It’s going to be a couple of days until my next journal entry.
My grandfather, George Goer, passed away… peacefully, in his sleep. He
was 93.
I’m off to Miami for the funeral. More later.
Month: February 2002
Poker Night Invasion
Remember Charlotte Raven?
Well, she’s baaack.
This time she’s gushing about Muhammad Ali for telling an anti-Semitic joke at a recent
charity banquet. (What’s the difference between a Jew and a canoe? A canoe
always tips. Yuk, yuk.)
Raven is, of course, thrilled with Ali. In fact, she goes so far as bestow Ali with the
highest praise possible in the postmodern universe. Yes, she calls him “subversive”.
Nope, sorry, Ms. Raven. Telling anti-Semitic jokes is mainstream… and
boring, to boot. Hiding Jews from the SS: now that’s subversive.
In Other News: Gregg Easterbrook is not a happy camper.
“Where’s my Enron bribe?” he
demands. After all, he’s been writing long boring energy policy pieces for
years. But nobody cared. Here’s his account of trying to sell
an energy deregulation piece to
The Atlantic in 1992:
Bill Whitworth was silent for a long pause and then said in his
modified Arkansas drawl, “Gregg, don’t you think that topic is — a little dry?”
When Bill Whitworth, the most bookish and circumspect in a storied line of bookish
and circumspect Atlantic editors, tells you your topic is a little dry, that’s
like the pope telling you that you need to get out and meet some girls.
As for my life:
Sarah got pretty sick last night. With Mom and Dad both out of town,
I was the only one left to take care of her. She has some variant of the flu
with a nasty fever. Poor kid.
On Tuesday, we had a major Invasion on Poker Night. Our old friend Phil
was in town, and that brought out a number of friends from all over the bay,
including a couple of significant others. Well, just one significant other.
There was another cute girl (a cute Mudd alum!!) who I thought was
Brian Cheney‘s spouse, but
turned out not to be. Believe me, I was emphatically not-crushed to
learn I was mistaken. Unfortunately she’s moving to Albuquerque, NM in a matter
of days. At least that’s what she said… hmmmm….
Anyway, we had ten people for poker. We played with two decks,
high-low split on nearly every game, with very few wilds. It worked out
pretty well. I even came out a buck ahead, although Lord knows I didn’t
deserve to. On one game of
“Pass the Trash”
I had the winning high hand, but I folded on the first round. The hand that
actually won was a straight. A freaking straight. It was agonizing to
realize on the third round that half the pot should have been mine. Mine!
At least I played it
cool at the time. I was simply too embarrassed to let everyone know how high my
hand was. I’m still too embarrassed. I must be the Worst Poker Player
Ever. Grandma Ruth, if she were still alive, would definitely not approve. And
I don’t care for basketball, either. Oh, the shame.
Marijuana (or: Econ 101)
Well, it looks like
Ken Lay
has chickened out of his Senate hearing appointment, and now they’re going to
have to subpoena him. The article ends with a nice quote from the
Chairman of the SEC, Harvey Pitt:
Pitt lamented the impact of Enron’s dissipation on regular people who trusted the company.
“It is these Americans whose faith fuels our markets, who have no lobby and no trade
associations, whose interests are, and must be, paramount,” he said. “I am appalled at
what happened to them as a result of Enron’s collapse.”
Chairman Pitt’s concern for the average American investor would be truly
heartwarming… if only he hadn’t played such a large part in
creating the legal
environment that let Enron rip off those investors in the first place.
Oops!
Well, the Superbowl is over, and the Patriots, 14-point underdogs, beat the
St. Louis Rams 20-17 in an exciting last-minute field goal. But even more exciting,
apparently, were the Partnership for a
Drug-Free America‘s Superbowl TV commercials, which pointed out that the drug trade
supports criminals and terrorists.
Well, the PDFA was sloppy; they conflated the tens of millions of dollars of
Taliban
heroin funding with the six hundred million dollars of
cocaine
money that went to the FARC with the rest of the illegal drug industry.
This of course
prompted
numerous
self-righteous
screeds
from the other side that managed to muddy the issue further, claiming that
the government is trying to tie marijuana to Al-Qaeda. I admit, the screedists did a good job.
The straw-man argument that “smoking a joint supports terrorism!” can now be considered
Officially Knocked Down.
On the other hand… according to NORML,
Americans consume at least 1200
to 1800 metric tons of 6% THC cannabis per year. Here’s the bad news: those
hundreds of metric tons were not grown by your
goofy slacker college roommate in his dorm room closet. No, I’m afraid the bulk of the revenue
went to some very anti-social men in Northern California or Mexico. Men with guns and bear traps
and dogs trained to kill. And what products and services did these men purchase
with their profits? As much as I wish otherwise, methinks they did not
invest in Enron.
We Americans have spent the last few months bitching and moaning about “the root causes”
of terrorism. Where do these grievances come from? “Why do they hate us?”
Well, we can debate whether the Arab world is justified in hating us from now ’till
Doomsday. In the meantime, I’ll tell you who does have real grievances
against the USA. The Colombians, that’s who.
Of course, if we legalized all drugs, this problem would go away.
And I’ve got no objections to that. That’s the best way to cut the legs out
from under the organized criminals who profit from the business.
However, just because you support drug legalization, don’t
for a second think that means you’re pure as the driven snow when you consume
them. Your choices have consquences;
unfortunately, you don’t usually end up paying them.
Ye olde goer.org
I’ve decided to switch webhosts.
It wasn’t last month’s several hours of unannounced and unapologized-for downtime.
It wasn’t the numerous typos on their help pages.
No, I think what did the trick was the bill I received for $4,211.20 for
unpaid web services. To accumulate that bill, I would have
had to have been delinquent for 188 months, or since mid-1986. (That predates
the Mosaic browser
and the HTML standard, although not
the TCP/IP protocol.)
Anyway I think the procedure is pretty simple:
- Register with new host
- FTP files to new host
- Get NetworkSolutions to change their nameservers
- Cancel service with old host
So if all goes as planned, the changeover will cause no interruptions to this site.
Oh, damn. I’ve probably jinxed myself right there. I’d better move on before
I do any more damage.
Last night Nancy and I went to Bill’s for dinner. His
sister Patty was there, along with Jennie and a nice Belgian couple,
Sophie and Ward. The problem with the dinner: I can’t say anything
else about it. See, Bill is currently obsessed with my silly little website that maybe
ten people bother to read on a regular basis. All evening it was,
“Don’t put that on the website!” “That’s off-the-record!”
This must be what Bob Woodward’s social life is like.
So I think the only thing I can talk about is the wine. So here it is,
another Winelog entry:
Stag’s Leap, Napa, 1998 Cabernet Sauvignon: BRAVISSIMO!!
In Other News:
“Reassurance is good. Cash is better.” – Ahmad Fawzi, spokesman for the
United Nations special envoy to Afghanistan, on long-term American
support for the nation (from Newsweek.)
Fawzi should take heart: if President Hamid Karzai doesn’t get the
support his country so desperately needs, he can at least
knock
us dead with his fashion sense.
Edit, April 2003: Well, it’s pretty clear by now that we’ve screwed Karzai pretty good. I guess fashion sense isn’t enough.
Misinformation… on the INTERNET??
First, I’d like to call your attention to this month’s sidebar commentary.
I’m sponsoring a very special charity project. I’m sure you’ll
all agree that it’s a worthy cause. Check it out… and give, give, give!
Last night Nancy, Randy, Shauna, and I went to a
Bill Fredlund lecture on “Fra”
Filippo Lippi, an influential
painter in early 15c Florence. (I use “Fra” in quotes because
as it turns out, Brother Lippi did not exactly turn out to be the best “Fra”,
as his wife the ex-nun might attest.) It was a good Bill-lecture, although
at just over an hour, it was a bit short. Also, while some of Lippi’s paintings were
breathtaking, he had the same “misshapen baby” problem that all his contemporaries
struggled with. Perhaps there was some tradition or taboo in Renaissance Italy
where adult males were not permitted to see infants? I can’t explain it otherwise.
Incidentally, while I was looking for Lippi biographies to put on the site, one of the
biographies
I ran across had this amusing statement near the bottom:
“His pupils were far inferior to him.” Ummm, really? Inferior like, say, Botticelli?
Oh, well. I only mention this to remind you all that I scruplously check
all links on this site for quality. Rest assured, a goer.org link is a
mark of taste, erudition, and 100% quality, guaranteed. You’re welcome.
In Other News: This morning I was listening to
Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me!
on the radio today, and guess who they had as a guest? That’s right,
Petra Verkaik (warning: link unsuitable
for children), perhaps better known as the
Playboy Playmate who took 17-year-old Toby Hocking to his Winter Formal dance
(as I mentioned earlier).
Coincidentally, NPR is doing another Pledge Week right now. Can you think of
a better reason to support National Public Radio? Neither can I.