The biggest is sometimes also the best

I have been sitting in a cafe in exotic and glamorous Chicago, Illinois for a couple of hours, looking for a blog app that simply and effectively does what I want it to do. I haven't actually found one, it's just that while blogger is limited and annoying, it's not nearly so limited and annoying as the others I tried. Honestly the biggest problem is that I want to do a photo blog, and there doesn't appear to be an easy way in the other apps to change rotation of a photo. This sounds like a small gripe, but actually it fucking isn't, dude, and here's why (I'm about to teach you something, so get ready, or just skip down to the pictures if learning makes you feel uncomfortable, but don't be surprised if they make you feel uncomfortable as well. Maybe you just can't handle me). HTML, the language of the web, if you will, doesn't have any way to rotate a picture. Your phone, probably the thing you use to take most o of the pictures you take, stores the orientation information of the images you take with it. Then, when you go to look at the picture, it can look at the orientation info and display it so it's right-side up. This isn't always what you want it to do, but it's probably better than what HTML pages do with an image, which is to just display it in landscape whether that happens to be what you want or not. Blogger orients the picture so it's upright, since it knows the picture has that info stored with it. So, blogger it is, at least until I find a blog app that is actually good.

Ok, here is pictures:

Chicago is full of old buildings with signs like this.

This Puerto Rican neighborhood is full of big malls and other public art.

The weather here tends to be nice.

The yoga studio lockers have jovial expressions.

Louis the ferret.

Y'all are making me mad out there

hey, everyone. Maybe if a little rain affects your driving that much, you were too marginal to operate a vehicle in the first place. maybe you should take a cab or one of those buses, you know, for disabled people.

How to argue like a Republican

There's a very common trick that I see all the time when dishonest assholes argue.  It is widely used by proponents of Republican politics.  First, you think about what your goal is.  Then, once you've figured out your goal, you accuse your opponents of trying to accomplish your goal.  For example, if your goal is to foment racial hatred in order to divide people who ought to be working together against the interests of your employers, you'll want to call your opponent a racist, and claim they're trying to tear the country apart.

The beauty of this method is that you attack them and you also steal what they were going to say.  They're left just staring at you in disbelief that you would lie so brazenly.  If they're the really empathic type, which a lot of liberals are, they might even stop a second and try to see if maybe you're right.  It's the trolliest kind of trolling there is.  Plus, of course, idiots believe you.  It's basically the best argument style possible, so long as you don't actually care about being truthful.

DISCLAIMER: This only works if your intentions are evil.  

The filibuster and why It doesn't matter whether Obama's EPA nominee gets confirmed or not

Hello, sometimes I write a blog.  I actually write more of them than you see if you are subscribed, because I post much fewer than I write, since I get to thinking somewhere along the line that the stuff I'm writing is stupid.  But today's post I did publish, because I'm super disappointed by the Senate Democrats' preposterously shortsighted decision to end the filibuster by forcing a simple up/down vote on presidential nominees.

First of all, let me explain what the filibuster process is and is not.  When a senator filibusters a vote: he isn't standing before his peers and talking like Jimmy Stewart pretended to do in that old movie.  All it really involves in most cases is that the senator makes a phone call and says he's blocking the vote and then the vote cannot proceed.  This is a very, very stupid thing to allow, and I'm surprised that ANYTHING EVER gets voted on when that's all it takes. 

Even though the filibuster as it is currently used is stupid and obstructive, filibustering is an important thing to be able to do, and by forcing a simple up/down vote by essentially nullifying the filibuster rules, Hairy Reed has just eliminated the filibuster as an option.  It's true that being able to block a vote by making a phone call is essentially a subversion of democracy. However, rather than eliminating the filbuster altogether, amending the rules of the filibuster so that the Senator must at least  actually be present in the chamber would be a much better move.  Frankly, the standing filbuster is a good system.  It's a much better idea to make a senator stand and talk the entire time they are blocking a vote.  That way, if a senator feels compelled to block a vote, they can do so, but only through expenditure of some personal energy.  It would seriously cut down on the frequency of the filbuster's use, but preserves the tactic for dire cases.

If the filibuster rule isn't amended by then, I guarantee that the next time the Republicans are in majority in the senate, Democrats are going to regret having backed the nuking of the filibuster rule. 

My Life Has Been Revolutionized by a Coffeemaker (plus boring minutae)

I have this love/hate relationship with coffee. Whenever I tell people about it, they don't seem to understand, but I tell people about it all the time anyway, because I'm a self-obsessed boor. I have a love/hate relationship with that too. In fact, I think that loving and hating kind of go along with each other. You don't know something, anything really, well enough to love it without knowing it well enough to hate it, too. This goes for everything: people, coffee, your society, your phone, whatever.

My friend Rebecca moved out of her place, and she is trying to get rid of some stuff she doesn't use, so she gave me this coffeemaker that we had originally found together when we dumpstered at the university. If you like to collect stuff that you probably don't need, (lord knows I do) then you really ought to be aware that at the end of every college semester (mostly in the Spring, and less so at the end of other semesters), idiot kids move out of their dorms and throw everything they had in there away. I have found a lot of good clothes, several computer speaker systems, furnishings of every description, movies, fancy calculators, durable foodstuffs, personal journals, valuable books, original artwork, stuffed animals, cleaning products, kitchen appliances, school supplies, deadly weapons, sexual aids, and live plants, to name a few items. What really keeps me coming back, though, is the odd things, like a set of billiard balls, a battery-powered air pump, a box of 40 12-volt electric motors.

My stepdad goes to thrift stores all the time and pokes around looking for treasures. He's been enormously successful at this, but he was actually doing it so much that he had to stop for a while. It was consuming his life. He had something of a routine where would drive out to Palmer on a weekly basis to check the stores out there, which he says tended to be more interesting. He knew every thrift store in a 40-mile radius of his house, and he went to all the worthwhile ones nearly every day. He filled my parents' 5000 square foot house with the most amazing things. He bought a sitar at a Salvation Army once. He found a gramophone at the ASPCA thrift store. He's found hundreds of things of that nature, and he buys them to keep them. He repairs them if they're broken, as he's a brilliant tinker and craftsman, and having restored them to their former glory, or generally something better than that, he just keeps them, in the way that a dragon keeps a hoard of jewels and gold. It's not merely avarice, I think, that causes him to do this. He has a respect for the objects themselves, a sense that they have a right to exist somewhere and to be appreciated.

This coffeemaker is so much more efficient than my devised means of making coffee. You add grounds to it, you pour cold water in a rear reservoir, flick a switch, and go stare at something for a dumb couple of minutes. When you come back, there's a pot of coffee waiting for you, perfectly brewed, no grounds in it. It's amazing.

You have to understand that the way I made coffee before this didn't exist for the purpose of making coffee entirely. The object which made my coffee before was a sort of monument, or maybe more reasonably, a trophy of my interest in solving problems with bits of things I have on hand. It's a cone coffee filter jammed into an Erlenmeyer flask. I poured hot water over the grounds, a little at a time to keep it from overflowing. The parameters of this method could vary wildly in terms of the amount of water I added, which was difficult for me to judge, the amount of grounds, the length of time the water took to filter through them, the temperature of the water, and whether I had managed to keep all the grounds out of the reservoir or not. It generally made pretty bad coffee, since very few arrangements of those parameters tend to produce something good.

I bought the Erlenmeyer flask at Arctic Brewing Supply years ago. It's a standard piece of chemistry equipment: an inverted cone of Pyrex with a neck and a bottom and graduations to indicate volume. The brew shop sold them because they're a convenient way of making yeast starter. Being Pyrex, they can be heated directly over a flame, which is useful in brewing, since you want everything to be completely sterile or the yeast will get it's ass kicked by wild bacteria and you'll end up with something that tastes like crap (incidentally, that's where abominations like “Belgian IPA” originate from: improper sterile technique). I was hanging out at the shop one day, and these spun out biker types pulled up in a shitty minivan and wandered around the store mumbling to themselves.  They were looking for a Pyrex flask to make meth with, and Peter told them he didn't have any.  After they walked out he told me he had to keep them in the back, since would-be meth cooks come in all the time looking for them, and he doesn't want to be Arctic Meth-brewing Supply. On a whim, I bought one, and I've used it for various things ever since.  To clarify, I have never made meth with it, since I figure the stuff is cheap enough that I can just buy it when I want it.   I got the cone filter attachment at a moving sale, and I had to poke holes in it to allow air to escape as I added water, because it fit so perfectly into the top of the flask.

I essentially made coffee in a homemade hourglass, and it took about that much time to make coffee. This new machine is great. It does its job well, leaving me with more time to do other stuff, like cook breakfast, which I'll talk about some other time.

I rode my bike across campus to help some people do something, and during that time, I remembered an interview of Dick Cheney I had seen on a TV show.  At the time, he was in a fairly advanced stage of heart failure and I was pretty sure he would die soon.  When he took a machine out of his coat and explained that his heart had stopped working, I hoped the interviewer would say something like "may your death be sudden, and your eternity in hell intolerable by any mortal measure."  But instead, she didn't.  I can't understand how some people get through their days.

After helping the people, which turned out to consist of turning off a television that was bothering them, I saw the newspaper which had an article titled something along the lines of "Serial Killer Rotting in Hell, Family's Pastor Tells Them." without feeling any sense of cognitive dissonance, I felt that it was an extremely harsh thing to say.

Here's my feeling on the matter, though, so you can get a little insight into my judgement.  The serial killer in question, who, by the way is named Israel Keyes, and is maybe not actually a serial killer, was definitely a bad guy.  I would say he's about as bad a guy as Cheney is.  But telling his family that he's in Hell isn't, in my opinion what you have a pastor around for.  If a religion can't be comforting in the face of death and other bewildering stuff, what use does it have?    On the other hand, telling Dick Cheney that you'll be glad when his corpse is no longer haunted by his forever-doomed soul is, in my opinion, just a statement of a widely-held belief.  It would be impolite to lie and say that the fact that he was dying was troubling to you in the slightest.

Luckily for fiction writers, we can't tell the difference between 3 things and a million unless we think about it.