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hibiscus

Originally uploaded by conradh.

On a rare whitefly-free day, the front yard hibiscus flowers seem to float independent of everything else like fat sticky dragonflies.

I grew up in the Transistor Age. When I was a child in the 1970s, the great selling point for any electrical device was that it had no moving parts. The salesman would rattle off a series of bullet points and then pause for effect and intone “and this baby has No Moving Parts. Nothing to break, sir.”

This was an awfully attractive idea. When the fridge broke, or the 1967 MGB-GT, it was because some cotter pin or compressor or belt had failed. Life was a parade of blown gaskets, burnt electrical coils, snapped timing chains, and leaky valves. The promise of the new electronic age was that everything would just go on working, and we’d never repair anything again. Frequently, the marketing slogans would use the phrase “zero maintenance” or “nothing to fail!” as a sure closer.

The revolution is complete. Currently, everything has a microprocessor in it, and solid-state electronics are in all consumer products. Not only is my car run by circuit boards, but my refrigerator and my clock and the thermostat and almost everything else than ran on a spring or a valve or a chain drive is now completely electronic.

There are some results of this that we did not expect.

For one thing, everything is a computer and therefore unreliable. My phone “crashes”. My car is recalled because the logic in the processor is incorrect and the headlights turn off. The microwave shuts off because a bug in the embedded code does not allow the time to be 14;15. Complexity (the constant enemy of engineers) results in subtle problems that can’t be easily visualized. A task like shifting gears in a truck, which was once performed by metal plates controlled by wires pushed by a foot and a hand, is now carried out by possibly buggy computer code, so that second gear may not arrive because someone divided by zero.

And to make things even more trying, it’s very expensive. The promise of “no moving parts” was endless success. Since we haven’t achieved this, instead we have unrepairable mistakes. The car, which once could be fixed by a drunk with a ballpeen hammer in an hour, now requires an entire replacement of a $1000 “computer unit”. Airplanes with dangerously defective software require multi-million dollar recalls. And the oven that can’t handle time is not repairable; it must be tossed in the garbage and a new one bought.

The promise of digital technology followed an accelerated path to destruction similar to that of Communism. We were told that a new era dawned; that history had moved to a new state, free of the failures of the past; and that a near-perfect world had been inaugurated free of the outmoded mechanical chaos of the past.

Like workers freed of our chains, we would enjoy a trouble-free world of infallible digital machines that just worked, forever, without the need for metal-bending. Much like Communism, the no-moving-parts revolution was stained with human weakness. We can’t make perfect software, any more than we could make a perfect carburetor. The transistor revolution brought us errors at the speed of light and inexplicable mazes of complexity filled with terrifying minotaurs.

So while we rightly praise the digital revolution, with its instant banking and Internet communication and space-shrinking power, let’s not forget the humble moving part. With faulty humans we’ll always get faulty machines, but the clanky old cotter-pin and sawtooth machines can always be repaired with a bang and a curse and a twist, like the ‘67 MG. Like us, moving parts are forgiving.

Metafilter led me to the website of the dreadful Michelle Malkin who argues that the illegal internment of Japanese-American citizens during the Second World War was justified. She does this partly by muddying the waters between Japanese citizens and American citizens of Japanese descent, and by a general appear to fear and hatred of Arabs and South Asian people post 9/11.

It’s odd how clumsy her arguments are. Basically she says that we are justified in locking up people who are related to people who’ve threatened us, as long as they look different. Italian and German enemy aliens were indeed interned, as were Japanese nationals during the war. But Italian-American and German-American citizens were not. The issue isn’t the actual threat, but racial fear.

Notably no one was interned in Hawaii at all, where the danger was greatest, because way too many people there were Japanese-American.

Malkin is disingenuous and smarmy, and obviously knows when she’s lying and how to do it in order to please her masters, who are wealthy and powerful people. I assume she gets a nice five bedroom house and a couple of $80,000 cars for her trouble, and some well-heeled racists get another book to footnote when they’re raving about the need to lock up the brown people.

I wonder if Halliburton will take the job of shining up Manzanar for its new occupants? After all, they do look funny. A lot easier to find than Tim McVeigh or Eric Rudolph.

I’m using this thing again and preparing to do some real work with it. Blog spam is out of control, so I required TypeKey registration. If anyone has a better idea, or a reason why TypeKey is horribly evil and must be destroyed, let me know by email or by registering with TypeKey and commenting (ha).

I’ve been out of the loop with this stuff for a while.

I just resurrected and upgraded this weblog, and in the process found that I hadn’t been getting comments emailed and that there were 4,700 of them, almost all spam. Yeargh. Now that I’m getting comments mailed again I’ll actually notice that happening.

Apologies to those on the feed list who got all of CGH at once again because of RSS silly.

I’ve been remiss in updating this thing, but that is going to change! Three or four posts on the way. Brace yourselves, my imaginary fans.

I feel bad for Elliott Smith in a number of ways. He was unhappy, and had terrible struggles in life, and now it appears they were unbearable and he had to leave. That’s really enough.

In exiting this way, though, he condemned himself to a worse fate. Mr. Smith has now entered the Pantheon of Sad Artists, enshrined next to Ian Curtis, Kurt Cobain, Nick Drake, Sylvia Plath, Karen Carpenter, and that really talented gal you knew in high school who offed herself. Generations of grimly satisfied depressives will play his music for their friends and say “…and he died young, and so tragically. He was just not made for this world.”

That’s crap.

Suicide is a terrible thing for an artist. All sorts of people off themselves or O.D., every day, and it’s a grim business. Most of them are ordinary people with extraordinary problems, and anyone with a heart feels bad for them. It’s unromantic, inconsiderate, and depressing for everyone concerned. But when you make art and die by your own hand, you turn into a Suicide Artist and your entire body of work becomes raw material for immature angst. Every dysphoric teen in a suburban mall will wear your t-shirt, and every suicide-gesture livejournal will invoke your name in the daily goodbye to a thousand cruel worlds.

Ian Curtis should be remembered for a fine hand with songwriting, a haunting voice, and the skills and heart to make that Vox guitar scream and scream. Sylvia Plath put her nose to the grindstone and produced beautifully polished prose and poetry. Nick Drake, Kurt Cobain, and even poor Karen Carpenter worked long hours at the studio and practiced and made art that people cared about. The fact that they couldn’t make it further, beat their problems back, and produce more art is a crappy footnote to their creative biographies.

Please don’t turn Elliott Smith into the latest sad-kid suicide poster boy; he deserves better.

It’s time to move on.

Pouss has been probably the best relationship of my life, but we both want to see other people and it’s clear that we’re going to be better off as friends. Dating a younger person hasn’t bothered me, but she really has a very different life to lead than I do, and there are major social and cultural differences between us.

With all this in mind, I am seriously looking for a woman to spend time with. It doesn’t have to be a sexually intimate relationship (cross-species issues prevented anything of this kind with Pouss), but I do like physical closeness, shared time together, and a lot of communication. For any of the ladies who might be interested, here are some of the things I’ve come to like and dislike over the last couple of years.

* It’s great that you like it when I kiss you on top of the head and hold your hand. I like sharing those things.

* I understand that when you lick my elbow for 20 minutes that you are showing affection, but please don’t. It leaves a red spot on my arm.

* Mealtimes should be a shared joy. I know that food is important to a lot of people, and so is punctuality, but my own enjoyment of our time together isn’t enhanced when you yowl for 20 minutes before you’re fed.

* I do like a woman who is warm and pleasant to the touch, but maybe next time less facial hair would be a plus.

* Although I am sensitive to the problem of eating disorders in society and I do not wish to be cold and rejecting about someone’s pain, it has struck me as odd that someone would eat that much and then insist on wolfing down half the lawn and vomiting on the couch. I think I’d like a less dramatic approach to food in my next gal.

* If you communicate with me that you like having your belly rubbed, I’ll do that for you. But you have to listen to me when I ask you not to stand on my neck.

* I’m a responsive and sensitive person, and I will attend your needs. There is no need to jump on the table, or to rustle plastic bags in the night. Just tell me, and I’ll talk to you.

* No matter how much you knead my breasts, I cannot produce milk. The whole thing is painful for both of us; just drop it.

* It’s totally ok in the relationship if you need, in the deepest darkest hours of the early morning, to run about the house screaming and clutching a stuffed catnip-filled duck in your mouth. I’m used to it.

So, I’m on the market again. I feed you, I know where you want to be scratched, and I’m good to fall asleep on. I hope I’ve been honest and forthright about my issues and needs, and I hope to find that special someone soon.

I have read that Halloween is now the second biggest grossing holiday for retailers, after Christmas. It’s certainly a very big deal now. Stores begin putting out their displays more than a month beforehand, movies are released for Halloween, and anyone who has anything to sell begins to “tie in” their sales pitch to the holiday in the last couple of weeks before October 31.

The holiday has an odd history. Celebrating wildness, devilry, and death has always been a difficult business in this country. We’re very conflicted about it. When my father was a child in the 1930s, Halloween was a dangerous wild mess in which he and his friends destroyed property and committed various other crimes. A favorite trick was tipping over an outhouse. In some parts of the country there are still traditions that recall the original Roman holiday of “Pandemonium”, e.g., Devil’s Night in Detroit.

When I was a child in the 1970s, Halloween was dress-up and candy for kids. We all made or bought clumsy costumes, and just after dark but before it was “dangerous”, we toddled about our neighborhood begging candy. The neighbors had a lit pumpkin or maybe a spooky record playing, and there were some decorations. It was loads of fun for young kids. Once in a while the adults would have a costume party too, but that was pretty rare.

Now it’s a full-fledged Adult Party Holiday. Offices have workers in costumes. People go to multiple parties in one night. There’s a whole lot of drinking. Forty-year-olds ask each other “what are you going to be for Halloween?”. And the money rolls in, probably mostly for beer and party supplies. Even fundamentalist Christians who actually remember what the holiday is about and want to avoid celebrating the occult will have a “harvest party”. I noticed, for example, that big chain retailers are calling the holiday “Friday October 31″ to avoid offending the people who want prayer and pumpkins but no devils.

And the decoration bit has gone straight off the rails now. Ordinarily normal suburban homes are lit red and stacked with skulls, and a repellent “executed criminal” dummy hanging from a tree and a tombstone on the lawn. Orange pumpkin heads and black cats wave from the back of minivans. The nurse at the E.R. may be dressed as a vampire when you stagger in bleeding. This holiday has definitively and finally been stolen back from the kids.

Here’s our problem in America. We don’t want to grow up. We want to drive a Tonka truck to work, eat cookie dough with our hands, continue having “boyfriends” and “girlfriends” well into our seventies, and eat sugary breakfast cereals with milk. Because we’re rich we can do it.

So this October 31, we’ll celebrate the Day of our Dead, our All Hallows Eve, Pandemonium, or any of its many names by saying “boo” to each other at the office and heading off to parties, where we’ll wash candy corn down with beer and play a little grabass with the other kids.

Later at night, when we’re clutching the toilet and heaving up a mess of Tootsie Rolls and Jagermeister, we might even feel the cold breath of the guest we forgot was there the whole time.

I wish to update my BLAWG with the remote XML-RPC client. But, none of them work for me. I get mysterious, cryptic XML errors instead. My logs show my nothing of value, just a “200 OK” in my web log, and a spew of incomprehensible XML in my client window.

I guess I can’t be cool now. I hate updating via the web interface; that’s one of the main reasons I haven’t updated this thing in a month. The only hint I can find is that perhaps some interaction between extended characters, SOAP::Lite, and my Mac OSX blog clients are to blame.