You know how the hypesters like to hype something up and make you think it’s a really really big deal that’s really really easy to do? Like meth. It’s supposed to be really damn simple to make methamphetamine — hell, you can feed a simple search query into Google and get back a whole whack of results, some of which are even kinda plausible. (The one that mentions the Isomer Fairy is my favorite, and no doubt there are people out there who are wholly unaware of the chirality issue with desoxyephedrine.) It’s so simple, the press gushes, except for the part where you have to do 48 hours of refluxing and know how to use a sep funnel properly and how to handle hydroiotic acid, and.. well, okay, maybe the meth gangs are pretty sophisticated.

Regardless, according to the hypesters, you can cook up a batch of meth in your basement, blow the whole neighborhood to hell, get the local kids hooked on the stuff, and then convert them all to Satanism, or something, in some small amount of easy, trivial steps. It’s so easy the bikers have figured it out. Uh-huh. Somehow, I guarantee you that if you or I tried to do it, we’d end up with the wrong isomer of the wrong compound and synthesize something that makes your hair fall out and calls the cops for you.

Crime, it seems, not only makes you stupid, but has stupidity as a prerequisite, too. Or, alternatively, maybe making meth isn’t as easy as it seems, and it’s not as big a problem as people seem to think it is. It’s not like they have a reason to make you afraid of meth or anything, do they?

So it goes with piracy. You know how people downloading TV offa the Innernet is going to be the downfall of the modern television network? And how you’re supposed to be able to turn on your machine and suck back all the TV you want, without those annoying commercials? How come this doesn’t actually work on any Internet I’ve ever used? I’m in the process of downloading some episodes of Six Feet Under, the damn BT session’s been running for two friggin’ days, and we’re still only 43% done. I totally don’t get it. 700 MB, and I’m downloading it about as fast as I would have over a 14.4k dialup link. This is so not the piracy haven I’ve been lead to believe exists on the network at large.

Yeah, we’re really gonna wreck your business model at frickin’ 483 B/sec. Yes, four hundred and eighty three bytes per second. What decade is this, again?

It seems that you can’t trash Macintoshes — or dismiss them as a useful platform for your computing — without legions of idiot fanboys coming out to defend their favorite toy computer. This problem always existed to one extent or another, but now that OS X is basically some kinda Unix, it means that you get the self-righteousness of Mac users coupled with the aggressive advocacy dumbassery of Unix dweebs.

(Funny that these new Unix dweebs don’t seem to see the irony in how they came to their particular Damascus: Their Favorite Toy Hardware Vendor decided to improve their modern hardware product by.. hauling a 35 year-old operating system design out and porting it. Um, yeah. That’s progress. Uh-huh. Yup.)

Philip is finding this out right now. He made some disparaging comments wondering why, if OS X is so great, how come none of the really important software applications from the world’s most innovative software company have been ported to it. (It wasn’t phrased this way, but that’s certainly the thrust of his questioning.) The comments are, predictably, a collection of people attempting to educate Philip on the importance of using a Macintosh. Lots of luck, fellas.

So he follows up on the friggin’ thread, and says this: “Commenters have been talking about how it is worth spending extra $$ to have a Macintosh instead of a Windows machine, or, more likely, in addition to because one still needs the Windows machine. The implication is that money is infinite that there is nothing better to spend it on that a high-style personal computer. So what would I buy in the next month or two instead of the Mac? (We can call this “the straight guy’s dividend” — money that one saves by not having to invest in a fancy wardrobe and an iBook.)” He then lists a whole bunch of cool toys you could buy with the price differential between a PC and a Mac.

As you might have expected, the Macfanboys have found this thread, too, and begun not to offer suggestions about what to buy, but rather to advance their own particular view, which is that there is nothing better to spend it on [than] a high-style personal computer.” The comments crack me up, and I’m sure you’ve ssen them somewhere, but this one just leaves me breathless:

walk up to a mac, open a console window, and type “which python”. Feel free to type “which perl”, “which java”, and try a few others. If you don’t know what any of this means, then the other gizmos will matter more to you. If you do know what that means, then you *might* want the mac more than the other toys. Kind of depends on what floats your boat.

ooh. Bring it, yo. Quothe the Greenspunster:

It is nice that Apple includes these 1960s-style computer languages, thus saving folks who want to run Perl the two minutes that it takes to install Perl on an XP box (http://www.indigostar.com/indigoperl.htm came up from a Google search for “Perl and Windows XP”; maybe if you work at a hedge fund a two-minute savings is worth paying $500 extra). But it would be more interesting if Apple included a good language from the era (Lisp!) or even tried to move its customers into the modern era with Haskell or ML. I found Perl pretty useful back in 1994 when doing a CGI programming project but it was free then and I’m not sure why I would want to pay Apple big $$ to get me back to the tools of 1994…

Oh, snap! He did not! say that. Did he? Oh yes he did. You just got served, fanboy. But wait, as the ads say, there’s more!

By the way, I’m not sure that “perl” is the most pleasing thing about “which perl”. It’s the “which” – that you are working in UNIX (OK, freeBSD) rather than DOS. I agree that it is a sad state of affairs when you’re delighted to pay big bucks to be restored to old tools. But when you’ve taken ten steps back, it’s still gratifying to take a few steps forward, yes?

I’m sorry, but did an OS X fanboy just say that which(1) is the killer example of why OS X will take over the world? which(1)? Good lord. “which(1) means you’re running on Unix!” (Cue the scene from Jurassic Park with that hella cool SGI application.) OK, that’s enough of that. Time for a New Rule. Anyone who says they’re a Unix guru by virtue of using OS X — i.e., anyone who claims to be a Unix guru but never had to cut their teeth on a version of Unix where the GUI was horribly painful to use, and I’m looking at the both of you, GNOME and KDE — gets taken out back and beaten with a hose. By Linux fanboys incensed at Apple’s pilfering.

I want to put my head down and cry, but I’m afraid that if I do I might not get up in the morning.

Robotnik:

It’s been said that Canada has “too much geography and not enough history.” I don’t entirely agree, but I do know that Canada doesn’t have nearly enough alternate history. And it’s a shame. Bookshelves groan with Nazi alternates (alterNazis?) and Civil War alternates; I’ve never seen an alternate Canada. Of course, Canada is kind of an alternate version of the United States already. What if the Thirteen Colonies had not revolted in 1776? Well, four colonies didn’t—skip ahead a couple of centuries and they’re legalizing swinging and queer marriages and smoking the chronic.

…

I give you five journeys north of the border gone astray: five alternate Canadas.

The first one is kinda short, the second one is fucking hilarious. I won’t spoil the punch line, but let’s just say it combines many of the best and worst elements of the 20th century into one seriously huge ball, and includes, as a comment, the concept of “GURPS WWI: Blame Canada,” which I would pay good money to see, play, and enjoy.

I frequently joke that there’s a Simpsons analogy for virtually every situation in life, even if it’s one that only hard-core fans of the show are likely to get. This frequently amuses me, though people who don’t have my encyclopedic knowledge of the series typically find these analogies painful, useless, and incomprehensible. In my own mind, though, I process at least a substantial chunk of the world through the lens that is the Simpsons. (Chris Turner’s excellent book is a more thorough examination of the topic, and the more general phenomenon of the Simpsons as a form of social currency.)

Well, it wasn’t immediately apparent to me, but it turns out that you can use the Simpsons as a method to understand the 2005 baseball season. This guy did the heavy lifting, and now I find myself rolling my eyes at the adventures of Bumblebee Man and Barney Gumble. Who’da thought?

PS: The Season Six DVD set is wonderrific. Go buy it immediately.

I try not be judgmental about people with tattoos. I mean, I have one, so it’s not like I’m in a position to shake my head and wonder how it is that people can be so friggin’ dumb as to have ink permanently embedded in their skin — and I’m hardly one to talk about stupid reasons for getting a tattoo, or what those stupid reasons and stupid designs say about a particular person. The stereotype, however, persists for better or worse, and I’m periodically embarrassed by the degree to which it has been cultivated in my subconscious. “That’s a pretty ugl–wait, who the hell am I to talk?” It’s not that I can’t pass judgment, my brain says, it’s that I shouldn’t. And, for the most part, I manage just fine.

Enter Scott Spiezio, proud owner of a 2005 batting average of 0.064 — I think I have a dog somewhere who can hit better than that — and newly unemployed, since the Mariners released him on Friday for having 3 hits in 47 AB. That’s a sorry-assed line, kids. Speez hasn’t just been bad, he’s been teeth-gnashingly, mind-bogglingly, historically awful. So when the Mariners finally fired him (and, in the process, finished throwing out the entirety of 2004’s starting infield) last week, there was much rejoycing in Marinerland. The front office, it would seem, learned something and ate a contract on a crappy player!

(On the other hand, they did call up Greg Dobbs, owner of a very empty .200 BA and a real pretty swing, so maybe they didn’t learn as much as we would have liked.)

The day before he was released, Spiezio was the subject of a column by the Worst Sports Columnist in Seattle (Jim Moore) about his new tattoo. As the Go2Gimp explains, Speez got himself a new tattoo to get out of his funk caused by owning a two-digit batting average. It’s a terribly article, combining all the things I can’t stand about sportswriting in one package. (The only thing missing was a lengthy moralistic tirade.) I think we’re supposed to feel some combination of sympathy for Scott because of his problems with the Mariners, and maybe some envy that he has a 27 year-old model named Jenn (with two Ns) for a girlfriend, whose image he can tattoo on his bicep. (Also, that he has a bicep big enough to accept said tattoo.) But I can’t really tell — I don’t know what sort of emotion the article was intended to engender, and I’m also not really sure what the point of the article was.

Attached to the article is a picture of the tattoo. I went and looked at the thing, and I’m seriously starting to re-think my “no picking on tattooed people” policy — if this is what people are going to be doing to themselves, well, maybe it is OK to tease them and be judgmental about it. Yeah, yeah, it takes all kinds and all that junk, but really. That’s just terrible. Gyech.

So there you have it. Two reasons to dislike Scott Spiezio: (1) Crappy BA. (2) Ugly-assed tattoo.

• Herewith, a compendium of some of the best bad movie reviews Roger Ebert’s ever written.
• A mindbogglingly comprehensive guide (?) to Japan’s railways. Includes audio (the subject of another post for another day) and — this is the part I really love — photographs of station exteriors, signage, and platforms. Question: Could I have used something like this while I was over there? Answer: YES! Indispensible for anyone planning a trip to Japan and thinking of using the trains to get around (which is basically everybody).
• Lara Specialty Tools has some awfully interesting stuff and a very thorough primer on screw types.
• Cindy Sheehan bashers: Idiots or misogynists? You
  decide. (No, I still can’t shake my blog punditry habit. It sucks. I need help.)

• Anyone who hasn’t been reading The Poor Man is to be pitied and then ridiculed mercilessly. Andrew’s been on fire (to re-use a stupid and hoary blog cliche).
• I’m probably a loser for admitting this, but the best time waster in the world after Yarchive is probably some combination of Wikipedia and Wikitravel. When did these things go from being “merely interesting” to “shockingly useful”?

So about a month ago, on the ever-excellent Definitely Not The Opera, I happened to catch an interview with Paul Anka that wasn’t nearly as annoying as I had thought it would be. Why on earth would Paul Anka, the definition of not-pop-culture, be doing on the CBC’s pop-culture program? I mean, my parents listened to that stuff — not me. (Well, ok, not my parents, being that they were more the Cat StevensYusuf Islam type, but you know what I mean.) And I like to think of myself as being a pretty hip and with it kind of guy. Paul Frickin’ Anka?

Okay, fine. If it be known, DNTO was in Ottawa and talking about Ottawa’s favorite teen idol-turned crooner. And he did have a new album coming out — Rock Swings. The premise was baffling: Anka does crooning covers of rock and roll songs from the 1980s and 1990s. Fine, I can deal with that, too. And then Sook-Yi played one of the tracks from this new album, a cover of “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” “oh, this is gonna suuuuuck..”

First impression: Yup, it sucks.
Second impression (about a week later): Hey, this song is stuck in my head.
Third impresison (about a week later still): Hey, this song is still stuck in my head.
Fourth impression (a month has gone by): I wonder what else is on that album?

So I broke down and bought the damn thing the other day. It’s been in my car ever since. And I cannot, for the life of me, decide whether it’s an abomination that should be hauled out and destroyed, and the minds of everyone who has listened to it wiped, or whether it’s really fucking brilliant. If nothing else, Anka deserves credit for having the guts to try something like this — it’s not exactly a gimmick and it’s not exactly an homage, it’s more like a retelling of the same story with a slightly different twist. Purists (read: old-school Nirvana fans) will freak out and argue, as some reviewers on Amazon have, that no one should ever be allowed to remake songs with completely different moods and emotions; “Smells Like Teen Spirit” cannot and should not ever be a peppy, upbeat thing. I suppose they have a point, but it’s a pretty lame one; why shouldn’t people be permitted to put a new twist on an old work? I mean, it’s not like Cobain’s around to complain, is he?

On that point, I think it comes down to people thinking the “purity” of a particular song is going to be ruined if any performance ever differs from the original version. Which I can sort of appreciate; “Hold On,” for instance, was always an angry song and Sarah McLachlan got it right on the Fumbling Towards Ecstasy tour when she played it as though she were lashing out against a cruel fate, but it sorta morphed, over time, into a sad melancholic ballad, and I don’t like this one bit. I also resent the repeated use of “Angel” as a romantic song — damn, people, do you not know the back story behind that song? So I can understand the reluctance on the part of die-hard Nirvana fans and resistance from Bon Jovi and Van Halen groupies to accept these new versions, but as someone who (a) wasn’t that into Nirvana that first time around and (b) can appreciate a good cover (heck, one of my favorite albums is full of them), I gotta say, this album works. I don’t know why, but it works.

Sarah Harmer’s in town tomorrow night. This is the third time that I’m aware she’s played here, and the first time I’m actually going to get a chance to see her play — the first time I skipped it for something I thought would be more important at the time, the second time I was in Japan. Now, at $25 a head for a festival seating outdoor show in Centennial Square, I’m finally going to get a chance to see her play live. Finally. Yay me.

British Columbians are being asked to decide whether to radically change the way MLAs are elected. In the past, we’ve used the old first-past-the-post system of electing candidates. Now, the Citizens’ Assembly on Electoral Reform has recommended that we implement the single transferrable ballot (STV) as a new way of electing provincial representatives. There are lots of sites out there, pro and con, on this issue. Here are my four reasons for voting no.

1. It’s too damn complicated. I’m a reasonably smart person. Moreover, I’m a reasonably smart person who enjoys politics. And although I understand STV, it took me the better part of an hour to figure it out, and I’m still not sure I fully “get” it. Any voting system that requires a flowchart and complex mathematical formulas and can’t be explained in less than five minutes to your mom is too complicated.
2. There’s no accountability. Or, if you prefer, you can’t actually vote against some candidates. Under the current systme, you can specifically vote against someone by casting a ballot for the person most likely to be elected if not the guy you hate. Under STV, those opportunities don’t actually exist — you run the very real risk that your potentially excess vote will go to someone you don’t like even though you never actually cast a ballot for them. For instance, if I’ve got a real hate on for the NDP candidate in my riding (and I do), I can easily make that work in my favor by casting a vote for the Liberal candidate. Under STV, this kind of voting isn’t possible anymore.

   Also, because a group of MLAs would represent an electoral district, it’s tough to figure out who you complain to, or who your beef is with. Say all four leading candidates in Victoria managed to win seats, and I’m annoyed about something the province has done. Do I complain to Shiela Orr, Carole James, Jeff Bray, or Rob Flemming? Say I get pissed with one of these MLAs. Can I play them against each other, or do I have to be stuck with one of them, or…? It’s the same problem I’ve had since I moved out here and had to start dealing with slates of candidates for city council — I grew up under a ward system, where you had an alderman and a mayor. Well, we have a mayor (and a damn fine one, if I do say so myself), but which municipal councilor do I bug if I have an issue? Who do I pester to get things done? How do I make that decision? That’s never been made clear to me, and I’ve lived here (as I say, as a politically-interested resident) for an awfully long time now. At least provincially and federally, I know who I can complain to.

3. And I can’t rank those assholes anyway. For those of us who view the majority of candidates with little more than thinly veiled contempt, the idea of ranking a half-dozen or so isn’t particularly appealing. When the majority of your voting comes down to “who do I hate less?” the prospect of having to rank candidates in order of slime appeal isn’t, um, very appealing. Moreover, there’s very little you can do about it anyway, aside from leaving the name off the ranking. But I don’t understand what happens when you do that, either.
4. It’s too much friggin’ work. To my mind, this is the best argument against STV. Even if I wanted to rank all the candidates in my electoral district, and wanted to do it honestly (i.e., no #1 followed by five or six #12s), it would be waaaaay too much effort to try and figure out how I felt, relatively speaking, about each individual candidate. I would probably have a clear favorite, but after that, it might get kinda muddled. Who do I like more, the Sex Party candidate or the Marijuana Party candidate? Democratic Reform or some random independent? How do those four compare against each other? I don’t know. I bet you don’t, either, and the number of people who do is a teeny tiny minority of the population. So how are candidates going to be ranked? The same way they’re picked now — at random. Only this time, there’s a very real chance that a candidate ranked entirely by random is going to get elected, and who the hell knows who you’re actually going to end up voting for?

Proponents of STV like to talk about how it will lead to a greater diversity of opinion and more representation. Yeah, I don’t think so. I think we’ll end up with a lot of coalition governments, and we all know how much fun those things can be. A lot of people were honked off in the wake of the last provincial election that we had “no effective opposition”; I hate to break it to these folks, but when you have a majority government, you can more or less do whatever the hell you want, whether you have a majority of two seats or a majority of a zillion seats. (The only issue is party discipline, but that’s a separate problem that has nothing to do with the effectiveness of the opposition.) STV won’t fix that. STV won’t fix problems of local representation, either — it’s tough to do that when you’re confronted with a larger electoral district and multiple representatives.

A strong argument can be made that STV will increase voter participation and encourage people to become informed and, hopefully, vote. But that’s shouldn’t be the point of electoral reform. It shouldn’t be a coercive tool to get people to pay attention to a subject most of them hate. I’m a political wonk and I hate the amount of work that’s involved in finding out who believes what (and there are some real shockers, like when I discover that, modulo their fiscal policy, the Green Party is exactly what I want at the federal level). Normal people won’t put in a tenth as much work, and so the STV will be wasted because they’re going to do what they always did — vote for the candidate they understand and trust and acknowledge, and then leave the rest of their slate blank. And, like I said, I don’t really know what happens when there are more candidates than rankings. People are lazy. They don’t put that much effort into making voting decisions now. They’re even less likely to put effort into a system that requires much more, um, effort. Under FPTP, their laziness doesn’t hurt. Under STV, laziness is a dangerous thing.

I also don’t see the need. Was what we had so terrible, so broken, that it was unsustainable? It’s not like we’ve had cases of rampant electoral fraud, or suspicious results, or people promising to deliver states with black-box voting technologies that magically end up doing exactly that in opposition to exit polling data, or people who can’t figure out how to use their existing ballots. This isn’t, you know, Florida. If we had problems that we coming out of the system, then yeah, I could see the logic behind looking at alternatives. But we don’t, and I don’t.

Is it broken? Nah. Bent, maybe, but not broken. Not worth overhauling right yet.

Even more reasons to hate that Canadian Tire guy. I’m deeply pleased to see I’m not the only person who dislikes him so much. Deeply, deeply pleased.

PS: Definitely not work-safe, or for those with sensitive eyes and brains.

One of the best things about not having a blog anymore, and not really paying attention to blogs that aren’t jwz and USS Mariner, is that I have no idea what’s going on in the world. It’s very liberating — my blood pressure is much better, and I don’t get worked up about dumb shit anymore. I’m much calmer and much happier. s’great, actually. Highly recommended.

Unfortunately, one of the side effects of not paying attention is.. not paying attention. So major events pass me by. Not things like Pope Deathwatch or anything like that, but things like the electoral reform issue on the ballot on the 17th in British Columbia (I don’t know what STV is, and I’m not sure I want to find out). And things like the latest developments in AdScam. I knew there was an inquiry on, but had no idea what was happening until fairly recently, and I still don’t have a clear picture. Government throws money at problem, money ends up in hands of cronies. Got that. Not sure what to get worked up about, since we knew the Liberal Party was full o’ crooks years ago. But something happened in the past couple of days, the outrage has hit white-hot levels of intensity, and the PM addressed the nation last night to deal with it, promising an election within 30 days of the Gomrey Inquiry’s final report.

I have no real desire to go back to the polls anytime soon. I won’t vote for the Liberals, I can’t vote for the Conservatives (notwithstanding my qualified support in the last federal, they’ve lost me with their dumbshit position on same-sex marriage), I categorically refuse to vote NDP, and oops, that’s it. I’d vote Green, since they seem to be best aligned with me on the non-major policy issues, but I can’t shake the feeling they’re.. well.. hippies. And we know what happens when you give hippies power. (Nothing. Which actually.. might not be such a bad idea. Anyway.)

What’s funny about the PM’s statement is the reaction from the other parties to it. And the hell of it is that the reactions had almost nothing to do with the actual issues; you could have predicted it going in. Both the Conservatives and the Bloc are chomping at the bit, unable to contain their glee that an election is looming. They stand to win big from AdScam, so they have the most to gain, and they can’t really lose — voters pissed off at the corruption will vote for Someone Else, and that someone else, in many relevant parts of Canada, is going to be the Conservative candidate. For the Tories, they want to know whether they’ve managed to pick up enough pissed off former Liberal supporters in Ontario to form a government, majority or otherwise. I doubt it — the Liberals will have their lead cut by the Bloc, but I suspect those Ontario voters who could be persuaded to vote Tory would have done so already, and so the bulk of the support is going to shift to the NDP. (This is a well-documented trend in much of the country, where the second choice of Liberal voters tends not to be the Conservatives, but rather the Dippers.) To explain the Bloc’s reaction, replace “Conservative” in this argument with “Bloc,” and “Ontario” with “Quebec.” The irony is tough to swallow: A program that was designed to quell separatist rhetoric in Quebec may end up enhancing the profile of a separatist party in Parliament. Who knew?

(Diz-claimer: I don’t honestly believe most of the Bloc’s voters are itching to separate. That ship, it seems, has pretty much sailed for the current generation. I have no evidence of this, but that’s how it feels to me; the Bloc’s popularity right now is more a function of Liberal stupidity and Quebecois self-interest. It’s no different from westerners voting Reform.)

The Liberals’ reaction is easy to predict, too. Of course they want to wait. They want to see if they can ride it out and regain support in the next half-year or so. The NDP reaction was even more predictable: They’re the only other party with a vested interest in making sure that the government doesn’t fall. See, the problem is that if the government were to fall tomorrow, we’d probably end up with a minority again, but with the Conservatives holding most of the cards. You think a minority government under Harper is likely to cut deals with the NDP to advance a legislative agenda? You think they’d be willing to cut a deal with the Bloc to advance an agenda? (Now that I think about it, this might be kind of funny to watch.) Not likely. While the NDP is likely to pick up seats, their influence in the next minority government is probably going to be diminished. At the moment, Layton can play the role of negotiator, holding Martin’s feet to the fire over various issues in exchange for Parliamentary support. I can’t see Harper doing the same thing.

The hell of it is that that scenario — a Conservative-lead minority government, forming a coalition chiefly with the Liberals — might be in everyone’s best interests. They’re necessarily going to rely on consensus and deal-making in order to get anything done, and so you’d probably see the influence of the socially conservative wing of the Conservative party diminished significantly. They could do some pandering, of course, but how effectively can you pander when you can’t actually get anything done? It’s doubtful the economic policy would change significantly, and we might actually be able to have the Important National Conversations about health care that we really really need to have under a Harper government. Will I support it? Not a hope in hell — like Jay Currie, I’ve lost my patience with the Tories and I cannot in good conscience ever support a party that is willing to make principled arguments about why it’s OK to discriminate against a particular group of people. But it’s interesting to think about.

‘kay. I’m done writing unsubstantiated punditry for the next four months.