No more guns, ever

Most of the time police respond to a gun crime the shooter is long gone. I question the logic of being lethally armed as protecting police lives. What I'd like to see is an analysis of all of the situations in which police found themselves firing their weapons over the last say 30 years - how would a non-lethal like a taser have changed the situation? What is the practical net effect overall, all things considered (individual and societal psychology included)? Carrying a gun every day and everything that entails is what attracts many people to the police force, and I think it can be fairly hypothesized that such an initial distillation of character types primes the service for a certain brutish culture. You add to that the fact that police are keyed up from being exposed to life and death situations whenever they're out, and it's not surprising that you get the nervy cowboy effect we've been seeing with these unnecessary shootings and bullyings. The second amendment be damned, guns are technology that is ruining everything, not only should every single one of them be as illegal as a hand grenade, their manufacture needs to be severely curtailed. Other than how fun they are to shoot, there is nothing at all about guns that is good for civilian society. They are way too powerful and way too easy for young, immature people who don't know how to deal with overwhelming emotional problems to access. This is the only country where there are regular mass shootings of innocent people in public places, even little kids. We have to do something about it, we need to try some potential solutions.

Is it Ironic?

That one song comes up a lot as an example of the misuse of the word. Is it ironic? It could be with more context. Some of the lines need more context than others in order to qualify as ironic. I can't believe I'm about to do this when this lame song has been around for so long, but here goes. 

"An old man turned ninety-eight / He won the lottery and died the next day"

Yes, if he was struggling his whole life, no if not. In this case ‘turning 98’ is redundant to ‘died the next day’ - the point could be made equally since 98 year old people aren't really able to enjoy most things money can buy and it's a given that death is in the mail.

"It's a black fly in your Chardonnay"

Maybe with some convoluted context like it’s an exterminator celebrating a promotion to head exterminator or something.

"It's a death row pardon two minutes too late"

Maybe if the accused was known as the Punctual Killer or something like that.

"It's like rain on your weddin' day"

No, unless you’re experiencing a drought and decide at least you can get married without it getting rained out.

"It's a free ride when you've already paid"

Not by itself, though it’s primed for irony. You’d just need the extra detail like going out of your way to get payment for the ride (figuratively or literally).

It's the good advice that you just didn't take

By no means.

"Mr. Play It Safe was afraid to fly / He packed his suitcase and kissed his kids goodbye / He waited his whole damn life to take that flight / And as the plane crashed down he thought"

Sure. He didn’t fly all those years, all those planes probably didn’t crash. He finally does and it crashes. Irony.

"Well life has a funny way of sneakin' up on you / When you think everything's okay and everything's goin' right, right / And life has a funny way nobody helpin' you out when / You think everyhing's gone wrong and everything blows up in your face"

The key here is that it’s not ironic if everything is going a certain way and then there’s a 180 of fortune, it’s only ironic if you have every reason to believe that it will go a certain way and it goes the opposite way.

"A traffic jam when you're already late"

Nope.

"A no smoking sign on your cigarette break"

There’s enough suggested here to give this one to her. Like this well-earned break is symbolized by a cigarette you're allowed to take by those in authority, only to find some other authority disallowed it.

"It's like ten thousand spoons when all you need is a knife"

Not unless you threw away your knife in order to get all them spoons.

"It's meetin' the man of my dreams / And then meetin' his beautiful wife"

Convoluted context required again. I.e. ok if the wife turns out to be the person who convinced you to leave someone else because the man of dreams was so great.

Dumb Things in Otherwise Well-Regarded Movies 1.2

I really don’t understand why everybody made such a big deal about this stupid movie. It's gorgeous, and Javier Bardem is great, but it's a big ridiculous mess. Some point of reference: I thought Casino Royale was mostly pretty great and charming, and I agree with the rest of the world about how much Quantum of Solace sucked. In spite of it having a pretty cool title. So yes, this movie (which also has a pretty cool title) is full of dumb things. Such as:

• How the fuck do you blow up a building with the internet? We’re told that somebody “hacked into the system, disabled the security and turned on the gas.” OK. Let’s say the HVAC system in your super modern MI6 facility is networked for some reason. What would it physically take to make an actual gas leak happen? I'll have to check, but I don't think there's a setting for "release gas into the air" on my furnace. But I guess smart HVAC systems come equipped with a Wi-Fi enabled robot grabby stick ready to yank out gas lines. Just in case. 

You know, I bet that's why the fridge always freezes my bologna... 

• The identities of five secret agents embedded in terrorist groups get posted on youtube, with more reveals promised every week. M orders these five to be pulled out immediately, but three of them get assassinated. Even after that, she doesn't order the rest of them in, content instead to find out who's behind all this. I don't want to tell you how to do your job, M, but maybe we should have brought our people home, say, three months ago when the data containing their identities was stolen.

You're fired.

• Sylva wants an island so he makes everybody think there is a chemical spill with the internet. I guess nobody with chemical testing stuff bothered to check before completely abandoning all of everything forever.

• Hey, cosmonauts! Did you know that cyanide doesn't burn you? Nope, it just inhibits respiration. But I get that in keeping with the James Bond mythos they wanted some kind of hideous monster reveal for the villain, and they smartly figured that nobody would buy that agents get issued a hydrochloric acid tooth. For emergencies only!

Baby... Ruth!

• Why, oh why would you plug a hostile computer into your mainframe, or main networked computer system or whatever? Of COURSE it’s going to get hacked. Shit. Even my dog was like, Well, what did you think was going to happen? And he's a dog.

I think I fucked this up.

• Silva lets himself be caught so he can get close enough to exact revenge on M for giving him up to the Chinese. Q helpfully jams Silva's hack all the way up MI6's ass, unlocking his Hannibal Lecter cage so the two armed guards can watch through the glass while he casually approaches the unlocked door, opens it, steps out and kills them both.

I'm gonna get you guys!

• When and why did Silva plant a bomb in the tube like that? I'm just wondering what his plan was, since he seemed to use it specifically to cause a train to fall on Bond's head.

• Silva has his minions hand off a bobby uniform in the tube, then goes after M at her public hearing. He has no particular trouble doing this, by the way, in spite of the fact that this is a congregation with a British MP, among other presumably important people. But, why go to all this trouble if all you're going to do is barge into a public hearing and start shooting up the place? Couldn't he have done that at any point at all?

You're under arrest, sugar!

• HHokay. So Bond and M decide to lure Silva out into the open, and go out into the Scottish moors and get Q to leave an internet breadcrumb trail instead of firing him for being dumber than my dog. Fine. But take a day – take two! – to prepare before you activate your lure. You work for one of the most powerful governments on the planet. You can’t scare up a tank or two? Or even just call up a few friends, tell them to bring beer and sniper rifles. You can hang out on the rooftop and pick Silva’s men off a few at a time, stopping only to high-five one another until they’re all dead. Job well done, chaps!

Fuck you, awesome country mansion!

Power Tools

One day, my son

No one will remember 

That construction and lawn care tools were once ear-splitting

Head-cracking 

Usurpers of peace and quiet

Enemies of concentration

Befoulers of productive thought. 

Yes, the day will come

When the broom, perfected centuries ago

But long forgotten

Will take its hallowed place in the hands of the landscaper guy

Deposing the terrible reign of the angry

Screaming

Leaf blower. 

Stonecutters will whisper no more harshly than does the fur of a lion aprowl

Neatly, gently 

Slicing bricks and shoringstones

Into pleasing shapes

While colorful finches enjoy bright songs

In the nearby trees. 

Two-by-fours will segment 

Like so many pats of butter

The buzz of the circular saw nigh indistinguishable

From that of a bumblebee. 

Jackhammers like jackrabbits

Lawnmowers like breezes

Nail guns like girlish sneezes.

After Spending the Last 6 Months in Pajamas...

Some things I thought I'd share now that I've been back at work, commuting to Downtown Chicago every day. Some of this stuff may not be especially shocking to you, but after writing for 6 months in my pajamas with my cat planted firmly on my legs for hours at a time, it's pretty shocking to me.

This company (a high-end hotel chain) owns the entire building, which is a skyscraper. You have to pass through a metal detector, and you have to place your bags on a scanner thing, before being allowed into it. If you beep they politely scan your whole body with an illuminated golfball detector. I tried to walk through once with an empty bag, and even though it didn't set off the metal detector they stopped me anyway and made me go back put it through the scanner. This is, by the way, after you’ve already used your keycard to gain passage through the initial turnstiles. All of this security requires about 5 full-time security guards. It being the tail end of a ridiculously long winter, usually I arrive basically sealed into a suit of armor designed to protect me from the weather, the sun and public annoyances. Peeling all that apart is something of a chore that often results in my belongings dropped and kicked and skating across the floor. 

Once inside, there is another full-time security person whose only job is apparently to make sure nobody steals from or otherwise fucks with this tiny little quickie mart of the sort found in lots of building lobbies. She has to stand behind a wall that separates her from her colleagues screening out bombs etc., and so doesn't get to fraternize as they do, so she's especially bored-looking.

The lobby for this particular branch of the company is on the 12th floor -- the next 4 floors above are designed to provide this lobby with a 4-floor-high ceiling. The floors and furniture, and a little coffee and tv station, are all dark stained wood. The stairs and bannisters are all brushed steel and layers of greenish plate glass. There are bowls of real green apples everywhere that nobody eats. There is a bench to sit on while you wait for whatever. It's a huge tree split down the middle. On my third day I still didn't have a keycard, and they forgot all about me. I waited in this lobby four floors below by destination for 45 minutes until I finally sent an email to the only person for whom I had an email, and she came down just as the secretaries were starting to get suspicious of me.  

Initially I was bringing in my own laptop every day (not totally unusual for contract copywriter work). A few days after I started a cute girl came over and nervously provided me with a power cord for a laptop. I didn't actually get the laptop for another week and a half or so.

In order to get online here, everyone has to sign up for a temporary guest wifi account, providing a phone number to receive a text with a temporary password -- every single day.

If I want both coffee and water, I have to use a thermos with a handle for my water so I can carry both with one hand, because I need to use my other hand to both reach into my pocket to grab my keycard to swipe it at multiple doors, and then to open the doors, whenever I want to go anywhere.

In order to get to the kitchen I must pass through no fewer than four doors (up to 7 doors if I want to go to the bathroom first – the bathrooms have buffer areas (kind of nice)). The bathrooms are the most direct route to the kitchen. Otherwise I have to go wide past the elevators. Either way I have to beep through two separate doors.

The brand manager, one of two people working directly with me, looks so much like my sister that for the first few days I was consistently surprised when my sister's voice didn't come out of her mouth when she spoke to me.

The manager of the creative team speaks but doesn’t write fluent English. Much of my job is figuring out what she actually means.

Both of these people are so busy that I see them on average of once per day for five minutes for a quick update on everything that is happening, and all my email inquiries usually take between about an hour and a half to a full day to be replied to. This goes for feedback on drafts as well -- 80% of my day is waiting for feedback. I am writing this while waiting for feedback.

I was never actually asked to do what turned out to be the very most important thing I was hired to do, I just eventually figured out that it needed to be done. In fact, the information I was given would have led anyone to do something completely different than this. I’m sure (I think) if I hadn’t figured it out they eventually would have asked me to do it, but I know for a fact that one of the other copywriters was screwed over by a similar situation, failing epically, apparently.

On the second floor of the building there exists basically the best food court I've ever seen. I'm currently eating my way through their ridiculously vast, delicious menu. I had forgotten how much I liked taco salads.

I’ve been here for three weeks and I’m still bumping into people I swear I’ve never seen before in my life.

Scraping More Brain

There is ringing in my ears. It's deep, I can dig but I'll never reach it. It is always there. The discipline within reach for many physical endeavors may be a way to cope, but I will always know where to find it. Instead I would drown it with other noise.

Places that are known to be vile are taken as such by comparison of what is vile means but there are many forms of it. The one that arrives feels personal, and something to not be shared. What are not the crutches of the world are the pillars of the sky. Into the dark cold damp bowel where there are teeth and breaths that left time long ago. The rabbit remembers the breath as the foliage remembers the shrinking of the sun. 

What the brain is trained to grasp is what the brain craves, and in denying that the self resists fulfillment. Cracks that appear in the ice don't necessarily weaken its structure, at least in no practical way. 

Scraping the Brain

And still if there couldn't have been a fox, a grey charter set against a receding plane so fouled and cracked its resolution is not even a scent memory. You'll get in where everyone else did, and by your own design and wit. There could be something worth hearing in the song after all, you think, or worth predicting. If its that therer were colors that stood in for favors, scenes constructed by a mind for details as much as for impulse, five steps would be little less than the same for seven -- you dig in a meaning for it, a proof clapped against the row of blackboards a mile long, raining a gentle cloud of dust to the scotchguard carpeting.

Problems that get solved too quickly risk failing to instruct, as in fact the speed of it suggests either excessive resource or in the end a lack of a tangible problem at all. There are always windows, and through them it is always possible to draw enough information so as to begin to tell a story. Seeing in through the molecules that span the distance is the clearest way to reach in, to grab something with no particular degree of tangibility and trying to bring it somewhere with contours and gradients. Not allowed were any of the sounds so familiar to break through the typical, or the lessening drive to mold it or them, tracking context in order to graft them on to the mobile idea. Living in a particular way, softness must be answered with asceticism, deny the id if possible, punish the body when not. There is a brain somewhere that can track the elements, the character of the black line on the white field, so that pinching closed the book conjures a hologram of the soul.

Anything can be made a personal design, adopted, co-opted, aped, inspired, the merit is irrelevant in the shadow of its contribution. Does this bring minds to unsought conclusions? Does it add real estate to the realm of the imagination?

To whom to we address our inquiries regarding what should come next? Beacons posting playful messages in an otherwise shrouded atmosphere communicate at enhanced speeds. The chemicals mingle and produce results subtly differnt from the norm. Honor is described on old papers boxed in dusty corners. They should be read once and for all but they are merely there, occupying thought and with the intention that they'd rest as resources, being unwilling to trust the mind to do the proper work of storing with prioritized accessibility, instead that information will always be missed, lost and found again with pleasant surprise when furtive interest grants fractured elements of the whole to be absorbed before distractions cause it to be abandoned again. In this manner the collection of items containing information are hoarded. But there are always more items of information to be encountered, nor is there a need to glean every pixel from every line.

If we leave they will crush us. They will leave faster than flight. Areas of the mind once loyal to the ambitions of the body turn mutinous. And all that is left of the vessel will fall from the current and drift slowly to the cold black crushing deep.

The house was dry, yellow walls thickened by unknown decades of paint, each new tenant transfixed to the present by the control they exerted on it.