I honestly love it when I find a succinct explanation of a problem that’s been bugging the hell out of me for a long time. Today, I found it in this piece from Rick Perlstein in The Daily Beast (by way of a link from Amanda Marcotte at pandagon):

When one side breaks the social contract, and the other side makes a virtue of never calling them out on it, the liar always wins. When it becomes “uncivil” to call out liars, lying becomes free.

Perlstein, is, of course, reacting to American politics, particularly the results of the recent mid-term election. I’d just like to suggest briefly that the statement above applies across the board to most social interaction within post-industrial society, and unfortunately, we’re at a place where in large segments of that society, the liar’s already won.

Things went on a little bit longer than usual at the office on Thursday; long enough to miss the narrow window of time that would have gotten me home ahead of DC rush hour. As a result, it took me almost five hours in a soaking gray rain to get home last night. It wasn’t a fun experience, left me keyed up and totally unable to sleep for way too long last night

Been taking care of a couple of necessary chores today this morning before another drive this evening in support of my offspring’s extracurriculars.

Oh well, what the hell else am I going to do?

1. “As High as It Can Go” – Dimensional Holophonic Sound
2. “Let’s Go To Bed” – The Cure
3. “Big Boom” – Jonathan Coulton
4. “I’m So Tired” – The Beatles
5. “Nun Fight” – Paul & Storm
6. “Plastic Tramp” – Arctic Monkeys
7. “Here Comes The Fool You Wanted” – Rock Sugar
8. “Whirlpool” – They Might Be Giants
9. “Island In The Sun” – Weezer
10. “Black Heart Today” – Amy Ray

If I can establish reliable routines and patterns, I tend to find I’m an easier person to deal with, and am generally more upbeat about things.

Thankfully, after a seriously trying occurrence of Alexander Chuck and Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day that lasted most of a week, the new job, schedule, and general weekday activities are settling into a predictable pattern that I’m starting to be able to deal with, and hopefully I’ll swing a little less widely on the pendulum between “angry shouty monster” and “weepy blubbering lump” for the coming weekend.

I also feel pretty good because I’ve managed to rack up a slight surplus of words against the target value for the first three days of NaNoWriMo, many of which I quite like, even if I still haven’t quite settled down into a plot or even a genre just yet. For what it’s worth, I think I found a little direction today, and for the first time this cycle, I’m starting to think I might like the places it seems to be going.

Finally, I’m enjoying the possibilities inherent in the thing I finally broke down and hit “order” on this evening – I just bought my first new desktop computer in over a decade. I kept the last one running for ten years before the power supply finally crapped out a few months ago – not that it bore much similarity to it’s original specs by the time it finally gave up. I finally decided that it was simply too old to bother swapping in any more parts, and I was tired of using nothing but laptops – there’s just something about a big imposing tower a portable can’t match.

To give you an idea of how long it’s been since I bought a new machine, the old machine has a first-generation Pentium 4 and shipped with a whopping 64 megabytes of RAM. The new box is going to have a 6 Core Athlon processor and 16 GIGABYTES of memory. I suspect I’ll notice something of an increase in performance.

I probably paid a little too much for the machine, but I figure if I buy a new desktop machine once a decade, it’s worth getting the best one I can manage, and if I’m going to overspend, better to throw it into maxing the memory than on some of the other stuff – it’ll save me some of the upgrade headaches later on if I get way ahead of the curve. Not that I won’t upgrade sometime soon – new 1.5 TB hard drives are only like fifty bucks, and this box is going to have a free bay just sitting there waiting for something to fill it with…

if this post feels a little disjointed, it’s because I feel a little disjointed right now. There’s lots of stressful and often unpleasant stuff rattling around in the deep dark corners of my brain right now, and it’s got me both totally on edge and wallowing in what may not necessarily a deep well of depression, but is certainly at least a not-entirely-shallow cistern.

I’m not going to go into all that, because you don’t necessarily want to read it – my therapy will be this year’s National Novel Writing Month project. I figure that if I’m going to be feeling shitty like this anyway, I ought to channel it into something I can at least pretend is productive. And, I had fun last year, even if that novel is mostly a bit of crap. So, if I start putting things up here even less often than has become habit, that’s where I’ll be.

By the way, don’t go looking for the NaNoWriMo site right now – as of this evening, it’s getting slammed. Less browsing, more writing, people!

The other thing I wanted to tell you all about is that tomorrow (Tuesday, November 2) is election day in these (allegedly) United States. If you’re an American, you have at least a congressional election to vote in, so get out there and do so. Even if you’d rather have dried leaves than ground beans and steamed milk in your hot water beverage*, I’d still encourage you to vote, because it’s part of the American experience. However, I’ll also try to convince you of the error of your ways before you hit the voting booth, because that’s another part of the American experience…or at least it should be.

For example, if you live in Virginia’s 4th congressional district, voting for Dr. Wynne LeGrow like I did a couple of weeks ago (absentee – I’m not going to be home for election day) is an excellent idea because he’s got great positions on the economy, the environment, and on health care, and if he’s elected to congress, he’s likely to do more over ten years than sponsor and pass just one bill and spend most of his time in DC running a prayer group.

Anyway, get out there and vote…and maybe when you’re done, write a book.

_______________________

* –please enjoy my enjoy my particularly tortuous figurative language attempting to point out the superiority of “Latte Liberal” over “Tea Party.” This is made even more torturous due to the fact that politics aside, I enjoy tea quite a bit, and can’t stand milk in my fair-trade organic coffee from the excellent coffee and pastry shop near my office.

Yeah, no random ten on Friday; I was busy doing Friday things…things I couldn’t necessarily do before I was doing an alternate work schedule (4 x 10 hrs, Fridays off). This works for me.

Anyway, for now I’m sitting here on the front porch waiting for some trick or treaters to arrive…so far, it seems like the world forgot it was Hallowe’en today.

Anyway, enjoy your candy.

Just some stuff rattling around in my head; with only a few re-runs from the twitter feed:

♦ – As strange as it sounds, I am coming to believe that LEGO Rock Band is a better game than Rock Band 2.

♦ – My new favorite Southern Colloquial expression is definitely “getting down to the gnat’s ass.”

♦ – There aren’t many things funnier or cuter than watching a three-year-old singing Parry Gripp’s “Nom Nom Nom Nom Nom Nom Nom” in Rock Band

♦ – Totally against home aquarist conventional wisdom, I seem to have bred ghost shrimp in a tank full of hungry fish.

♦ – Attentive readers will not be surprised to learn we played a bunch of Rock Band this weekend.

♦ – That Tea Party demonstration I passed in the car on Sunday afternoon was kind of amusing in it’s whiteness and oldness. Also, I doubt they could discuss with any depth the Constitution their signs say they’re such big fans of.

♦ – The dictionary may say that “architect” can be used as a verb, but that doesn’t mean I’d recommend it.

♦ – Animaniacs couldn’t have existed without the Marx Bros. Irrefutable evidence of this conjecture may be found in Duck Soup.

♦ -I picked up the new Gamma World release using 4E rules a few weeks back; haven’t played it yet, but the rules allow you play as, among other things, a PC that is a swarm of kittens possessing a single sentient distributed intelligence (and in fact, uses this as an example in the rulebook). If you do not think this is one of the coolest things ever, there’s something wrong with you.

♦ – Tonight, I will finish a book that has been hanging around in my unfinished pile for far too long. It presents a vaguely interesting concept, though finishing it became more a challenge of endurance than a desire to actually see the plot and character arcs resolved.

♦ – Some day soon, I hope to decide on which hotel in this general region will receive my repeat custom for the next several months. The decision will likely be weighted greatly toward how the renovated fitness center in one of the finalists turns out next week.

♦ – I think this post will probably fall under more topic categories than any other post I’ve ever written here. To contribute to that record, here’s a link to new internet classic .

Sort of settling into a routine now; hope it’ll get a little more regular next week. No big plans for the weekend; probably just going to continue cleaning and take a couple of bike rides (did fifteen miles this morning; felt very good after spotty gym access this week).

And now for the pre-school’s favorite thing today:

On that note, here are tunes:

1. “Praying for a Sweet Weekend” – Rock Sugar
2. “Damnation” – Gaia Epicus
3. “I Don’t Want to Grow Up” – Scarlett Johansson
4. “Burn Your Life Down” – Tegan and Sara
5. “Gratin Dauphinois” – Miss Kittin & The Hacker
6. “Jet Airliner” – Steve Miller Band
7. “Etienne Trilogy” – Y Kant Tori Read
8. “Can’t Do Nuttin for Ya Man” – Public Enemy
9. “Haunt You Every Day” – Weezer
10. “A Question of Lust” – Depeche Mode

More than once, I’ve lauded the President for his initiatives to promote math and science education in America. Promoting academic achievement as something worthwhile and beneficial is something this country always ought to be doing.

So of course, I’m going to point out the news today that President Obama is going to be making an appearance on Mythbusters with great excitement and enthusiasm.

There are few (if any at all) better outlets for illustrating how freakin’ cool science can be, and all the amazing (and explosive) stuff you can do with it in this country today than that wonderful little program put together by Adam Savage and Jamie Hyneman.

Kids (at least my kids) watch this show obsessively – it’s very good television; and, they generally come away from it learning something. Kids also look up to the President of the United States; having him get associated with quality science-based television will only further enhance the allure of science and learning.

And who is he really kidding – we all know that the President is a huge nerd anyway; is it that far out of the realm of possibility that he’d use his position as Head of State to wrangle himself a guest appearance on a highly-rated nerd tv show?

I probably would.

thanks to twitter, I have learned that the whole Lolcat phenomenon is actually more than 100 years old. Turns out that the first person to take a picture of a cat and affixing a silly caption to it was Harry Pointer, a photographer from Brighton, UK. Starting around 1870, he began publishing his The Brighton Cats series, which, by 1884, had included some 200 photographs.

So, in the scheme of things, HappyCat is a relative n00b, by more than a century.

Overall, I’m sure moving to this new job is the good kind of stress. However, good or bad, it’s still stress, and it plays havoc with my system in all sorts of unpleasant ways. I am, as many know, a creature of habit, almost compulsively so; these changes (new position, new place of business, new work schedule, etc) are totally blowing my routine, and throwing me off a bit. Give me a few weeks, though, and I’ll be used to it.

In the meantime, here are some tunes:

1. “Who Do You Think You Are” – Spice Girls
2. “Doreen” – Old 97s
3. “The Engine Driver” – The Decembrists
4. “Because” – The Beatles
5. “Walk to the Water” – U2
6. “Ribbon of Honor” – Innocent Nixon
7. “Going Through The Motions” – Aimee Mann
8. “Heaven & Heaven” – Rock Sugar
9. “Got My Own Thing” – Liz Phair
10. “Michael Jordan” – that dog.