Category Archives: Uncategorized

Short on time this morning so I’ll make it quick.

Over the weekend, Russia signed a $500 million deal to supply Syria with weapons. This would be the same Syria that’s already murdered over 5,000 of its own people in the past year, for the crime of wanting democracy. Apparently Putin watched the videos of the Syrian military shooting civilians and said, “You know what those soldiers need? More bullets.” Thanks for that one, Vlad.

France (along with Britain and the U.S.) condemned the sale, even as it took steps to restrict freedoms inside its own borders. The French Senate recently passed a bill making it a crime for any French citizen to deny the occurrence of the Armenian genocide, which happened in World War I. There’s no question that the genocide is a historical fact, but wrapping its memory in a law that tears away at free speech is a bitter irony, not to mention idiotic.

What the hell, France? You’re supposed to be one of the good guys.

Picture this. You’re walking down a hallway. Suddenly you notice someone else, someone you know, off in the distance…walking toward you.

I know, right? Disaster.

When someone is far away it’s no problem, because the two of you can easily pretend like you don’t see each other. When someone is close it’s no problem, because you can throw out some little greeting and be on your way. But anyone walking toward you will inevitably reach the intermediate zone between “far away” and “close,” a zone of supreme awkwardness, where you are near enough that some form of interaction seems required, yet far enough away that you can’t start talking yet.

This is the realm of Hallway Eye Contact Syndrome, or HECS.

You’re playing a dangerous game, and you know it. If you make eye contact, you’ll have to offer some kind of weird long-distance greeting, like a wave or a shout or a nod. Neither of you wants that, of course. So you both start looking around, searching for other things that could plausibly interest you (“oh my, our floors have carpet, when did they put that in?”) while trying to avoid walking into a wall. But you know, just as they do, this game can’t last forever. Sooner or later, one of you will have to break, decide that you’ve entered the Communication Zone, and offer a greeting. By the time it finally happens, the awkwardness has grown so intense that you don’t even care anymore – you just want it to be over.

HECS isn’t so bad if you don’t know the person at all, because then you can pretty much pretend they don’t exist without seeming rude. It’s also not so bad if it’s a close friend, because then you can do something goofy in the intermediate zone, like an exaggerated wave, and it works out okay. As before, the danger lies in the middle – with people who aren’t friends, but are good enough acquaintances that you have to greet them.

And of course, the fewer people in the hallway, the worse it is. If it’s just you and them? Forget it. You might as well turn down a side hall now.

For some people, HECS is only an occasional hazard, a few seconds of awkwardness per month. But those of us working in office buildings aren’t so lucky. All the conditions are ripe: long uncrowded hallways, lots of people that are acquaintances but not really friends, and a constant stream of reasons to be up walking around.

I’m telling you, it’s brutal.

Do you suffer from HECS? What strategies have you found for dealing with it? Share your tactics with fellow patients!

Hey look, I got a new toy.

Here’s the problem I was having. My wife has to get up around 7:00 to get to work by 8. I, on the other hand, get up at the ungodly hour of 5:30, which gives me time to write my blog post and still be at work by 7.

I was using my cell phone’s alarm clock feature – in vibrate mode – to wake me up. The motor in the phone was so loud I could set it on the night stand and the sound alone would wake me. In fact, it would wake Betsy, too.

An hour and a half early.

You see the problem.

The concept of the LARK is simple: you wear a wristband to bed, and it wakes you up by vibrating – quietly, so you’re woken by touch, not sound. You can sneak out of bed so your wife keeps sleeping.

We’ve been on this new routine for almost two weeks now. The verdict? It works. I wake up, Betsy sleeps. Mission accomplished.

That said, it has some drawbacks:

• The LARK wristband inexplicably requires you to download an iPhone app to set your alarm, which means you have to have an iPhone (or iPad). Why they would narrow their target audience so drastically is beyond me.
• The app also has some trouble connecting to the wristband. It often tells you to hook up the wristband to the docking/charging station so it can connect, even though the wristband is already docked. Often you actually have to remove the wristband from the dock to make it work. It’s fine once you figure out the quirks, but this is something they easily could’ve fixed. (Fortunately, the wristband alarm will go off even if the connection is broken.)
• The vibration is quieter than my phone’s, quiet enough that it gets the job done, but it’s still very much audible. I could imagine it waking someone if they were a light sleeper.
• The damn thing costs a hundred dollars. Yeah, there are cheaper products out there that do the same thing, but they all had serious problems. (One wristband had buttons on the band itself, and if you accidentally hit the wrong button while sleeping, it could turn the alarm off!)

The LARK app has some other features, too: it’ll track your sleeping statistics and even (at an extra cost) act as a sleeping “coach,” provided you care enough to set up a username and password. I do not.

So. Money well spent? I’d say so. But for as much money as I did spend, you’d think they could’ve worked out some of those issues.

(Official site is here.)

What’s your wake-up situation? Do you have any kind of unusual alarm or system? Have you ever had the same problem I did, and if so, what did you do?

They're serious about that No Parking sign.

There comes a time in every man’s life when he must watch a 19-ton truck roll over five other vehicles consecutively. For me, that time came last Saturday, when I went with my wife and two friends to a monster truck rally in Cincinnati.

I am not what you would call a “truck person” in general, and I’d never been to anything like this before. I went because I like trying new things, and I like doing stuff with my friends. Still, I was acutely aware that the demographic at this event was not – how can I put this – “my people.” I am not generally accustomed to seeing that much camo in one place.

Me and my far more attractive wife, Betsy. xkcd in da hizzouse!

But although we didn’t really fit in with the crowd, everyone was very nice to us. Another group even told us we didn’t have to move when we turned out to be in the wrong seats. I was struck by this politeness, not because it was unexpected, but because it flies in the face of what pundits tell us about the supposed culture war in America. In the headlines, tensions are always on the verge of exploding. In real life, people are pretty nice to each other.

Back to the trucks, though.

The pit party.

The point of a monster truck rally is to be big and loud and fun, and to that end, mission accomplished. Four trucks competed: Big Crunch, Outlaw Clydesdale, Defender, and Bigfoot. (The only mental image I can summon for the name “Outlaw Clydesdale” is that of a very naughty horse.)

Between the announcer’s commentary and a little pre-game Wikipedia research, I learned that Bigfoot is the original monster truck, the one that started the whole thing back in 1979. There are lots of trucks called Bigfoot now, all owned by Bob Chandler. This particular Bigfoot was the star of the show, and seemed pretty popular with the crowd.

Unlike the Internet, Bigfoot is, in fact, a big truck.

So what do these trucks actually do? Well, this rally had three main events. First, there was a wheelie contest, where the trucks compete to see how much air time they can get when jumping over a pair of unfortunate cars. (The winner is determined by applause.)

Second, they do a drag race, which is just two trucks going in a straight line from one end of the (rather small) stadium to the other. This was the least interesting.

And third, there’s an event called “freestyle,” which was essentially driving over five cars instead of two, plus some other driving around that appeared (to my untrained eye) rather pointless.

In between these events, they gave the trucks a break and did motocross and four-wheeler racing.

The Defender. What is it defending? The same thing the Avengers are avenging, I guess.

It was a cool show, but unfortunately, the venue was really too small for what they were trying to do. The trucks are huge, and they packed them into a dirt-filled arena the size of a basketball court. They had to back up just to turn around. I felt like a bigger area would’ve given them the freedom to do more stunts, not to mention more interesting races.

Also, as I mentioned, only four trucks competed, and aside from the paint jobs they all looked pretty much the same. But the jumbotron played videos of other monster truck events, highlighting a wide assortment of vehicles of all different designs, from the Grave Digger to a van with tank treads. A little more variety would’ve helped.

Each truck costs a quarter of a million dollars. Hopefully the cars were a little cheaper.

Still, it was fun, and loud, and they crushed things, which – I’ll be honest – is all I really wanted.

And what did you do this weekend?

On November 2, 2010, Oklahoma voters approved 70%-30% a state constitutional amendment that “makes courts rely on federal and state law when deciding cases” and “forbids courts from considering or using Sharia Law.” (Full text of the ballot description here.)

I can barely even wrap my mind around how ridiculous this is.

Think about it for a second. You’re making a state law that says judges have to follow state law.

What conceivable problem are we solving here?

Picture this: a judge comes into work one day, says “Hey, instead of interpreting U.S. law, I think we’ll give the Islamic religious code a whirl.” Nothing at all prevents this – nothing like, say, the entire existing United States legal framework – except, wait! Oklahoma voters to the rescue! Thank God, crisis averted!

Can’t imagine it? Funny, me neither.

This nonsense is back in the news now because a federal appeals court recently ruled the measure unconstitutional. I’ll let the staggering irony of that sink in for a second.

The whole thing is part of a larger wave of anti-Islamic sentiment in the United States. Similar laws have been proposed in twenty other states. Representative Peter King has begun a series of pointless hearings investigating the extent of radicalization in the Muslim community. And Herman Cain – who, for reasons that remain unclear, was briefly the Republican frontrunner for President of the United States of America – warned of the “creeping attempt” to work Sharia law into the government.

Sigh.

The sheer volume of ignorance and stupidity here is depressing. Maybe we can…yeah, let’s see, I think I can find…

Source: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Dingo_puppies.jpg

Yay, puppies! Ah, I feel better now.

Puppies.

All right, readers, what do you think about all this? Alternatively: can you tell us something that will cheer us up and/or restore our faith in humanity?

And, go!