My friend Troy and his girlfriend Tomoko have been bragging about the High Definition TV and Blu-Ray DVD player they assembled at her apartment.
“You’ve got to come over some time and see how sharp it is!”
Eventually, a date was set. Sunday the 14th of December. Tomoko would make authentic Japanese food at the table in a hot pot.
Getting There
The bus system is a poor chariot. Tomoko lives in one of those huge apartment buildings along Glover-Archibold park - the creek that rises near American U. and joins the Potomac behind the playing fields at Georgetown U. We know the N2 goes down her street, but it doesn’t go anywhere near mine. I chose the 96 bus instead. That bus stops on my corner and goes up the hill to the Cathedral. Everything is downhill from the Cathedral.
I don’t know why I thought Tomoko’s place was so far away. It’s about the same distance as walking from my place to Georgetown - if it weren’t for the long uphill stretch, I suspect it would take half an hour. When I take a bus somewhere, I use a special logic: Buses are tragically unreliable, so I can’t expect to get anywhere on time. I have to show up early for pick-up and expect to have some time to kill after drop-off. Door to door service isn’t so important when you have to program in extra time anyway. That’s why I prefer the final leg of a journey to be on foot: If I am running late, I walk straight there, but if I have a lot of extra time left over, I can take more circuitous routes, exploring the neighborhood…
That 96 came right on time. Or, close enough. I was at the Cathedral with half an hour to spare. I examined Macomb street to see what had changed since the last time I was there. Cafe Deluxe and the flower shop are still there. Cactus Cantina which I might not have been to since the day we got our India visas in 2000. One coffee shop I used to like has been replaced with a wine bar. There’s Two Amys, the Italian joint. A fancy antique furniture store that has been there as long as I could remember, a sushi joint that looked closed but wasn’t, then just residential to the end of the block. I cut down Idaho to Cathedral. A church on the corner of Massachusetts was selling pine trees in the parking lot for some obscure religious holiday. I turned on to Cathedral, and checked my clock. Twenty five minutes left. So I did a little reconnaissance around the corner on Nebraska. It wasn’t far from there to AU. I looked at what shops were in the little strip there. I was tempted to get an espresso, but by that time I decided that I was not too terribly early, so I returned to Tomoko’s building.
Arriving
Tomoko’s apartment number has an “E” on the end. The building is really two buildings, so I decide that she must live in the more easterly one of the two. I have to walk around the elliptical driveway to the front door, but when I arrive, there is a doorman to open the unlocked lobby doors for me. Kind of nice - later I am told that there are a lot of elderly residents, so I figure that having someone to open the heavy glass door for you is an attraction unto itself. I enter the lobby and turn to the east, where I can see a set of doors leads to one of the glassed in corridors and the more eastern building of the two. That door is locked. I didn’t see a front desk yet, so I thought I would reach it at the end of the corridor. Confused, I look back where I came from for guidance. That front desk is all the way on the other side of the room.
They called up to announce my presence, and buzzed me through those eastern doors. Down the corridor to the elevator bank and I got in an elevator completely out of proportion with the rest of the complex - an elevator in which four people would have been a crowd. Signs gave an arrow for different ranges of apartment numbers, and I proceeded the correct direction down a hallway so long I couldn’t see the far end. When I arrived at her door, I marveled at just how far I had walked within the building itself, although certainly being indoors makes such distances appear longer.
I forgot completely that I should wear loafers to a Japanese house. My lace-up sneakers are best for all that walking, but they lack a certain convenience factor. Tomoko thought she might have a pair of house slippers big enough for me, but they were inadequate. My socks would have to do. I produced a bottle of plum wine from my bag (with actual plums in the bottle), then Troy and Tomoko welcomed me in and sat me down to watch BBC’s “Earth”.
Since I was early, I was also first, but soon Tomoko’s friend Jef from Baltimore showed up. I remember another Jeff we used to hang out with, but this wasn’t him. Troy, searching for something to show off the equipment, put in a disc of Kubrick’s 2001. It had a strange effect on the look of the sets - I thought it looked more like videotape than film. Textured backgrounds that moved on screen had a strange moire pattern that I found distracting. At one point I thought sitting any closer to the screen would drive me to distraction, eyes tracking all over the screen at the wealth of detail, unable to make sense of the whole.
We were waiting on Troy’s college roommate John who couldn’t be reached by phone. Eventually, he called to discover that he had the date mixed up. He would join us shortly.
Dinner Is Served
Nihon-Ryori is Japanese for “Japanese Cuisine”. It’s a bit self-conscious, since you might just say “Ryori”. What other kinds of cuisine would you mean without qualification? Nabemono is the word for food cooked in a ‘nabe’ - a hot pot. But cooking food this way constitutes a whole procedure. Restaurants have little choice but to serve you a bowl of the finished product - meat maybe, tofu, mushrooms, and vegetables in a soup stock. At home with a group of people, you just keep adding new ingredients as they cook and people take from the pot.
Turning food into such a process puts the idea of cooking into a whole different light. “Compliments To The Chef” seems a little off… Tomoko did everything, swooping in to serve us from the pot so that she could add more ingredients from platters she had arranged or broth from a saucepan. In other words, hers was a management role - more magician than cook. We were left to hunt for flavors from the various plates of garnish and bowls of sauce. There were flavored soy sauces, fresh grated ginger, dry seasonings and a sesame dressing - if I can remember it all.
John arrived in time to participate in the hot pot, then when we were all stuffed we retired to the TV for more fine-grained visual stimulus. Troy had a copy of the Batman movie, filmed in the ’60s after the first season of the TV show aired. Once again, it looked so much like video that I felt as if I could climb through the surface into the virtual space of the display. After cake rolls and some coffee, I could barely reach my feet to put my sneakers back on. John offered me a ride home and I stood in the foyer browsing Tomoko’s Japanese books while I waited for him.
Shop Talk For Electronic Musicians
On our way to the car, John and I talked a little about what we’ve been working on lately. He teaches music and I’ve seen him play bass in one of his old bands. I was raving to him about how my Roland keyboard’s user interface is woefully inadequate, and that I had discovered Audacity and Nyquist, which would help me construct and deploy synth tones more freely on my laptop screen.
Of nearly everything I do, you could ask: “Why didn’t you start sooner?”. Well, that’s the rub, isn’t it? So many high barriers to entry, so many unprovable advantages. So what if I become proficient at something - how useful will it prove to be? That hasn’t stopped me from pursuing advantages - it just makes pursuit more of a hedge maze. I will never experience a lack of avenues to run down, but with every avenue I do run down, I am just as likely as not to wonder where I really wanted to go. A heuristic like “just keep climbing” won’t necessarily take you to the top of the mountain, and yet everyone who arrives there spend quite a while doing just that.
Posted in DC-roaming, ontology, gourmand, music-synthesis | no comments | no trackbacksPosted by Evan Bittner
Tue, 16 Dec 2008 19:18:00 GMT
A lot of people probably think that predicting the future is hard in the same way that predicting the chart of stock market values is hard. Will the curve go up or down? Or will it meander in just such-and-such a way?
Hard as that might be, it’s nothing compared to the full-on complexity of reality. Real futures are not extrapolations, just as the future of a financial graph is not simply a trend. Real futures depend on competing factors. If you think you can just mix in a little of this factor and a little of that factor - Until you’ve accounted for all the factors you know about - Well, guess again: Some of those factors won’t matter at all, no matter how important they might seem today.
It’s something I was taught to call “non-linearity” - When you can’t simply add together all the contributions in their respective proportions. You can’t because most of those contributions have effects on each other. It’s not easy to do experiments with reality, because experimentation - the scientific method - relies on the notion that different contributions can be separately accounted for. When you tease out one factor and watch the results, or when you map the relationship between two, you’re experiencing a toy world. You don’t get to see all the chaotic interactions that happen in reality. And, in reality, you don’t usually get a second chance to run that experiment under the exact same conditions.
The digital logic in computers is an attempt to freeze out uncertainty. Using only ones and zeroes in every operation should in principle remove every source of error. And, it would - if you were willing to take it slow. All those ones and zeroes require a minimum amount of time to stabilize and propagate. What seems rapid to us will not seem rapid viewed from within the machine. One component really can be called on to sample another component too soon, causing fresh errors. Signals at the speed of light still require some time to arrive, and one signal arriving late can make all the difference on an outcome. Whole branches of a complex calculation can be mistakenly rendered mute - or mistakenly called into play - by poor timing.
And so it is with reality - And real futures. The chains of consequence branch in new ways due to some unappreciated factor. You might have heard it called the “Butterfly Effect” (now there’s even a movie with that title…) but, that emblematic idea can be a little misleading: The real complexity - And the real difficulty in predicting the future - is that so many of those unappreciated factors are at work all the time. And, at least as many of those factors are meaningless because they do not arrive at a moment when they can change the outcome at all.
Campaign Promises, A Reprise
I don’t know if you bothered to read this little gem of mine, but the preceding discussion relates to the campaign promises of politicians. I didn’t have trouble “pulling the lever” for my favorite (except that I drew a line through an arrow this time, touched a screen a couple times before, and most years had to punch a hole in a card), but all the while, leading up to the big lever-pulling day, I was certain only that none of the candidates was going to do what they said they were going to do. In one sense that’s good: They can’t predict the future with any more precision than I can, so when the time comes, I want them to do the thing that is appropriate for the reality they face - not some stubborn dream of what reality should be. Where we run into trouble is with the people who haven’t adapted.
I believe that many citizens of the United States of America are ignorant fools - And it’s not necessarily their fault. You can’t always make a reliable diagnosis, it’s true. And there are days when I think I’ve simply been duped by the media into believing a fairy tale. But I say “Ignorant Fools” because the coin of the realm is pandering. Whether it’s true or not, I have a prejudice against Republicans because I believe they subvert real discussion with emotional appeals. Conversely, I think Democrats are less likely to do it. The difference is probably subtle, I know, but I respond to that difference. All those “Ignorant Fools” out there are victims of that pandering. Rooting from the sidelines of America, unable to identify with a lot of the players in the political arena, I root for them to ignore all that pandering and demand the facts.
I read about it in “Nixonland”, where the ‘silent majority’ seemingly responded to a government’s - a politician’s - promise that they would take care of everything, don’t you worry your pretty little head about it. And there were ‘freaks’ and ‘weirdos’ who were willing to speak up - sometimes reluctantly. But participation in democracy is so inconvenient for the leaders. You really start believing that dictatorships are created as a convenience. “As your president, totalitarianism just makes my job easier, and I can be much more effective in serving you, the people.”
Posted in politics, ontology, books | no comments | no trackbacksPosted by Evan Bittner
Mon, 24 Nov 2008 15:25:00 GMT
The Intercollegiate Studies Institute has the following up on their site: “Our Fading Heritage: Americans Fail A Basic Test on Their History And Institutions”.
Do you find that shocking? How about just appalling?
I immediately thought about what I wrote about literacy the other day, and what I think is most fascinating is that I forgot about this sense of the word “literacy” being used by the ISI - The familiarity with a body of information. That bothers me more than a little… Knowledge of a specific topic is good. Better to have it than not, I guess. But it pales in comparison to a good grasp on the tools to acquire new knowledge. Or, simply a positive attitude about the value of knowing.
Because the facts about our country and its form of government are all available in an encyclopedia, you are always just a trip to the library away from finding out.
But on a deeper level, not knowing those facts reflects a set of priorities: Maybe you don’t care. For things that I don’t care about, I usually try to maintain a vague awareness. Is that so much to ask?
Most of what I know about the US government probably came from High School. They made a big deal about it there. In Maryland, we had to pass a Citizenship test to graduate. We also had to pass a Reading, Writing, and Math test. I doubt you were going to do very well on the Citizenship test if you didn’t do well on the Reading test. But nonetheless, I believe the passing score was lenient.
You need to scare people with a test if you plan to make them remember arbitrary facts. And, let’s face it: Human law is often very arbitrary. But you’re stuck with it. Nobody is going to change the laws to make it easier for you to remember.
Let’s add one more “literacy” to the bunch: Computer Literacy. The term bugs me for some of the same reasons. Facts about computers are different form practical abilities with computers.
You may have noticed that there are ideas that ring true the moment you hear them, and other ideas that require a lot more trial and error to implement. Think also of ingenious inventions: Some of them can be replicated at a glance even though you might never have come up with the idea yourself, and others remain mysterious even after careful examination.
So I wonder about how we should classify different varieties of “literacy” when knowing is not always good enough.
Posted in ontology | no comments | no trackbacksPosted by Evan Bittner
Mon, 24 Nov 2008 01:39:00 GMT
It never fails: Every time I resolve to blog more I actually wind up blogging less. Maybe I should promise to blog less to begin with. Somehow, I don’t think that would work too well. This pitiful little entry will have to do for now, while I think up more interesting things to say…
My new glasses are ready at HourEyes. Nobody called. Today, I called, and there they were, waiting for me. Bad timing, though: my friend Sam was going to take me out to lunch the next time I was down around K Street, but she’s not working on K Street today.
One of the other things I can do in that neighborhood is go to Penn camera, so I loaded up a USB drive with a few good photos that should be printed. They are also photos with a lot of black that I wouldn’t have printed on an ink-jet printer - they need to be done on real photo paper instead. Maybe I won’t print them all, but it would be nice to return home with a couple prints to help me calibrate my eyes to the screen… That is, be sure I’m not going to get something wildly different on the paper from what I see when I’m editing them at home.
I had a programming idea while I was in the shower. Class inheritance and operator overloading is so easy in Ruby that I though I should be able to add an operation to floating point numbers to calculate the value of two electronic components wired in parallel. Then, as with some fancy circuit analyzer package, I could do my own charts of electronic circuit responses, like monte-carlo variations or frequency response in linear circuits. I didn’t think it all the way through, though: Getting software objects to combine with an arithmetic-like syntax is easy enough, but passing in a frequency parameter to such an expression is not so easy. I’ll need to be able to pass in the expression using internalized symbols along with a value substitution or frequency parameter. It’s got something to do with blocks, maybe, but then I’m going to need a circuit object to read in the expression and “simulate the interconnection” of the components… I lathered up with soap standing in the tub, and then the water cut off.
Probably be back in a few seconds, right?
No. They’re back at it, screwing aroung with the plumbing on the second floor. I waited until after my roommate left for work, which is how it happened that I was taking a shower at 10am, and not 7am. I heard the tell-tale hammering on pipes. I screamed at the top of my lungs and banged first on the wall, then on the tub, apparently no one heard - or they just ignored it. I’m pretty sure they don’t speak English, anyway.
But they did this yesterday afternoon - a Sunday - and when I looked, it was just one little sink in for the whole floor. Clearly, they must have a bathroom, with a sink and a toilet, and the corresponding need to shut off my water, but why couldn’t they install all the valves they needed in one session, then never turn the mains off ever again? I said it out loud: “Some day they’re going to shut that thing off while I’ve got soap in my eyes!”.
The prophesy has been fulfilled.
Posted in ontology, programming | no comments | no trackbacksPosted by Evan Bittner
Mon, 10 Nov 2008 19:25:00 GMT
Check out this article “Intentional action and Asperger Syndrome” in Psychology Today. I spotted it in BoingBoing.
I’m disappointed at the lack of analysis in the article. Would you like to hear MY theory?
Think of side-effects: Results of an action are sometimes inseparable. We seek a desired result, and in the process we get some inseparable side-effect. So far, so good? Sometimes we require that separation and won’t settle for a particular side-effect. But, that is not usually what is on offer, so we have to keep searching. That extra time spent searching is experienced as a cost, too. We will sometimes take the lesser of two evils - supposing we actually do that cost-benefit analysis.
In the article, the two related examples differ in the side-effect: In one example, the goal of getting the biggest smoothie means also getting a commemorative cup you didn’t want. In the other example getting the biggest smoothie means paying an extra dollar. The researchers asked: Do you experience these side-effects as an intentional choice?
In a sense, when you make a choice, you are signing on to all the side-effects - even ones you don’t know about. So I understand the point of view that any side-effect you are aware of immediately becomes a part of your intent.
The article contends, assuming I still remember it accurately, that a person with Asperger’s syndrome does not experience those side-effects as intentional at all, whereas a normal person (control group?) makes distinctions: the unwanted commemorative cup vs. spending the extra dollar.
I think I agree to a lot of side-effects that I regret - and I can’t stand to admit that I agreed to them, so claiming them as my “intent” seems wrong. It manifests as a feeling that I didn’t get enough choices to really get what I intended. I can live with the poor choices I am forced to make to ‘satisfice’, but that doesn’t mean I have to accept them as my intention.
Not the cup or the dollar.
Posted in ontology | no comments | no trackbacksPosted by Evan Bittner
Thu, 06 Nov 2008 04:31:00 GMT
It is very cold in my apartment, for reasons that I do not understand. Only a few weeks ago, workmen came to test the radiators - it was a success. The radiators proved that they could get hot when it was not necessary for them to be hot. Today they need to be hot and they aren’t. I have exercised the “stay in bed” option, after trying out the “walk around in slippers”, and the “drink hot liquids” options. It’s like I’m living in the woods or something.
Look on the bright side, though: I like gloomy fall weather. It threatened rain all day yesterday, then finally delivered. Today I assumed from the weather maps I saw that a cold front would pass by and the sky would clear. So far it has not happened. I thought heavy wind usually drove away the clouds (notably not true in a hurricane - but is that usual?).
I don’t talk much about sports here - mainly because I don’t care - but, last night was potentially the closing game of the World Series, and my roommate Phil invited me to come out and watch part of it on the big screen TV at the Reef… So we braved the cold drizzle to have a pint and watch some baseball. Phil is rooting for the Phillies, and when we get into a conversation about it, I occasionally introduce myself to people as Ray. (Some of you won’t get that joke, but I can assume these people will - just tailoring my performance to the audience…)
Maybe I should bite the bullet and get up - take a hot shower, put on several layers of clothing (maybe a coat, too)… I suppose I should go shopping - there’s an errand I need to run for my sister - and then it’s back to the books: I’m brushing up on my Windows admin skills with a skim through the debugging book and a couple other security and programming tomes. The blog won’t write itself (lazy blog! the nerve…), and I’ve got several economics questions I’ve been meaning to explore lately, not to mention all those photographs to sift through and process.
Posted in ontology, bar-scene | 1 comment | no trackbacksPosted by Evan Bittner
Tue, 28 Oct 2008 18:09:00 GMT
I realize I recently said the same thing, but I’ll say it again: Being at home all day puts a lot of things in front of my face that I used to be able to ignore… I have better opportunities to be unsatisfied.
Today it was shoes. I could continue to wear the shoes I have, but they are gradually disintegrating, and I don’t want to put it off too long. In fact, when I went across the street to the shoe store, I was only intending to buy socks, which never seem to have the shelf life I would expect - perhaps I walk more than the manufacturer would recommend. But, if that’s true, the shoes have held up to the same punishment.
The need for shoes is merely symptomatic. Use it as a stand-in for any number of things I now realize I need to do or buy. Strange, when I was in a hurry to get places, I could casually note how badly the bathtub need a scrub, or the stacks of stuff I wish I could figure out how to organize, discard, or store.
Now I have the conceit that I should be working on something all day. And, this whole apartment is jam-packed with distractions - some of them beyond argument. Things that I was simply neglecting all that time. It reveals one of the reasons why I liked to haul my laptop in to the office and stay late after work to surf the web or write on the blog. I was both running away from my problems, and exercising control over my work environment. Hmmm… why should I have to do the former to achieve the latter?
Posted in ontology | no comments | no trackbacksPosted by Evan Bittner
Thu, 09 Oct 2008 22:57:00 GMT
If I had my way, I know what life would be like: Each day split roughly into two parts, one great inhale and one great exhale… I would wake up early to devour information until I had my fill for the day, and then I would spend a few hours creating something in response. It feels like an excellent pattern, and I wonder how long I can get away with doing it.
The thought of it provoked a few reactions in me: For one thing, the best television happens in the evening, when I would prefer to create rather than devour. As with many things, I am wont to ask “Why?”. Why is the world not supportive of my most supportive pattern? Bye-bye television. Sorry you couldn’t come along. But, you are one more cultural product with false urgency that forces a decision.
BAM!!! - $120 for a new AC adapter!
Three minutes of battery life distinguished my laptop from a fancy rock.
Luckily, there is a Radio Shack across the street to spend half an hour looking up which universal adapter went with my precise laptop model number… Because 19 volts and 90 watts is not enough information. There are apparently fifteen different sized plugs for the device end.
I hate interruptions. Where was I?
Oh, yeah - I was achieving inner peace with a zen-like daily regimen or something. !@#$%^&*
Posted in ontology | 1 comment | no trackbacksPosted by Evan Bittner
Tue, 07 Oct 2008 23:47:00 GMT
I had planned to go to the Takoma Park Street Festival yesterday. I knew about it at least a week in advance - which can be a long time for my planning apparatus. Too long, even. I was getting ready to go over there when I had a writing idea. “This should only take a minute.” Ha. It was 3:30 when I was satisfied with my rough drafts. Much of the work went into the extended rant on Wall Street. For some reason those ideas were in my head Saturday night during the movie, but I couldn’t express myself. Part of the problem is an issue I’ve talked about before: Commercials can be a boon. WETA has no commercial breaks at all during movies. And “Wall Street” was two hours long. So I can’t run to the kitchen for a snack without missing something, or reflect on what I’ve watched. After not producing anything the night of the movie, I was predictably unsatisfied - So, when the ideas did start to flow, I wasn’t going to stop for anything. And I was too late to catch much of the street festival.
But that’s all right… Because it was on to the next thing. Yet another get-together with the brokenhearted of Olsson’s. This time it was very Alexandria-centric - they held it at the Union Street Pub, across the street from the old “Book Annex”, or as I sometimes liked to call it: “Store 4” - Or - the one voted most likely to flood.
I took advantage of the new Yellow line Metro service. The trains that used to turn around at Mt. Vernon Square (don’t you just love telling tourists that the Mount Vernon they’re looking for is twenty miles due south of where they’re standing?) now turn around at Fort Totten. Although, I think that’s only true during non-rush hour. With that new service, I can ride non-stop from Columbia Heights to Alexandria - which helps me rest up for the long walk from the train station to the waterfront.
I was running a little early, so I stopped in at Hard Times Cafe for a bowl of chili. Dry Texas with chopped tomato and onion on top. The service was crappy and the food was excellent. Actually, the cornbread could have been fresher, but since it took so long to get it - deja-vu! - I included it in the service category. I’m easy to please, so screwing it up is an impressive feat.
King Street in Alexandria is a template of memory. I never hung out there much, but most of that was more than ten years ago. The place haunts me - just to walk down that street today is an exercise, physical and mental: Many businesses have been replaced over the years, but I never pinned down where everything was anyway. More than once, I thought something was gone when I got to the corner I remembered it on, only to discover it still there, further on. It is just not a route that I can play back in my imagination and get right. One segment near the courthouse is clogged with the chains - Starbucks and Gap and Austin Grill to name a few. Starbucks is starting to feel old to me, though. One year around ‘93 or ‘94 we had Liz Phair play at the store, and when they ran late arriving from Philadelphia, I remember going up to Starbucks for a cafe mocha with orange colored whipped cream on top. It must’ve been a Halloween theme. Since then, another outlet has opened at Union, so there would be no need to walk all that way.
I took a minute to look in the window of Olsson’s - a place I haven’t been since who knows when… Was it an overnight inventory four years ago? The PC screen-saver was still going on the ticket sales computer. It looked ready to open in the morning. Part of me was hoping to be seen by a stranger, looking forlornly into the closed store for unknown reasons. And if they were a thoughtful stranger, they might wonder at the nature of my relationship with that place - the worlds of unknowing in a chance encounter.
A big group had assembled by the time I got there, but I think I arrived at the half way point. (I suppose in any normal distribution or arrival times, most people would appear to have arrived “in the middle”, though). There were book sales reps, the long silent former employees, friends who hadn’t drifted too far away, the veterans and the recently hired. People who seem like surrogate parents to me, and people who were only names on my computer. The drinks were flowing, and I didn’t have to pay.
Posted in DC-roaming, ontology, olssons, writing-craft | no comments | no trackbacksPosted by Evan Bittner
Mon, 06 Oct 2008 21:46:00 GMT
There was a guy waiting for the bus last night, flouting the rules on audio devices. The mini-speakers attached to his bag were pumping out soul music, and it didn’t stop when we were on the bus. His taste in music was relatively inoffensive - not my choice for tunes, but it didn’t distract me from reading… What distracted me was the conversation he started having with another guy - who, coincidentally, was also trying to read. Soul Music looked over at the aging, light-skinned hipster and said “Now, I know you listened to the debate.” Hipster had a thousand times more class than the youngsters who normally interrupt my bus-time reading. He was reluctantly drawn into a conversation with Soul Music, just as I eventually was, one pithy reply at a time. Soul Music drove the conversation with his folksy indignation. This is Obama country around here, and these are Obama people - liberal to the core, no matter their skin color - people who grumble over the “stolen” elections of the past, and wonder at the sense of giving in to the needs of the merely greedy. At one point the African man sitting between the two was examining the contents of his worn Walgreens shopping bag, and I swear I saw him crying over receipts of some sort. No, he was definitely trying to hide his sorrow over something printed on those slips - grocery bills? lotto tickets? For a moment there, I thought it was our fault - I was worried that the conversation was too depressing for him.
I had my economic theories at the ready, and I tried to inject some balance. I said that everything both the politicians had said was meaningless, to some general agreement, and I said that they have no choice but to be meaningless if they want to win. But what I did not say was this, not sure if it would even help: “Hey, look, I program computers, and so when they say they’re going to decrease our dependence on foreign oil by investing in alternative energy, or that they are going to end wars and bring the troops home… I need to see the code for how they intend to accomplish that, otherwise it’s all just hot air”.
But, these are not the men who will know the details - it’s about teamwork and leadership, and so maybe it’s not such a bad thing that we elect them “Miss Congeniality” (which apparently Obama has lost repeatedly in the senate). They need to impress the other men in suits to do their bidding. I’ve been saying that the job of president has become progressively less important as time goes by. They must inspire the actions of others, and so it isn’t so weird to elect the cheerleader Bush over the technocrats Gore or Kerry. And that’s just charisma.
Posted in politics, DC-roaming, ontology | no comments | no trackbacksPosted by Evan Bittner
Tue, 30 Sep 2008 11:35:00 GMT
