Posted 12:29 PM by Floyd

Via Jeff Jarvis I found out that Germany has a unique excuse for not forgiving Iraqi debts:

Paul Wolfowitz, the deputy defense secretary of the United States, has asked Germany, France and Russia to forgive debt to Iraq totaling around EUR20 billion ($21.8 billion), of which it owes Germany EUR4 billion. But the German chancellery remained tight-lipped, saying only that the United Nations was in charge of forgiving debt.

So if you're a government and you forgive a debt to another nation, the UN will step in and debate the issue, then pass a resolution telling you to stop? And if you fail to collect, they pass sanctions on you?

Supposedly there have been a lot of stupid people in Washington. George Bush can't talk, and John Ashcroft covers classical statues of naked women when he gives press conferences, and Tom Ridge is trying out for a Cosmo gig as a color and hues columnist. Two administrations back we had a vice president who wasn't very good at spelling vegetables. Has any of these people ever said, as an official response to an important foreign policy question, anything as can't-tell-your-ass-from-a-hole-in-the-ground dumb as "we can't forgive the debt because the United Nations is in charge of that"?!

Posted 4:35 PM by Floyd

Best opening lines of a blog post ever:

Goodie. President Bush is coming to St. Louis on Wednesday. I bet the fascists make me wear pants.

Posted 3:24 PM by Floyd

Today's San Jose Mercury News had an article on the "18 Mighty Mountain Men" with the subhead "Asian-American troupe skewers stereotypes." The first line of this effusive article was "When it comes to satire, the 18 Mighty Mountain Warriors take no prisoners."

Naturally, what this really means is that the Warriors are not at all daring or scandalous, and are bound by political correctness like a magnet dropped on a metal floor. But don't take my word for it; here's more information from the article that describes the Mighty Mountain Warriors in action:

The running theme in this show is outrageousness. Epicanthic eye folds, ``Miss Saigon'' icon Lea Salonga, the historical animosity between Korea and Japan . . . no subject is off-limits.

...

Still, some theatergoers think the troupe goes too far. At a recent production in Los Angeles, objections were raised during a sketch about the 2002 World Cup, in which a Korean and a Japanese soccer player started hurling insults at each other -- turning politics, history and racism into punch lines.

I wonder if the reporter who wrote this article has ever listened to radio or watched a sitcom or a movie. I imagine her hearing that Howard Stern had been fined a million bucks and thinking to herself, "He must have done a monologue on Japanese-Korean tensions."

Americans stereotype Asians as being meek, polite, and inoffensive. Bragging that you are crossing boundaries by making jokes about epicanthic eye folds is hardly a good way to dispell that caricature.

Posted 10:25 PM by Floyd

It's been a long time since I've blogrolled anyone. Here are two blogs worthy of your attention:

Evan Kirchhoff writes about various political and technology topics at 101-280.com. Here is a classic essay lauded by Colby Cosh; note the wonderful turn of phrase at the finish line:

To summarize: Amis writes a book in 2002 attacking intellectuals for giving Stalin a pass. Less than a year later, the world confronts a real, live, breathing (at least until last Thursday), self-professed emulator of Stalin, except this time with the atrocities available in many convenient media formats, including some in full color. You'd think that Amis, self-assigned avenger of the Soviet dead, would be in his element here. But Amis's intellectual response apparently boils down to a three-part case: (i) Christians are dumb; (ii) Americans are dumb; (iii) American Christians are really damned dumb. If there's a position on the war in there, I missed it.

...

The bottom line for Amis seems to be that, sure, there might be a certain amount of horrifying torture and genocide going on over there, but on the other hand this needs to be weighed against the possibility of looking like a rube. In other words: even writing a book-length expose on the peer pressure of intellectuals is insufficient immunization against the peer pressure of intellectuals.

Jeff Jarvis is a TV critic, editor, and columnist. He publishes a blog called BuzzMachine that is well worth your time. Lately it's been two for the price of one as Jarvis has attracted a trolling commenter named Puce. Puce appears to be a European with practically no understanding of English spelling or grammar; his understanding of rational argument is even more limited. Here are some classic Puce posts (some of which came from A Small Victory):

Geneva Convantion make USA soldier of angry, kill babie and the TV reporter!

Tobey Keith make boot from cowsboy as in to boot of Hitlers!

Shut up George Bucher! You are Bush as much in Bush type, stop all war NOW

Keep away George Bush, can having not American all kill childs and starting Pizza Hutts!

It as what vasili to saying! Why all of American want Kentacky Fry Chicken in Baghdad? Make statue fallen, is not a way to have!

Typacal USA sayings! Eat more food with shoot gun!

I as makes all USA ladies for my harem. Smash all capatilist Starbock and Mountian Do.

Posted 1:23 PM by Floyd

This morning at work we had a demo of Borland's development environment (Together, JBuilder, etc.). The first PowerPoint had Borland's motto: "Excellence Endures."

Now that's a sad little slogan. "We were hemorrhaging employees and money before you even thought about creating a startup and taking it public and advertising on the Super Bowl and being delisted. But we'll still here!"

Posted 8:53 AM by Floyd

The almanac I used to research my previous post is a 1999 New York Times Alamanac. Like any almanac, it has a section listing information about the fifty states. The format is a few paragraphs on the history of the state and its outstanding features, followed by a list of major cities and some statistics. Here is the description of North Dakota:

The first prominent settlers in North Dakota were Scots-Canadians who settled at Pembina on the Red River near the Canadian border, and who traded primarily with Winnipeg and St. Paul. The arrival of the Northern Pacific Railway in 1872 created a surge of huge farms, many of which were wiped out by drought and harsh winters in the 1880s. There followed a huge influx of Norwegians and Germans whose influence is still very apparent today. North Dakota's economy is heavily agricultural and leads the nation in production of wheat. Farming is centered in the fertile Red River of the North valley, with livestock throughout the rest of the state.

This is a good, concise history and description. Now what do you think the entry for California would look like? If I were writing it I would start with the Spanish and Mexican colonial history, describe the gold rush, then close with a few cliched references to beautiful weather, beaches, earthquakes, Hollywood, and Silicon Valley.

But this is the New York Times Almanac, remember, with its own peculiar prejudices. Here is the actual entry for California:

Before the arrival of Europeans, no area of comparable size in North America was home to a greater variety of languages and cultures than what is now California, and today the state's population is more diverse than that of any other. Some demographers expect that within 50 years more than 40 percent of California's population will be of Hispanic origin, a larger proportion than at any time since before the Gold Rush of 1849. But the trend toward a two-tiered society is also increasing, with Caucasians and Asians on top and African-Americans and Hispanics on the bottom.

The largest state by population since the 1960's, California gained seven additional representatives in Congress as a result of the 1990 census, for a total of 52. By some estimates, California is the sixth largest economic power in the world.

Despite these attractions, and the state's rugged terrain and dramatic vistas, California has problems. The state's position as a leader of agriculture masks an alarming lack of water. It alreader draws off 4.4 million acre-feet from the Colorado river, mostly for irrigating the Imperial Valley -- a desert when settlers crossed it 150 years ago. Almost the entire flow of the San Joaquin River is similarly diverted for the Central Valley. This inefficient use of water leaves less and less for consumption by people, whose numbers have leaped from 15 million in 1960 to over 32 million today.

Of more immediate concern is the threat of earthquakes. California has already suffered eight major earthquakes in this century. The 1906 quake destroyed San Francisco, and the Loma Prieta earthquake on October 17, 1989 -- one of the most powerful quakes in U.S. history -- killed 67 people, left 48,000 people homeless and resulted in $10 billion of property damage. Like surfers waiting for the perfect wave, scientists are still bracing for the "big one".

Hello? Movies, beaches, computers? Hello?

Posted 10:45 PM by Floyd

Evan Kirchhoff has an excellent blog called www.101-280.com. I don't know if the name is because he lives near the confluence of those freeways in San Francisco, or because he lives between those freeways somewhere in the Peninsula. (Based on those criteria I could register domain names for 35-84 or 1-280.)

Kirchhoff had an entry a week ago in which he lamented that

... the North Dakota Senate has declared my lifestyle illegal ...

I thought of Akbar telling Jeff "I hate it when you use the word 'lifestyle'". But apparently the Peace Garden State (distance from hand to almanac: 30 inches) has banned not homosexuality, but cohabitation. Kirchhoff did some Googling and found some other legislative silliness originating from Bismarck (stupidly had to make second trip to almanac: true).

One gem that he did not list came to me while I was idly thumbing through Northwest's in-flight magazine. They profiled some North Dakota pol who proudly mentioned that North Dakota prohibits the sale of any small farm to a larger conglomerate. This sounds populist but is actually a disaster for Dakota farmers; if you cannot make a living on your farm, you can sell your land only to some other sucker willing to have a try at ekeing out a subsistence living.

Evan said that North Dakota is "bent on combining the most intrusive features of California, Europe and Singapore." Add to that list the planned economy of fourth-century Rome, where people were fixed in their professions and could not leave them even if they were going bankrupt.

Posted 9:51 AM by Floyd

In a Usenet post yesterday, James Donald had a new slur for the anti-war movement:

These people are in love with successful cruelty and violence, like those women who marry death row convicts.