Monday, July 31, 2006

Greenpeace gone bad? Huh

My wife and I were watching "Without A Trace" on CBS last night. Interesting plot. Boy gets kidnapped. Parents are asked if they have any enemies. Dad: none that he knows of; Mom: lots of them. She is lobbyist for the petroleum industry. OK. That's a start. So have you been getting any threats, lately? Tons every day, she replies. Any violent environmentalist groups? Well, there is this one...

Awww, I hate it when you can so easily eliminate a suspect on these shows, not by any of the usual deductive methods that one would logically use if one were a real detective, but just from knowing how Hollywood works.

See, in the real world, such an extreme environmentalist group might actually be capable of such a horrific act. Trust me, I just read a whole bunch of responses to AlGore's Yahoo-Answers question. (Yeah, Gore, who I thought was soooo smart as to invent such things as the internet and time travel, doesn't even know how to keep the sun from fluctuating it's temperatures to stop this global warming trend that is going is going to kill us all tomor---









Ha gotcha. No, he posed a question online about how to best attack all us non-believers - presumably in a figurative way - and got a whole laundry list of mindless zombies, some of them quite aggravated at me.)

Anyway, I asked my wife what the chances were that this environmentalist group had anything to do with the boy's abduction. She just gave me that 'yeah, right!' look. So we then began speculating about who is actually going to get blamed for this and determined that it is either some right wing petroleum group trying to protect themselves since this lobbyist is probably actually going Benedict Arnold on them, or some business-type people upset with the minimum wage increase and the effects it will have on their roughnecks.

We were close. It turns out the Dad was going turncoat on his pharmaceuticals company, and that made some pro-business people (who of course must be wackier than any hey-dude-greenpeace wacko) very uncomfortable.

Suprise, suprise.

Thanks, Hollywood, for another unexpected twist!

Sunday, July 30, 2006

Impatient Hacker

Because I am too cheap to set up my own wireless network, I am forced to rely on the kindness of strangers. Most of them, however, have me locked out, and after about two... thousand random mixes of letters and numbers, I have yet to open one of them. However, one beautiful soul, whom I have never met, occasionally pops up on my list with an unlocked network. Kind of exciting. I don't know whether I should even be writing about this. I don't want Al Gore knocking on my door and giving me noogies with his burly beard and then lecturing me about my body heat melting the polar ice caps and wondering why I do not go into hibernation like the groundhog.

Having said all that nice stuff about this anonymous superhighway donor, I sure wish she (I think it's a she... Al, do you know?) would get a little more power. Jeez, it's like watching molasses grow (or grass in January, maybe)!

Saturday, July 29, 2006

Proletariat wins again!

Cool! We got a minimum wage increase! The economy is saved! And all is good in the world. The millions of parents who are still on their first job (you know the one they started at sixteen, and have never left, even though the only wage increases they have received in the last twenty years came from the government) can rejoice because now they can afford their rent. The government has felt their pain, and at long last has again forced those nasty business-type folks to give generously of their means to help their poor, exploited labor force. Of course, those poor folks won't be able to do anything more with their newfound wealth, since every store they buy from is also feeling generous and providing the same increase to their poor exploited laborer, and then kindly recouping their losses from their customers.

And those union guys can finally get that raise to bring them into the $65-$85 an hour range, since thier contracts are based on the minimum wage rates, and naturally they have really been struggling, what with raising 2.8 kids and having to pay an additional $20 each month of their own insurance. Now they can finally upgrade to the sparkly fishing boat with black specks in the carpet and get rid of that old trowler they have been shamefully forced to use for weekend recreation. Problem now is, do they strike over whether to be allowed to wear shorts to the company picnic at Six Flags, or over the more pressing matter of pushing for Fishing Days in addition to their Holidays, Sick Days, Vacation Days, Personal Days, Birthdays, Floating Holidays, Boss's Days, Union Employee Appreciation Days, and the monthly Company Picnic. If they're going to buy a boat, they at least deserve the courtesy and respect of the company to allow them time to use it.

Sadly, those of us who have not been paid minimum wage since junior high, yet have failed to securely latch onto the back end of the union bosses, find ourselves a few steps backward. After having worked for several years and earning our wage increases, and seeing our paychecks slowly reflect some contrast with the minimum wage, we have once again been slapped back down by those caring, feeling politicians. (Present company excluded, of course. I have been on a two week, unpaid vacation, waiting on my used-to-be-higher-than-minimum-wage job to start, after having recently moved the family here to Fayetteville.)

I shouldn't complain, though. I should rejoice. The Proletariate has scored yet another victory against those selfish bourgiousies. Go Proletariate. Yea, team! I guess, in a way, this has only brought more exclusivity to the work force. The logical argument is that a rise in the minimum wage will cut jobs, because now that a store owner has to pay an extra $2 an hour per employee, he can either raise his prices, or cut one employee for every four to make up the difference. (Or both) But he is not going to do that. No, he has a better idea. Now, he can pay less than he was paying originally by hiring illegal immigrants. In fact, he won't even have to pay their social security any more. (And you thought it was just that Americans were too good for those jobs.)

So here is the scenario. Almost all minimum wage jobs are held by teenagers, or adults who either can't hold a job long enough to get the raise after sixty days, or were teenagers just yesterday and are entering the workforce for the first time. Somehow, Congress is under the impression that those are the people who are supporting a family and deserve a raise (I guess they must have reviewed all those employee evaluation reports). Banking on all other economic factors remaining unchanged, they have mandated employers to give them more money. After an intense nationwide search, they have found the one person who actually was supporting a family on a minimum wage job, and can now claim to have championed the worker. Meanwhile, on the other side of our Southern Border, someone who really is supporting a family on less than a dollar a day is gearing up for a crossing, knowing that there are now millions more jobs in America offering eighty times more than what he was earning in Mehico.

Thanks, Congress! Check's in the mail! Shhhh....

Sunday, July 23, 2006

Hacking on Sunday

My wife took over the computer again this morning. She hadn't read her sunday school lesson yet, and since our ward drew the short straw and can't enter the building until 12:30 in the afternoon, she decided to study this morning.

Not wanting to be the only dummy who didn't read the lesson (never was a problem in our old ward), I was frantic about what to do. So I opened up the laptop and discovered that somebody had failed to secure their wireless connection. Curiously, I decided to see what it would be like to hook up (I'm too cheap to set up my own wireless). After prodding my computer (I guess it had a conscience) I got online, and promptly directed myself to lds.org to look for my lesson.

Now I'm wondering: is there irony in freeloading onto someone else's connection to study a sunday school lesson?

Thursday, July 06, 2006

Nu wae uv speling? I dunno

There is a movement to revamp the way we spell. It has been ongoing for a hundred years, endorsed by such people as Mark Twain and Teddy Roosevelt, who used simplified spelling in all his White House correspondence. I am not sure just how I feel about it.

I have always been pretty good about spelling. I made it all the way to my third grade spelling bee. But I got knocked out by 'sailor' which I spelled 'sailer' (which is an actual word, by the way, meaning something that sails). But after losing a demanded recount, I have recovered and become a sort of walking dictionary. My oldest daughter is, too. (I'll make sure she gets a fair shake at her spelling bee.)

But some people have a hard time with it. And that is why God (spelled G-o-r-e by some) invented the internet. Now, we can say 'wazzup' and 'lol' and spell innrnet a hunnert difrent wayz.

I guess there are several ways people learn. For me, suffixes and prefixes build upon the base of the word. It makes sense. I can better make out the meaning of a word by finding its root, and then deducing from the additions to it what its concept it. Phoenetic spellings would change all that. The argument is that children would learn to read faster. I am not so sure, in light of what I just mentioned. Children would have a harder time learning meanings. They would have to read out loud just to hear what the sentence is saying.

There is a comparison to Germanic languages, in which spelling more closely resembles the sound of a word. Having learned Norwegian, I understand where the argument is coming from. The problem with the argument is that Norwegian words can be 15-20 characters long, and consist of 4 or 5 words all lmushed together. And they evolved differently than English. They still use base words, which are kept whole in the word, and other words are added as suffixes and prefixes, or compounds. We could model after this, but to do so would require that we standardize the spellings of base words only. But we would still require a standardized way of adding to them.

We would still require some standardization of the language, otherwise we are left playing MadGab every time we sit down to read the paper or a fairy tale. "Wuns upon a tiem ther wuz a lidul gurl hoo woer a red hud. Shee wuz cald Lidul Red Rieding Hud." or "Subwae riedr sliesd in paer sa atak." Which brings up the other problem of local dialect. For example, is it "pak th ka at Havad skwae" or "pok th ko at Hovod skwe" or "park th kar at Harvrd skwer"? And when you build a shishkabob, do you skewr or skeur? Duz Santa's raendeer leev huf marks on th ruf, or huuf marks on the ruuf?

And then there is the graphic designer who should also be heard. There are some letter combinations that just will not go together, like "LJ" or "kd". So maybe we can design our new written vocabulary to accomadate the designer, as well.

Interestingly, to read some of the founders' writings, it becomes apparent that spelling was not really as important as the message. Apparently, it wasn't until the late nineteenth century that standardization was enforced, probably by some liberal who felt that government had to control everything.

It wouldn't really bother me to see some of our sounds reduced to fewer letters. 'C' is an almost useless letter, as is 'Q'. Except you would still use 'c' for the 'ch' sound.

Perhaps th bigst advantej iz thet it wud keep reedrz frum faling asleep in th midul uv a blog. It wud be liek plaeyeeng a gaem.

Hav urself a gud dae, y'all!

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