The Weak In Rock

And you need to be unsettled. Seriously.

If your life is going well and you’re happy then you’re very, very lucky. I don’t think that people who are content and satisfied with their lives really understand how fortunate they really are. Most people aren’t very happy. I’ve spent more of my life under the heading of “Damn, this sucks pretty hard” than my current heading of “Wheeeee!” I’m profoundly happy. Happier than I’ve ever been or ever hoped I would be. I’m very lucky.

So, gentle readers, about now you’re saying something like, “what’s he on about?” Let me introduce you to Erik, via his blog, .David Duchovny is my Lord & Savior. Erik and I were inseparable from the end of 6th grade until we graduated from high school in 1985. We were such close friends that without even trying when we went shopping for school clothes prior to the start of 8th grade we bought the same shirt and then proceded to wear our embarassingly matching shirts on picture day. Erik was mad at me for a month after that one. I just thought it was funny.

In that crucial time of life where you’re trying to figure out what’s up and what’s down in the world Erik and I spent hour after hour watching Planet of the Apes movies in his parents’ basement, did unspeakable things to Star Trek action figures with rudimentary explosives, concocted schemes for dealing out righteous vengeance upon our neighborhood foes and got as close as two uptight, suburban teenage boys can.

He went to one college and I went to another. He got into ska, skinny trousers, Vespa scooters and hanging out in clubs in San Francisco while I got into Goth and punk, dying/growing my hair (you should see the pictures, that much hair had to be considered a hobby) and hanging out in warehouses in Oakland and Berkeley. He drummed for the Dancehall Crashers, I played guitar for the Wynona Riders.

For years we lived only a few miles from one another in Alameda, but we lost touch. Apart from running into each other at the occassional big punk rock show we had no contact at all. Somewhere along the line his life took a few bad turns. Since we’ve been back in touch over the last year or so I’ve been impressed with the way that Erik is trying to come to terms with how he got where he is. We keep threatening to meet up at Juanita’s for lunch or dinner one of these days but it somehow doesn’t happen. It needs to.

Read his blog. It might offend the hell out of you. It might shock you. At the very least you need to read it because you need to. You need to know why you’re happy.

Erik, I love you man. Don’t forget that.

Technorati Tags: Planet of the Apes, Star Trek, ska, Vespa scooters, Dancehall Crashers, Wynona Riders

As of this morning Pluto is no longer a planet. The International Astronomical Union has voted to demote Pluto from planet to dwarf planet, a new classification that was developed by the IAU earlier this month. Pluto lost its designation as a full-fledged planet because its orbit is extremely elliptical and takes it across the path of Neptune’s orbit.

Now if I were an evangelical, fundamentalist Christian I’d probably be using this as a reason to cast into doubt the existence of planets altogether. Much in the same way those folks argue that because evolutionary scientists disagree and changes their minds about the exact mechanisms of evolution that they don’t really know what they’re talking about and therefore evolution must not really exist.

Sad as I am to see Pluto demoted - what with having lived my entire life so far in a solar system with 9 instead of 8 planets - reading up on the debates and discussions at this year’s IAU meeting in Prague has been a wonderful window into the way that science works. It’s great to see the collaborative nature of scientific inquiry out in the open like this.

Unfortunately I’m quite sure some nitwit school district in Kansas or Georgia will rebel and insist on retaining Pluto as a planet in their textbooks out of some misplaced, moronic notion of tradition. I can just hear it now:

Cletus: Didja hear about how Pluto ain’t a planet no more?

Billy-Jack: What in tarnation?

Cletus: That’s right. Some Yooropein’ science guys say Pluto ain’t a planet no more.

Billy-Jack: Was there French scientists there?

Cletus: I es’pec there were.

Billy-Jack: Damn those cheese-eating surrender monkeys. Well we ain’t gonna stand fer no Yooro queers messin’ up our solar system.

And so on. Mark my words, Dubya will speak out against this “travesty” soon. America - each scientific step forward is an opportunity to show how stupid we really are.

Technorati Tags: Pluto, International Astronomical Union

Ok, so the Onion managed to make the point I was trying to make yesterday and be a lot funnier doing it.

Read it and snicker in a superior fashion.

Technorati Tags: the Onion

According to this article at ESPN Washington University psychology researchers recently put Albert Pujols through a battery of tests once given to Babe Ruth 85 years ago to measure his reflexes, eyesight and a bunch of other things.  The original tests were designed to try to determine why the Bambino was so great at baseball and concluded that he had a wide range of abilities that were far superior to most people.

The results of the test on Pujols show that he, like the Babe, is no mere mortal.  What no one is talking about (yet) is that these tests also show that what counts for a baseball player isn’t brawn, but a very finely tuned neurological system that helps him see the ball, keep track of the action on the field, read the spin of a ball and react with a coordinated response.  Sure, it doesn’t hurt if you’re as strong as an ox, but if you don’t have such a fine-tuned neurological system being The Hulk isn’t going to help you much.

The more I think about it the less I care about performance enhancing drugs.  I don’t care if Floyd Landis was using artificial testosterone to help him recover from long rides faster, I don’t care if Barry Bonds crammed the clean, the clear and the kitchen sink up his ass and I don’t care if Marion Jones gobbles HGH by the bucketful.  I don’t care because it really doesn’t matter.  Being a great athlete has so much more to do with the composition of your mind than it does the composition of your muscle fibers that it really doesn’t matter how artificially bulked any of these folks are.

That’s one reason.  The other is that it’s beyond stupid and naive for any sport, whether it’s cycling, track and field, baseball or curling to think that any one competitor has managed to develop some sort of scientific edge over anyone else.  For two years sports writers (note: I didn’t say the public because the fans don’t give two shits about this, only the balding, pot-bellied whiners who write about sports for a living and a bunch of grandstanding jackasses in Washington actually think this is important) have been bitching about how unfair baseball is in the steroid era.  That is they were bitching about that when their argument was that hitters on performance enhancing drugs where outmatching the poor defenseless pitchers.  *bzzzzzzzt* WRONG.  Then the Jason Grimsley story broke and it became obvious, even to a dimwitted sportswriter, that pitchers were just as juiced, if not more, than the hitters.  And what does that make, friends?  A level playing field.

Likewise, anyone who thinks that Floyd Landis was the only cyclist in the Tour de France using performance enhancing drugs is, well, a nitwit.  If it were otherwise then Floyd would have left the peloton in the dust, which he did not.  In fact the second-place finisher in the Tour was only a minute behind after the final time trial.  A little application of logic and you have to come to the conclusion that if not every cyclist in the Tour all but a few is using some form of performance enhancing drugs to allow their bodies to recover more effectively between stages.

My hunch is that all of this wringing of hands and gnashing of teeth about athletic drug use is really just the same nitwittery that fuels the battle against recreational drugs.  In spite of the fact that we westerners love our drugs (just look at the fortunes being made by the makers of everything from aspirin to zoloft and you know that western culture is pretty much running on drugs) our professional pontificators and puffed up politicians are on and have been on an anti-drug crusade for the past 50 years or more.  And the story is always the same - we’ve got to stop these drugs to protect our children.  Won’t someone please think of the children.

Ok, here’s my thoughts on the children - they’re going to do what they want regardless of what we say.  In fact, the more restrictive we are and the more forbidden the drug the more attractive it is to kids who are trying to define their identities as separate from their parents, teachers, coaches and other elders.  Instead of shaking our fingers at kids and telling them “drugs are bad” whether we’re talking about pot or HGH just give them the facts and let them make up their own minds.  Sure, give them your opinion but don’t turn drugs into a shortcut for defining themselves as individuals by demonizing them.

As for adults - so long as they’re not driving a car, flying a plane or operating a crane lift under the influence then let ‘em alone.  Likewise for athletes.  Unless you want to tell me that you don’t find feats of strength exciting let them gobble all the roids they can handle.  And once again, make sure this stuff is out in the open so that athletes can make educated and intelligent decisions about whether or not they want to deal with the consequences of using steroids, HGH or whatnot now on their future lives.

At the very least the sportswriters of America need to find something more interesting to write about.  And in the interest of them knocking off this business about being so excited about tearing athletes down I think there ought to be a physical fitness standard for sports hacks.  Maybe that would weed out the bitter old jerks who quite openly hate the sports and the athletes they write about.

Technorati Tags: Washington University, Albert Pujols, Babe Ruth, performance enhancing drugs, Floyd Landis, Barry Bonds, Marion Jones, HGH

Damn! Not one, not two, but three sets of cajones attacked by the meanest baseball ever. I wish the video was a bit clearer so I could see who this mega-dangerous Florida Marlins pitcher was. That guy should trademark this pitch. Call it something like the two-fingered nad-knocker.

Thanks to Deadspin for uncovering this, ahem, gem.

Technorati Tags: cajones, baseball, Florida Marlins, Deadspin

Ok, I promise I’ll find something else to write about soon. Really I will. For now I just really cannot stop thinking about the foiled airplane bomb plot in the UK and the assinine response that the authorities have had to it so far.

Here’s a gem of a quote from a reader at Boing Boing that nails it:

Ultimately, all solutions to terrorism issues are political, not technological, as the origins are political. It took years for the British to figure this out; finally, they sat down with the IRA and said, “What the hell do you want?” The IRA had slowly progressed from blowing up people to blowing up cars to finally calling in bombs that were going to go off at 2 AM when the streets were deserted. “If you don’t mind, please keep this bomb from going off. We found out killing people makes us unpopular. Thanks!”

A combination of arrests, killings, and negotiations brought the problem to a halt- not better bomb-detectors, or silliness about removing shoes before getting on planes.

The same writer contributes the altogether sensible thought that no matter what sophisticated detecto-ma-bob you put into an airport security line all you’ll ever accomplish is protecting yourself from the last threat. Semtex blew up Pan Am flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland and ever since we’ve had lots of neato machinery in our airports that detects Semtex. Of course, since anyone who might want to blow up a plane knows they can’t get Semtex onto a commercial airliner they don’t even try. Total number of Semtex bombs these multi-million dollar detectors have found in luggage since they were put in service = 0.

It is technologically possible to create equipment that will successfully screen for the types of chemical agents the foiled UK plotters were planning to use, but by the time you install that equipment the wingnuts who want to blow up planes will have already moved on to the next nasty compound or non-explosives-oriented threat.

If you want to stop this you have to stop being so damned stubborn. Are the methods used by al Qaeda, Hamas, Islamic Jihad, etc. appalling? You betcha. Are some of their demands likely to be as crazy and illogical as their methods of getting our attention? Yup. But it doesn’t matter. Ultimately you have to figure out a way to sit down and talk, find out what grievances are legitimate and address them constructively. Your only other option is to kill them all, and while that might sound like a fine solution (heck, it’s occured to me more than once a month, but that’s probably because I watched too many James Bond movies as a kid), but it’s impossible.

Much as Dick Cheney and his pals might like the idea of a never ending state of war it’s unsupportable. Ultimately, in any war, each side is going to suffer losses. With al Qaeda, Hamas, etc. they’ve already accepted that and built their ideology and recruiting strategies around the notion of martyrdom. With the western world that’s not going to cut it. Even a noble war, such as WWII, would have worn down the populations of the Allied Powers if Hitler and Tojo had been able to retrench, retreat, rebuild their forces and wait for opportunities to strike back.

To put it another way, eventually these asshats will succeed in taking down 10 or 20 planes with hundreds of passengers and single-handedly demolish the commercial airline industry and cause economic repercussions throughout the economies of the developed world.

The writer quoted above mentions the IRA. The difference between the IRA and al Qaeda is that the members of the IRA shared the same set of moral values as their foes. Ultimately they didn’t see killing non-combatants in their war as advantageous to acheiving their ultimate goal of reuniting Northern Ireland with the Republic of Ireland and living and trading peacefully with the British. The Islamic terrorists we’re currently locked in a tussle with consider us all combatants. The UK government was able to play pretty much the same waiting game with the IRA that the IRA was playing with them. We won’t have that luxury. One really horrific event may be enough to turn the population of the US against its own government and beg it to sue for peace.

Technorati Tags: foiled airplane bomb plot in the UK