My brother (a regular contributor here) has written a surreal humorous poem that may-or-may-not be entitled “A Poem”.  It begins:

I

did

not

write

this

poem

I

compiled

it

It really is great.  Check it out.

I just listened to Candlebox’s song “Sometimes” — for some reason a common title for songs by grunge and alternative bands — and forgot how much I loved the lyrics.  Here’s an excerpt:

Somehow we’ll find a way
We’ll paste it back together
These ripped out pages of old coloring books
Where your gold is silver, my blue is gray
Its all held together by cellophane tape

But we change directions, we watch the tides
And we borrow too much
We form restrictions, we form lines
And we separate you from me

But sometimes — sometimes we carry more weight than we own
Oh, but sometimes — sometimes goes on and on and on and on

Marvelous.

The excellent humor blog at MumblingNerd had a post collecting jokes of the format “My wife’s gone to….”  They are of the following template:

“My wife’s gone to the Caribbean.”
“Jamaica?”
“No, she went of her own accord.”

This old joke, by the way, is the origin of the title of Led Zeppelin’s 1973 pseudo-Reggae song “D’yer Mak’er”.  In the accent in which they spoke, this is pronounced how I would say “Jer-MAKE-er”, which is how they pronounce “Jamaica”.  Languages are funny, aren’t they?

I didn’t know this was a format of a class of jokes, though.  Some of my favorites that he put up:

‘My wife went to a music concert in South Korea’ ~ ‘Seoul?’ ~ ‘No, it was R&B’

‘My wife bought a house in Sweden’ ~ ‘Stockholm?’ ~ ‘No, it was custom-built’

‘My wife’s on holiday just south of London’ ~ ‘Surrey?’ ~ ‘I SAID, MY WIFE’S ON HOLIDAY JUST SOUTH OF LONDON!’

I loved the idea, and made a few of my own:

“My wife’s not going to her conference in the South of England.”
“Kent?”
“No, she just refuses.”

“My wife used to maintain aircraft weapons systems when she was serving in India.”
“Bombay?”
“No, mostly machine gun turrets.”

“My wife’s gone to open a restaurant in India.”
“Delhi?”
“No, a diner.”

“My wife’s gone to sculpt a topiary at an embassy in Russia.”
“Moscow?”
“No, an evergreen giraffe.”

“My wife’s gone to open a toy factory in Nigeria.”
“Lagos?”
“No, Tinker Toys.”

Perhaps too weak:

“My wife’s gone to teach in rural Norway.”
“Hell?”
“Yeah, she doesn’t particularly like it, but that would be overstating it.”

This town in Canada, and the capital of Thailand, are left as exercises for the reader.  Private exercises.

OK, you (a collective proper subset) have asked for it: here is a sneak peek at a scene from my in-progress SF novel.

The assassin didn’t hear anything until Zero spoke.

“Squire?” said Zero.  The assassin spun, as he had a few minutes before, but without pulling the trigger this time.  He wore a fashionable and semiformal orange denim kilt and a black rugby shirt, fringed in hyperwhite.  A pea-soup duster, which until recently had hidden a belt with matching hip-holsters, was swept back.  He was shod in the trendy faux-bare-feet style, and the weapon from his right-side holster was in his hand, pointed at the middle of Zero’s chest.  Zero’s weapon was pointed at the assassin’s face.

“Easy,” said Zero.  “You don’t want to fire that thing.  What’s your name?”

The assassin barked a laugh.

“You’re Terran,” said Zero.  “Male, maybe twenty-five.  You’ve been captured on camera.  They will have looked up your name by now.  I just don’t happen to know it.  Tell me, and I will have something to call you other than Squire or Assassin.”

The assassin equivocated momentarily.  “Seamus,” he said.  “You can call me Seamus.”

“Good, that’s a start.  Seamus.  Thank you.  Now, if you would, please put that on the floor and slide it over to me with your foot.”

Seamus laughed again, a harsh sound like flint striking steel.  “You would like that, no?”

“Yes, I would,” said Zero.  “But not for the reason you think.  Because I abhor killing.”  Zero took a step forward.

“Stop!  I have a gun!” snapped Seamus.

Zero’s head shook minutely, back and forth.  “No, Squire,” he said.  “What you have is a sidearm, if you are military.  A pistol if you are an enthusiast, a weapon if you are an engineer.  You would call it a gun only if you just purchased it last week.  You slipped it through some of the most sophisticated detection screens on this planet.  How did you do that?”

Seamus chuckled.

“That’s OK,” said Zero.  “I’ll guess.  What you have is a Pulsar-7 corundum pistol.  Recent manufacture — maybe this Rat.  Last Pig at the earliest.  Right so far?”

Seamus’s face remained impassive.

“OK.  It’s all ceramic — that’s how you got it into the IPA Parliamentary room.  Room-temperature superconducting ceramic, which is expensive.  From the charred parliamentarians around us –” Zero gestured with his head without shifting his gaze “– you just pulled the trigger and pirouetted.  That means a highly illegal full-automatic modification.  Full-automatic means you wouldn’t have a gnat’s chance of bringing that through a CQA post, even here on Calymon.  Your pirouette probably took at least five seconds.  Maybe six.  That means liquid oxygen-cooled.  I’m still right.”  The last was a statement more than a question.  “As for padparadscha….”

Seamus blinked twice, then tried to hide it retroactively.

“Yeah.  Padparadscha.  You don’t know that word.”  Statement.  “I wasn’t sure until I saw your reaction.  The best padparadscha is from your corner, on Terra.  The Subcontinent.  Padparadscha is corundum.  A beautiful pink-orange.  Great for jewelry, better for lasers, like the weapon in your hand.  You could have bought some of the stone at home.  But you didn’t.  Do you know what that means?”  He didn’t wait for a response.  “It means,” he said, slowly moving his left hand to the collar of his tunic and pulling it down.  “I wore the right color shirt.”  Under his loose tunic lay a form-fitted mailshirt, ashen spidersilk over blood-red ruby.

Seamus’s hand began to tremble the slightest bit.

“Steady,” said Zero.  “Keep your hand steady.  I’m not here to scare you.  I’m here to educate you.  For instance: if you were to calculate the absolute worst place in the Association to commit a mass assassination this week, you couldn’t have chosen better.  You are in the city of Noki.  So, Noki sheriffs.  Province of Ellssiss.  So, Ellssiss marshals.  On Calymon, but at an interplanetary event, so you have both Interior and Exterior Calymonian intelligence services with jurisdiction.  This is an ad hoc Parliamentary session.  Every single attending delegation has native-soil claims to this meeting hall, and they all brought security.  Plus Parliamentary police.  And why are they here?  To discuss the Flaro ‘problem’.  That means that, begrudgingly, both sher and resh Flaronians have the right to carry arms in this hall.  If all the first part of the list wasn’t enough to scare you, the Flaronian bit should.”

Seamus’s hand hadn’t stopped trembling.  After a pause: “Which are you?”

“Which am I?  No.  I’m just a weapons enthusiast.  I like that pistol in your hand.  I like mine more.”

Seamus looked incredulous.  “That?”

“Yes,” said Zero.  “This.”  He slowly rolled it first clockwise, then anticlockwise, letting Seamus see it without moving his aim from between Seamus’s eyes.  “Yes, I know it’s old.  An antique.  A needler-railgun.  Magnetic coils accelerate iron spikes at Mach-several.  This one has a mixed magazine: it can fire four-nought needles — that’s finer than a sable’s hair — up to 6-go bolts, which are thick enough to hammer into teak wood.  It’s an antique, as I said, and it had an antique stabilizing computer in it.  But I removed it.”

Seamus’s hand began to steady as his mouth began to develop a sneer.

“I’m not done,” said Zero.  “I removed it because it would get in the way.  I can control my aim by one two-thousandth of a degree.  That is more than accurate enough to perforate the three dots of an ellipsis on a printed page at a hundred meters.  Your pistol’s computer couldn’t get within two orders of magnitude of that, let alone this one’s old computer.”  He saw the look of naked disbelief on Seamus’s face.  “Oh, you bet your life,” he said with a fleeting grin.  “Squire Seamus, my liege.  Put your weapon on the…”

Seamus’s forefinger depressed the trigger pad.  The biometer measured the patterns of the nerve running through his finger, more individual than any retina print, in microseconds.  With a scream, Seamus jerked his hand, moving the focus of the beam up toward Zero’s face.

Zero had a moment to smell the dusty scorched flax of his tunic and the slightly metallic char of the spidersilk, but he had been right about the color of the ruby: the corundum reflected most of the energy of the beam, scattering it harmlessly, the little that was absorbed feeling like a matchstick dragged upwards along his sternum.

With a fluid snap of his arm, his eyes still locked on Seamus’s face, his needler moved down and to the left, the air snapped with a whip-crack, and the aim of the needler returned to between Seamus’s eyes.

Just at the top of Zero’s mailshirt, the laser beam stopped moving, stopped burning, and a fraction of a second later Seamus’s shriek of rage turned into a howl of disbelief as his nerves informed his brain of what had happened.  Seamus gazed wildly at his wrist, thrashing his arm from the elbow, trying to move his curled digits, no more responsive than the trigger pad had become when the nerves through his finger had stopped transmitting.

“That,” said Zero quietly, firmly, “was a three-nought needle.  I clipped the back seam of the O2 tank in your pistol.  What you fail to feel in your wrist and hand is what it doesn’t feel like when your carpal nerve is suddenly frozen.  If I call for help now, Squire –” Zero’s expression bore a sadness Seamus could not understand “– the doctors can save the rest of your arm.  Reach for your other pistol with your left hand, and the next bolt severs your corpus callosum.  My Squire, my liege, my master,” said Zero, “I do not want that any more than you do.  On the ground, if it pleases you.  Now.”

(Unlike the rest of this site, this content is copyrighted All Rights Reserved.  See here for details of the mcgees.org content license.)

I’ll add this to my short story from when I was 15 and my poem from when I was 18.  We were given the (brilliant) assignment in class to update a nursery rhyme.  This was such a good idea for whoever put it together — the teacher, or if it was on state curriculum or something.  I was assigned “Jack and Jill”.

Jack and Jill (updated)

Jack and Jill drove up the hill and hit another commuter
Jack jumped out and hopped about and fell on his Apple computer
A cop was hailed and Jack was jailed and this was the final decision
For when he struck that Nissan truck he caused a four-car collision

(This is probably either a good argument for why you would have wanted to know me at age 11 or a good argument why you would not have.  Not sure.)

There’s an odd phenomenon in which one collecting field will have some things much more cheaply than in other fields, and some things much more expensively.  Here are some ideas for using other types of stores, or other collecting fields’ supplies, to help with stamp collecting, sorting, and shipping.  There are of course converse cases, but  those belong in other posts. 

Trading cards

• Padded 3-ring binders are much cheaper in trading card collecting than in stamp collecting, and sometimes even cheaper than non-padded ones from the office center.  They’re great if you don’t mind a logo on the front (most have one) — or those can be easily covered with a label.
• “Toploaders” — hard cases — are cheap and great for inserting a stamp or small pane or cutout into to mail cheaply, and are thin enough that they never get tampered with in customs.  These are under 15¢ apiece.  Look for these at Amazon.
• “Penny sleeves” — thin archival plastic sleeves to securely hold a trading card —  are crystal clear (you can easily scan through them, for instance) and are great for stamps.  They don’t seal like most stamp bags do, but they are super-cheap (about $1 for 100 — it’s not just a clever nickname!)  One can fold them over and hold them securely with sticky tape.  Make sure to fold them — you don’t want stamps sliding up and touching tape adhesive!  Here are some at Amazon.

Comics

• Comic “Bags & Boards” have lots of uses.  Put a backing board into the mylar sleeve, slide a stamp sheet in front of it, fold the flap over and seal it.  A “Current Comic” size cut into thirds fits perfectly into a #6¾ envelope; therefore they can be used to stiffen covers sent for first-day servicing or can stiffen FDC-size polybags and glassines.  The bags themselves can hold panes.  These are around 9¢ apiece for a pair of bag and board.  Here are some at Amazon.

Office Supply Stores

• Letter filing and storage boxes are frequently much less expensive at office supply houses than through stamp supply mail-order houses.  If you buy your envelopes in bulk, keep the boxes and store (a smaller number of) full envelopes inside.  The cardboard will almost certainly be non-archival even if the envelopes are — line them or make sure your envelopes are in archival plastic.

Craft Stores

• “Archival mist” — an aerosol can or pump bottle/can full of alkaline fluid to deter yellowing of acid paper — can be a tenth of the cost at a craft store compared to stamp supplies.  This is easier to get in a walk-in store than by mail order, too, because some have shipping restrictions.

Any other ideas for cost savings in philately?  Add them as you like!

I saw a commercial for a ‘Chicken Pot Pie’ Hot Pocket.  Now they’re just messing with us.

Just a matter of time:  “Have you tried the ‘Hot Pocket’ Hot Pocket?  It’s a Hot Pocket filled with a Hot Pocket.  Tastes just like a Hot Pocket!”

Really bad insomnia past few days.  So I’m taking the time to do a bunch of work on the site.

Tonight I revamped my stamp offers page.  It’s now basically a “What I collect, or used to collect before it was all stolen” page, due to lack of funds.

Enjoy!

I collect Machin stamps — the long-running series of renderings of a plaster bust of the head of Queen Elizabeth II.  If you’ve received any mail from the UK since 1967, you are likely to have seen them.  This picture of the Queen — printed in various fashions after a bust sculpted by the late Arnold Machin — is history’s most-reproduced image (in print), with billions that have run off the presses.

This is the picture on Wikipedia:

I collect examples with 22m circular date stamps — the “cancels” — situated squarely on the stamp and clearly readable.  But I set aside other ones that catch my eye.

And this one did catch my eye:

Isn’t that cool?!  I’m working on a Machin album right now — designing specialized album pages to print from my computer.  This image will be reproduced on the album cover, and the actual stamp will appear on the first page.

I plan on a set of pages on this site on the topic of collecting postmarks on Machins, that will have a literature review — if you are a stamp collector or just an interested person, please reply with any suggestions of what else to include.  But until then, I’ll give links to what I consider the best current printed references:

This is a letter I am sending to the Los Angeles Metropolitan Transit Authority regarding a negative experience with the 268 bus.  I will update the thread with any responses from the MTA.

16 January 2011

Dear Customer Service Agent,

On 15 January 2011, I was awaiting the 268 bus from Lower Azusa and Halifax, in El Monte, to the Lower El Monte Transit Station.  The bus was scheduled to arrive at 18:22.

The bus was nine minutes late, arriving at 18:31.  Perhaps in an attempt to make up lost time, the driver simply drove past where I was waiting at the stop, despite my signal.  I believe, but am not certain, that it was bus # 7209.

This is, obviously, unacceptable.  The 268 bus is, by far, the least-reliable bus I have encountered in the entire Metro system.  Late, early, and missing buses are the norm, but this is the first time a late bus has refused to stop.  Even if the bus were to have picked me up this time, presuming the driver did not skip any other stops to speed the passage, I would have been nine minutes late to a stop with a 12 minute transfer window.  It is questionable whether I could have made the transfer in any case.

I waited for the next bus, roughly 45 minutes later.  I would like to commend the driver of this bus, # 7023, for his friendliness and professionalism.

Would you please provide an explanation of what happened and a description of what is being done to keep this from happening again?

Photographer Paul Nicklen, in an expedition off Antarctica, captured amazing images when a female leopard seal decided he was floating helplessly.

Nicklen:

“After [the pictured] big female seal realized that I was unable to catch a swimming penguin, she tried different ways of presenting her offerings, elegantly moving toward me in different postures.”

“She no doubt thought that I was doomed and would starve to death, but without her knowledge, she gave me the greatest gift of my career as a wildlife photojournalist.”

Put aside the seal eating the cute penguins.  We, as H. sapiens, are tempted to feed and rescue helpless animals we encounter in the wild.  Is it surprising that other species do, too?

Because it is, to me.  Every time.  And it shouldn’t be.  How arrogant for us to think that we have special empathy that “the lower animals” cannot possess or demonstrate.  I love these pictures and how they remind me that my pretensions of uniqueness as a species are unjustified in many areas.

The site last.fm allows one to “scrobble” (make a record of) a play of a song on one’s music player.  I had to reset my plays a year ago due to scrobbling errors — many tracks were being wildly duplicated.  Now I have another year’s worth of data.  Top 15 artists over the past year, in descending order:

This leads me to two conclusions: (1) I love data mining and (2) my musical tastes are absurdly predictable and haven’t changed all that much over the last ~20 years.

Here’s a wee sampler I put together for you:

I’m watching the pilot of the program ReGenesis.  Crack team of scientists.  Pretty formulaic so far, but interesting characters.

So, there’s reasonably good setup for exposition, and the main character (a molecular biologist) says “OK, Virology 101:  Viruses are very small.  They’re about a millionth of an inch across.  If this room were a cell, a virus would be a pinprick.”

Wait, what?  BOTEC time.  How big is a ‘pinprick’?  I’d say about a tenth of a millimeter.  That means there are 10,000 in a meter, and maybe 80,000 across the room they’re in.  So if a virus is a millionth of an inch across, then by this scale a cell is between an eighth and a 16th of an inch across.  Which it’s not.  A cell’s about 10 microns (1 × 10^-5m) across: off by a factor of 200.

OK, so say we keep the scale.  Divide the cell width by 80,000.  That would make a virus 1 × 10^-10m across.  Which it’s not.  They’re talking about Poxviridae, which is about 2 × 10^-7m across: off by a factor of 500.

So, what’s the actual scale?  A human cell is roughly 50 times the width of a pox virion.  So if they’re in a room 8m across, rather than a pinprick, it’s about six inches across.  The difference between the ratio of six inches to the room and a pinprick is about 2000.

Am I making too big a deal out of this?  Maybe.  But it’s a mystery show.  Presumably, we’re supposed to potentially figure it out while they’re working on it.  Or else, at least have it plausible at the end.

If you’re unconvinced, imagine a traditional detective show.  Someone is talking about how fast a car could have fled the scene of a crime.  But instead of saying “The max speed of a Toyota is about 100mph”, they say “The max speed of a Toyota is about Mach 200″ (that’s about ten times the highest velocity the space shuttle reaches as it goes into orbit).  Or instead of “Just a drop of this poison is enough to kill a man — he wouldn’t have noticed it in his coffee”, they say “Just half a cup of this poison is enough to kill a man”.  Would that be fun in a show?  No, right?

Or let’s say there were a book that some people wanted to put into a science classroom, that instead of saying the Earth was 4½ billion years old, was off by a factor of 2000, and said the Earth was only 2¼ million years old.  That’d suck, right?  But that one’s silly.  Certainly no American would trust a book that said the Earth was as preposterously young as two million years old, right?!  Good thing!

I have converted everything in the Single Malts Pages from static HTML files to the content management system.  Many of them are quaint snapshots in time of my reviews from when I was much less experienced.  Some generated awesome flames, examples of which can be found in the entries for Loch Dhu and Johnnie Walker Green Label.

If you take a look and find any errors, please let me know.

I got a misaddressed email from someone this morning.  Here’s the exchange so far:

Me:  Hello, I’m not the person you are trying to reach.  Please check your “To” addresses.  Best, Joshua H. McGee

W.W.:  Thank you so much. Sorry about that!

… And then W.W. forwarded me a copy of it.

Me:  Nope, still me.

W.W.:  So Sorry.  I am not sure why it is coming to you.  I am putting in [my email address].

Me:  Yes.  That is my email address.  To get it to someone else, you are going to need to send it to his address.

I found a short story I wrote, longhand, when I was fifteen years old.

Rex woke me this morning.  One moment I was asleep, dreaming that a crate of oranges had just been delivered to my door, and the next moment I was awakened by friendly snorts and whines coming from the speaker on my bedside table.

Rex is my dog.  Actually, Rex is a kind of hybrid of a computer dog and a Rolodex.  I programmed Rex in 72 hours straight.  About thirty hours of it was the actual skeleton of the program, and the rest getting Rex’s snorts and whines right.  I did it, finally.  It took me 42 hours, but I console myself with the fact that it was the 42 hours at the end of the programming rather than the beginning, and that about three hours into the snorting lessons my coffee machine broke down.

I got out of bed, cautiously, and tiptoed across the collection of coffee mugs that had accumulated on the carpet of my bedroom, to the bathroom first, then to the hall closet (this was a mistake; I am not a morning person), then to the kitchen.

I walked up to the counter and opened my high-use drawer.  It contains my keyboard, my pizza roller, my coffee filters, a box of pens, and my laser pistol.

I buy my pens from my baker.  He sells donuts by the “baker’s dozen” (13) and pens by the “baker’s gross”.  I get 156 pens in a box.  This is my baker’s logic.

He maintains that because a gross is a dozen dozen, a baker’s gross should be a dozen baker’s dozen.  I say that a baker’s gross should be 169 pens: a baker’s dozen baker’s dozen.  I still buy my pens from him, though.  My baker’s pens are cheaper than their office-supply counterpart, and I am in the habit of finding myself needing a loaf of cornmeal hearth bread more frequently than finding myself in need of a telephone answering machine.  After all, people stopped using telephones a hundred years ago.

My laser pistol qualifies as a high-use item due to the large number of people I have over for a cup of coffee and the corresponding number of people who have never seen a Smith & Wesson Mark VII Aility [sic] sidearm.  I traded my car for it at last month’s community swap meet.  It doesn’t work.  Neither did my car.

I removed my last pen from the drawer.  This was OK: I could use some more cornbread.  Four loaves.  I’ve gotten this down to a fine science: I go through 156 pens for every four loaves of cornbread for every 3 coffee mugs.

I was also out of coffee filters.  This was not OK.

So, car-less, coffee-less, wearing clothes I had slept in, and carrying my last pen, I made a plan:

• Buy coffee filters
• Buy pens
• Buy bread
• Buy car
• Wash clothes

Armed with this list, I set out to face the day, stepping over the crate of oranges outside my door.

So wordy!  But I don’t think too horrible for a 15-year-old.

1.  I think I won line of the night while out to dinner with Bob Mike.

Joshua:  The tasting notes on this beer include “A whirlwind of fruit and spice.”

Bob Mike:  That’s one of the lesser-known Dune novels.

Joshua:  Actually, I think it’s a magazine article about David and Victoria Beckham.

2.  Can anyone listen to Rifftrax audio and not picture Kevin and Bill as robots?  (That question makes sense even if you didn’t get it.)

3.  I met a guy today who introduced himself as “Persian”.  At first I thought he was lying: he didn’t look anything like Jake Gyllenhaal!  Then I deduced that not every citizen of a country has to look like the nation’s royalty; otherwise surely most Brits would have klled themselves by now.  Also, I deduced that he was Iranian but was uncomfortable introducing himself that way.  Those clever, clever terrorists.

4.  Since when do trees have roots?!

I often hear (or read) people opine that pre-teens and teens today have a wealth of information resources that “we” (with a vague referent) would have loved.  And I often hear people bemoan and bewail the loss of erudition in communication between “today’s youth”.  But something is often missed, I think.

We all — any “we” — said stupid stuff when we were kids.  We parroted stuff from our parents or other kids without thinking through it; we said self-serving lies; we were arrogant and brash; we (I would wager everyone) said things that disparaged entire groups.  Elaborating on the last one: although I consider myself, in retrospect, to have been more sensitive than many of my peers, I blanch at the memories of remarks that I made that sexualized classmates; at the gay jokes; at the Mexican jokes.  Yes, I did these mostly to fit in.  Every young person in history has done these things, to some degree or other, for the same reasons, because youth is a time when we have not yet formulated our identities, and we are trying on various ones to see if any fit.  Show me the man who acts as an adult the way he did as a child, and I’ll show you the man in prison.

But when I said such things, or when those born before (perhaps) the mid 1980s to early 1990s said them, they were spoken, to be heard by our peers — the ones we were trying to impress — and there is no record of them.  But when it’s done today, it can be forever.  An email or text message can be shared or archived, and I’m assuming many of those will come back to bite people later.  But a tweet or a Facebook status update or a blog post or (beware, kids) a YouTube comment will, with near-certainty, be archived on some hard drive or other and be digitally accessible in some fashion in perpetuity.

I was thinking of citing a number of examples I have seen recently of brash, arrogant, abusive, unthoughtful, and just idiotic things I had seen online — the items that made me think to write this post — but I needn’t, because every person reading this has his or her own examples.  But I don’t expect it will be any easier to teach kids to be careful to not write these things down, even when “all the kids do”, than it is to teach kids that they don’t need to say these things, even when “all the kids do”.

That’s because the “all the kids do” phenomenon is a manifestation of all kids going through the same awkwardness and fear and experimentation and self-definition together.  Adults know this, and they try to tell kids this, and the kids don’t believe them, because rather than realizing they’re discovering a world, they’re convinced that they’re inventing it.  That’s fine, they’re kids.  They are never going to grasp the real extent that their parents (and grandparents, and distant ancestors) went through the same stuff about sex, and peer pressure, and drugs, and bullies, and school, and criminal impulses, and masturbation, and suicide, and on and on and on.  As usual, Ed Vedder from Pearl Jam said it better than I: “The young, they can lose hope ’cause they can’t see beyond today; wisdom that the old can’t give away.”

• If you’re an adult:  I’m right, yeah?
• If you’re a teen:  Don’t put anything on the web that you wouldn’t want on your college admission or job applications.  You won’t listen to that advice, of course, but keep it in your mind for the stuff that might really come back to get you.
• If you’re a random kid/preteen:  You don’t belong on this site.  But, meh, you’re going to figure out how to read what you want.  Your mom and dad know this too.  Welcome to the world of “open secrets”.
• If you’re my kid/preteen:  There’s more on this site than I probably would have wanted to know about my father until I was in my twenties.  But if you’re here, and you’re reading all of this, you’ll know a lot about me.  We’re all — you, me, the world — in it together.  And I’m always here to talk.  No judgments.  Ever.

Has everyone watched the three episodes of “Sherlock”, the new, modern-day-set, Steven-Moffat-reimagined (!) version of Sherlock Holmes?  I have loved it.

I am one of those insufferable Holmes purists, and do not withhold my words against interpretations I dislike (I hated, and railed about, the Guy Ritchie, for instance).  But this interpretation has been marvelous.  It’s the first I’ve ever seen to have Holmes properly directed and acted as bipolar — which of course he was.  Doyle’s depictions, especially in the early adventures, read like case studies. (Or stories of other famous British bipolars, such as Johnson.  In fact, I’ve often wondered how much Holmes was based off of Samuel Johnson — doesn’t Watson’s Holmes read like Boswell’s Johnson?  Perhaps this is commonly written and I’ve never encountered it; or, worse, is so obvious that everyone recognizes it and no one bothers to mention it.)

In any case, the program is excellent — in writing, directing, and acting — and I cheerfully excuse the liberties taken.  The actor playing Holmes has the character’s moods down perfectly.  (By the way, yes: “Benedict Cumberbatch” is indeed the name he was born with.  I can say this because [1] I researched it and [2] no one in the world has the balls to pick a stage name that posh.)

The estimable (if not indeed inestimable) Martin Freeman, also, has Watson sorted.  I feel sorry for any other fortyish English actors of small stature able to play awkward men in a constant state of mild offense: Freeman’s landed John Watson, Arthur Dent, and Bilbo Baggins.  Anyone born in the late 60s or early 70s who wanted to inherit the David Suchet roles (the ones Suchet himself received as hand-me-downs from Ian Holm) must be rather sad right now.

A couple moments that struck me: in one episode, a theory of what has happened at a crime scene has been formulated.  A character says “Well, it does seem to be the only explanation of all the facts.”  Holmes barks: “Wrong!  It is one possible explanation of some of the facts!”

In another, a police technician (who hates Holmes) introduces him as a “psychopath”.  Holmes gives her a withering look and intones dismissively, “I’m a high-functioning sociopath, not ‘a psychopath’.  Do your research.”

A link?  Don’t mind if I do!  But check it out even if you don’t buy it through my affiliate ID:

Whoops!  Missed the anniversary by five days, but the ten year anniversary of the mcgees.org blog was on 15 December (mcgees.org itself predates this by almost a year, and my first personal website by five years.)

In that inaugural post I had to define for people what a “blog” was, how it worked, and indeed referred to it by the full name “web log”.

To put this in dramatic context: when my inaugural blog post was published, Clinton was in office.

December again!  This is the month when, among other things, I get to hear Protestants drone on about “putting the ‘Christ’ back in ‘Christmas’”.

A year ago I discussed a Garrison Keillor article entitled Don’t Mess With Christmas, including the sentence “Christmas is a Christian holiday — if you’re not in the club, then buzz off.”  (My reaction was then, and still is, “Wow.  OK.  ‘Club’.”)

But I don’t think most Protestants are as strident, if only because so few of them have thought this one through all the way.  I mean, what is the argument for not “messing with Christmas”, anyway?

If you are arguing:  That you shouldn’t celebrate traditions from a religion not your own
Then you need to give up:  Fir trees, yule logs, mistletoe, wreaths, and carols (aaaand a much longer list of more-fundamental traditions that I won’t begin because it will seem combative.)

If you are arguing:  That a religious holiday shouldn’t have a secondary effect on secular society
Then you need to give up:  Christmas as a national holiday.

If you are arguing:  That nothing new, recent, or contrived should be incorporated
Then you need to give up:  Santa Claus (in a non-vicious formulation), tinsel, electric Christmas lights, Rudolph, and basically everything from Dickens.

If you are arguing:  That nothing should be taken out of “Christmas”
Then you need to give up:  Your pretense of celebrating “Christmas” while taking the “mass” out of it.

Now, maybe you’re with Keillor, and are arguing that I shouldn’t even be talking about this, because I’m not “in the club” (and because I’m a big meanie, and because I can’t make nearly as cool a treehouse as you can, so I should just go play in whatever lousy clubhouse I can build for my lousy club.)  If so, and you really want to play that card — the SHUT UP, YOU’RE NOT OF THE MAJORITY RELIGION! card — then that saddens me a bit.  But if you think the traditions of your family from when you were growing up are definitive, original, and came from the sky fully-formed — they aren’t, and they didn’t.

Now, if you perform all these steps, you’ll be celebrating a fairly routine mass, delivered in droning Latin, inside a brutally cold chapel, with a priest railing against the evils of pagan symbolism, accompanied by none of the trappings-and-trimmings.  I don’t think you’ll enjoy it, but have at it: your “club” can have its stupid mass and not invite me!  Just see if I care!  I’ll be over here where it’s warm and nice.  You poopyheads!

Does Google crawl <IFRAME>-related tags?  Yes.

I created a page with this code:

<IFRAME src="URL1">
    <a href="URL2">URL2</a>
</IFRAME>
<NOFRAMES>
    <a href="URL2">URL2</a>
</NOFRAMES>

Each was only mentioned on this one page, and my web logs verified Googlebot was the only visitor besides me.

All three URLs were identified and crawled by Googlebot.  So, Google does crawl <IFRAME> “src” URLs, links in the interior of an <IFRAME>  (the “alternate text”), and links within the deprecated <NOFRAMES> tag.

There are few domains in which a simple query can have such an unhelpful response as when you ask questions about the Linux operating system.  Imagine if asking for cooking advice were like this:

mcgeesorg:  Hello!  Does anyone know the right temperature to use when cooking a turkey?  It would be a big help.  If I get a bunch of answers, here or offline, I’ll post a summary.  Thanks!

hiroptag:  That depends.  Do you have a gas or an electric oven?

mcgeesorg:  No, it really doesn’t depend on that.  I can guarantee that I’ll keep the temperature constant.  What is that temperature?

nyrd:  Turkeys taste great with stuffing, but please keep in mind that they require longer cooking times if the stuffing is cooked inside of them.  Yes, I learned that the hard way. 

mcgeesorg:  That’s awesome advice.  I appreciate it.  But do you know the temperature I should use to cook it?

msftw:  I agree with @nyrd, but even though this won’t be popular here, have you considered just buying one from Honeybaked???  They cost more, but they’re already fully cooked and come in a pretty box.

mcgeesorg:  I appreciate your suggestion, but I have a raw one sitting in my kitchen, and I just want to know the oven temperature.

helio:  What’s the real problem you’re trying to solve?  Maybe an oven isn’t the best approach.  It sounds like you’re trying to feed your family, right?

mcgeesorg:  No, what I’m really trying to do is find out the right temperature at which to cook a turkey.  Please, could someone just tell me the temperature?

linuxuser05484:  If anyone knows the answer, please tell me, too.

fadillest:  Where do you live?  I mean, are you asking in Fahrenheit or Celsius?  Because the scales are different.

mcgeesorg:  I realize the scales are different.  As long as you tell me which one you’re using, I can do the conversion from one to the other.  I just need a number.  Any scale, just the right number.

ForumBot:  Has the question been answered?  If so, Great!  Please mark it as “SOLVED”.

wonderland:  You bring up an interesting point.  I absolutely agree that this is a question that now needs to be asked.  Before British people moved to North America, winter holiday feasts included roast goose.  But, no, not any more!  Thank you.  I don’t normally read this forum, so I’m glad I saw your post!  (+repped)

mcgeesorg:  Glad my question was inspirational (?).  Do you know the answer?

stanford_jim:  You’re trying to microwave your turkey?!  That’s something most pro cooks advise against.  Just set a conventional oven to the right temperature and put the bird in.  I think it’s even easier than a microwave, despite what General Electric wants you to believe!

mcgeesorg:  Please read my question again.  I am trying to use a conventional oven.  What is the “right temperature” you’re referencing?

USSenterprise:  Careful!  There’s been a major recall by one of the big poultry plants.  Worries about salmonella or E. coli, I think.  Might want to look into that.

linuxuser06884:  I’ve been wondering the same thing for a while.  I was going to ask it myself before I saw that you already asked it!  Anyone know the answer?

DorkInNY:  There’s a great book called “Joy of Cooking”.  I bet you can find your answer in the index.  Search for it at Amazon or see if your local library has a copy.  Hope this helps.

mcgeesorg:  That’s a marvelous idea in general, but it’s Thanksgiving right now, and even if it weren’t, $20 or a trip to the library is a lot when all I need is a single number.  Does anyone know it?  A quote from “Joy of Cooking” would be completely satisfactory.

linuxrawks:  I’m pretty new at turkeys, but I’ve been cooking my whole life.  I don’t remember exactly, but I think it’s around 50,000 degrees Fahrenheit (or maybe Celsius?)  Whichever is the temperature that steel melts at.

mcgeesorg:  I’m fairly sure that’s not correct.  Other readers, please don’t try that 50,000° temperature.  It’s not going to give the result you want.

HotLuckyGirl99:  Best Taiwan farmss offers the best most flexible delicous turkey birds visit turkeycookeddeliciousbirds.tw.

linuxPRO_18:  Out of curiosity, @mcgeesorg, when you took the turkey out of the oven, did the juices run clear?  Because someone told me they’re supposed to “run clear”, and I’m not sure if mine did or not, because I don’t really know what that means, so given that you’ve done this, can you help a n00b haha!? 

mcgeesorg:  When people talk about “juices running clear” when cooking poultry, they mean for you to insert a thin blade into a thick meaty bit near a bone and observe the appearance of the liquid that drains from the incision.  It needs to be transparent, because if it’s pink, that means there is still blood in it, and the blood can harbor diseases.  But I haven’t cooked a turkey yet, because I don’t know the right temperature.  I just need this one datum.

MarvinSWheydlePhD:  Just a suggestion, and no offense meant, but I took a cooking certification course.  It was tough, but it really helped me when I was facing questions like this.

mcgeesorg:  Thank you.  Honestly.  I’ll consider that.  But it is Thanksgiving day, and already past noon, and I just want to know the temperature to set my oven to.  Again, even if someone wants to contact me by email, I’ll re-post it here.

wickeditor:  RTFCB!

pierre:  People have had success with a couple of temperatures, actually.

mcgeesorg:  Good to know.  Could you tell me one of them, please?

free-as-in-speech:  I stopped buying Butterball turkeys years ago, and started buying from small farms.  I assume you’re buying from small farms, too?  That’s a good step, but since then I’ve been buying Tofurky Feasts, and they are really tasty.

bonzabonza:  I hear claims like @free-as-in-speech‘s all the time, but non-Butterball turkeys aren’t really any worse than small farm ones.

betamax:  It’s not about flavor, @bonzabonza.  I think @free-as-in-speech was making a moral argument.  That’s why we all started eating turkeys to begin with, right?

bonzabonza:  Well, maybe it’s an issue, but for one turkey, once a year?  I think @mcgeesorg should just use a Butterball turkey.  But I agree with @free-as-in-speech that Tofurky can be quite nice, if he wants to go that route! 

mcgeesorg:  All these “you should try” answers are very interesting, but if it helps, just pretend I’m doing research for an encyclopedia article about cooking turkeys, not cooking one for myself, and I need to publish the cooking temperature.

skeletor:  I found this article through a Google search: [http://eceserv0.ece.wi...].  It’s for a slightly different setup, but it should still work.

mcgeesorg:  Thanks @skeletor, but that’s a guide to different tunings of a six-string guitar, and unless I’m missing something, I don’t think that applies here.

dru:  Sometimes it’s printed on the package.

mcgeesorg:  Yes.  But this time it’s not.

dru:  Sometimes it is there, though — just in small print.

mcgeesorg  Yes.  But this time the answer is not on the package.

dru:  They’re supposed to put it on the package!  WTF?!  Everyone write and complain, OK?!

best_researcher:  Turkey?  That’s Asia Minor, right?  Are you sure your oven supports Asian birds?

mcgeesorg:  It’s 9 p.m. on Thanksgiving now.  Thanks for all your help, but people are hungry, so fsck it.  I’m driving us to McDonalds, and tomorrow I’ll buy a dozen turkeys and spend this three-day weekend experimenting with different temperatures.  I’ll come back on Sunday night and let the forum know what I discovered, because it sounds like this might be useful to other people as well.

Adele_ForumModerator [Friday evening]:  Thread marked “Solved” and closed to comments.  Thanks everyone!

Glenn Beck claimed, on national television, that 10% of Muslims worldwide are terrorists.  To put this in U.S. terms, the number of people this includes is equal to the combined populations of:

New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston, Phoenix, Philadelphia, San Antonio, San Diego, Dallas, San Jose, Detroit, San Francisco, Jacksonville, Indianapolis, Austin, Columbus, Fort Worth, Charlotte, Memphis, Boston, Baltimore, El Paso, Seattle, Denver, Nashville, Milwaukee, Washington D.C., Las Vegas, Louisville, Portland OR, Oklahoma City, Tucson, Atlanta, Albuquerque, Kansas City, Fresno, Mesa AZ, Sacramento, Long Beach, Omaha, Virginia Beach, Miami, Cleveland, Oakland, Raleigh, Colorado Springs, Tulsa, Minneapolis, Arlington, Honolulu, Wichita, St. Louis, New Orleans, Tampa, Santa Ana CA, Anaheim CA, Cincinnati, Bakersfield, Aurora, Toledo, Pittsburgh, Riverside CA, Lexington KY, Stockton CA, Corpus Christi, Anchorage, St. Paul, Newark, Plano, Buffalo, Henderson NV, Fort Wayne, Greensboro, Lincoln NE, Glendale CA, Chandler AZ, St. Petersburg, Jersey City, Scottsdale, Orlando, Madison, Norfolk, Birmingham, Winston-Salem, Durham, Laredo, Lubbock, Baton Rouge, Chula Vista CA, Chesapeake, Gilbert AZ, Garland, Reno, Arlington, Irvine CA, Rochester, Akron, Boise, Irving TX, Fremont, Richmond, Spokane, Modesto CA, Montgomery, Yonkers, Des Moines, Tacoma, Shreveport, San Bernardino CA, Fayetteville, Glendale AZ, Augusta, Grand Rapids, Huntington Beach, Mobile, Newport News, Little Rock, Moreno Valley, Columbus, Amarillo, Fontana CA, Knoxville, and Fort Lauderdale

Actually, wait, I did my math wrong.  It is more than three times the combined populations of those U.S. cities.

Dear Mr. Beck:  Do you know why you had no idea the number was that large?  Because most of them are quiet, law-abiding, and keep to themselves.  Do you know why we know your name?  Because you shout hate and lies on the national airwaves.  I think you may have this one exactly backwards.

Before you believe something, and definitely before you pass it on, perform these steps:

1.  Type it into Snopes.  Has Barbara already done the research for you and shown it to be inaccurate?  She’s pretty good at that stuff, and it’s her full-time job.

2.  If there are quantifiable elements, punch the figures into a calculator.  Do the numbers check out?

3.  Does the claim violate what are generally accepted as fundamental ways the physical universe works?  If so, ask how much of human knowledge, research, and understanding would have to be overturned.  If it’s “a great deal”, consider whether it’s more likely that the claim is untrue.

4.  Would the claim’s truth or falsehood have any easily-observable effects?  If so, are they happening?  For instance, if people could psychically predict cards, would casinos still be in business?  If any newspaper psychics could foresee the future, how did all of them miss the 9/11 attacks?

5.  Consider if the claim immediately benefits the claimant.  If so, be on your guard.

These are all before you even have to start wondering whether someone’s personal testimony is reliable, whether data was collected rigorously, whether testing procedures were adequate, etc. — even before you worry about whether the people in the story actually exist or not.

Never quite sure what the right and wrong audiences are for breaking news like this, and whether it’s always a good idea to put it up online.  But from what I know of who attends to this site and who doesn’t, I’m putting it here instead of Facebook: My grandfather just died.

Shit.

I’ve changed the canonical domain of this site from “www.mcgees.org” to “mcgees.org”.  I’ve gone back and forth with this a few times, but now that I’m also using the domain as a link shortener — and in that capacity I do strip the “www.” to save four characters — I decided to unify it.

I think I have made sure that everything still works (or, rather, works now), but if you see something broken, please let me know.

I wondered if I could get Google Translate to speak English in foreign accents by using clever enough spelling, the hack to have Google translate a language to itself, and the text-to-speak synthesizers for the various languages.  For example, if I could use French→French translation to get a French accent.

Looks promising!  Follow these links and hit “Listen”:

Ze que ique braune fox jumpd auvere ze laisie dog.

Nâu ise ze taîme faure aulles goude meine tu comme tu du aiduve daire conte ries!

Oui caime tu bairie Saissare, naûtes tu praîzze îmes.

Maî hauvercreft ise foules auvîlzes.

Feel free to post yours here, for any language.

Summary: GOP gets a president sort-of-almost-OK-not-really elected ten years ago.  The president pays back his millionaire supporters by giving them huge tax breaks, using the Ayn Rand logic that by giving them tax cuts, we help the economy and create jobs.  To get it passed, he concedes a date at which they will expire.

Under this president’s policies, the economy all but collapses.  Banks almost fail, and people become unemployed in droves.

New president inherits this mess.  President is of the same party that controls the Senate.  This party thinks, “Hey, maybe the idea that giving millionaires and billionaires money so as to give everyone else necessary money is a bullshit, self-serving, now proven lie!”  So they decide to allow the tax cuts on millionaires to expire as planned.

Twice, with different pay ceilings, the Senate votes with a 53 out of 100 majority to allow this to pass.  A majority.  The minority party says they will delay all other legislation until this is addressed, and uses a maneuver that requires the controlling party to have sixty votes to keep this from happening.

The minority party rails in bewilderment, mocking the idea of allowing the tax cuts to expire as the craziest idea they have ever heard, to “raise taxes” during a recession!  And they have the audacity and sheer wickedness to hold our country and citizens hostage to millionaires and billionaires, and then accuse the people wanting these cuts to expire in the first place of “class warfare”.

I.  Do.  Not.  Have the vocabulary.  To insult these motherfuckers.

The caffeinated malt beverage “Four”, sold in formulations called “Four Loko” and “Four MaXed”, has been ordered withdrawn from sale by the the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.  The FDA has called them a “public health concern”.  The reason given is that caffeine can mask sensory cues of intoxication, and therefore caffeine is an “unsafe food additive” in alcoholic beverages.  (Four also contains guarana and ginseng — those make up the remainder of the ingredients that suggested the name of the product — but those can be safely ignored for this discussion.)

Let’s take this apart a bit.  First, the FDA is not saying that caffeine is itself an unsafe food additive.  It’s still present in other foods, beverages, and snacks, and I’m not aware of any restrictions (if nothing else, I’d expect to find ThinkGeek’s range limited if there were), although my ultimate point is not especially harmed if there are restrictions.  But my understanding is that giving the FDA the authority to ban food additives is to ban additives that are themselves unsafe.  No Red Dye #2, no strychnine, etc.  Making it illegal in one domain seems silly — but even if it were in-principle defensible, what bugs me is the doth-protest-too-muchedness of this issue: caffeine is not safe.  Caffeine is a psychotropic, addictive drug that has some nasty side-effects.

Which is fine, as far as it goes: I’m not in favor of outlawing caffeine any more than I am of outlawing alcohol, although I do wish sales of both were age-restricted, with the threshold age as 18.  But note that it’s not illegal to sell them together, just to mix them together before sale.  Anheuser-Busch could legally produce alcoholic malt beverages and high-caffeine products, and even request retailers to sell them next to each other in the same case, and not be breaking the law.

I think a way to understand this weird position is that there are some implicit arguments being made, that might be unpopular were they stated outright.  One is that by selling them mixed into one drink, and selling them so cheaply, one is encouraging their purchase and use by young buyers without much money.  So let’s work through the math — I did some research at my corner market (El Monte, Los Angeles County, California, USA in late 2010) to see what I could figure out.  There will be some numbers, so bear with me.  All prices are after tax.

1. A “unit of alcohol” — one “drink” — is formally defined as 20ml of pure ethanol.
   
2. Prior to the removal from sale, Four Loko was $3.25, sold in 23.5oz cans.  That’s $3.25 per 0.7l, or $4.68/liter.  The cans were 12% alcohol, so the liter contained 120ml of ethanol, or six drinks.  Thus, alcohol is $0.81/unit in Four Loko, with the smallest purchase being four drinks’ worth.
   
3. Let’s say you want to concoct your own carbonated high-caffeine sweet alcoholic drink.  The most straightforward seems vodka and Monster drinks.  At this store, vodka is $6.60/750ml bottle, or $8.80/liter.  A liter of vodka at 40% a.b.v. contains 400ml of ethanol, or 20 drinks.  Thus, alcohol is $0.44/unit in vodka, with the smallest purchase being 15 drinks’ worth.  Monster drinks are $3.25/24oz, or $4.58/liter.
   
4. So we’re going to mix vodka and Monster to get the equivalent of a can of Four Loko.  To figure out the ratio of vodka to Monster, we need to dilute 40% alcohol to 12% alcohol.  So we need 3 parts vodka to 7 parts Monster.  So to get a liter of Loko-equivalent, we need 300ml and 700ml, respectively.  This will cost $2.64 for the vodka and $3.25 for the Monster, or $5.89/liter, for $0.98/unit of alcohol.  This is 26% more money than Four Loko (it also tastes a hell of a lot better, but that’s not relevant here).  If you buy one bottle of vodka and two cans of Monster for $13.10 (as the minimum purchase), you can do this, and get the equivalent of 3 cans of Four Loko with some vodka left over.  So all you need is three people to pool their money.
   
5. Can we do better?  How about a Black Russian?  Use the same $8.80/liter vodka.  The cheapest coffee at that store seems to be Folgers Crystals, which is $2.99 for a jar that makes 2.84l, for a mere $1.05/liter.  I don’t know if one needs to use a smaller or larger measure of coffee crystals to get Four Loko-level caffeine, but let’s say you just want to mix vodka into coffee reconstituted at the suggested strength (if not, the coffee is super-cheap anyway).  Using the same logic with Monster above, add 300ml vodka ($2.64) into $0.74 of coffee.  This makes a Four Loko-strength concentration $2.37, or $0.59 per unit of alcohol, or 28% less than Four Loko.  A bottle of vodka and a can of crystals would run $9.59 for the minimum purchase and would make more than 3½ cans of Four Loko, with a whole bunch of coffee crystals left over.  Water is generally free, and at a convenience store one can usually mooch sugar packets and ice.

OK, sorry for all that.  But I needed that to get the right number.

When the FDA took Four Loko off the market, they made caffeinated energy drinks 26% more expensive and increased the minimum purchase size by roughly three.  (It’s of course a smaller minimum purchase if you buy 200ml or 325ml bottles of vodka, but they are much more expensive per unit volume, and I didn’t research their prices.)  Black Russians remain 28% cheaper.  How to account for this?

I don’t want to get all bleeding-heart tin-foil-hatty here, but this has got to have something to do with market demographics.  Young men of racial minorities are key purchasers of Four Loko.  Young whites drink “Red Bull and Vodka”, which is basically what we’re talking about with the Monster concoction.  Adults (mostly white?) drink Black Russians.  So they’re not banning caffeine; they’re not restricting sale of caffeine and alcohol together; they’re not demanding a 26% increase in the price of Four Loko, which would have the same effect — they’re just banning it.  And the market segment has no powerful lobby.

Anyone else reminded of harsher penalties for crack cocaine possession than powdered cocaine?