Flickr’s Interestingness 24 Hours page recently went away due to stupid people trying to game the system. It was replaced by a page that shows interesting photos from the last week, but this is less than interesting, to me, than more recent photos. So here’s a bookmarklet to take you directly to the most recent daily listings: Flickr/Interesting/24h.

The only occasions I have ever successfully quit smoking for any remarkable amount of time, a few months perhaps, it has been by replacing the addiction with another. This is exactly the wrong thing to do, mind, but it’s also the only thing that works for me. The first time I quit, when I was 17, it was by popping NoDoz like candy. Every time I craved a cigarette, boom, a quick 200 mg of caffeine took my mind off of it. I lost 60 pounds, my grades improved, my house was spotless, and I developed a permanent twitch. It got to the point I’d take two at a time and chew them. I started smoking again when I started having chest pains.

When I was 19, I tried to replace it with a healthy habit, namely exercise. I managed to find something so obscenely low-impact that it overcame my deep seated revulsion for physical exertion. I would sit watching music videos until 4:00 in the morning, endlessly lifting a 20-pound weight until I was exhausted enough to go to sleep. I added a few leg lifts and squats when I noticed my disproportionately developed arms and shoulders, but nothing so strenuous as to distract from the theoretically somnolence-inspiring television. I stopped this when I realized that the nicotine craving-induced insomnia wasn’t going away, and the nocturnal exercise was further reinforcing my creature-of-the-night ways. My college, damn the luck, did not offer midnight classes.

At 22, fully embroiled in a relationship, another alternative offered itself: sex. Morning, noon and night, and a few times in between. The sad and scandalous truth was too soon discovered, though, that even gay men can have enough of sex. (”Baby, I’m not prudish at all. Really. I think I may have given you a wrong impression of my upbringing. I guess what I’m trying to say is, I really don’t mind if you masturbate.”)

So now, at age 24 and faced with the facts that 1) I’m getting no younger, 2) I spend way too much money on antihistamines and decongestants, and that 3) frankly cigarettes are fucking expensive too, what new hell shall I inflict upon myself in the name of self-improvement? Shall I drink myself to sleep every night so I don’t just sit there staring at the ceiling twitch twitch twitch? Meditate and smudge herbs, calling upon whatever powers are associated with “Hey, guy, don’t slowly kill yourself” to give me strength and patience and the fortitude not to bludgeon someone to death on a daily basis? Or shall I just spend way too much time on the internet, devoting my life to failed redesigns of my weblog, pondering the seemingly complete incomprehensibilty of Wordpress, and prattling on about privy details of my utterly trite personal life?

So I just finished re-reading the entire series, searching for clues basically, and I think I may have found one. Don’t get me wrong, I’m firmly of the “who the hell knows what’s up with Snape” camp, and have thoroughly enjoyed the way Rowling has kept him ambiguous. Naturally, I’m anticipating being able to watch Alan Rickman gnaw on some more scenery, as well. But I think the following quote, spoken by Bellatrix Lestrange during the huge battle at the end of book five, may be a bit telling with regard to certain events in book six:

Which doesn’t really tell us anything new, just that if Snape is evil, we have one set of cicumstances, if not, another. But it does give us a possible method the not-evil scenario could play out. Eh? Eh?

I honestly didn’t think I was still the type of person who could wish someone dead. I’ve come believe in a balanced universe, that you get back what you put out there, more or less. This has wrought a few changes in my life and the way I think, all very gradual, and frankly I like myself a little better now.

Now though, I have to rectify this belief with the fact that in my considered, informed opinion there is no purpose in the continued existence of — and every reason for the world to be rid of — not one but several persons. Persons who, and we have solid evidence on this, contributed directly or indirectly to the preventable deaths of thousands of American citizens they were sworn to serve.

I don’t know who coined the phrase outrage fatigue, but it  is an apt one to describe what regular white people experience when subjected to the daily disappointments, slights and general fuck-uppedness of the world that minorities have to deal with. It’s resignedness in the face of the seemingly insurmountable stupidity, power, and unfairness of them.

Well, the fatigue part has officially worn off for this little white boy, leaving us with outrage. Simplify a little more, and you get rage, which is what I’ve been feeling lately. Scream-and-break-things rage. I want that form of revenge dressed up in righteousness and called capital-J Justice. I want capital murder trials followed by televised executions. Yes, I want blood for blood. Will this undo any of the pain? No. Does this make me a nice person? Fuck nice. Does this agree with anything I profess to believe? Not the tiniest bit. Is this basically the mindset that , taken to its logical extreme, allows things like terrorism against innocents to occur? Yeah, now that you mention it. But I still want what I want.

Working in an arcade is not unlike working in a very small amusement park. You’re the admissions booth, you’re security, you’re the janitor, you ensure all the rides are working. And just like an amusement park, you’ve got kids, parents, and the roving bands of teenagers. And the ones that cause all the trouble are the parents. I haven’t yet had the opportunity to play security and toss someone out, but something tells me I’ll either hate it or enjoy it a little bit too much.

Mark: “You start at 4:00 tomorrow.”

Me:  “Como se huh?”

Mark: “You’re my newest associate.”

Me: “Er… okay.”

Sep. 4th Washington Post article on the events which led to federal aid being withheld in New Orleans. The administration wanted total control of the city, including the multibillion dollar rebuilding efforts, before they would render aid. The word murder is being used. I am agape. A lot of people are wondering why troops arrived so late, why supplies were delayed, why rescuers were blocked, and why FEMA actively sabotaged the rescue effort. The answer is that the Bush Administration essentially delivered an ultimatum to Lousiana Governor Kathleen Blanco: before they released the emergency supplies, they wanted her to sign the city of New Orleans over to the Federal government. — MeFi thread About the smartest thing Napoleon ever said was that one should never ascribe to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence. In the case of this administration, though, I’m honestly torn between the two.

Unless you’ve been living in a cave, or (perversely enough) in New Orleans, you’ve no doubt heard or seen something by this point relating to the depressing role of race and class in the government response to this tragedy.  Some points that need to be made have been, but what’s been bugging me, and what I’m about to try to express, is that race is only peripherally a factor in all this. I’m not a political writer, being neither very political nor a very good writer, but this all touches on an ugly reality I’ve seen in this country, one which has never been seriously addressed in our national discourse.

Kanye West, among many others, believes that George Bush does not care about black people. In the face of the evidence, he’s right. He’s also wrong. Truth is, George Bush does indeed not care about black people, but only because politicians at the national level do not care about people. With no extra qualifiers. Blacks, whites, gays, soccer moms, WASPy New England royalty: your representatives in Washington do not care about you. They simply don’t have the time. Our political system is broken. It’s broken in such a way that successful politicians (ie those that get re-elected) do not have time to do their jobs in addressing the needs of the people.

In Washington we have created, or allowed to evolve, a severely weird ecosystem. The most highly adapted and successful inhabitants of this environment are those that have their priorities in order:

1. Survival, or their campaign. The campaign never ends anymore, and in order to survive, the campaign must be their sole focus.
2. Money, or donors. Private or corporate, though corporations have more money and thus more influence.
3. Votes, or those votes which can be swayed using the money the politician has received from donors.

Do you see people anywhere in that list? Yes, money is donated by people, but it’s such a tiny number of people that it amounts to a statistical anomaly. And yes, votes come from people as well, but they are merely possessions that politicians attempt to buy using the currency of push-button issues and slick campaigns. It is a closed system: survive, to survive get votes, to get votes get money, to get money keep the donors happy. There is no room for real people and their concerns, needs, or everyday lives. Or, in the case of a national disaster of this scale with so many everyday people in mortal danger, their very lives themselves.

As this is my blog and not a debate, we’ll forgo any more rhetoric and accept that this is simply a truth. It’s a truth many people dismiss as pessimistic, which it is, but it’s still a truth. The larger part of the American people accept it — whether they can or bother to articulate it or not, they believe their vote doesn’t really matter.

I don’t have any platitudes about making a difference and voting or dying (though there were surely those in New Orleans who, had they voted, would be alive today) but I do have hope. I have the hope that if someone, or a group of someones, could get the American people to care, to raise their voices and express what’s on their minds, yell and scream about what’s on their minds, get ignant about what’s on their minds — if that could happen, it would amount to a bloodless revolution in this country. But before we have a revolution, we have to all agree that what we have now doesn’t work. In the face of what goes on in this country every day, not even considering the tragedy upon preventable tragedy we’ve seen recently, you’d think that would be the easy part. But here we are, predictably and tragically dividing along lines of race and poverty.

Continued refinements to the XPCalReplace widget. There’s a new background, and the fonts are fully configurable now. The new background is due to the fact that I’ve figured out how to use msconfig to “downgrade” the Windows XP interface to something more old school and slightly less hideous.