning a new job. I never have time to settle in and become the local expert, because I’m never around long enough.

But I’m discovering that doesn’t mean I’m not an expert.

People in executive level positions are my age now. They always used to seem to be these unknowable, strange, wholly-above creatures, but these days they’re dudes and ladies like me. They have different areas of expertise, but they’re not smarter or better equipped than I am. They just have nicer offices and make more money. That’s weird. And annoying when they turn out to be jerks.

Meanwhile, there are people 10 years younger than me, who are competent and good workers, but inexperienced. They are where I’m used to being -- the outsider, scrambling to figure out what I need to know just so I can start doing my job. To my own surprise, these days, when these less experienced people come to me with a question, I know the answers.

I’ve been a working adult for 15 years. Jobs that ask for 5+ years of experience? They’re asking for me. I haven’t had more than 2 or 3 years at any one job, but I’ve had a bunch of years total.

I'm a full-time copywriter now, with only about six months of direct experience. I was looking at a senior copywriting job opening a few weeks ago, and except for the fact that I’m relatively inexperienced at copywriting, I had everything I needed for that job. I could do it. A senior-level job didn’t seem strange and unknowable.

Our pastor sometimes talks about leaders in the church being afraid of their own power, afraid to exert their own leadership. Until very recently, maybe even minutes ago, he was describing me.

I am ready to be a leader -- among my church and at work. I’m ready. It’s not time for me to step up, because I’m already at the proper elevation. I just need to step across, and start the work.

Alea iacta est

And I crit! Woo!

This is how Caesar rolled for initiative at the Rubicon:


This baby came in the ORIGINAL original D&D box set.

Black Swan Conjecture

I'm tempted to quote far more than fair use from this Times Online article about Nassim Nicholas Taleb. But that's why God made hyperlinks, so go read it and save me the cut and paste.

Taleb articulates several ideas that only flitted through my consciousness previously, and you always pay attention to people who are saying what you already sort of believed anyway. The gist: You can't know exactly what it is that you don't know, so there's no point in acting like you comprehend what's happening in the universe. Be humble enough to accept your potentially vast ignorance, even (especially) in areas where you are considered expert.

His articulation also leads me to weigh his ideas that I hadn't considered before though, which is the real exciting part. New ideas are practically currency here in the future.

Aside: Why are so many noteworthy nonfiction writers economists these days?

Cherrypicked from Taleb's 10 Life Lessons:

1 Scepticism is effortful and costly. It is better to be sceptical about matters of large consequences, and be imperfect, foolish and human in the small and the aesthetic.

2 Go to parties. You can’t even start to know what you may find on the envelope of serendipity. If you suffer from agoraphobia, send colleagues.

3 It’s not a good idea to take a forecast from someone wearing a tie. If possible, tease people who take themselves and their knowledge too seriously.

5 Don’t disturb complicated systems that have been around for a very long time. We don’t understand their logic. Don’t pollute the planet. Leave it the way we found it, regardless of scientific ‘evidence’.

7 Avoid losers. If you hear someone use the words ‘impossible’, ‘never’, ‘too difficult’ too often, drop him or her from your social network. Never take ‘no’ for an answer (conversely, take most ‘yeses’ as ‘most probably’).

10 Answer e-mails from junior people before more senior ones. Junior people have further to go and tend to remember who slighted them.

Pulp Fiction

Screw Tarantino.

I'm talking about real fantasy pulp fiction, straight out of the 1930s, yards better than modern fantasy lumbering behind embossed covers featuring dragons and sunsets and whatever.

I'm fortunate enough to be friends with Erik Mona, publisher at Paizo, and the driving force behind Planet Stories, Paizo's attempt to make a few bucks off reprinting out-of-print pulp fiction classics.

Erik sent me an assortment of Planet Stories books about a month ago, and I have read them like a starved man. This is what I've wanted for about 15 years now: someone with trustworthy sensibilities to tell me what the good fantasy is. Not the good-enough fantasy, the GOOD fantasy.

I've already blown through Elak of Atlantis, Black God's Kiss, and City of the Beast. I was reading them serially, but I've since trifurcated, and am trying to read three at once (this never works out): Northwest of Earth, Lord of the Spiders, and the Secret of Sinharat, that last one written by Leigh Bracket, who got writing credit on a little flick we like to call The Empire Strike Back.

Many of these stories are not masterpieces, right? They're not keen indictments of the frail human condition. But now I see why people lionize pulps, why George Lucas keeps trying to remake them. I see, basically, where comic books came from.

The energy in these stories leeches out of the paper into your brain. These working writers wore out typewriters, just writing the very next thing that came into their heads. And the stories mostly read like that--you don't know what's coming next, because the author quite possibly didn't know either, but they are both "rip" and "roaring" and you will do well to purchase one or more of these books, both for your own edification, and to insure that Planet Stories is properly funded to continue this literary archaeology.

Punk'd

I was impatient to wait for Fjurthermore to grow organically yesterday, so I emailed Meredith to get her to visit. She did, and I checked back in:

Jeff: There's 2 houses now! Awesome!
Meredith: I think your house is bigger than mine. Why? That's not fair. I'm just as good as you.
J: Actually, that's your house.
M: Oh, of course! Haha!
J: Also, we both know you're not as good as me.
M: At being a punk...

Visit Scenic Fjurthermore!

On Monte's boards, I discovered a lil' Web game that is just my kind of low-impact tamagotchi-type amusement: MyMiniCity.

When someone visits your mini city, you gain population and such. It sort of procedurally grows from there. It also doesn't require me to give them my email address, so it's a double WIN.

Since I already live in the USA, I wanted to put my city some place more exotic, so I tried to find a place I'd never heard of. Eventually, I found Svalbard, an island chunk of Norway, circa 80 degrees latitude with a population of 2400. Sweet! It's a yeti's island getaway!

Svalbard also contains the awesome doomsday Global Seed Vault so that humanity (or at least Norway) will have some plants available in case Monsanto accidentally kills everything with their awesome Terminator seed technology which could theoretically render all plants sterile.

Note: That second part is actually not very awesome.

But for now, the sparsely populated frontier of Fjurthermore could use your tourism. Visit today!

Evangelicals: Maybe Not All 'Tards

This just in from CNN: Study to crack evangelical stereotypes

For decades, Boston University sociologist Peter Berger says, American intellectuals have looked down on evangelicals.

Educated people have the notion that evangelicals are "barefoot people of Tobacco Road who, I don't know, sleep with their sisters or something," Berger says.

It's time that attitude changed, he says.

This is like when some lab coat puts out a press release announcing they've proven that a majority of little girls do not like "icky things."

Anyone walking around with the idea that Evangelicals are uneducated or uniformly stupid has a bad case of the asshats, and I try not to patronize that particular form of haberdashery.

Crackpots -- particularly the self-styled "intellectual" variety -- don't take to correction. The way to deal with them is to deny them attention, and go about your business. Reality will out.

The Party's Over Here!

Part 2 in my irregular series of attempts at eBay comedy writing is up. (Reminisce about part 1 here.)

When I worked at the newspaper, our art director, Ron Dacanay, had a fair amount of free time on his hands, and some powerful graphics software. That's pretty much the basic recipe for comedy right there.

Ron churned out all kinds of crazy shit on the clock, and I kept most of it in a little art gallery on the wall by my desk.

The picture at right is an exemplar of his work. I bought a dollar store frame and kept it on my desk until I stopped working at the paper. Then I just kept it.

It was a stock photography model looking up at a light bulb floating overhead. Then Ron perfected it by slapping the face of North Korean "Dear Leader", Kim Jong-il, over the bulb.

Because the picture is already so absurd, my writing adds little to the humor of the thing. But one does what one can.

Christina's bright idea? Kim Jong-il! I totally know!

Please bid early and often. Thank you and good night.