Halloween Observations

Many people have taken the day off. Some of my friends are traveling to a gaming weekend (where doggies are not permitted). Humans have no sense of humor.

So the dog and I are alone for the weekend.

The political frenzy approaches it's final apoplexy. My favorite board has been plagued by bots. Cyberattack? a new form of political warfare? In any case, most of my ramblings have been there, not here, since the Inquisition (on the board) hasn't been doing very well, lately.

The leaves are finally starting to come down.

I haven't been able to enjoy the fall as much this year, due to work. I haven't even read the almanacs, something I normally do by mid-September. Being sick twice this month has not helped.

I bought a bus/Metro pass for this month, and have used it once. Too often, I have needed to travel between work sites, overtime, from work to home or event, been too ill to ride, etc. Looks like I'll have to bring the bike in for the winter. Damn.

RANT:

Why in HELL does The Game HAVE to be MONDAY FRAKKING NIGHT?!?. Mondays are the worst, for me, since everything that has broken down over 2.5 days is waiting at 0800 Monday Morning, plus the usual Monday Panic. And why does it have to be at 1815? I have to cross town twice, first to relieve doggie, then to the game. Assuming a 1700 launch from work (dubious) I'll burn an hour and a half just running my ass off.

The answer is, of course, is that we're all in our mid-to-late forties, and are unwilling to sacrifice weekends. Monday holidays, Tuesday-Thursday classes, and Wednesday sports games all combine to make the worst night of the week the only night of the week that can be sacrificed for going back to the days of unlimited leisure. It does not help that I only get a fraction of the generous vacation time that my group's other players' employers ladle out. Plus, there are at least two regular campaigns going at any time, so a missed game means a month's wait anyway.

A monthly Saturday game would work well. The occasional Wednesday games work OK. Better to have a good day, and a good game, than to have a time clock punched weekly.

/RANT

Deathbug.

Sunday afternoon, Mom and I had a dinner to celebrate her 73rd birthday. Max enjoyed it most of all, with the food and attention. It was a lovely fall afternoon.

Monday morning, I had a sore throat, nausea, stomach pain, headache, and GI problems. Called in to work, and visited the healthcare system for another merry go round. Had a 99.9F temp. Tried going back to work today, had recurrence of GI problems and nausea. According to the medical people, this new form of gastro virus has been making the rounds.

The dog is happy, since he's had me for four days. Sickeningly enough, I want to go back to work... :)

Flamewars, Explained

http://www.slate.com/id/2202303/pagenum/all/

Joe the Plumber Gets More Attention

http://www.toledoblade.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20081016/NEWS09/810160418

The New Word For The Last Several Weeks

http://www.slate.com/id/2202262/?fail

the good word: Language and how we use it.
Epic Win- Goodbye, schadenfreude; hello, fail.
By Christopher Beam
Posted Wednesday, Oct. 15, 2008, at 11:55 AM ET
A demonstrator holds a "fail" sign at a Senate hearing on the financial crisis.

When Ben Bernanke and Henry Paulson testified before the Senate banking committee last month about Paulson's proposed bailout bill, a demonstrator in the audience held up an 8.5-by-11 piece of paper with one word scrawled on it in block letters: "FAIL." Earlier in September, Sarah Palin's interview with Charlie Gibson was dubbed by some bloggers an "epic fail." Grist magazine invoked the phrase when John McCain told a Maine TV reporter that Sarah Palin "knows more about energy than probably anyone else in the United States." And just last week on the Atlantic's Web site, Ta-Nehisi Coates found the theory that Bill Ayers ghost-wrote Barack Obama's memoir so "desperate" he called it an "Epic Fail."

What's with all the failing lately? Why fail instead of failure? Why FAIL instead of fail? And why, for that matter, does it have to be "epic"?

It's nearly impossible to pinpoint the first reference, given how common the verb fail is, but online commenters suggest it started with a 1998 Neo Geo arcade game called Blazing Star. (References to the fail meme go as far back as 2003.) Of all the game's obvious draws—among them fast-paced action, disco music, and anime-style cut scenes—its staying power comes from its wonderfully terrible Japanese-to-English translations. If you beat a level, the screen flashes with the words: "You beat it! Your skill is great!" If you lose, you are mocked: "You fail it! Your skill is not enough! See you next time! Bye bye!"

Normally, this sort of game would vanish into the cultural ether. But in the lulz-obsessed echo chamber of online message boards—lulz being the questionable pleasure of hurting someone's feelings on the Web—"You fail it" became the shorthand way to gloat about any humiliation, major or minor. "It" could be anything, from getting a joke to executing a basic mental task. For example, if you told me, "Hey, I liked your article in Salon today," I could say, "You fail it." Convention dictates that I could also add, in parentheses, "(it being reading the titles of publications)." The phrase was soon shortened to fail—or, thanks to the caps-is-always-funnier school of Web writing, FAIL. People started pasting the word in block letters over photos of shameful screw-ups, and a meme was born.

The fail meme hit the big time this year with the May launch of Failblog, an assiduous chronicler of humiliation and a guide to the taxonomy of fail. The most basic fails—a truck getting sideswiped by an oncoming train, say, or a National Anthem singer falling down on the ice—are usually the most boring, as obvious as a clip from America's Funniest Home Videos. Another easy laugh is the translation fail, such as the unfortunately named "Universidad de Moron." This is the same genre of fail that spawned Engrish, an entire site devoted to poor English translations of Asian languages, not to mention the fail meme itself. A notch above those are unintentional-contradiction fails, like "seedless" sunflower seeds or a door with two signs on it: "Welcome" and "Keep Out." Architectural fails have the added misfortune of being semipermanent, such as the handicapped ramp that leads the disabled to a set of stairs or the second-story door that opens out onto nothing. Even more embarrassing are simple information fails, like the brochure that invites students to "Study Spanish in Mexico" with photos of the Egyptian pyramids. These fails often expose deep ignorance: One woman thinks her sprinkler makes a rainbow because of toxins in the water and air.

The highest form of fail—the epic fail—involves not just catastrophic failure but hubris as well. Not just coming in second in a bike race but doing so because you fell off your bike after prematurely raising your arms in victory. Totaling your pickup not because the brakes failed but because you were trying to ride on the windshield. Not just destroying your fish tank but doing it while trying to film yourself lifting weights.

Why has fail become so popular? It may simply be that people are thrilled to finally have a way to express their schadenfreude out loud. Schadenfreude, after all, is what you feel when someone else executes a fail. But the fail meme also changes our experience of schadenfreude. What was once a quiet pleasure-taking is now a public—and competitive—sport.

It's no wonder, then, that the fail meme gained wider currency with the advent of the financial crisis. Some observers relished watching wealthier-than-God investment bankers get their comeuppance. It helped that the two events occurred at the same time—Google searches for fail surged in early 2008, around the same time the mortgage crisis started to pick up steam. And the ubiquity of phrases like "failed mortgages" and "bank failures" seemed to echo the popular meme, which may have helped usher the term out of 4chan boards and onto blogs. It's rare that an Internet fad finds such a suitable mainstream vehicle for its dissemination. It's as if LOLcats coincided with a global outbreak of some feline adorability virus. The financial crisis also fits neatly into the Internet's tendency toward overstatement. (Worst. Subprime mortgage crisis. Ever.) Only this time, it's not an exaggeration.

Most Internet memes have the lifespan of fruit flies. But there's evidence to suggest fail is here to stay. For one thing, it's easier to say than failure. (Need for brevity might explain why, in Webspeak, the opposite of fail is not success but win.) And there's a proud tradition in English of chopping off the endings of words for convenience. Between Old and Middle English, many nouns stopped being declined, says Anatoly Liberman, an etymologist at the University of Minnesota. Likewise, while Romance languages still conjugate their verbs, English keeps it relatively simple: I speak, you speak, we speak, etc. It's also common for verbs to become nouns, Liberman points out. You can lock a door, but it also has a lock. You can bike, but you can also own a bike. There was great fuss a century ago among readers of the British magazine Notes and Queries when it used the word meet to refer to a sporting event. It's not surprising that failure would eventually spawn fail.

It wouldn't be the first word to owe its ascendance to the Internet. The exclamation w00t—an interjection expressing joy—gained mainstream recognition when Merriam-Webster crowned it Word of the Year in 2007. The phrase pwned, a perversion of owned used by online gamers, made it into an episode of South Park—not quite the OED but still authoritative—and enjoys broad ironic usage. And of course, Google is no longer just a noun.

Unlike those words, though, fail has the luxury of pre-existing forms. It already exists as a noun in the phrase "without fail." It's therefore likely to gain quicker entry into most people's lexicon than, say, a word that includes digits.

In other words, fail will win.

This Would Never Be Misused

http://www.express.co.uk/posts/view/65419/Forces-personnel-hard-drive-missing

Note: MOD=Ministry Of Defence

MPS 'FURIOUS' AS MOD DATA MISSING
Story Image


Data of Armed Forces personnel has gone missing

Friday October 10,2008

MPs have demanded a "cultural change" in public sector data handling as it emerged that a computer hard drive possibly containing the private details of Armed Forces personnel was missing.

In the latest Whitehall data embarrassment, the Ministry of Defence (MoD) said its IT contractor, EDS, could not account for the portable drive.

It could contain the names, addresses, passport numbers, dates of birth, next-of-kin and driving licence details of up to 100,000 Army, Navy and RAF personnel.

An urgent investigation by the MoD is under way to establish what the drive actually contains. Officials stressed that they were currently treating the case as a "potential" data loss.

Ministers are understood to be "furious" at the development and insistent that it is resolved as quickly as possible.

Downing Street described the loss of the data as "regrettable".

It is only the latest information security breach to hit the MoD.

In July it admitted 658 of its laptops had been stolen over the past four years and 26 portable memory sticks containing classified information had been either stolen or misplaced since January.

Tory MP Nigel Evans, who chairs the All Party Parliamentary Group on Identity Fraud, said: "This is yet another example of the serious implications the loss of personal data can have for the general public.

The Liberal Democrats described the loss as a "disturbing breach of security" and called for an urgent inquiry into how it had occurred.

Where We're Going After Loss-Of-Empire

http://women.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/women/the_way_we_live/article4880902.ece?print=yes&randnum=1223543484765

From The Sunday Times
October 5, 2008
Let’s put the drink down and just talk
New Yorker Sarah Lyall voices her shock at the British dependence on the bottle for relaxation
Sarah Lyall, New York Times London Correspondent

Most Octobers I cover the Man Booker prize, an occasion where members of the literati converge in an elaborate medieval banqueting hall in London to hear who has won the country’s most important fiction award so they can proceed to attack, sneer at and feel jealous and insecure about the decision. The dinner beforehand tends to drag and when you are seated next to someone who has nothing to say and seems weary of his (and your) very existence, you feel you should have spent the evening at home watching CSI: Miami reruns in your pyjamas.

I felt this keenly at one of these dinners when the man on my left, a moderately successful publishing executive, turned out to be a twitching parody of a tongue-tied Englishman spooked by normal social interaction. He answered in monosyllables. He failed to initiate topics of conversation. He stared at his bread roll, shuffled in his chair, fidgeted with his napkin. Aside from the occasional phlegm-displacing sound he was a silent companion.

But by the time the main course arrived, a strange transformation had taken place. Mr Silent had become Mr Forthcoming, even Mr Amusing. He listened to what I said, told complex anecdotes with memorable punch lines, spoke expansively about literature, leant in close for a tête-à-tête.

I had drawn him out, I thought; I was finally getting the hang of this place. But it wasn’t me. It was the wine. By the time we got our coffee, my man had had too much and his conversation flowed down the path to nowhere. He started and abandoned subjects. He spoke in nonsequiturs, repeated himself, grew sweaty and red-faced. Finally he went quiet again, clutching his glass in contemplative desperation.

By British standards, of course, this man was not a hopeless drunk, not even close. Meeting him taught me that you should take advantage of a man’s lucid middle period during this type of meal because you won’t get much before or after it. His performance also helped to illustrate the benefits and drawbacks of alcohol as a tool and a prop and a backdrop to British society.

In a nation of the chronically ill-at-ease, alcohol is the lubricant that eases the pain of frightening social encounters, an essential prelude to relaxation, to joie de vivre and even, at times, to rudimentary conversation. But because Britain has what is known as an “ambivalent alcohol culture” – which means the British haven’t worked it out completely – they can take their drinking too far, too fast, with corrosive consequences to health, happiness and productivity.

I have many British friends who in America would be considered functioning alcoholics – the equivalent of 1950s Cheeveresque businessmen from suburban Connecticut who greeted the end of the workday with a couple of predinner martinis before moving on to wine and whisky. Heavy drinking is part of the fabric of their lives and it would be considered rude to comment on it.

I had come from New York, a city where this kind of drinking is reserved for the weekend and drinking to the point of insensibility is an activity only for the very young or the very likely to be headed for AA. By contrast, Britons seemed to drink all the time. It was a shock to see how enthusiastically they knocked back the booze at Sunday lunches in the country and how high their tolerance was. It was a shock to see, after we’d had our first weekday dinner party (everyone stayed until 1am, never mind their jobs), that the table was covered in twice as many empty wine bottles as there had been guests.

Britons love to drink and love to boast about drinking. Like hungover students who wake up sick on sticky, beer-soaked floors with someone else’s underpants on their heads but then brag about their awesome night of partying, they have an amused tolerance for drunken high jinks.

One of the reasons the late Queen Mother was so beloved was that she spent the last decades of her life in a benign alcoholic haze. For the British, alcohol is a relaxant, an emollient, a crutch, a relief, an excuse. If they go overboard, it is the get-out-of-jail-free card that allows them to throw up their hands, palms out, and disavow responsibility.

Per capita drinking across most of Europe has decreased in the past 40 years, but in Britain it has increased. People start younger, drink more and are increasingly likely to binge-drink. Government figures released last year show that British adults on average drink the equivalent of 11.4 litres of pure alcohol a year – translating into 130 bottles of wine or 1,137 pints of beer. The government has estimated that the total cost to society, in medical bills, missed work, clean-up charges and increased policing, is about £20 billion a year.

“There’s no social group that’s immune to binge drinking except the elderly – although we recently had a 90-year-old who drank five pints and fell down as he tried to leave his local pub,” Dr Paul Atkinson, a consultant in the A&E department at Adden-brooke’s hospital in Cambridge, told me. “It’s very common to have head injuries. I’ve had people who’ve inhaled their teeth into their lungs.”

The effects are all too obvious to anyone brave enough to take certain trains late at night, to stand outside pubs or clubs at closing time or to venture into town and city centres late on Friday or Saturday nights.

Drunken Brits are one of the country’s most visible exports, too. Other Europeans sometimes feel as if Britain treats their continent as one huge pub, followed by one huge bath-room. One day I decided to go to Prague on easyJet (price of last-minute ticket: £50) on a flight that left at 6.15am. Most of the passengers – groups of young men in matching shirts with stag-party slogans – seemed to have been up all night in the pub. When I tried to talk to some of them, they were like schoolchildren: embarrassed to be singled out, staring glassy-eyed through the window.

Why did they choose Prague? “We looked on the internet and these were the flights that were available,” said one guy, maybe 35, whose breakfast, three cans of Kronen-bourg, was lined up in front of him. He snickered: “I thought we were going to Barcelona.”

His even more unfriendly friend, unshaven and paunchy, finished his first round. “Bring the trolley to me with a big straw!” he shouted to the flight attendant, who seemed unperturbed.

If the atmosphere on the plane was unpleasant, the atmosphere in Prague was poisonous. Rocky O’Reilly’s, a transplanted Irish pub just down the street from my hotel, was filled with British men drinking for drinking’s sake. A group were attempting to flick sugar cubes into water glasses. One man wore a plastic headpiece in the shape of a turd because he had expressed annoyance about something – or “got a turd on”. So he had to wear the hat until someone else got annoyed, whereupon he could then pass it on.

These were men in their early thirties whose touristic research had consisted of printing out lists of Prague drinking establishments and strip clubs from the web. They explained that British society no longer allows for male-only activities, except possibly for football matches, so stag weekends are important bonding opportunities. “It’s the extreme end of men’s behaviour,” said one guy, who admitted that he couldn’t have a real conversation with his pals without a drink in his hand.

Robbie Norton, the owner of Rocky O’Reilly’s, told me about a party of 23, fresh off the plane, who had consumed 180 vodkas and 60 cans of Red Bull in a single Friday. Sometimes the British embassy was taking 60 drunken calls a night from Brits who had lost their wallet or could not remember the name of their hotel or what city they were in.

I hate to sound like a spoil-sport, but it’s hard not to feel there is a large problem here that many people simply refuse to confront, no matter how much doctors warn about cirrhosis or the government enacts new laws about antisocial behaviour. It’s also hard to expect the public to change its attitude when many of the people it most admires – sports stars, younger members of the royal family, politicians – spend so much of their time getting publicly trashed.

Extracted from A Field Guide to the British by Sarah Lyall, published by Quercus at £14.99. Copies can be ordered for £13.49, including postage, from The Sunday Times BooksFirst on 0870 165 8585

Nobody Saw This Coming!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IU6PamCQ6zw

Have a laugh at Laffer.

As Expected, No Suprises

Tonight's debate was a draw, as expected. Events will still drive the campaigns, not rhetoric.

Total Information Awareness

http://www.dailyexpress.co.uk/posts/view/64725

Death Knell for Politics As Usual

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/05/magazine/05Davis-t.html?_r=1&ref=todayspaper&pagewanted=print&oref=slogin

The 3T political structure is collapsing.

Fukuyama Says 4T

http://www.newsweek.com/id/162401?tid=relatedcl