A Curious Little Blog

I was heartened this week when my wife said she was going to start reading my blog, as this brings my total readership up to 1. That may not sound like a lot, but, in percentage terms, it is enormous. I used to think people had to be conceited to think that others would want to read their random thoughts on a daily basis. Some people work for years to publish finely-honed books of fact or fiction; bloggers spend thirty minutes or an hour a night writing essays and think they deserve an audience. On the other hand, they are partially justified by the fact that they have an audience. How conceited must I be to publish a blog that no one actually reads? Do I think that what I am writing is so valuable that it needs to be available for the public, as though someone is one day going to discover it and realize its value? Actually, the truth is that I started this particular blog on my own web server, just because I had things I wanted to say and no obvious place to put them. I didn...

I've been thinking of changing my name to the title of this post. I saw "mata ratones" (=kills mice) on a mousetrap, and I thought it sounded cool. That, and the fact that I have become the scourge of mice recently. In the last week, I set out 4 traps and caught 5 mice. Yes, two in one trap. I don't think I'm done yet. The choice of mouse-catching devices is interesting. You can buy mouse poison, which is probably very effective because the mice will take it back to the nest and share it with others, so it will kill all of them. On the other hand, do I really want a nest of dead, smelly mice somewhere in my house? With a regular trap, I get to dispose of them, which is preferable. It is unfortunate to have to kill the little things, but it actually seems more humane than the alternative. I tried a glue trap once, and came home to find a mouse struggling frantically to free himself. Who knows how long he had been there? It was really sad to see. I'...

Now that the Van Jones issue is completely over, I am getting around to commenting on it. There is something in the brazen way he lies about the issue that compels a certain admiration, the same way that I admire Alger Hiss for maintaining his lack of Communist ties until the day he died. Here is Jones's defense : "On the eve of historic fights for health care and clean energy, opponents of reform have mounted a vicious smear campaign against me." [Translation: I should get away with my views because everyone should be focussed on the issues.] "They are using lies and distortions to distract and divide." [Translation: they are telling the truth about my background, turning respectable Democrats against me.] "I have been inundated with calls -- from across the political spectrum -- urging me to 'stay and fight.'" [Translation: a few left-wing nutjobs have asked me to stay.] In his " apology ," Jones also stated, "In rec...

I may be the only adult in the country who thinks our kids need less homework, not more. I remember when I was a kid back in the 80's, one of the key ideas of education reform was that schools needed to assign more homework so we could keep up with the Europeans and East Asian countries. I hated the idea then, and I'm not too crazy about it now. My kids spend 7 hours a day in school. I would think that that would be plenty to educate them in whatever they need to know. Maybe older kids who are targeting college need more homework, but I don't see how it could help 8-10 year olds. How much patience for study can they be expected to have? What is so important for them to learn that they need to spend more than 7 hours a day learning it, to the detriment of having a life? I also don't believe in giving impossible assignments. My 5th-grade son came home last week with an assignment on the Bill of Rights: rephrase them in your own words and draw pictures of them. Th...

I am a "software developer." I don't know when or why this title became preferred to "programmer." Probably it sounds less technical and therefore more professional. Perhaps engineering school graduates called themselves "software engineers," and non-engineer programmers wanted a similar title. Whatever it is, I can't get used to being a "developer" instead of a programmer. I write programs; I am a programmer. If you spend a lot of time on computers, eventually you pick up some shortcuts. The best shortcut I ever learned was how to touch-type, but that's in a different class, because you have to practice it to use it. The kind of shortcuts to which I am referring are the shortcuts that you just learn about once and keep re-using. Many of them involve using the keyboard instead of the mouse, because typing tends to be faster than moving a mouse, even if you aren't able to touch-type. For example, when you go to log into a ...

Curse the person who first decided that it would make a product more appealing to rename product sizes from the logical small, medium, and large to something more catchy. First they got rid of small and started sizes with medium, which was annoying enough. Then they started renaming the "large" size. At Wendy's, you can't get a large order of fries; you have to get a "biggie." (Or at least, that used to be the case; I haven't eaten at Wendy's in a while.) I refuse to say biggie. Once I ordered a large fries and the cashier asked, "You mean a biggie?" "Yeah." Then they started getting really crazy and just naming the sizes whatever they felt like. Starbucks was an early leader, with the famous "tall" drink being the smallest size on the menu (though I understand you can actually order a "short"). Then comes "grande," Spanish for "large," and finally "venti," Italian for ...

I watched episodes three and four, "Revenge of the Sith" and "A New Hope," with my family this weekend. I hate the fact that the original movie is now "episode four" and has a new title. I didn't go watch "A New Hope" 30 years ago, and I don't know why Lucas would want to change the name. As for series numbering, if he wanted to be really geeky (and appeal to his primary fan base), he could have used -2, -1, and 0 for the first three. More realistically, he could have done something a little creative and called the first three episodes a, b, and c. Add Darth Sidious and General Grievous to the list of Lucas's lame names . Episode 3 was pretty good, but I found 2 to be my favourite of the prequels. Nothing really convinced me that Anakin would go over to the dark side. Saving his wife would have been sufficient cause, but it just wasn't carried out in such a way as to make me believe it. He was, after all, fiercely loyal to ...

I watched Star Wars parts I and II with my family in the last week. I had seen part I years ago -- not too long after it came out -- and it was so bad that I didn't want to waste my time seeing part II. I only picked part II out of a video store because I was having trouble finding a PG-rated movie that the whole family would like. Actually, I was having trouble finding PG-rated movies at all. Browsing the shelves of a video store, anything outside of the "Family" and "Kid" sections seems to have about an 80% chance of being rated at least PG-13. I was actually grateful to come upon Star Wars. Part II turned out to be better than I had expected -- quite a bit better. Then the kids wanted to watch Part I, which I was happy to do, because I realized how little I had remembered from it. On watching it a second time, I now understand why I thought it was so bad. It's because it actually is really, really bad. Let's start with the acting, which was i...

Kudos to David Brooks for being honest, even when it is embarrassing. In an interview with the New York Times (cited in this article in The New Republic), he gives this account of one of his first meetings with the president: “'I remember distinctly an image of--we were sitting on his couches, and I was looking at his pant leg and his perfectly creased pant,' Brooks says, 'and I’m thinking, a) he’s going to be president and b) he’ll be a very good president.'” Brooks has fallen victim to sartorial determinism, a famous historical fallacy that holds that the best-dressed men make the best political leaders. Many profound thinkers have fallen to this fallacy in the past: Voltaire, for example, was inspired to write his book "The Age of Louis XIV" based solely on the king's plush robe and tights, and Carl Sandburg wrote his biography of Abraham Lincoln because he was infatuated with stovepipe hats. Most modern political theorists have moved on to more so...