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If I don’t do one today (Monday) I’ll have missed a week.  So sorry.

Ed once said that their first album dealt a lot with teen and youth angst, but that he figured older people felt it too, and wanted to make a song about that.  Here it is, the song with the longest title in the Pearl Jam catalog.

Elderly Woman Behind the Counter in a Small Town

I seem to recognize your face
Haunting, familiar — yet I can’t seem to place it
Cannot find the candle of thought to light your name
Lifetimes are catching up with me
All these changes taking place
I wish I’d seen the place
But no one’s ever taken me
Hearts and thoughts they fade, fade away
Hearts and thoughts they fade, fade away

I swear I recognize your breath
Memories, like fingerprints, are slowly raising
Me, you wouldn’t recall, for I’m not my former
It’s hard when you’re stuck upon the shelf
I changed by not changing at all
Small town predicts my fate
Perhaps that’s what no one wants to see
I just want to scream “Hello!”
My God its been so long!
Never dreamed you’d return!
But now here you are, and here I am
Hearts and thoughts they fade, fade away

The next one … tomorrow?

All Vedder Tuesday

• Car is blocking roadway in movie. Line: "That must be the guy whose car I talked to on the phone." #
• Sorry to my #UK friends, but I just ordered from overseas, and I LOVE how week the #pound is! #

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From eBay:

MC011 Your eBay selling account has been limited – [my username]

Dear [my username] ([my email address]),

Your account has fallen below eBay’s minimum seller performance standards.  You are still able to list and sell items; however, your volume will be limited until your performance improves above these standards.

This limit takes effect on 2/20/2010.  Each week you can sell up to 50.00 % of what you historically listed with this account.

You may have up to 0 open listings, up to $18.00 open sales and up to $10.00 closed sales during each week.

Note*: If you exceed any one of the above thresholds (open listings, open sales or closed sales), you will be unable to list for 7 days, when the limit will reset.

My response:

I was just told my account has fallen below seller performance standards.  WHAT are you talking about?  I’ve received no negative feedback recently, am not involved in any disputes that I know of, send everything with tracking numbers, have been providing great service and great products — and now this message that I can now list 0 items for reasons that were NOT STATED?

Seriously — I need assistance here.  What is going on?

Their response:

Dear Joshua,

Thank you for writing eBay in regard to the recent message you received from us. I have looked into your account and I can see that your Detailed Seller Ratings are fine.  I believe that you received those emails because of a technical problem that we are experiencing right now.  I would like to apologize for this.  Please be reassured that we are working to resolve this, and that it is our top priority at this time.  If you are experiencing any limitations due to this, please know that we are aware of this problem, and we will have it resolved within 2 hours.  If you are still experiencing any problems after that time please
respond to this message and let us know.

I understand your frustration regarding this matter and apologize for the inconvenience it caused you.

Thank you for your time.

Sincerely,
[representative name]

eBay Customer Support

I just arrived back home.  I knew I was in for a scolding from my cat.  I always get a scolding from my cat when I walk in.  Except, I realized, he was standing by his food dish.  He always does, but I have always assumed that is because it is by the door.  But this was clearly his “feed me” yell.  I thought about it.  It always is.

“You have food!” I told him.

“FEEDMEFEEDMEFEEDMEFEEDME!”

So I took his food bowl, held it through the front door for ten seconds, out of his sight, then brought it back in and set it in front of him.

He stopped screaming.  He was happy.  He had been fed.  He ate.

It’s been a while (2.83 years) since I gave an update of the number of countries or territories I’ve “collected” as visitors to mcgees.org.  According to Google Analytics, the source I now trust, it’s now at 164, including some gems such as Libya, Kyrgyzstan, Réunion, and now (woo-hoo!) Kiribati.

23 of these territories visited only once.

Here’s the data.  If you find anything interesting, or want to find out what any given location was looking for or at, let me know.  I find all this fascinating.  I think it’s some of the stamp collecting itch.

JHM: What’s the price on those, please?

Employee: We have three-packs for $8.99.  We also have large bags individually for $2.

JHM: Individually they’re $2?

E: Yeah, but they’re larger.

JHM: Then it … kinda sounds like the individual bags are a better deal, yeah?

E: [nervous laugh] I didn’t want to say that.

From Stephen King’s novel Bag of Bones:

There’s something oddly comforting about talking to a legal guy once the “billable hours” clock has started running.  You have passed the magical point at which “a lawyer” becomes “your lawyer”.  “Your lawyer” is warm.  “Your lawyer” is sympathetic.  “Your lawyer” makes notes on a yellow pad and nods in all the right places.  Most of the questions “your lawyer” asks are questions you can answer.  And if you can’t, “your lawyer” will find a way to help you do so, by God!  “Your lawyer” is always on your side.  Your enemies are his enemies.  To him you are never shit but always Shinola.

This sort of seduction is probably why otherwise kind people can sit back and watch a $1200-suited bully with filed teeth tear someone else apart, and then defend the shark by saying “He came very highly recommended!”  Actually, the latter is probably a different character trait.  But you know who else is good at this kind of seduction?  Whores.  The only difference between divorce attorneys and whores appears to be that most of the latter would blush at the rates the former charge for their services.

(Yes, it’s all over [the divorce] and I’m still bitter about that fucking piece of shit asshole.  That passage from Bag of Bones brought it all back.  Carry on.)

Being interviewed by a social worker today, because I’m applying for disability benefits, I was asked to “define love”.

“Huh,”  I said.  “I left my Keats at home.”  No reaction.  I thought for about thirty seconds, and then said, “A relationship in which one cares about another’s well-being more than one’s own.”

Then she asked me to “define peace”.  I reflected for another half minute and settled on “A shared conviction that differences can be settled without resort to violence or cruelty.”

After a few more moments I said “I’m not sure those are very good definitions.”  But she seemed pleased.

Later I realized I probably wasn’t being tested on eloquence or insight, but rather being screened for answers such as “Them’s when I cut their eyes out so they don’t look at me so funny.”

A science fiction movie just explained an insect eradication technique to me:  Expose males to sterilizing radiation.  Then when they have offspring, the offspring will be sterile, and after a few generations the species will be extinct.

A … bit of a reasoning gap there.

Now, messing up their genome so that their offspring were not viable might work, if these modified insects were reintroduced each generation.  Breeding or engineering the flies to be stronger and sterile might work, if they could compete with normal males and make the latter starve — again given that this were repeated.  Or introducing a terminator gene so that offspring were sterile could be a good strategy.  All sorts of hand-waves work.  Just not this one.

[reference in title]

• My #laptop runs hotter than #HalleBerry in bed with #IreneJacob. New power supply might help(?). #

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When the used computer place sold me a refurbished Dell Latitude D810 notebook PC, they included a 65W power supply.  This is apparently not the correct one: it gives me a BIOS warning that this underpowered model would not give optimal performance.

Also, unless I throttle the 2.13GHz CPU speed back to 1.33GHz or lower, the laptop will most of the time overheat, triggering an auto shutdown.

Could these be related?  (Can you tell I’m not a double-E?)

• Is #JohnnieWalker Red like 1/3 Caol Ila now? Egads. Where's the #Talisker?! Too valuable, probably. Damn #ClassicMalts. #whisky #scotch #
• just discovered what a #Google #Sidewiki is via a combination of clicks I don't know how to repeat. #

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I have disabled CAPTCHA challenge-response.  Also, I’ve edited the code of the OpenID plugin so that the checkbox is unchecked by default.  Good?

Two stories with Niall from tonight.

First, Niall, Nonna (my mom) and I were watching a cartoon:

Cartoon: I think I just cracked my Artex!
Joshua: What’s an artex?
Nonna: Must be a {seal}.
Joshua: What’s an artex seal?
Nonna: Ceiling.
Joshua: Sorry, thought you said “seal”.
Niall: A “ceiling” would be a baby seal!

Successfully hacking diminutives is such sophisticated humor for a six-year-old.  Also, Artex here, but I didn’t know that at the time.

Second, while getting him out of the bath and asking what he wanted before bed:

Joshua: Do you want a story, sing you a song, …?
Niall: I want you to play me a song on the {fawoot}.
Joshua: The what?
Niall: Flute.
Joshua: Flute?
Niall: FLute.
Joshua: I don’t have a flute.
Niall: [looks at me]
Joshua: Oh, the harmonica?
Niall: Yes.
Joshua: OK, I can play you something on the harmonica.

Problem is, I only know how to solve major-key musical improvisations one way — I work myself into a corner, like you do, and need to resolve the melody line, and all my endings sound basically the same.  Mozart used the first half of his career employing — “inventing” is probably closer to the truth — “discovering”? — major key endings like that, but when I try it, it just sounds like the “amen” chorus at the end of the “Johnny Appleseed” hymn.

Niall didn’t mind.  Little boys are awesome.

• My next financial instrument purchased will be an on-sale mattress from the local store. Guaranteed 0.00% yield; better than most, yes? #

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• just had X flat-out crash on me for the first time maybe ever. #

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Oh, hello.  mcgees.org just turned ten years old — on 2010-01-18.  I had been so focused on the blog’s tenth birthday that I forgot this one.  So the aforementioned “Definitive Songs” project I will issue as a CD, in a limited edition, to the contributors of the first 80 minutes of tracks, and I’ll distribute it free to the people who contribute to the list.  This also suggests I should cap the track length.  8 minutes?

With the speed at which I work, they should be ready — round about 2010-12-15, the tenth anniversary of the blog.

I maybe could have come up with a better topic for a post than an out-of-office president’s standardized test scores, but I just discovered this in article at Wikipedia on George W. Bush:

Though no official “IQ” test score for Bush has been found, the score he received on his SAT during his final year of prep school at the exclusive Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts is known.  He scored 1206, which has been correlated to an I.Q. of 120.  The score that Bush received on his qualifying test for the military suggests that his IQ was in the mid 120′s, placing him in the 95th percentile of the population …  An article published in the journal Political Psychology, estimated Bush’s IQ at 125. The same study estimated the IQ of Bush’s predecessor Bill Clinton at 149.  …  A lecturer in American politics at Warwick University said: “…[H]e is by no means a dimwit.”

OK, taking this apart.  First, Bill Clinton should have been assumed to have a disadvantage due to his lower socioeconomic bracket in his youth.  All else between them is roughly commensurate: they were both WASPs of about the same age living in roughly the same part of the country, so bias should presumably be roughly commensurate.  Whatever the I.Q. test is measuring — and it is measuring something, it simply fails to reduce absolute “intelligence” to a scalar — it puts Clinton way out in front.  For most I.Q. tests, σ=16.  Cross referencing this with the claims in the cited article show that this is the σ value being used (play with this to find out why.)

Points:

• Bush is at 1.6σ, Clinton is at 3+σ.  This is statistically huge.
• Clinton’s 3σ is 99.9th percentile.  That’s “smarter” than 999 in a thousand people.  Is this starting to sound more like a president to you?  More to the point, perhaps, is it starting to sound more like — Clinton’s estimated IQ by one single paper in a psychology journal?  [And mcgees.org zooms off in a different direction!  Anyone still reading this far?  Anyone comment before reading this far?]
• Zooming still — why the fuck do we care so much about the answer to this question?  It shows up all over the Internet.  Obama hasn’t released any scores, so far as I can tell, and people have estimated his IQ at between — 116 and 160.  Gee, that’s useful!  Tell you what: give me your estimate, and I’ll tell you for whom you voted.
• Bill Clinton did better on his SATs than George W. Bush did.  Great.  I believe I beat both of them.  Does that mean that I should have been president instead of Bill Clinton?  Not remotely.  Not only because I was 14 years old at the time, either.  So much more than (trivial) math problems and (fairly trivial) analogy questions are required for someone to head the Executive branch.  Gah.  Isn’t this completely obvious?  One needs to work well in crisis, to manage people, to handle public attention well, to get by on little sleep, to be responsive when required, to keep a great deal of information in one’s head, to … well, it’s starting not to sound like George W. again, is it not?  But that’s just snark.  The whole idea of reducing something as complex as “intelligence” to a single number — and then pretending that corresponds with the ability to lead a fucking country — is lunacy.  I therefore request you to:
• Read Stephen Jay Gould’s  The Mismeasure of Man.  I have been strongly anti-I.Q. since reading it in college.  I left Mensa upon reading it (in that year of great self-examination, I left the church as well).

Here’s something that is valid, though:

• Bush’s SAT scores put him in the 95th percentile.  Good.  That’s one in twenty.  A thinking person probably should not put all that much in the number.  But you know who does do such things?  Schools.
• Schools.  Since when does “one in twenty” get you into the Ivy League?  I mean, unless you have a famous legacy father and grandfather?  What might one expect of someone literally grandfathered into Yale?
• I’d expect “gentleman’s Cs”.  Which is what Bush got.  This is because the thing most accurately measured by the SAT is, perhaps, how well one takes tests.
• I’ve taken my 1590 SAT scores and my 148-150 IQ as carte blanche to write about how dumb I think reliance on these tests is.  Whatever else may motivate me, the grapes are sweet.

(The intended title of the post was “The IQ Obsession”, but that rather gives the game away, yes?)

Zombies of Mass Destruction comes in at sixth out of eight in my ranking of this year’s Horrorfest.

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“Riding atop a black horse” is one of the best metaphors for depression I’ve ever heard.

Hold On

I was drawn
Riding atop a black horse
Whatever prize there was,
I could only observe
Where the trouble starts.
Where does it end?
How can I be cured …
How, before it ends?

I know life would be different if I held on.  Held on.
I know I could be something if I held on

Gave her life away
Put it in my pocket when it should have been framed
Oh, I lost its shine
Gotta get this out of my head
Out of my bed
How could it end …
End like this?
How could it end?

I know life would be different had I held on.  Held on.
I know I could be something had I held on.  Held on.
I know I could be something if I held on.  Held on.
I know life would be different if I held on. Held on!

Held on.  Held on.  If I …
Held on.  Held on.  If I …
Held on.  Held on.  If I …
Held on.  Held on.

All Vedder Tuesday

• #UK government #travel advice for the #US: http://bit.ly/aVJoCL (includes: carry $1M in medical insurance, don't sleep in cars) #

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I was listening to [music] today, and I thought “This is my definitive piece of music.  If someone understands this, he or she will be most of the way to understanding me.”  And then I wondered if this were hopeless affect and, regardless of the answer to that, whether other people felt the same way about a given song/track/piece/whatever.  People always ask for definitive book, but I haven’t seen or heard this posed.  So: any submissions?  After a useful number are submitted, I’ll reveal mine.  “Show me yours”, in other words.

Here is my photographic study of my Dad from today, with suboptimal equipment, entitled “Have You Seen My Reindeer?”

• .@BrentSpiner Did you see the public retraction of The Lancet's #vaccine / #autism link? Three cheers for real science! http://bit.ly/b265Ix #

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I rate The Graves seventh out of eight in this year’s Horrorfest, and the lowest-rated for simply being a bad film.

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Super, super late this week.  Sorry.

Love Boat Captain

Is this just another day, this God-forgotten place?
First comes love and then comes pain.  Let the games begin.
Questions rise and answers fall, insurmountable.

Love Boat Captain
Take the reigns and steer us towards the clear, here.
It’s already been sung, but it can’t be said enough:
All you need is love

Is this just another phase of earthquakes making waves?
Trying to shake the cancer off?  Stupid human beings!
Once you hold the hand of love it’s all surmountable.

Hold me, and make it the truth
That when all is lost there will be you
‘Cause to the universe I don’t mean a thing
And there’s just one word I stil believe
And it’s …

It’s an art to live with pain.  Mix the light into gray
Lost nine friends we’ll never know two years ago today
And if our lives became too long, would it add to our regret?

And the young, they can lose hope ’cause they can’t see beyond today
The wisdom that the old can’t give away
Constant recoil, sometimes life don’t leave you alone

Hold me, and make it the truth
That when all is lost there will be you
‘Cause to the universe I don’t mean a thing
And there’s just one word that I still believe and it’s
“Love”
Love. love. love. love

Love boat captain
Take the reigns and steer us towards the clear
I know it’s already been sung but it can’t be said enough
Love is all you need
All you need is love
Love, love
Love

All Vedder Tuesday

• Since #Ubuntu has decided to be all "legal, ethical & shit" in #Karmic, here is how to enable #AAC encoding in #ffmpeg: http://bit.ly/cWCSoV #

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In my tabulation, The Final comes in at 8th place — the worst out of eight.  It gets this honor not because it is a bad film — which it is — but because it is completely unacceptable.

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I think it will be the case that people with email notifications will see the synopses in the clear, so I hope that doesn’t cause problems for those who want to see the films.  If it does on this first one, don’t read the snippets in the subsequent emails, instead visiting the site directly.