TempleViper has passed another milestone today. Another year older, but still - as she is quick to point out - younger than me. Fortunately, she's like a fine wine - richer and sweeter to behold as time goes on. Happy birthday, sweetheart. I love you.

It’s over.

For over five years now, I have journeyed along with these weary survivors and their foes. I have admired them, I have wanted to smack them, I have offered words of encouragement and oaths of damnation, I have loved them and been terribly disappointed in them, I have celebrated with them and grieved with them, hoped and feared along with them. They have been real to me. They have mattered to me. They have, in a sense, been friends to me.

And now their journey is over.

In its final hour, Battlestar Galactica was not really a science fiction story but a work of poetry. And deeply moving poetry, at that. Though I loved this series, the one thing about it that I always disagreed with was its persistent thread of religious mysticism. I still disagree with it. But I admit that Ron Moore and his crew used it well, as one lyrical voice in a larger symphony. I also disagree with the ultimate choice made by the surviving humans at the end – or, more specifically, I flatly do not believe that they would make such a choice – but I recognize that it was the only one that could lead the series to its very final scene. And, more importantly, the smaller choices made by individual characters were what really had the most powerful emotional impact for me, as each of them faced life or death on their own terms. The image that still burns brightest in my mind as of this writing is the last shot we see of Admiral William Adama.

I spent that entire final hour in tears. The last time a series end had that effect on me was the end of Babylon 5, over a decade ago. I am in tears as I write this now.

And it’s okay. What Moore and company gave us, above us all else, was the truth about each and every one of these characters from their own lips, unflinchingly. And that’s the most important thing he could have done.

No, I don’t agree with the supernatural angle. And I never will. But… I don’t feel that I have to. Since Battlestar Galactica is a work of fiction, its showrunner has the luxury of weaving whatever colors he chooses into its tapestry, and I as a viewer and fan can still love and admire everything else about it. And I do. BSG was uneven at times, even maddening in a couple of places, but overall it was thoughtful, evocative, and challenging in a way that television seldom is. At its best it was exquisite in ways that television never has been before.

More importantly, it has raised the bar for both television in general and televised science fiction in particular. There have been a few truly great series in the genre – the aforementioned Babylon 5, Stargate: SG-1, much of Star Trek, the re-launched (and even some of the original) Doctor Who. This is not to say that we won’t find ourselves wading through crap in the future – it does find a market, after all – but I won’t be surprised to find that the good stuff is just a little bit better than we usually expect.

For now, we can let these people, human and Cylon, have their own future.

Here’s hoping for ours.

So say we all.

The Bush Administration was a cabal of dictatorship-loving, America-hating, freedom-destroying traitors, and was nothing more or less than the full manifestation of conservatism in action.

There is no hyperbole whatsoever in that statement; it was obvious in every action they took, and is documented in their own writings, finally made available by the Obama Administration. It's an odd feeling to finally have a functioning Justice Department again.

In these memos, secretly signed and enacted by Bush, the President is declared to be completely above the law with no checks whatsoever upon his power. He reserves the right to exercise his power any way he sees fit, including military action against American citizens on American soil. I'd like to repeat that, because it's pretty fucking important - The Bush White House claimed the right to wage war against American citizens within America. Purely in the name of fighting "terrorism", of course, suuurre...

When Clinton obtained warrants under the oversight of the FISA court for counter-terrorism surveillance all the conservatives screamed that it was a threat to our liberties, but when Bush declared that he needed neither warrants nor oversight the conservatives told everyone who pointed out that such an action was illegal and unconstitutional - you know, us liberals - that we were being traitorous and disloyal and un-American and helping terrorists and probably kicking puppies, and should just shut up or risk "consequences". And even now, they tout "the rule of law" as one of their most pressing, hand-wringing concerns... especially when when anyone points out the horrible things that they've actually done.

Conservatism is treason. Period. There is no better way to describe that ideology, or the deeds committed in its name. Conservatives have worked ever since the inauguration of Reagan for the ruin of America, and the damage they've done is so great that they may yet achieve that goal despite the best efforts of grownups to clean up their mess.

Download the memos in the link above. Read them. Read them several times, and pass them on to every patriotic American you know. There is no room whatsoever for doubt, no quibbling over interpretation, no question that these memos describe the deliberate transformation of the United States of America from a republic to a dictatorship through declarations that were kept secret from Congress and from the American people.

And... conservatives? Shove it up your ass. Don't you dare try to tell me about how you value liberty or the rule of law, because such a claim is a treasonous lie. You - all of you - at least gave assent to this and frequently openly championed those who gutted the very system of law and principle that makes America what it is and should be. In every criticism and warning we gave we were and are one hundred percent right, and you were and are one hundred percent wrong. So fuck off. You have nothing to offer but poison and destruction, and this nation deserves far better.

Philip Jose Farmer has died today, at the age of 91. He was already 60 when I first started reading his works, and though the Riverworld was a rather silly idea it was also bold and unique and ambitious, and I found Farmer's use of it as a backdrop for epic storytelling and speculation about historical figures to be absolutely captivating (at least for the first four books).

He officially retired some years back as his health declined; he didn't even go to conventions anymore, much less write. All the giants pass, in their time; so will we all. I must revisit his work again, and journey to the Tower with Sam Clemens and Richard Francis Burton.

Rest in peace, PJ. May you awaken again on the bank of the River along with lots of interesting people.

You know, these articles aren’t hard to write or anything, I just haven’t gotten around to them for a while. As a result, it’s been a year and ten months since part five of this series which, in computer technology, is a geological age… but I will finish this series. Or at least continue, thus:

-------------------------------------------------------------------

Intel said it simply couldn’t be done. AMD said, “Oh, well; we’re going to do it anyway.”

And they did.



In April 2003, nearly six years ago at the time of this writing, the giant and the contender fired shots heard ‘round the world. AMD’s Sledgehammer architecture was released under the brand name Opteron for use in enterprise servers in configurations of up to eight sockets without the need for expensive bridge chips. As if that wasn’t enough, it was also a true 64-bit CPU. This wasn’t unusual by itself – the Sun SPARC, DEC Alpha, IBM PowerPC, and SGI MIPS were all 64-bit and everyone remembered Intel’s ill-fated Itanium debacle, but Opteron had something new up its sleeve… it could also natively run existing 32-bit code with absolutely no performance hit, making it suitable for any current apps.

The Opteron had, in addition to its 64-bit wide bus, a radical new core architecture that was beyond anything Intel had ever even considered, and it took the revolutionary step of integrating the memory controller onto the CPU (something Intel wouldn’t do until the end of 2008!). In all previous computer architectures the memory controller was part of the mainboard chipset, typically in the northbridge, and so there was always a certain amount of latency that could never be avoided no matter how fast the memory or the controller. With Opteron’s Sledgehammer architecture, memory latency was vastly reduced and resulted in greater performance. As the public tests on the finished product were demonstrated it became clear that Opteron was incredibly faster than anything else presently on the market or to be released in the foreseeable future. Period. Game over.

Well, there was one little snag; the mainboards being shipped for Opteron at the time had no AGP slots, so high-end graphics cards were not an option. Gamers were grumpy. AMD assured the public that when a consumer version of the CPU shipped, AGP-equipped mainboards would ship with it.

Intel attempted to counter Opteron by launching a refresh of the Pentium 4 lineup with a front-side bus boosted to 800 MHz, much faster than the previous 533 MHz bus. But everyone was talking about AMD’s new Direct-Connect system architecture and HyperTransport implementation, an entirely different approach than the traditional front-side bus.

Intel also did something else; kind of an afterthought, really… they released a new mobile processor dubbed the Pentium M. Their Mobile Pentium 4 was a rather lackluster chip with low performance and high power requirements, but this new chip had a much lower power draw and faster performance even at lower clock speeds. Almost as if it were an entirely different architecture than the Pentium 4. Which it was. It came out of Intel’s small Israeli Design Center under the leadership of Schmuel “Mooly” Eden. And… let’s hold further words on that topic for a future installment…

In the consumer desktop space the battle was still being fought between the Pentium 4 and the Athlon XP. Intel had just transplanted a trick from its Xeon line into the latest revisions of the Northwood core dubbed HyperThreading. This was a technique by which the CPU could, with certain kinds of code, execute two process threads simultaneously as if a single CPU were actually two chips. This had proven fairly useful on the Xeon as developers had coded certain server apps to take advantage of it; in the desktop space it proved to be, well, mostly underwhelming at best. With apps that were designed to take advantage of it – and if they were well-coded – a modest performance gain was seen. But there were very few applications that did so, and with conventional single-threaded code there was at best no difference and at worst – and, unfortunately for Intel, most commonly – there was actually a noticeable performance decrease. Nonetheless, it was recurring feature in many future revisions of the Pentium 4.

The Athlon XP also got a refresh in the form of the “Barton” core. Barton was built on the same 130 nm process as it predecessor, Thoroughbred, but the standard 256k L2 cache was now upgraded to a whopping 512k. The Barton core debuted with the Athlon XP 2500 which had a 333 MHz bus and quickly became famous for its overclockability, but even though later revisions were bumped up to a 400 MHz bus something was starting to become apparent – AMD’s K7 architecture was reaching its theoretical performance limits. Intel’s 533 MHz bus brought the Pentium 4’s performance to reasonable parity with the Athlon XP; with the 800 MHZ bus it pulled ahead and Intel was able to claim the undisputed performance crown on the desktop. A desktop variant of Sledgehammer was clearly needed.



In September of 2003 AMD pimp-slapped Intel and took its crown away with two new desktop chips; first, Sledgehammer’s little brother – Clawhammer. Entering the desktop space with the name Athlon64, it differed from Opteron in two key respects – where Opteron had a dual-channel memory controller, Athlon64 addressed only a single channel (the resulting smaller die allowed Athlon 64 to fit into a 754-pin socket rather than Opteron’s 940-pin socket) and, unlike Opteron, which required registered ECC DDR-RAM, it could use cheaper conventional DDR-RAM.

For the enthusiast end of the desktop market AMD offered the AthlonFX. AthlonFX was simply a re-badged Sledgehammer core for Socket-940 mainboards with long-awaited AGP slots. It was much more expensive than the initial Athlon64, and the chip to own if you wanted bragging rights, but even the entry-level Athlon64 was a powerhouse CPU that thoroughly embarrassed anything that Intel could put up against it. The amazing thing is that the K8 architecture of the Opteron/AthlonFX/Athlon64 was delayed by a year as AMD worked out the kinks of a wholly new manufacturing process and it still beat Intel.

Intel countered with something called the Pentium 4 Extreme Edition. This turned out to be their version of the AthlonFX; it was a re-badged Xeon, a Northwood core with its standard 512k L2 cache but also an additional 2 megabyte L3 cache. It won in some synthetic benchmarks but was completely trounced in all real-world apps and games by the much less expensive Athlon64 3200. It’s also worth noting that the P4EE ran at 3.2 GHz and the Athlon64 3200 ran at 2.0 GHz. And there was no contest.

AMD did have one initial stumbling block, and that was available supply. Their initial yields were not as high as they needed to be and that hurt their position in the market for several weeks. They did recover, though, and by early the following year new speed grades were introduced at different price points.

Everyone noticed how nervous Intel was as they laid out a road-map for forthcoming products that were hoped to reclaim the crown. Northwood would be replaced by Prescott, which would be supplanted by a core called Tejas which would require a new socket design. All these chips were still derived from the Netburst architecture, and so the industry watched Intel’s doings with a skeptical eye.

Prescott was released on February 1 of 2004 with the promise of scaling to higher clock speeds than Northwood. And it did, but it also generated more heat and was somewhat slower clock-for-clock. Intel released Prescott initially in socket 478 but later in the LGA775 format designed for Tejas; this move was intended to reduce heat and power consumption but actually made things worse. Prescott-core Pentium 4 processors were released at speeds of up to 3.8 GHz, but they didn’t scale well. In fact, they were terrible. Each increase in speed brought progressively smaller performance increases at tremendous operating cost – a 3.8 GHz Pentium 4 was only slightly faster than one at 3.2 GHz, and they couldn’t be pushed to 4 GHz or more without prohibitively expensive cooling solutions. To add insult to injury, Prescott had a bug which made it incompatible with Windows XP Service Pack 2; updated Prescott-based systems (ALL of them!) were completely unable to boot without a BIOS updated for compatibility with SP2. Tejas proved to be even worse than Prescott while still in testing, and so was unceremoniously cancelled. Netburst, which Intel had boasted would scale to 10 GHz with ease, was widely – and publicly - declared a failure.

And Intel had nothing with which to replace it.



Meanwhile, the Athlon64 continued to be overhauled and upgraded, gaining an even better memory controller and a new interface – Socket 939. This socket, adopted in June of 2004, accommodated both new Athlon64 and new Opteron processors with dual-channel memory controllers designed for conventional DDR-RAM. Socket 939 quickly became the enthusiasts’ platform of choice as Athlon64s at a wide range of price/performance options became available on the market. Socket 939 also was designed with an eye toward the future, as AMD announced that it would be shipping dual-core processors within a year.

As 2005 dawned, the CPU landscape seemed irrevocably changed. Intel, once the assumed inevitable champion, had been knocked reeling from a series of one-two punches characterized by wildly successful AMD products and its own ignominious failures. It was not merely beaten, it was humiliated. But it was still the proverbial 800 pound gorilla and it wasn’t going to simply go away…

To be continued in The Upgrade Path, Part Seven – “Intel versus AMD; Double Your Pleasure, Double Your Fun.”

She was the original hawtness. Forget Betty Grable, or Mae West, or Marilyn Monroe; none of them held a candle to her. No other woman of her era ever made black-and-white look so good.



She died today at the age of 85, long after walking away from her fairly short-lived modeling career; she was, perhaps surprisingly, not an exploited woman in an arguably exploitative era... but it wasn't that no one tried. It was those attempts, coupled with the onset of what was much later recognized as schizophrenia, that led her to abandon her career and fall prey to organized religion in the form of the Billy Graham Crusade. She was tall, athletic (a weightlifter!) and possessed of a beauty that is perhaps the most widely imitated in the world. Ironically, she achieved her greatest success as a model long after she chose to no longer be one. The world is just a bit dimmer today. Rest in peace, Betty.

I confess to a certain amount of euphoria. It is appropriate and well-deserved after the blundering nightmare of creeping fascism that has typified the last eight years. But it will wear off, and what will remain is cautious optimism. I am going to jump to that stage a little early to look ahead at the coming Obama Presidency. There’s a hell of a lot to do, much that must go right, and many things that can go wrong.




Let’s begin with Obama himself and take a look at his history. Contrary to wingnut memes that have been forcibly embedded into the media over the last several months he is an extremely accomplished man who has consistently demonstrated a measure of intelligence, learning, judgment, temperament and leadership that the Founding Fathers themselves would have regarded with approval. His work and education at Harvard, his teaching and community organization in Chicago, his work in the Illinois State Legislature and the United States Senate were all logical outgrowths of an upbringing that endured hardship and tragedy but was supported by a strong and loving family who valued hard work, learning, and community. That’s what we the people have sent to the White House, in the form of the first president in eight years to win the Oval Office by actually being elected.

As of today, Electoral Vote has Obama at 364 electoral votes and McCain at 163, with 11 more as yet undetermined. That is a landslide of epic proportions that carries an undeniable progressive mandate, one to which most Republicans – and possibly some Democrats – will be bitterly opposed. President Obama’s first hundred days in office will have to be an unyielding charge toward important key goals. I have a modest set of proposals for our incoming President…

First – Close the illegal prison at Guantanamo Bay. Begin to scrub out the bloody stain it has left on our nation’s honor by bringing any prisoners who may be guilty of actual crimes to trial in open court, releasing and if necessary compensating the many people there who are clearly guilty of nothing whatsoever, and granting political asylum to those who cannot return safely to their country of origin.

Second – Restore the FISA courts to their pre-2001 status and allow them to do their gorram job. Immediately halt all extra-FISA activities implemented by the Bush Administration, including and especially torture, extraordinary rendition, and domestic wiretapping.

Third – Dismantle the Department of Homeland Security. And then decapitate the corpse, burn the body and scatter its ashes into the wind. And I’m not kidding. Seriously folks, the Bush Administration and the congressional Republicans, proud champions of small government, birthed a shambling dysfunctional bureaucratic monstrosity that even the Soviet Fucking Union could not have created if it tried. No bureaucratic undertaking of the Democrats has ever even come close to this power-mad, resource draining horror, even with decades to grow; the Republicans did it in two years. Kill it and drive a stake through its heart.

Fourth – Stop treating Iraq as something to make up slogans for and start pulling our troops out. Get them rested, treated, retrained, re-supplied, and ready for the criminally unfinished job in Afghanistan.

Fifth – Launch investigations in Congress. Lots of them. Start legitimate and PUBLIC inquiries into the political partisanship of the Justice Department, the civil service, the nation’s intelligence services, the administration of public agencies, and the handling of elections in the Bush years.

Sixth – Revisit the Kyoto treaty. I don’t propose to simply ratify it as it stands; much has changed in the decade since it was introduced, and much is still changing. But it’s a good idea, and it should be gone over carefully to see if we can make something practical and widely applicable out of it.

Seventh – Engage the European Union and Russia in an adult manner (as opposed to the moody, pouty egotism of Dubya) with regard to energy and security policy. That will help a hell of a lot with Four.

Eighth - Roll back Bush’s tax cuts for the vampires royalty nobility mistress-beating wealthy. That may not be possible in the first hundred days, but he can get the legislative ball rolling for when it comes up.

I could ask for a lot more than this, but I’d be thrilled beyond measure if even half of it goes through. And it can, if we citizens demand this agenda of our President and our Legislature.

And we can.

Yes, we can.

Hello. To all my friends and readers, and to anyone else who happens to stop by, I am thrilled to be able to say...

Welcome back to the United States of America.

338 electoral votes. Three hundred. And thirty-eight. Republicans, take heed; THIS is what a mandate looks like.



Getting here was not easy. On the radio today there were numerous reports of Republican "election observers" (which is a euphemisitic way of saying "vote suppressors") who examined ballots and singled out Democratic voters for harrassment. In some precincts the villians had to flee as the precinct workers themselves chased them out. No one is falling for their dirty tricks again.

In January of 2001 George W. Bush gave an inaugural address that chilled me to the bone. It oozed insincerity and avarice and barely-veiled predatory jingoism like no other political speech I had heard given in my lifetime. And I began to fear that the times ahead of us would be far worse than I initially thought.

And I was horribly right.

Just moments ago I heard a man only a handful of years my senior give a victory speech that spoke with unwavering conviction of all the best things that Americans can achieve and all that we can be, given by a man who, unlike his his predecessor, actually won the election. A man of intelligence, thoughtfulness, leadership and deliberation. A man I respect.

It's been what feels like an eternity since I've looked to the White House and found someone there who is worthy of my respect. I can wait a little longer. January 20, 2009.

That day will give us a White House inhabited by an American, leading a House and Senate with solid American majorities in each. The Republicans, with their hatred of freedom and liberty, will have to adjust. And probably split.

As our President-elect himself has said, the road ahead is going to be hard. There is a lot of damage to undo, a lot to rebuild. But we can do the work. Yes, we can.

And we will.

America is back.

"Though we are not now that strength which in old days moved Earth and Heaven, that which we are, we are: One equal temper of heroic heart, made weak by time and fate but strong in will. To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield." - Alfred, Lord Tennyson as quoted by Jeffrey Sinclair, commander of Babylon 5

In 1990, the Republican nominee for governor of Minnesota was a far-right hardliner named John Grunseth. He made the rather conservative Democratic incumbent Rudy Perpich seem suddenly liberal by comparison, and the GOP was enthusiastically banking everything on him. Near the end of the campaign it suddenly came out that he had certain vices involving minors, and he was dropped from the ballot and replaced with the more-liberal-than-Perpich Arne Carlson, who went on to win the election. The MN GOP leadership shrugged and grinned ruefully and said, “Well, yeah, we always kinda knew there was something, y’know, funny going on, but he was a strong champion of conservative values, so…”

And with that, I knew everything that I would ever need to know about conservative so-called “values”.

Not that I was a stranger to conservatism; the Cult of Reagan had been completely failing to hide their fangs over the preceding decade, but I had always been willing to grant that there must be some self-styled conservatives who, however wrong, were at least sincere and genuinely principled. In 1990 I was shown that such mythical beings must be so rare as to be almost non-existent, and irrelevant even if they did exist (Note: I do know one. Exactly one. After over four decades, I know just one. Only… one). In the nearly two decades since then conservatives have not only reinforced this conclusion, they have made their predecessors seem almost humane by comparison.

What separates liberals from conservatives is this: Liberals have a functioning moral compass to guide them, whereas conservatives have only whatever this week’s set of talking points happen to be.

After these last eight years, to vote Republican one has to be nursing a deep and pathological hatred of America. No other conclusion is possible; no other position fits the facts. They hate America, they victimize our children, they have contempt for law and common decency, they are pathologically dishonest and completely abjure the most basic critical thinking skills.

Their hatred of America is displayed in the illegal and contemptible practice of voter suppression, a long-standing Republican tradition. In the dismantling of common sense regulations in order to feed greed at the expense of the American people. In ignoring warnings of a threat to America and then using the resulting attack as an excuse to lead America to war against a nation that had nothing to do with that attack and posed no threat to us. Hatred of America is found in locking the minority party almost completely out of the legislative process by denying them entrance into the meetings of the very committees they serve on and barging into meetings they put together themselves and shutting them down. To vote Republican, you have to believe that all of that is perfectly acceptable.

Victimization of children is in denial of medical benefits for them and their families and in deliberately degrading the educational system under the Orwellian boast of “No Child Left Behind”.

Contempt for law is displayed in a Justice Department that fires attorneys who refuse to waste time and resources on obviously bogus claims of voter fraud and replaces them with unqualified partisan idealogues. In an Attorney General who declares that everything the President decides to do is legal by definition, simply because of his title. In torture and extraordinary rendition. In declaring that torture ceases to be torture merely by redefining it. In keeping emails about government business hosted off the system designed to archive them and then deleting them when they become inconvenient. In catching white supremacists in the act of plotting the assassination of a Presidential candidate – with sniper rifles, even – and dismissing the whole thing as a minor drug case. To vote Republican, you have to have been snickering about these things all along.

Contempt for common decency is found in pridefully boasting of one’s foreign policy and military decisions and then denying ever having said those things when they turned out wrong, as predicted by those who were paying attention. In pointing an accusing finger at citizens who point out dishonesty and ask reasonable questions and demand accountability before the law, calling them “disloyal” and “unpatriotic” or even “traitors”. In using race-baiting as a time-honored campaign tool.

Critical thinking skills are what allows one to recognize that redefining science to make it more palatable to religious idealogues is both damaging and treasonous to our students and teachers, and to recognize that those who demonize you for pointing out what they’re doing are not sincere, honest, or decent people but thugs and vandals. They allow you to see that a voter registration drive that finds questionable entries in their forms and flags those entries to the attention of registration judges is, by definition, NOT engaging in voter fraud.

Pathological dishonesty is in found in trying to redefine a progressive tax code as “Marxism”. It’s found in the reality-free bloviations of every right-wing talking head and blogger.

Can we free America from such horror, from such vile and monstrous thugs?

Yes. We can.

We can take America back from the anti-American filth who’ve imprisoned her these last eight years and restore her to the American people. But only if we vote. And if the Republicans don’t manage to steal their third presidential election in a row.

I vote for Barack Obama not because I am a “liberal” or a Democrat but because I am an American. I vote for him because I uphold ideals, rather than regurgitating ideology. I vote for him because I am an adult, and recognize the importance of having adults in charge of things that matter. Like America. I support him because I hold the Constitution and the principles it espouses to be of vastly greater importance than a flag pin. I stand for him because he stands for me, my family, my friends and my neighbors, even those who disagree with him.

I vote for Barack Obama because he has made “Country First” an unmistakable guiding principle, where John McCain made it into an empty slogan.

I do not “worship” Barack Obama, nor any other man or alleged god. I merely find him to be the right man, in the right place, at the right time. I find his record (yes, I have actually looked deeply into his life and work) to be admirable, compelling, and inspiring. His has been a life of service. And before you ask – No; I do NOT respect John McCain’s “service”. There is nothing heroic in McCain, nothing of genuine service. His entire life has been based on using family connections – first of birth, later of marriage – to advance his ambitions when his own pitiful lack of ability failed him over and over. As he has failed America over and over. As he would fail us again, if given the White House. If there were ever any doubts about his character, his campaign has certainly stripped them all away; he is a vain, shallow, narcissistic, egotistical, selfish, tantrum-prone hollow shell of a spoiled child playing at being a man. He is beneath contempt.

And if he takes the White House, well, we’re fucked. The Republic will be dead, sacked, and burned.

But now, I vote. Right now, my hope is stronger than my fear. And for that, even if nothing else, I owe Barack Obama my sincere thanks.

Senator - dare I say President? - Obama, I am a citizen, a patriot, a husband, and the son and father of enlisted men of the United States Armed Forces, and I thank you.

Barack Obama is often described as our generation’s JFK. I’ll go much further; I find Barack Obama to be rather Jeffersonian. Like that great man he is both a pragmatist and an idealist, and sufficiently brave and intellectually agile to balance those qualities and put them both to work. And in times like these, where a frat boy turned would-be tyrant hath refuted his assent to laws, that most wholesome and necessary for the public good, a man like Obama is no less revolutionary.

And my hope is stronger than my fear.

Yes. We can.

Good luck, everyone.

I've recently come to a realization. Over the years I've had some conversations and many arguments with people who identify as Libertarian, both online and in the real world, and after the more recent bouts in the last couple of months I've reached the conclusion that Libertarianism is a religion. Not a political or economic philosophy, just yet another exercise in dogmatic groupthink derived from holy texts. In function and practice it's essentially the crack-addled bastard child of Scientology and Amway.

Last month at a friend's blog I was being chastised for not recognizing the Holy Truth of Sound Libertarian Doctrine by one of the regular commenters, and his slew of insults gave me an idea. The following was what I fashioned in response and pinned his ears back with, presented now on my blog with some spelling corrections and minor editing as this critical election draws nearer. If nothing else, it's an excuse to post a blog entry. So, here goes...

-----

A few years ago there was a man named George who convinced a lot of people to give him a Very Big Job. You would think that someone would be very smart and grown-up to have this Very Big Job, but George was actually pretty dumb and a real brat. He got the job because some other people wanted to put someone in the Very Big Job who would let them get their way, and they were very good at saying a lot of stuff very loud over and over again and get a lot of other people to believe it. Even so, another man named Al got more votes, but the people who were trying to put George in the Very Big Job just got some judges to say that the votes didn’t matter.

And so George got the Very Big Job. He had a friend named Dick who came along to help him with the Very Big Job. Well, actually, Dick sort of took over the job and so George spent a lot of time taking naps and going on vacation. One of the things Dick did was bring over a bunch of his other friends who were Very Greedy People. They had a Secret Club where they talked about things that would affect all the other people in the country, but they said that the people weren’t allowed to know what they said or did. A lot of people pointed out that it was Against The Rules to do that, but the Secret Club said that they didn’t care about the rules and had decided to make their own rules, and didn’t care if anyone else didn’t like it.

So nobody found out much about the Secret Club at first. Then some Very Bad People made some buildings blow up and everybody got very scared. George and Dick didn’t say anything for a while and then they suddenly said that there was a Very Mean Man far away who made the buildings blow up. Everybody agreed that George and Dick should send soldiers to catch the Very Mean Man.

But while that was happening, George and Dick said that there was someone else, a Very Scary Man, who helped the Very Mean Man and was going to do a lot of things that were much worse. They said that it was more important to go after the Very Scary Man so everyone could be safe. Some people who had been paying attention said that they didn’t understand how the Very Scary Man could have anything to do with what happened or be able to make other bad things happen, and George and Dick got very mad. So did all the people who made sure that George and Dick got the Very Big Job. George and Dick and their friends went on TV and said that anyone who asked them questions they didn’t like or said they shouldn’t do everything they wanted was a Bad Person. Maybe even as Bad as the Very Mean Man and the Very Scary Man. They asked if anyone wanted to be thought of as being that bad, and most people said no. But some people said that they still wanted proof of what George and Dick were saying. But Dick winked at his friends from the Secret Club and said that the proof was secret and they couldn’t show it to anybody.

Now some other people started getting mad at George and Dick and said that they had to show proof because it was In The Rules! So George and Dick got their friends to say bad things about the people who wanted proof while they went away for while. Then they came back with some drawings and some letters and said that they were proof. Some people said that the drawings and the letters weren’t enough because they could just be made up. Those people got called lots of bad names by George and Dick’s friends and George and Dick said that everyone had to let them go after the Very Scary Man or more bad things would happen. Some people still said that George and Dick weren’t following the rules and were probably lying, but most people were still scared about the Very Mean Man and now even more scared about the Very Scary Man, so they said George and Dick could do whatever they wanted. George smiled, and Dick went back to the Secret Club in a hurry. Both of them said that taking care of the Very Scary Man would be easy and would be over very soon.

Taking care of the Very Scary Man wasn’t easy and it wasn’t over soon. There were a lot of people who lived in the same place as the Very Scary Man, and they didn’t like him at all, but what they didn’t like even more was a bunch of people that they had never hurt coming to their homes with guns and hurting them. So they fought back against the people that George and Dick sent to hurt them. And once the Very Scary Man wasn’t in charge anymore they also started hurting each other because they had been mad at each other for a long time over some other things. George and Dick were surprised by this, and then they got really mad when some other people pointed out that they had been told this would probably happen. So they fired those people. They had fired a lot of other people before who told them that things wouldn’t work out the way they said, and every time they fired someone they hired one of their friends in that place. They hired them just because they were their friends, even if those friends couldn’t do the job that the person they fired did.

Things went really really badly in the place where the Very Scary Man used to be in charge. But George and Dick and their friends didn’t like it when people said so. If anyone said so, George and Dick and their friends said that the person saying so was just like the Very Mean Man and the Very Scary Man. They especially got mad whenever anyone noticed that they weren’t doing anything anymore to get the Very Mean Man who blew up the buildings. But all of Dick’s friends in the Secret Club were smiling all the time now.

While all this was happening, some people started to find out some of the things that the Secret Club did in the meetings that no one was allowed into. It turned out that they were talking about the place that the Very Scary Man had been in charge of. They were talking about taking it over because it had stuff they wanted. It also turned out that a lot of the Very Greedy People in the Secret Club and a lot of their friends had talked about it before when they had another club that wasn’t as secret as the Secret Club. It was called the Project, and they wrote letters to the man who had the Very Big Job right before George and Dick telling him that he should do all the things that George and Dick were doing now so that the Very Greedy People in the Secret Club could take what they wanted from the place where the Very Scary Man had been in charge. They even put the letters on the Internet, but then when more people started to notice and to say that it looked like they were planning this all along they took down the letters and said that everyone who said anything bad about them were liars and Bad Persons. The Very Greedy People in the Secret Club were making a lot of money now that George and Dick were doing what they were doing, and they were very happy and didn’t want it to stop. Not only had they gotten a lot of stuff, they had gotten The Rules changed so that they were the kind of rules they wanted.

And then it came to be time for George and Dick to go, because the rules say that they could only have the Very Big Job for a certain time. Maybe they’ll change those rules, too. Anyway, now some people are arguing about who should have the Very Big Job next. One man who wants to have the Very Big Job wants to change everything that George and Dick did and try to put things back the way they were before, at least as much as he can, and his name is Barry. The other man, whose name is John, says he also wants to change things but his idea of change is to keep doing everything George and Dick were doing. That doesn’t make very much sense.

One of the arguments people are having is about what to do about the Secret Club. They’re not so secret anymore, but they still have things going their way. John, the man who wants to keep things the way George and Dick made them, thinks that the Secret Club should keep having their way. Barry thinks that the Secret Club shouldn’t get their way anymore. He thinks that the rules should go back to what they used to be and that the Secret Club owes something to everyone else because of how they got the rules changed in the first place.

Many people think that this is a good idea. They aren’t sure how to go about it yet, but are happy that at least someone is talking about it and willing to work something out. There are other people who think it’s a bad idea, even some people who don’t like the man who wants to be just like George and Dick. Some of them think that it doesn’t matter how the Secret Club got what they did. They think that making the Secret Club go back to the old rules is bad. They think that if the Secret Club had to give up some of what they got by changing the rules, it’s somehow the same thing as taking everything away from them that they’ve ever gained or ever built, even the good things.

Obviously, it’s not. But they say it is. Some of them say that the only man who could fix things is the Very Cranky Man named Ron who kept saying that the Constitution is all about God even though that word never shows up in the Constitution. He would do a couple of important things differently than George and Dick did, but he said he would do everything else the same. Ron, and the people who like him, not only think that the Very Greedy People in the Secret Club should keep doing the same things that George and Dick let them do, they think that the Secret Club should have even less rules that they have to follow. They say that if they have less rules to follow, everyone will be better off because the Very Greedy People will treat everyone better. The people who believe this aren’t able to point to any time in history where this has ever been true, but they believe it anyway.

The people who don’t agree with the people who like Ron get annoyed with them sometimes. Once someone even lost his temper and used bad words. But mostly they just ask the people who like Ron to stick to the facts, and are puzzled when they refuse to. The people who agree with Barry like him for a lot of reasons, but partly because he’s not like the people who don’t want things to change. The people who don’t want things to change say that that isn’t a good enough reason, and so everyone should support John, or support Ron. That doesn’t make any sense either, but they pretend it does.

Once upon a time there was a man named Thomas. Thomas was one of the first men to have the Very Big Job, and he said that part of the reason for government was to protect the ordinary people from the Very Greedy People. The Very Greedy People, like the ones in the Secret Club, and other people who like the Very Greedy People, don’t like it when people tell what Thomas said, or when they agree with him. They say that it’s the same thing as being like a man who was named Karl, who was born after Thomas had the Very Big Job.

There was once another man named Teddy. Teddy was another man who had the Very Big Job a long time ago, and he said that he didn’t mind if the Very Greedy People got to have a lot of money, but that they had to understand that it was all the other people who made it possible for them to have all their money and the Very Greedy People owed the people for their wealth. He also said that the Very Greedy People shouldn’t be allowed to have Secret Clubs and should have more and more taxes when they got more and more money. He said that the government should have lots of rules for the Very Greedy People to follow and that the government should “supervise and control” them if they got out of hand.

The Very Greedy People in Teddy’s time didn’t like Teddy. They didn’t like him at all. They said he was big and mean and scary. They said that anyone who agreed with him was also being like the man named Karl. The people today who like George and Dick and Ron also say that people who agree with Thomas and Teddy are being just like Karl. They say that because they hope that people who don’t want to be compared to Karl will stop saying that they agree with Thomas and Teddy. That way, they can make people forget that Thomas and Teddy said these things. And then they can get their way, just like the Secret Club.

A lot of people don’t like Secret Clubs. They think that clubs that affect everybody else should have their meetings in the open so that the people can see exactly how they will be affected. Barry wants to have all the clubs meet out in the open. And that’s one of the reasons why why the people who agree with him support him instead of supporting John or Ron.

The End.

First of all, let me simply say “Wow.”

Secondly, I’ll say this: Mass Effect may well be the single greatest PC game I've ever played. This is coming from someone who adores the Half-Life series, Crysis, System Shock 2, Oblivion, and many other story-driven action games. Why do I feel so strongly? Well, the short answer is this – Mass Effect, in terms of length, content, and production values, is essentially the first season of an ambitious and lavish science fiction television series done as a game instead of on TV. Imagine that David Brin’s Uplift universe of novels were loosely adapted for television by Babylon 5 creator J. Michael Straczinski with a handful of material from Battlestar Galactica and you’re effectively at the bullseye.

Which leads to the long answer.

The game is set in the year 2183 against a backdrop of interstellar politics played out between several space-faring species of varying degrees of both good and bad intent. This interstellar Alliance meets at a vast station called the Citadel that is located in neutral space and deliberates on the disposition of its member and non-member species.



The year is 2183; the place - Babylon... uh, I mean, The Citadel!

Speaking of non-member, that’s where humanity comes in; in the recent history of the game humanity has discovered an alien relic on Mars that ties into the same ancient FTL tech used by everyone else in the galaxy. Humanity’s leap into the stars draws the attention of the Turians, who lay siege to Earth in an attempt to supress what they initially view as a potentially dangerous wolfling race. Earth successfully fights back against the Turians who re-assess humanity and, after calling off their attack, offer reparations and act as a sort of sponsor to represent Earth to the rest of the Alliance.

By the time of the game humanity has ongoing relationships with many of the Alliance races and is a (very) junior member of the Alliance (but without a much-coveted seat on the Galactic Council), active in commerce, politics, and military service. There is a broad spectrum of political emotions across the human race regarding this state of affairs, ranging from eagerness to prove our race to the rest of the galaxy to xenophobic hatred of all non-humans, and you’ll encounter them all - and perhaps play them out – in the course of the game.


A Salarian walks into a bar. The bartender says, "Why the long..." Oh, hell, you know the joke.

You, the player, take on several roles. First, the role of the main character, Commander Shepard. Shepard can be either male or female and has a modular backstory and career path that allows you to effectively make Sheppard one of dozens of different characters that you can play any way you choose. This leads us to the other roles you play – those of co-director, co-producer, and script editor.

No, I’m not kidding. The game offers a default appearance for each gender of Shepard but gives you quite a bit of power to customize it (rather like the character design menu in Oblivion, but better). I played a little bit of the default for each before settling on the female, and managed to shape her into a fair likeness of my wife ;-). Behold; Commander Tara Shepard –


The game wouldn’t let me give her long hair and the eyes aren't quite round enough, but otherwise this is the CG version of She With Whom I Snuggle.

Beyond character appearance you have broad leeway, within the framework of the plot, to determine how the story plays out. In addition to the main plot, there are various subplots and side missions that offer opportunities for character growth, new skills and enhancements to existing abilities, and a deeper understanding of the universe and history of the game. It’s broad enough that no two players will play out exactly the same story.


All I ask is a tall ship, and a nicely rendered starry backdrop to frame her against.

And the story is this: You are a senior officer aboard the SSV Normandy, a prototype attack frigate built as a joint Human-Turian project (*cough* Whitestar *cough*). As the game opens, you are sent to the human colony world Eden Prime to investigate a mysterious attack by the Geth, a machine race that has not been seen in known space for decades (they gained sentience, rebelled against their makers, fought a war for independence and then struck out on their own. Yes, it sounds familiar). On Eden Prime you discover that the mastermind behind the Geth attack is a Turian named Saren, a member of the elite SPECTRE division who has apparently gone rogue. The rest of the game is your quest to find Saren, figure out what he’s really up to and why, and to stop him.


"By your command?" I got yer freakin' command right here, pal!

Saying that is a lot like giving a one-paragraph description of the story of Babylon 5; it doesn’t convey even a hint of the mysteries uncovered, the history explored, the character development, the uncomfortable wrestling with politics… yes, Mass Effect is exactly that large and deep and complex and epic. And it’s more than that: Where many “thinking-person’s-games” may deal at least superficially with themes of power and responsibility, Mass Effect is a meditation on leadership. Almost everything you do in the game is, to one degree or another, an exercise in demonstrating what kind of a leader you decide Shepard will be.


Okay; when night falls, Ashley, Liara, and I leap out of the rabbit and take the Geth by surprise! Oh, wait...

Make no mistake; though the game is packed with rewarding combat and exploration, it is a deeply story- and character-driven experience. Shepard acquires up to six personal allies in the course of the game, all of whom are marvelous and interesting characters in their own right and who have their own motivations – and even quests that you can help them fulfill – for joining you. Not all will necessarily remain to the end, however; depending on Shepard’s behavior and decisions, some of them may choose to leave or may even end up dead. At one point in my run through the game one of those characters died under circumstances that struck me as a clear failure of leadership on my part… so I went back to a previous point in the game, replayed the scenario, and looked for a better option. And found one! It really drives home just how much your relationships with your crew matter; these things have a profound effect on the course of the game.


You can choose two characters as squadmates for any given mission. Characters who have not yet joined you - or who have left or been killed - are blacked out.

Developer BioWare is probably best known for the beloved Star Wars epic Knights Of The Old Republic, and the mechanics of this game definitely reflect both the design philosophy behind that game and the lessons learned from its development, though it thankfully eschews the turn-based combat of KOTOR for the conventional real-time combat of first-person shooters. Your dialogue choices are presented on a wheel as types of responses, rather than the entire section of dialogue, and they will usually require some consideration on your part. There’s actually a hell of a lot of dialogue – I’d dare say more than any other game that I know of – and it is all extremely well-written and delivered by a top-notch cast of voice actors. Keith David, Seth Green, Marina Sirtis, and Lance Henriksen are prominently featured in the cast, and both voice actors for Shepard are good – but the actor for the female Shepard, Jennifer Hale, is phenomenal which is largely why I chose that gender for my full run of the game.

Mass Effect is built on the Unreal 3 engine and is absolutely the best use of it I’ve yet encountered; it's jaw-droppingly gorgeous. System requirements are moderate; you’ll want an Athlon64 or better CPU, two gigs of RAM, and a GeForce 7600/Radeon X1800 graphics card to play on settings where it will look good and give you a smooth framerate. Anything less than this and you’ll need to knock down the settings to achieve good gameplay.


The Mako is the armored all-terrain vehicle that will transport you in most of your planetside missions. It rawks.

As mentioned earlier, there are numerous side missions that you can take, most of which grow out of conversations that you have with other characters in the game. There’s even an optional romantic subplot, should you choose to pursue it, with a couple of different relationship options that vary somewhat with the gender of your character (it was the reed-thin basis for a batshit-insane conservative smear campaign - given positive coverage on FOX Noise; gee, what a surprise - against the game when it was originally released on the Xbox 360 last year). On your missions you earn experience points that increase your level, skill points to increase your various abilities (I highly recommend putting some into Charm and Intimidate, as they open up more dialogue options), and special items that you wouldn’t otherwise obtain. There’s also a “buying” system like those common to most RPG’s, but Mass Effect actually fits it into the universe in a surprisingly logical way.

Rather than a simple "good-or-evil" alignment meter to determine where your character is going, your words and deeds earn you either "Paragon" points or "Renegade" points, and each type of points earns you different types of achievements. It's possible to play either path exclusively, though the designers seem to assume that many players will earn a bit of each (for what it's worth, I set out to be a Paragon but did get two Renegade points). Add this to the different career paths you can start your character out on, and you have a depth and complexity not often found in PC games, nor so accessible and intuitive to play.


Yep; Shepard's armor is very flattering. Even a Krogan can't help noticing.

At approximately thirty hours in length, Mass Effect really plays out like a full season of a television series with a tight story arc. It clearly pulls from a number of different influences, but what it weaves together out of those original sources is far more than the sum of its parts. In the post-Star Wars era, where much of what is labeled "sci-fi" is really just fantasy dressed up in spaceships and ray guns, Mass Effect is refreshing in that it truly is a science fiction story, where some real thought has gone into why everything in this universe works the way it does. It’s intellectually engaging, emotionally gripping, utterly convincing and sometimes exhausting – you will have to make some really hard choices at some points in the game, and they will cost you.

I said at that beginning that Mass Effect is probably the best PC game I've ever played, and I'm deadly earnest. If you've got a rig that can handle this, get it and play it. And then wait eagerly for the forthcoming Mass Effect 2.

Yaarr! Today be International Talk Like A Pirate Day!

The radio was just playing Don Mclean's American Pie and I sang along to the whole thing - with Weird Al's lyrics. I'm such a geek. And I love it.

This evening will be last-minute prep for tomorrow's garage sale at the home of my in-laws. I've thrown a few computers together out of my vast trove of spare parts; nothing remotely high-end, but serviceable and to be sold at garage sale prices.

And somebody mentioned that it's my birthday, too. I've got a coupon for Old Country Buffet, and tonight I'm having steak!

But the most significant thing about today, my birthday, is that it's four days after my wedding anniversary.

Four-and-a-half years ago, I met an amazing woman. Three years ago, she married me. And she's still amazing. I could say lotsa stuff about that, or I could let the BSG-themed anniversary card I made for her speak for itself below -






Then I stopped imagining.

Because everything became real.

Happy 3 year anniversary, my sweetheart.

I’m looking forward to decades more with you.

I love you.

So say we all.

Richard Wright, the brilliant keyboardist for the legendary rock band Pink Floyd, has died at age 69 after a short battle with cancer, almost exactly two years after the death of Floyd founder Syd Barrett.

Rest in peace; we'll see you on the dark side of the moon.

The next thing that went around after the Ireland thing below was the letter about how Obama supposedly "snubbed the troops" for a photo-op while in Afghanistan. It was written by a reserve officer stationed over there who, contrary to his claims, was NOT present at Obama's arrival and so was in no position to give his claimed first-hand account. This letter was debunked almost immediately by the soldiers who WERE actually present and told the truth. It got circulated at work just a couple of days after the Ireland letter by a different guy, and I immediately banged out my repsonse. I had to rewrite my closing remark a couple of times to avoid a tone that clearly said "Fuck the fucking fuck off you fucking fuck," even if the words themselves didn't.

The co-worker introed the letter with the following -

Subject: From our friend who is serving in Afghanistan

Hi all FYI--for what freedom is worth.

I don't know each of your personal political convictions, and apologize if anyone finds this offensive. I thought it was important enough to share. This is Jeff's first hand view of Senator Obama.

What followed was the entirety of the letter as found at its documented debunking at snopes.com. My response is below -


"This is indeed extremely offensive – because it’s a flat-out despicable lie.

Captain Jeffrey S. Porter’s letter, quoted below, is nothing more or less than a ham-fisted political smear that is bereft of any factual content written by a man who was not even there. The Army itself has condemned it as false and inappropriate. A full account of the background on this, along with a sampling of writing from troops who WERE there are found at snopes.com at the link below –

http://www.snopes.com/politics/obama/afghanistan.asp

As you can see, Porter was forced to backpedal on this almost immediately. Unsurprisingly, the original letter continues to get circulated around – much like all of the paranoid delusional BS about how Obama is a “secret Muslim” - but the retraction is almost never seen. When Porter sent this out last month it was picked up by various blogs and talking heads who gleefully trumpeted its claims, in many cases continuing to after it had been shown to be false, with no subsequent acknowledgement of its proven falsehood. I’d like to say that I’m shocked, but this sort of thing has been par for the course for many years now.

If you don’t want to vote for Obama, then by all means don’t. If you disagree with his policies, feel free to say so. But it is not asking too much for a citizen to choose facts over lies, especially when those lies are so transparent and easily checked with a few seconds of research. Like this one.

(Eric Saveau)
Son and father of enlisted men of the United States Armed Forces."


And now, back to a relaxing weekend with TempleViper.

I like the people I work with. All of them. But we do have a couple of people who do that "I'm forwarding this to all of you because it's IMPORTANT!" kind of emailing from time to time, and it's often some kind of conservative propaganda. As in, already debunked falsehoods, misleading insinuations, and cowardly smears. I sometimes respond, but I normally shrug it off...

The latest batch of brought me up short with a sudden hard realization - Liberals (a catch-all term for anyone who is at least slightly to the left of Attila the Hun) simply don't do this. Ever. Mass emailings of any propagandistic nature, fact-based or otherwise, simply aren't found ouside of political action groups on the liberal side, and even there the most odious of them is a ray of sunshine compared to the other side. Certainly neither I nor anyone else I know has ever been involved in something like that.

We certainly do get into these things on our blogs, though, and I just happen to have one. Below is an email forwarded by a co-worker, followed by my response. The first email was originally sent in an oversized green font.

An email from Ireland to all of their brethren in the States. A point to ponder despite your political affiliation:

We, in Ireland, can't figure out why you people are even bothering to hold an election in the United States ...

On one side, you had a pants wearing female lawyer, married to another lawyer who can't seem to keep his pants on, who just lost a long and heated primary against a lawyer, who goes to the wrong church, who is married to yet another lawyer, who doesn't even like the country her husband wants to run!

Now...On the other side, you have a nice old war hero whose name starts with the appropriate 'Mc' terminology, married to a good looking younger woman who owns a beer distributorship!

What in God's name are ya lads thinkin over in the colonies!


Well. I couldn't let that go by unchallenged. So I hit 'Reply to All' (it was a group email) and typed the following -

"Dear Ireland,

Thanks for your kind letter offering your thoughts about our upcoming election. It offers us a lot to think about regarding the many cultural differences between America and the Old World.

For example, most of us in America aren’t at all bothered by the thought of a woman wearing pants, or being a lawyer, or both. Many of us who didn’t support the person you’re referring to had many other reasons to choose otherwise.

Another way in which we’re different is that most of us don’t look at someone’s religious affiliations and decide that they go to the “wrong” church. You may recall that our Founders fought a war that dealt in part with that very sort of issue. Obviously, there are some Americans who’ve lost sight of that heritage by feeling free to bandy such labels about, but many of us still remember and still honor the ideals of those who created this country.

As to the “nice old war hero”, well, he certainly is old, and he did briefly fight in a war before being captured, but he’s actually not at all nice (the word used on your side of the pond would be “arsehole”), and while surviving as a prisoner of war certainly requires a measure of toughness, it doesn’t actually provide many opportunities for heroism unless your situation involves a daring prison break or some kind of covert action behind enemy lines; his situation involved neither. It certainly isn’t to be diminished, but making more out of it than it was is also highly inappropriate and looks a lot like egotistical grandstanding.

He also hasn’t been able to keep his pants on any more than the husband of the “pants wearing female lawyer”; when he came back from the war he immediately started sleeping around like he thought that women were going out of style. His justification was that his faithful wife, a former beauty queen, had been crippled by a car accident she’d had while he was away and so wasn’t as pretty any more and walked with a limp. Their friends were disgusted with him, but he found some new ones who didn’t care so much. The most awful thing was that he didn’t even try to keep it a secret; he paraded his women around openly, obviously not caring about how that would make his wife feel. He only toned that behavior down when he met the heiress he’s currently married to, which was probably a smart move – after all, her money and connections have been a huge boost to his political career.

Your comment about the lawyer “who doesn't even like the country her husband wants to run” must be a reference to the speech where she said that she hadn’t felt real pride in America until now. Actually, that’s an awful lot like something that was said by the old guy you like; he commented earlier in his political career that he never felt any love for America until he was locked away from her in Vietnam. I’m sure that you didn’t mean to imply that such comments are fine coming from a member of one political party but not another.

And besides, speaking as someone whose roots are planted firmly in the soil of the isle from whose shores my ancestors routed invading Vikings, I find the name Barry O’Bama to fall quite nicely on the ears.

That’s what us lads are thinking over in the Colonies.

Sincerely,

The United States of America"

There was another one a bit later; I'll post that one tomorrow.

Which could just as easily be titled "Holy Frak! Rick posted something on his blog!"

The title refers to a milestone: Last month my Acura passed the quarter-million mile mark, the distance from Earth to Luna. It had a hell of a time getting there, too; the exhaust was shot, it was using a lot of oil, one cylinder was firing intermittently, the air conditioning stopped working four years ago, and early in the spring I had a fun incident where my hood didn't latch properly after I put a quart of oil in and it flipped up and smashed back into my windshield while driving on the freeway. Boy, that was a hoot. TempleViper has been ready to give it a blindfold and a last cigarette before placing it in front of a firing squad made up of heavy artillery for quite a while now.

She had actually been looking at replacement cars ever since last fall when her Toyota suddenly coughed and died; we ended up getting a Ford Focus for her and then she was chomping at the bit to get almost anything to replace my Acura. Along the way we ended up spending money on many other things, including laying down new flooring and carpeting, so a newer car for me stayed on the back burner. I didn't mind; my car wasn't glamorous but it worked. Mostly. All the issues were fixable, but we had adopted the policy of putting money that would go to fix the car toward a different one.

And it paid off; a couple of weeks ago I got a 1995 Saturn sedan in absolutely beautiful condition. Yes, it's only three years younger than the Acura but it's been extremely well-maintained and runs like dream; it looks like the proverbial car-that-was-owned-by-a-little-old-lady-who-only-drove-on-Sundays and, by the Lords of Kobol, the air conditioning works!

In other news I've been battling pneumonia for a couple of months now, which is even more uber-sucky than it sounds - especially since it was settled into me for at least three weeks before I got diagnosed. TempleViper has been dismayed, especially with the news about Bernie Mac dying this Saturday from pneumonia. Me, I think it's far too early to panic; at the very least I have to finish playing Oblivion and Mass Effect before I croak ;-). Besides, the latest round of mega-super-antibiotics does seem to be making a dent in it, so I'm looking forward to eventually becoming an irascible old man lecturing young whipper-snappers about the ancient days when all we had in our computers were 64-bit multi-core processors and four gigs of RAM that we had to drag uphill through a blizzard both ways in order to run our games and dammit, we were happy! And then croaking.

I'll post a review of Mass Effect when I get further into it. For now, back to work.

Go see Wall-E. NOW!



Drop whatever you're doing, cancel your plans, forget the cake in the oven, log out of Team Fortress 2, and go see this delightful and cute and amazing and wonderful movie. It's a Pixar film that does NOT have Larry the Cable Guy in it; that alone should tell you everything you need to know.

Go see Wall-E now!

Two of my favorite things - Doctor Who and the marvelous political comic This Modern World. Enjoy!

A quick but important update - I know a number of people who use the free version of AVG Antivirus. Version 7.5 expired a few days ago, offering no further updates but pointing users to a download for the new version 8.0. The download offered is a trial of the retail version, and has left a few people wondering if they were out of luck for a free version...

Fear not; all you have to do is go to free.grisoft.com to get the latest free version 8.0. the free version will always be at that address unless GriSoft decides to stop offering a free personal edition someday.

If you're using AVG Free 7.5, or are using the trial of 8.0 - or are using something evil and horrifying like Norton or Mcaffee - uninstall what you've got running now, go to that site, and grab AVG Free 8.0. You'll be glad you did; it's a marvelous piece of software.

One year ago today, I posted to celebrate the birthday of my wife, the woman I love, the incomparable TempleViper.

I included the following line - "She's smart, funny, honest, ethical, and driven by fierce convictions." All of which is true, but when I first posted the entry I included the word "difficult" in that line. About an hour later I edited the post to remove the word, thinking it might hurt TempleViper's feelings... but she had already seen it.

When I got home that evening from work she asked me, "Why did you remove 'difficult'? It's true. I am."

And she is. And I guess that's worth a comment.

All relationships are difficult. All of them. I've never had a long-term - or sometimes even short-term - romantic relationship that didn't have some measure of difficulty, of challenge... sometimes minor things, sometimes major. People are just... like that. It had always seemed self-evident to me that such things were unavoidable and you needed to work through them in a partnership for your mutual good... but as the years went by I found that a great many people didn't think that way. And so partnerships ended, sometimes with a bang, sometimes a whimper, sometimes with a harried retreat to minimum safe distance.

That changed with TempleViper. She was, and is, willing to meet me halfway, as a partner. What was self-evident to me is to her as well. She is, like most any other person, including myself, not without her difficulties. But she's worth it. And seems to find me so, as well.

And now she is another year older, growing old along with me.

Happy birthday, sweetheart. You can be difficult. And I love you for it.