The joy of OS resets

While I watch Windows 8 play funny games with my ancient laptop PC, here’s another in the series of “The More Things Change…,” brought to you by the cartoonists of Punch magazine — Vital Discussion, circa 1961.09.20:

Classmates/neighbours in office

Political news of the day:

I saw where one of my wife’s secondary school classmates, “Nobody doesn’t like” Sarah Lee Davis, was elected in yesterday’s election at Hawkins County, Tennessee, to the office of Clerk of Courts.  In addition, according to the Kingsport Times-News, another of my wife’s classmates, Hannah Boyd Bell, a former member of Reagan’s West (or was it East?) Wing staff, has a brother, Daniel Boyd, who was also elected uncontested to the Hawkins County Juvenile Court judge seat, receiving 5,189 votes.  I didn’t even know he was running.

More from Davis:

Davis said the first person to sign her candidate petition for clerk of courts was her father, Jackie Lee, who passed away five days later on Sept. 15. Davis, who received 3,932 votes ahead of Cradic’s 2,966, said she dedicates the victory to her father, who gave her the confidence to run for the clerk of courts office.

“I took the petition to him and he signed it, and he told me that when I started work there he told his wife that I would have that office someday,” Davis said. “He looked at me and he said, ‘I have all the faith in the world in you, and you will run that office someday.’ And I’m going to get that chance thanks to my dad for having more faith in me than I did myself. He was really my driving force, and that’s what carried me through it.”

Davis said she attributes the victory to hard work.

“I went door to door, and I didn’t buy one advertisement in the newspaper because I felt like I was asking the people of Hawkins County for a job, and when you ask someone for a job you do it face to face,” Davis added. “I would say I’m here for my job interview because I’m asking you for a job.”

When Davis takes over in September, she said her number one priority will be doubling collections. She also plans to cross-train every deputy clerk to do every job in the office so they can provide better customer service, and she intends to improve public relations.

. . .

Voter turnout for Tuesday’s election in Hawkins County was 7,985 out of the county’s 35,017 eligible voters, or 22.8 percent. As for partisan turnout there were 7,606 Republican votes cast and 379 Democratic votes cast.

A reader asks…

A reader asked, when calculating departure and arrival times between two undisclosed locations in Iran and India, why are the time zones only a half-hour apart?

Good question.

Here are some answers for your reading enjoyment (truth/fact verification is up to the reader):

  1. Only the Swiss can make perfect timekeepers so the rest of the world’s clocks have drifted with time.
  2. The Iranian nuclear research programme has been going on longer than we thought and messed up many atomic clocks in the Middle East.  Same for India and its clock-based relationship to Pakistan, Nepal and the rest of the world.
  3. The Einsteinian gravitational wave spacetime field bending theory never really caught on in certain parts of the globe and thus seems to have a weaker effect there.
  4. There are many nations that opt to follow a different time zone than is common elsewhere. Some locations opt to observe times that are less than a full hour off of neighbouring time zones — Nepal for example is a quarter hour off India, which is a half hour off the normal pattern. Nepal does not recognise summer time and never alters the clock during the year. The abnormal time zone settings are not limited to Asia — the State of South Australia, for example, opts to use a half-hour time zone rather than a full hour. [Read more: Why is India, Nepal, Iran, and Kabul thirty minutes off of the rest of the world’s time? Ex. It’s 7:18 pm in Houston Texas, 1:18 am tomorrow in London, 7:18 am tomorrow in Bangkok, 10:18 am tomorrow in Sydney, and 4:48 am in Kabul. 4:48. Why 30 min diff? | Answerbag http://www.answerbag.com/q_view/909906#ixzz1oTCYg64d]
  5. The Chavez Rule: It’s my country and I’ll do what I want to distinguish my people’s proper sense of time from yours.
  6. Forget about me.  Ask you average basement geographer.
If that doesn’t answer your question, nothing will because, quite honestly, time is irrelevant in this day and age of GPS where we can precisely tell you what time it should be in relation to your geographical location and the position of Sun/Moon/stars.  Hey, you astrologers, step away from this blog entry very slowly, hands in the air — you’re not needed here to answer this question.

When an artificial hand cuts off your finger…

Wow!  Now I know what it means when the right hand doesn’t know what the left hand is doing.

I was tweaking some code in the Arduino servo subroutine to pull a thumb and forefinger together, totally missing the fact that the artificial hand had decided to pick up an X-ACTO knife on its own initiative.

Well, you can guess what happened.  I’m using my one-handed keyboard from Matias to complete this blog entry.

As soon as my iPad 3 arrives, I’ll download the half-keybd app to write the next blog entry while my scientists regrow a pinky finger for me, with nearly identical prints to the one that’s no longer attached.

But now is not the time to count the number of confessed Democrats who switched sides and voted for Rick Santorum in the Tennessee election yesterday, led by famed anarchist XYZipper, a part-time paid volunteer for pharmaceutical test labs, whose intake of every failed drug has turned the anarchist into a genderless zombie unable to feel sympathy and thus willing to vote willynilly, as the wind blows or the politicos crow.

I exchanged texts with him earlier this morning:

ME: Yo, it’s me.

XYZipper: Yo, me. is it really me or are you someone else?

ME: It’s me.

X: Whoaa…i’m tawking to myself again.

ME: Maybe. Say, you voted yesterday?

X: I did?

ME: That’s what local news outlets reported.

X: Kewl. What does voted meen?

ME: You got in line with people and selected names on a ballot.

X: Oh, yeah.  Did i win?

ME: Win?

X: Yeah, that was lottery ticket, right?  Powerball’s up to $300 m, ain’t it?

ME: A lottery to some, not you.

X: I didn’t win?

ME: No.

X: So thinking I selek names insted of numbers don’t werk in the lotto?

ME: No.

X: Bummer.  Hey, u wanna score some weed?  I gotta pay rent.

ME: No thx.  CU later.

X: Bye.

What can I say that XYZipper didn’t say already?  With his mohawk haircut and totally tattooed body, he could probably win any number of elections, except where adverts blast the airwaves with “I’m more conservative than myself.”

Gotta go.  The scientists have rigged my solar-powered pinky with a laser cutter and ad-hoc wireless hub that I requested.  Let’s see if it fits!

A Valentine’s Card missed in the post…err, the misty past, that is

Wouldn’t you know that Putin is all teared up, laughing at the gullibility of the international press?

Besides, give or take a few countries…say, Greece for Syria and Turkey for May Day, the following Punch cartoon, posted around the 11th of February 1948, is about the same from one leader-for-life to the next:

A Moment of Silence

With all the bloodshed attributable to our species’ members deciding to fight and kill each other, there’s another type of tragedy that takes its toll — tornadoes.

Our heartfelt moment of silence goes out to the recent victims of tornado-y storm damage in the eastern half of the United States recently, including this one, with “before” and “after” images to give you an idea how quickly a peaceful lifestyle can end — swoosh!:

Rumour has it that tomorrow will also be a day of mourning for UT (Univ. of Tennessee) football fans who supported the Indianapolis Colts because of Peyton Manning, with charity clothing stores receiving a sudden influx of light-blue hats, jerseys and other memorabilia emblazoned with a white horseshoe.

We apologise to tourists passing through the states of Tennessee and Indiana, confusing flags flying at half staff, thinking it’s for tornado victims when, curiously, it’s just as likely to be for the loss of a football player’s loyal career at one professional team.

Such is the life of our species, finding hope in the midst of tragedy, wishing a sports figure would give them a glimmer of his former glory and/or a portion of his fortune to help rebuild houses of fans with no homeowners insurance.

As far as Syria goes…well, its fate lies in the hands of people who have just finished getting re-elected for at least six more years, are about to be put in charge for ten years or hope to get re-elected for four years.  Some hands belong to families that rule for life after life after life (and maybe the afterlife?).

Meaning, of course, that the people of Syria are pawns, if not pwnd, in a global gamble for strategic geographic control and international influence.

Guess I’ll become mortal, play with this copy of Windows 8 Consumer Preview, Evaluation Copy [Build 8250], Adobe Reader X (ver 10.1.2), Mozilla Firefox (ver. 10.0.2) and feed healthy levels of stimulants to my programmers to speed up people’s acceptance of direct supercomputer connections to their bodies so I can more easily “convince” our species to pour their efforts into exploring the solar system.

Most of you know what that means — lowering your standards of living, starving many of you, and allocating precious resources for more important matters than whatever it is you think you’re doing to reach self-actualisation physically while, instead, reaching self-actualisation virtually, a much less costly and more efficient means to achieve the Committee’s ultimate goals, which I have sworn an oath not to mention at this time.

If someone like me, who believes in unencumbered free will, swears an oath of loyalty, not quite fealty (certainly not quiet [sic] realty), you know what we’ve got planned for a milestone in 13940 days, to ensure events in 3011 take place without a hitch, must be important.

On a quantum scale, at the very least.

We’ll continue to use the sleight-of-hand tricks of comedy to slip messages into punchlines that keep all seven billion of us living our lives the way they’re supposed to be lived, often on emotional roller coasters.

Adding scientific achievements, popular culture trademarks, sports awards, and government public business secret agendas, along the way or via the Via Latina at times, notwithstanding contributions from the alleged authors of famous utterances.

How does parenting affect future adults?

Ahh…the parody, of the day, if not a lifetime: “Daddy didn’t hug me” photo series.

And a look back at military humour, just to show the progress of time is an illusion:

Like Jackie Gleason said, “Ten million comedians out of work and I’ve got to compete against the absurdity of politicians to get quality air time!  Who’s gonna think I’m funny after listening to them?”

A nod to humour everywhere, including Cairo.

Maybe a little ancient air-conditioning will cool off international tensions.

Back to raising the next crop of hackers to keep our species honest, whatever that means.

International Women’s Day

Most days, my agenda is filled with evaluating rocket fin designs or applying “think outside the fuselage” reasoning to assess the most cost-effective means of advancing our planetary lifeforms outward into the galaxy.

I pay advisors to tell me where to put my investments to give our group the most play money for building outer space travel toys.

In a few days, I’ll spend a few minutes with half my staff to evaluate any discrepancies we have concerning gender-neutral compensation.

We have a wide variety of people involved in running the organisation smoothly, from the least socially aware to the most brash, politically incorrect loudmouths.

Hey, when you manage seven billion people, the variations are nearly endless.

But not nearly enough.

Every other year, I ask one gender and then the other to review our employee policies and practices.

Because our subcultures are sometimes incompatible, I ask the people whose beliefs are separated the most from one another to meet and talk.

During these meetings, our supercomputers are listening, increasing the resolution of their intuition algorithms substantially.

Then, a panel composed of people and supercomputers is asked to evaluate the meet-and-greet session, resulting in a summary report that is sent out to all subcultures in formats they believe represent a view from their specific subcultural perspective.

I assign one of the Committee’s subcommittee ad hoc teams to rate the effectiveness of the absorption of every report into individual subcultures.

The reports with the lowest effectiveness score are sent to a new meet-and-greet team for discussion, which is, again, overheard by our supercomputers for error detection algorithm correction and fed into intuition algorithm automatic reprogramming routines.

In this week’s yearly event called International Women’s Day, we’ll ask the female gender to pull two “opposite” subcultures together for one of the meetings — female leaders of the porn industry, such as Lux Alptraum, and female adherents of celibate life, such as members of the Focolare Movement.

Because no two people are exactly alike, we prepare the participants, asking them to listen with respect, disagree passionately, do not compromise simply to avoid conflict, and find common ground that excludes the fact we are of the same species.

We expect members of the same subculture to share discordant opinions amongst themselves, let alone with people outside the subculture.

The Committee wants progress, even if movement in one direction appears to go backwards.

After all, the larger goal of culling the species for nearly ideal representatives to colonise and breed on nonEarth premises requires both conventional and nonconventional processes.

We need people who…sorry, sets of states of energy that can adapt and survive in the harshest conditions possible for what we’ll call living beings at this moment.

After a while, offworld colonists will no longer work to complete tasks assigned from Earth.

In the changes of the colonists’ agenda from external goals to local goals as the years pass, including reactions to adverse ambient environmental changes, the Committee wants to ensure our representatives will thrive.

As the current reluctant leader, my goal is to ensure the representatives can hold individual viewpoints that will adapt and grow together, even if the people pull apart, philosophically speaking, as all current models predict is inevitable.

The Committee advocates no specific subcultural belief.

We only believe in the capacity of our species to advance life out of the solar system while we have the means and window of opportunity to do so, holding to the basic philosophy of “leave the planet in better condition than when we got it” that each successive generation is taught.

We avoid words like mission or vision because we aren’t corporate entities that have to justify our existence although most of us depend on corporate entities interacting with each other to expand our budgetary constraints.

We make mistakes.  People will and must die to accomplish some of our major goals, and many will die accidentally.

All seven billion of us will die eventually but we empathise with those who feel individual losses, anyway.

However, at a global scale, we barely sympathise, partially composed, as we’ve told you, of supercomputers that are just learning to develop intuition algorithms and getting closer to acting like us on general subcultural levels that tend to gloss over the death of individuals, except those designated to represent the best or worst of us (e.g., ruthless dictators, popular entertainers, babies who died tragically, etc.), which the supercomputers simply assign as data points that may or may not designate significant changes to the subculture and are used as triggers for recording the conditions of the subcultural data sets for later comparison.

We hope you look forward to subcultural interaction reports containing gender-based information coming to a comfortable subcultural outlet near you, if you can recognise when we send them out and what they are.

An Incompetent Education

In case you missed it, the Association of Comglomerates announced today that, going forward, all newhires at any organisation — corporation, sports team, quilting club, stamp collectors, etc. — must sit through a viewing of the film, “About Schmidt,” and then write an essay about why life must go on despite one’s useless Sisyphean effort to make a difference.

As an alternative, one may appear in “Death of a Salesman” or interview a person standing on a bridge about to commit suicide.

Major universities around the world are contemplating adding curriculum as the capstone course to all university degree programs.

Card-losing members of Apathetics, Anonymous, are confused about the situation — why the fuss?

Nihilists are rejoicing that they’ve won the day and will announce the proclamation of “The World is Nothing Day” during this evening’s news broadcast.

The World Trade Organisation has refused to admit defeat and will continue to closely cooperate with financial institutions to put everyone and every institution under heavy loads of debt, thereby confirming the futility of life unknowingly.

Fortunate Drawers

Sitting here in a café in a small Turkmenistan town, watching caravan after caravan go by (what you Americans might call tractor-trailer rigs), smelling jet fuel and gunpowder, I figure this is part of the forward base action I was expected to report to my superiours in a conference call later this afternoon.

At first, I complained about this satellite phone, looking like a geek at a debutante party, or rather the rich geek father depositing his little princess at her coming-out party (and yes, you can take that for all it’s worth, these days).

But looking at those guys across the street cradling their smartphones covered with acronyms trying to get a good signal, I say being the sore thumb at an M.C. Hammer hardware store is a good thing, for once.

Besides, I’ve got a friend who carries her lucky knickers just for me.

And I’ve got another friend, El Presidente, who thinks about nothing but al Qaeda and schooling in Sunday afternoon football smackdowns to keep my thoughts warm at night, too.

I wasn’t always like this, sipping stale coffee, spreading badly-worded rumours from underpaid government copywriters, but then maybe I was…we just called it primary school back then.

That’s okay.  It beats sitting at home, not making any money there, either, watching the television news or surfing the Internet for useless tidbits like every other secret organisation in the “business.”

Where was I?  Oh yeah, spiking my coffee with homemade hooch.

You see, in the hinterlands of the former Soviet Union, radioactive material is as easy to get as rabies from the raccoons I used to…well, let’s not go into boring details at this juncture in the punctuated story.

But hey, when a guy gets lonely…never mind.

Anyway, I was sitting on a crate of rotten eggs, unable to distinguish the smell of my ripe, unwashed body from that of chickens that’ll never live to see the light of day reflecting off a machete swinging toward their heads, when it hit me.

The kid down the street, always pestering me to call a tobacco shoppe down the street from his cousin in London and asking if they have Princess Edward in a can, looked at this blog I was texting with my calloused thumbs (calloused, mind you, from texting — what else did you think caused the callousness?  I mean, calloused hands.).

He asked if I had a more interesting writing style, after he’d thrown the uranium/plutonium ball at my noggin.

Hey, that reminds me.  Maybe I’ve got a gold mine at my feet.  Either that, or the pyrite the panhandler pretended to think was gold and sold it only to me, his best friend in the whole wide world, if not the block in which we both live, at a bargain basement we were using to brew the hooch I give out to unsuspecting tourists before I remove their overweight wallets.

Seriously, what have I got that you don’t?

All this nuclear fissable material.  No, that’s the Coke gurgling in my stomach that’s fissable.

It’s the fissionable stuff I’m dreaming about right now.

You see where I’m going with this, don’t you?

Yeah, you know it.  Re-activating Project Orion.

We’ll just declare Turkmenistan off-limits and use it to launch the Mars mission my fellow members of the Committee are dreaming with me.

We’ll rename the country ChernobylTwo or something like that.

We can put this whole “war” to contain nuclear proliferation to a rest and just keep starving the Iranian people to death while their leaders bask in the personal glory of the sacrifice of their people to show them old episodes of “Who’s The Boss?

Can you think of worse torture than that?

Rumour has it the last thing that Andrew World’s-worst-job-as-overpaid-angry-man Breitbart saw before his heart acted up was Alyssa Milano pretending to act.

Let that be a lesson to you, kids.  Don’t get your hopes up.  And further more, don’t listen to a word your clueless parents have to say.  They were terrible students in school and the only reason they’re doing well is that their bosses were even worse so the whole adult scheme is to pretend that everyone is smarter than they really are.

Of course, you kids have no clue what I’m talking about because, as we’re supposed to know, genetic research proves that our species has actually gotten worse, our purity as animals watered down with talks about backyard BBQ parties, easy-to-hack security alarm systems and other ways we deny we’re overdressed members of the fight-or-flight club.

Almost time for the conference call.

Go back to looking at your cute kitten videos and sports scores.

I’ve got a nuclear bomb powered rocketship to promote!