The Internet Peasant

Steak Demands It

2008-07-29T08:48:00.002-05:00

Steak over at Steak Rules demanded that I update my blog.

So consider it updated, with this picture:

Placeholder

2008-01-31T13:56:00.000-05:00

I don't have anything terribly interesting to blog about, but it's been a little while. So here's some pictures for your consideration:

Addendum to Your Inner Teenager

2008-01-24T16:16:00.000-05:00

A quick update regarding nostalgia and its effects on quality:

One thing that I'm amazed by is the fact that Disney cartoons are amazingly consistent in this regard. Say what you want about Disney's efforts during certain eras of cartoonery, but each of their full-length cartoons is as good now as it ever was, with very little degradation resulting from adult hindsight. This is amazing when you consider how many films are in the Disney animated stable.

Of course the same holds true for the studio's more mediocre efforts -- Pocahontas, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, and Oliver and Company will always be the weak sisters of Beauty and the Beast and Aladdin. And the live action Disney films are all over the place; they don't seem to carry whatever Disney magic provides immunity to the animated fare.

Of course some adults may not want to let others know that they still watch Treasure Planet a few times a year. But social embarrassment is obviously not the same thing as personal opinions of quality. And, you know, that's just one more great thing about having kids. Chances are favorite movies from your own childhood will pop up pretty regularly, without you having to suggest it.

One more thing to note -- so far, Disney's genius offspring, Pixar, has yet to make a single misstep. Sure, Cars and A Bug's Life may not be the same caliber as Finding Nemo or Toy Story, but they're all damn good movies. Pixar studios started with Disney, then split, and now have come back under the umbrella, but all that moving around hasn't changed the high quality of their story-telling or animation. So far it looks like the magic's rubbed off on them, too.

Someone in the Editing Department Wasn't Paying Attention

2008-01-22T16:59:00.000-05:00

You know those catalogs you get in the mail around the holidays? They have names like "Collections and Such", and "What the Heck?" and "All Things Cheap and Resin". They offer homey knickknacks, personalized T-shirts with cliche slogans, specially-themed Monopoly games and Christmas ornaments, and just about anything else you can think of that can be made in China for less than $0.15 and sold to middle-aged women trying to find "good gifts" for their daughters-in-law.

We get these catalogs in our mailbox pretty regularly, and to be fair, there's occasionally a good deal or two on something worth having. But this is not one of those things:

I don't know what they called it, but I call it "Bad Indians". And I bet it got someone in trouble.

Your Inner Teenager

2008-01-21T14:49:00.001-05:00

Sometimes people talk about getting in touch with their "inner child". The rest of us scorn those people, and for good reason.

But even those fruit loops never talk about getting in touch with your inner teenager. I never really thought about it before, but you have to wonder why not. Is it because, as adults, some of us still act or think like we did at that age? Are so many of us still alternately naive and too knowing, arrogant and extremely insecure, selfish and generous? Maybe.

And its true that many people do want to return to what they imagined their teenage years to be. But those people are delusional.

The rest of us, upon reflection, remember thinking things were cool when they so obviously aren't, and weren't. Of doing things that were not just incredibly stupid, but unfulfilling and unrewarding even at the time. Of liking things that, upon coming back to them in our adult years, are not anywhere near as likable as we remember. It's something I call the "False Nostalgia Effect", as opposed to the regular "Nostalgia Effect".

I think we are all familiar with both these conditions: the latter is where we continue to fondly remember things that are basically good, but for which there's no reason other than nostalgia to like them now as much as we do. Whereas the former is when we look forward to revisiting something we were fond of, only to experience it again and wonder what the hell we were thinking.

Many things I go back to years later obviously fit in one category or the other. I find new good in a thing I didn't see before, and while I may not enjoy it in the same way, I enjoy it just as much. Or I clearly see through the false veneer of whatever attracted me to a thing in the first place, and cast it off, perhaps dejectedly, as something no longer to be admired or enjoyed. This can't be done without leaving at least a little hole in the heart, but the sheer obnoxious wrongness of the thing helps you to cope.

Sometimes though, things fall into a weird middle category. There's at least a glimmer left of what attracted you in the first place, but your "good taste" vision has become sharper over the years, and the rough edges of the thing have come into sharp focus. No longer can the thing be simply enjoyed, even in private. Something inside won't let you make the convenient excuses people typically make at this point: "just lighten up," or "it's a part of your childhood", or "stop being so serious and just enjoy it". It's almost bad enough that you want to wash your hands of the thing completely.

But it's not that easy. Somehow, despite all the embarrassment the mere memory of liking this thing has caused you, total repudiation is out of reach. It's not quite bad enough, not quite wrong enough, to toss out that small part of you that was still innocent in your teenage years. The part of you left over from that vaunted childhood outlook, trying hard not to die out completely in the brutal world of the American teenager. The part of you that could like a thing for itself, regardless of its objective qualities.

As an adult that part of you, if it survived, is still valuable. Maybe even more than it used to be. You realize that anything attached to it strongly enough will always live in your heart, no matter how cringe-inducing, no matter how lackluster, or how truly awful. You accept that you are forever chained to bad taste, because you used to be a long time ago, and at least a small part of you is still the same. And you will always be stuck with it, and everything attached to it.

Damn you, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie. Damn you.

Book Keeping

2008-01-19T12:44:00.000-05:00

Is that right? Or is it supposed to be one word, like "bookkeeping"? Or "bookeeping", with only one L? I could look it up, but lately I've noticed that the ability to look up anything at any time has effected (or is it "affected"?) my memory in much the same way a calculator dampens the math skills of a 6th grader. Meaning, since I don't use my brain for it, I've slowly become dependent on the machine.

As a result, my ability to recall facts without electronic help is dwindling. It's not bad yet, but noticeable enough to make me consider deleting my bookmarks for wikipedia and dictionary.com

And once they're erased from my computer, I won't remember them.

Anyway, to business -- some of the links have been updated. I may add more later, but for now everything should take you where it says it will.

Conquer Club

2008-01-18T21:28:00.001-05:00

Unbelievably, I'm back on the very same day as a previous post, this time to bring to your attention a new link in the aptly named "Other Stuff" category. It's to a site called Conquer Club, and for the strategy-minded, it's an exceptionally great way to waste a few minutes at a time without having to make a major commitment.

The idea is, take the classic board game RISK, change the rules ever so slightly, add a bazillion different maps, each with their own rules variations, and let people around the globe go at it. Up to four games at once is free, and for a mere $20 a year, you can play in as many games as you like and even start your own, publicly or in private. There's a well-moderated feedback system, the requisite forum, tournaments, and lots of other options. Win/loss ratios are tracked fairly, and you only have to take your turn once a day (but if you're not a complete jerk, you'll try for twice a day just to keep things moving).

If you make your way over there, look for Chief Beef and drop a line in my club inbox.

Great Crap! An Update!

2008-01-18T18:37:00.000-05:00

And a short one, too.

It's been so long since I've bothered with this thing that people have gone so far as to actually stop asking me to update it. So now that everyone's quit their bitching, I can finally get down to work.

Lots of people step away from blogging and then say they're going to get back into it full force. And most of them don't. And I will probably be one of them.

But in the unlikely event that I manage to provide sporadic updates, they will probably be shorter and less picture-intensive. All that extra creativity, as weak as it was, seemed an awful lot like effort to me. And effort's not what blogging is all about, at least not for me.

More later?

Probably not.

Transformers

2007-05-29T12:24:00.000-05:00

Anyone who knows me well knows that I have plenty of toys in my house. Some of them even belong to my children. The majority, sadly, are mine.

I've got the old G.I. Joe. Vintage He-man. Star Wars of all kinds. Various action figures representing characters from movies, TV shows, and video games. And if video games count as toys, then whoa, Nelly.

The only thing missing that hasn't been repurchased or simply hoarded since youth is the Transformers. Unfortunately for my wife, who for some reason is bothered that we don't have enough storage space because our closets are overflowing with toys, that's been changing lately.

Now, I never really played with transformers as a kid. I owned some, transformed them into whatever they were supposed to be and back again. But I never set them up and had them fight it out, never made up a story for them, never gave them voices. I watched the cartoon, but it was never on my must-see radar the way others were. In fact I never got into the "big robot" thing the way other kids did. I couldn't care less about Voltron, which makes me a heretic as far as some 80's enthusiasts are concerned.

And yet the very nature of transformers is what made me want them. I may not have loved the Big Robot genre, but transformers in robot form certainly looked cool. They also looked pretty convincing, at least in the early days, as vehicles. You could only transform Optimus Prime so much before every mack truck on the road

suddenly looked ready to pop open . . .

. . . and hand you an energon cube.

I've always enjoyed toys with realistic detail and great color. Transformers added to that the sense that they were intricate, and therefore not meant for kids. They may have broken easily if you were the typical ham-handed youngster (a reason why the vintage ones are now generally more expensive than other vintage toys), but they weren't poorly made. Rather, they felt like they were made for adults, and lucky was the child deemed responsible enough to have such a finely-crafted thing.

Eventually I sold all my transformers to an adult collector (when I was 11, no less). Although I regretted letting them go I knew I would rather own more toys that I would actually play with, and for that I needed money to buy them. I raked in roughly $100 for my collection (a sizeable fortune for a kid in the 80's), a small fraction of what I'd make for it today.

Much later in life I began to regret that decision. I'd always planned to keep certain toys for as long as I could, telling myself I'd sell them when I was older, and they would be worth more. I tried to enact that plan last year by selling off my He-man collection, but alas, He-man isn't Transformers; they just weren't worth what my nostalgia was demanding. So, I figured my kids might enjoy my toys as much as I did, and I gave them the He-man collection. And they loved it. Consequently, I now find myself on ebay periodically looking for deals on old He-man toys I can pick up.

And I still play with them, usually with my kids. I don't get a lot of time, but at least I'm realistic about that. But my 10 year old self still pops up from time to time, and far more than one might expect in a supposedly well-adjusted adult. In fact, kids have been a great excuse to indulge my toy-buying fanaticism. So while most of the toys in the house belong to "all of us", they really belong to me. Adults who spend a decent amount of time playing with toys and games eventually turn into (or already were) Nerds, whom other non-Nerds look at askance, and avoid if at all possible.

But the Nerd doesn't really care. My house, my nerdy compulsions. There's an AT-AT on my piano. Another one on the floor. A melange of figures set up next to my computer. A wicker chest full of plastic pirate ships, sitting atop a wooden shelf full of starships. And now the final frontier of 80's toydom (for me, anyway) is joining them -- transformers.

I found a cheap one on ebay, in pretty good condition. It arrived in the mail. I transformed it into a robot. Back into a corvette. Back into a robot. I showed my daughter. She wanted it to be a car. Then my son wanted it to be a robot. By then, the magic of transforming had done it again. Soon I was back on ebay, looking for the ones I used to have, trying to find a toy that cost my parents less than $10 in 1984 for less than $50 in 2007.

But then the one I bought broke. My kids were playing with it, and the arm fell off. I managed to fix it, mostly, but it reminded me of the fragility that vexed so many other kids twenty years ago. It was the only existing deterrent to quell my imminent online buying craze -- even the best-made old school transformers could break out of the box if an over-zealous 6 year old didn't want to finesse that wheel-arm out from under the hood just so. The problem wasn't spending money on a frivolity, it was wasting money on a frivolity.

But then I got to thinking . . . what about the new transformers? I saw them in stores, but had largely ignored them -- they didn't look like real things anymore, and that seemed to ruin the whole point. But I figured I'd look anyway, just in case they'd made any improvements.

And boy have they. For one thing, perhaps because of the upcoming movie, there are quite a few realistic ones out there. They're just as complex as the old ones, but generally bigger, more flexible, and perhaps best of all, designed to break and easily reassemble. That way if you accidentally stress a transforming point too much, it'll snap off before it breaks, and you can just snap if back on. They've accomplished this by making all the tougher movable spots hinged on metal rather than plastic, or reinforced with metal parts. That's not to say they couldn't break; I'm sure they could. But my wife "accidentally" knocked one off a high shelf yesterday, and only a single reattachable piece came off.

In fact, it seems like for all the many serious faults with modern culture, we've at least managed to improve on toys, even if the best ones are still just upgrades of older ones (modern culture still isn't very good at original ideas). But I'm not complaining -- it's a great way to combine my good old days with my grown-up days, and tie them to what will one day be my kid's "good old days."

Plus, it annoys my wife.

MBNA is the Devil

2007-05-03T11:22:00.000-05:00

Friends, this entry is not funny at all. It's not fun. It's not sad or tragic. It subject matter is important in a general sense, but the specifics are not. I just need to do what I can, because I am entirely pissed off and I can't punch the responsible parties in the face.

So we have this credit card. We've actually had it since 2000, when I signed for it thinking I was signing for more information. Instead they signed me up for the card.

We sat on this card for years, not knowing we even had it, until they sent us an account update. "Well," I thought, "expenses are getting tight; it couldn't hurt to have a credit card." So, while I had originally thought to call them to cancel the account, I ended up requesting they send us a card. They signed us up for a promotional rate, so that our minimum monthly was around $15 so long as our debt was less than $15oo.

So far so good. We used the card sparingly, until recently when I had to make some major car repairs. We still made our monthly payments, and paid more at times so as to keep the debt as low as possible.

And then suddenly, a late fee. Why? Because I paid the monthly bill a day before their computer was ready to accept payment for that cycle, which rather than being monthly is some kind of idiotic "rolling cycle" that lasts anywhere from 3 to 5 weeks, depending on . . . I don't know what. They tell me over at MBNA that all credit card companies do this. Maybe so, but that just makes it even stupider, that an entire industry can't seem to get their lazy asses on a monthly schedule.

Even worse, back in February we had a late fee, which was remitted, because I had paid the bill too early that time, too. But during that conversation, the lady on the phone didn't explain this rolling cycle garbage. Instead, she told me if I just paid my bill on the 2nd of every month, I'd be fine.

Yeah.

So then when I call yesterday to find out why I had a late fee again, and was told why, I tried to explain that one of the MBNA representatives flat out told me to do exactly what I did, which ended up causing the problem. And this new rep then proceeds to tell me that the MBNA representatives aren't responsible for what they tell us -- she may get a rebuke from the head office, but I'm still stuck with the late fee. Why? Because technically, all this was spelled out in the fine print.

Which I'm sure it is, but it seemed wrong to me that their reps could basically say whatever they wanted on the phone and have no fear that it would come back to them.

Well, I ended up paying the late fee. And then, when I checked my email this morning, I find out that my monthly rate has gone from $15 to $60 a month. Turns out that promotional rate ended with the late fee, and while we probably won't be paying $60 a month every month, we sure won't be paying $15.

The final straw came when I called in today to find out what had happened. The snooty representative (the second snooty one in a row, now) told me:

- They couldn't waive this late fee
- I should just pay in advance

When I told him paying in advance caused the problem, he had nothing to say. Yes, he could verify that I paid in advance. Yes, he could see that it was more than was owed for the month. Yes, he had a record of the phone call in February (but couldn't access it; that's not part of their "business practice"). No, he couldn't help me. No, there wasn't a supervisor available: he was the account manager, and there was nothing he could do "at this time" (meaning, ever).

It does me no good to know that we can get a better card somewhere else and pay this one down. It doesn't make me feel any better knowing we don't actually owe them more money, we just owe them more per month. Nothing can change the fact that this huge multibillion dollar company has ridiculous practices designed to benefit them and screw their consumers, and that there's no accountability on their end. There's nothing I can do.

Except what I've just done -- attach as much negative feedback in cyberspace as I can to the name "MBNA", and hope that someone, somewhere, searching for them, finds me instead and realizes how much of a mistake it would be to go there for a credit card.

But ultimately it won't do any good -- they'll go somewhere else and get a card from a company equally as disreputable and just as unaccountable. As Wargames tried to teach us, the only way to win is not to play the game. Stay credit-card free as long as possible.

I suppose we should just be thankful we found this out by experience before the damage was severe, like it is for so many other people.

Not one of those updates

2007-05-01T08:58:00.000-05:00

I never wanted to be one of those people. The ones that updated their blogs with "it's been so long since I've updated my blog because I'm sooooooo busy" blog entries. And that's all they put.

I hate those people.

So here's a picture:

2007-04-20T12:49:00.000-05:00

Just a quick note for all those people badgering me to update my blog:

Shut up.

While you're shutting up, listen to these great podcasts from Christendom College:

http://christendom.mypodcast.com/

The Fault of Default

2007-03-26T08:56:00.000-05:00

This article makes me sick:

http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20070325/bs_afp/useconomypropertypolitics_070325063724

I don't know how long it'll be active, so let me summarize. Mortgage companies are foreclosing and people are losing their homes. What makes me feel ill is that it's the fault of everyone involved, but they're all going to blame each other.

Let's start with the obvious: the mortgage companies are at fault for charging interest rates that should be criminal. The entire business of mortgage loans borders on usury, and it's clear that they don't want you to own a home so much as they want you to pay them for it for 30 years. That's the nature of big business. And we're supposed to feel sorry that some mortgage companies lost up to $15 million in mortgage-related deals last year. Gee, they only took in a few hundred million in profits after overhead expenses. Poor guys. They should just get out of the business, since it's so bad for them. Oh, but I forget -- those mortgage companies are dedicated public servants, doing us all a favor offering us such nice loans. Why, they're practically giving us our houses for free. No matter how much they complain about all that money they're losing, they'll stay in the game. To help us. To help you, worthy citizen.

Now why don't you go call your lender and say "thank you"?

Anyway.

We can't just blame mortgage companies. The government facilitates the problem, and for several reasons. For one thing, extreme overregulation of the home-building industry, combined with the inability of people to truly own their own land, makes it basically impossible to save money by avoiding the mortgage companies. Example: my friend Bill tried/is trying to build a home. From what I understand he is a competent building-fellow. And I think we would all understand if a few regulations existed to ensure he wasn't building a toxic waste dump, or wiring the house to explode.

Unfortunately he has been beaurocraticked into the ground. He is not a "liscensed and bonded" construction company, incorporated and paying all the Big Boy taxes such companies have to pay in order to grease the wheels with the local heehaw authorities (who, in my opinion, are still better to work with than the metrosexuals that operate towns like Manassas and Alexandria). His choices, therefore, are either to take out a loan to pay a construction company to build his house, take out a different kind of loan to become his own construction company, or take out a more different kind of other loan to just buy an existing house.

Whatever path Bill chooses, he's stuck with a high-interest loan from a mortgage company, or more accurately, a company that offers different types of loans, including mortgages.

My own fiasco with the town of Front Royal is bad enough: to put in a stupid T-wall upstairs I was required to rewire my house, and have four different contractors come and give the town's stamp of approval.

On a T-wall.

At least they let me do it myself, or more to the point, hire whomever I wanted to do it. And believe it or not, given the current state of things, they are generous to do so. Because of ridiculous federal laws and regulations, the town is partially responsible for what happens if my house collapses from being improperly built. It's a wonder they don't force me to use only "government-approved" builders for my twenty feet of drywall. Never mind that far fewer tax-payer dollars would be spent clearing away collapsed houses (assuming the owners couldn't pay for the clearing) than is spent on the staffing necessary to regulate the construction of every single piece of wall in every single structure ever built anywhere in America.

The government's other fault in this is in letting terrible mortgage and loan laws exist, especially the ones allowing front-loading of interest. I think I can speak for every American that doesn't run a mortgage company when I say that we would be perfectly happy with smaller, more numerous mortgage companies than fewer huge ones. That's what you get when you allow them to charge ludicrous amounts of interest, force you to pay it all up front based on the assumption that you won't pay it all in the long run so you have to take all the risk, and then buy out smaller companies and basically become oligopolies.

Now perhaps you blind-eye conservative types may claim that "capitalism works!" Well yes, it does, in theory and sometimes in practice. And I'm all for capitalism. But in this case, as in many others we could name, the system has run amuck. It needs to be deregulated in some areas, and more stringently regulated in others. We are, after all, talking about houses, where people live. The pure essence of capitalism, competition, should be facilitated, while the unfair business practices that creep in from time to time should be removed. Since they haven't been, it turns out that pure capitalism in the mortgage market doesn't really exist. Certainly companies can offer various types of loans and compete on those grounds. But what would happen to a company that offers a much lower interest rate, or didn't front-load the interest on the loan? Even within those different types of loans, what if someone offered a 17-year-fixed, or a 22, or a 35? Is any of that even legal?

By no means should mortgage companies assume all the risk. But if we consumers are expected to assume most or all of it, the government should at the very least allow us other reasonable options to assume other kinds of risk that don't involve financial slavery to the company store. As it is there's no way to legally live in a house you own, or are trying to own, without dealing with an interest-sucking moneylender like HSBC. If we prick them they don't bleed, they sue.

Finally the poor old lady in the article is, like so many others in her situation, also at fault. Her testimony before congress included that statement that she didn't know her $700 a month payment could become $1100 a month with an Adjustable Rate Mortgage (ARM). Well, so I guess that just makes it OK to default then, doesn't it granny? You didn't know the loan was adjustable because you didn't read the fine print, or perhaps you didn't know that "adjustable" meant "able to be adjusted". Well shit, ma'am, we're real sorry about that. Let us just swallow up that nasty ol' default with our little ol' taxpayer funds and higher interest rates, you kind ol' ignorant leech. You can just pay us back in time-tested wisdom and the experience of age.

Of course, she's not entirely at fault for being forced to take out a friggin' loan with a friggin' mortgage company just to live in a house (although, you know, if her kids still loved her they might consider taking her in. Assuming she'd go, and isn't living with delusions of independence). I suppose she could have rented, but not all areas are rent-friendly. Maybe she lost some income and was forced to refinance a mortgage she's had for years. I don't know.

What I do know is that she's a typical example of an idiot consumer who essentially lets themselves get taken advantage of and then goes crying to congress because she was too old to be bothered with reading a dictionary. Perhaps her loan advisor lied to her. Well, that's grounds for criminal charges, to be sure, but I doubt there's an industry-wide problem of loan officers dealing with people too stupid to know what "adjustable" means.

More likely people take these mortgages knowing more or less what they're getting into, but feeling like they have no choice (about which they are at least partially correct) and hoping they'll never be called in on it. I understand that not everyone can afford a fixed loan. Of course they shouldn't have to -- fixed loans wouldn't cost so much if the interest regulations were changed. And so we come full circle.

So to recap: we have mortgage companies that rape the system by abusing loopholes and poorly-constructed laws in order to charge criminally high interest rates and live like kings in order to screw the rest of us. We have a government that allows those loopholes and bad laws to exist while forcing states to adopt wicked-huge beaurocracies in order to deal with them all, because the government is too busy worrying whether it's going to elect "Free Abortions" Giuliani or "No-Cost Abortions" Hillary to bother changing silly old laws. Finally, we have a consumer-base that leaves itself more or less purposely uneducated about the way things work in order to claim ignorance later, living according to the old Faustian maxim: when you deal with the devil, better to just close your eyes and turn the other way while you sign the paper you haven't read. Sure, it says he owns your soul, but don't worry, he won't call it in. He never does.

That's what everyone else says, anyway.

"Patrick" -- A Book Review

2007-03-22T19:21:00.000-05:00

Some of you may be familiar with the author Stephen Lawhead, probably most well-known for his Pendragon Cycle. I read the entire thing and for the most part, it was quality reading, at least in terms of fantasy fiction.

I was especially impressed by how well the church was treated -- it was a while ago that I last read them, but I remember nothing but respectful approaches to monks and other religious figures who were almost uniformly good guys.

Prior to Patrick, the only other Lawhead book I'd read was Byzantium, which likewise started off well regarding religious figures (the main character is an Irish monk who leaves his monastery on a journey with his superiors), although part of the way through I got a vague sense that Lawhead was perhaps not a fan of "the Church" so much as he was of Christianity. Still, there was nothing pervasively offensive, and it was a decent read (Lawhead is also the author of a trilogy on the Crusades, but I haven't read it and can't comment on his religious sensibilities regarding those books or the historical events).

Apart from any religious aspect, Lawhead is really very good at his early social history, painting what seems like an accurate picture of what life may have been like, and also seemed to have his historical trappings well-researched. In short, it felt very much like you were where the story was taking place.

The only thing I've ever discovered to be anachronistic about Lawhead's work in general is the attitudes he gives to his main characters -- quite a few are either very modern in their sensibilities (although their ideas are still couched in a generic kind of archaic "history-speak"), or come off like how a fan of the New Age would render the thoughts of characters who happened to be Druids, or supposed Wizards (like Merlin, for example), or whatever. It was easy to excuse these departures as done for the sake of a modern readership, though, so it really wasn't a problem.

I was interested to see, then, how Lawhead would handle the story of St. Patrick. Unfortunately everything that didn't go wrong before was glaringly problematic this time, and everything that wasn't quite right before got worse.

In particular, Lawhead demonstrates almost a hatred for the traditional church. I'm not sure whether this attitude was adopted since his previous writings or whether he held them but they never came out in his writing. It seems more like the former, because he had ample opportunity in those earlier writings to villify the church and didn't really take them.

This time, though, he goes overboard, which is especially inappropriate in a book about a saint.

Essentially, the last half of the book ends up being an attempt at historically rehabilitating the heretic Pelagius, making him the good guy against those stodgy, self-absorbed priests of modern liberal (and angry Protestant) legend. It's all the more shameful because the first half of the book really is a good read, although my first clue-in that something was wrong came when there was a more-or-less graphic sex scene early on. It was unexpected, but when you find something like that it's easy enough to pass over if you can safely assume it would be the only one.

It wasn't. In fact, all the others involved Patrick himself fornicating with a woman he barely knew. She ends up being the main "girl interest" in the book, but the fornication continues when Patrick leaves her for a time and eventually finds another girl. The whole idea of giving a churchman a wife and son, although certainly not unknown or even necessarily looked down on back in those days, seems a particular anachronism the way it's treated here. And of course when Patrick eventually repudiates his past bad behavior, not a word is wasted in questioning whether premarital relations should parhaps be repudiated as well.

What little we know of St. Patrick includes nothing like this. In fact there's very little of what we know in here at all, other than that Patrick was captured by the Irish, enslaved, and forced to be a shepherd for years. But instead of saying hundreds of prayers a day, as Patrick himself tells us happened in real life, this fictional Patrick spends the time alternately learning Irish, laying around bored, or fornicating.

What an inspiration.

The anti-Catholic interpretation isn't the only difficulty; Lawhead also has a soft spot for druidism that gets in the way here. It isn't usually a problem in his other works, as pretty much every time he has a subplot about how the druids recognize the truth of Christianity and more or less incorporate it to varying degrees in their religious practice. As Lawhead presents the druids, they aren't really a problem for a Christian reader -- Lawhead's druids are basically scientists, naturalists, and doctors. In the case of Merlin in the Pendragon Cycle it was easy enough to accept some mysticism, since after all it was a fantasy story tinged with history.

This time around though it was a historical novel that inexplicably had bits of weird fantasy tied to it, for no good reason. The druids here make use of Power Words, which would be fine alongside Christianity if such powers were presented as a fantasy, where we are to suspend disbelief about things like native magic. In Patrick, though, the druidical powers, no matter how muted in use, stick out like a sore thumb and ultimately detract. Lawhead didn't see the need to include things like this in Byzantium, so I don't know why he did it here.

A particular weakness of all Lawhead's writing is that after a time he becomes predictible within his own works. He has some original ideas, but he reuses the same ideas for each story. By this time they were easy to spot, and besides were particulary unsatisfying. In fact there is one Deus Ex Machina scene, involving the climax of all things, that destroys any virtue the read had up until that point.

Finally, Lawhead drops the ball in plot choice. This reads less like historical fantasy and more like a Harlequinn novel from a man's perspective. And in fact, all Lawhead's male main characters are so sympathetic and wise as to verge on overly sensitive. At least characters in previous novels were still manly; here Patrick, while not effeminate in any way, nonetheless doesn't demonstrate much in the way of manly virtue, at least not until the very end. To some degree that seems to be the point, but it contrasts poorly to all the romance novel conventions Lawhead applies to other parts of the plot.

The story also ends when Patrick returns to Ireland to convert the Irish over to his brand of druidic quasi-Christianity, which Lawhead has him spout. In that light all that Patrick says about Christ comes off as mere relgious platitudes, afterthoughts that have no real power or meaning to the story or the character.

Prior to this novel I assumed Lawhead was a serviceable writer and a historically knowledgeable well-meaning Christian; perhaps he was, or still is but really, really hates Catholicism. Whatever his motivations, Patrick starts with promise but soon devolves into a poorly-crafted waste of time.

And The Answer Is . . .

2007-03-16T13:02:00.000-05:00

Pirate.

But that's not to downplay the ninja. In fact, I feel bad for poor ninja. He's gotten a bad rap lately, having been a victim of the "too popular to stay that way" effect. You know, where everybody loves something, then suddenly everybody hates it?

That's ninja.

I suppose ninja would be happy with that, actually. Being reviled and despised is the beginning of being overlooked, which is in itself the beginning of remaining hidden. The problem is, ninja isn't really feared anymore either. Being hated AND mocked is never a good thing.

The fact is ninjas are for the young, which isn't to disparage youth or ninjutsu. It's perfectly normal to choose ninja as a young person; lots of kids wish they could sneak about unseen, strike fear into the heart of the average adult, and have a great reputation for fighting skills. Ninjas are speedy, slick and smooth, and young folk often like to think of themselves that way.

Pirates, on the other hand, are more realistic, and are a better fit for an adult who knows a bit more about life. Pirates often aren't good at subtlety, and generally have little use for it. They get dirty. They get slow. They get old. And yet these things don't take away from their essential "pirateness", and in some cases even play into it. Old sea dogs can get away with things old ninjas never could. In fact, ninjas don't really get old; if you survive long enough to become an old man ninja you turn into a "respected master", which is a different class entirely. I'm all for respected mastery. Maybe, when I'm very old, I will have found a way to blend the two.

But in the short term, it's pirate. The pirate doesn't care what anyone else thinks about him, so long as he gets some respect. Fear is sufficient, if nothing else is available. Cleverness doesn't require all the trouble of sneakery; it's more about your reactions than your planning. And really, who has time to plan anymore? Not saying pirates can't put together a good sacking; they can. They just don't have to.

And I think that's what it gets down to: pirates don't have to do anything but remain loyal to their crew, swagger about, outwit their enemies by any means, and be generally competent with whatever they pick up to hit you with.

And that's the life for me.

Arrrrr, Sensei! Pirates vs. Ninjas II

2007-03-09T19:57:00.000-05:00

I'm back.

In the last post I was discussing the various possibilities of manly make-believe. To recap: young boys like to pretend to be grown-ups. Grown men like to pretend to be some other kind of grown-up than the one they are. To do so they choose among several different possibilities, depending on their own temperament and experiences. The ones that hold the most appeal can generally be broken into two categories: valorous and otherwise.

Of the "otherwise", pirates and ninjas are the two most common types. The difficulty is in deciding which one is the best choice.

And yes, before you ask, a decision does need to be made. One can't be both a pirate and a ninja; there are too many incompatible concepts that are central to each. These usually revolve around what is allowable vs. what is essential. For example, pirates can be sneaky, but ninjas must be sneaky. A pirate that had no choice but to sneak around all the time isn't really a pirate, now is he?

Now I suppose at this point it's important to more strictly define the terms in play, and that means a more serious discussion. This is, after all, serious business.

A pirate is not necessarily a seafaring outlaw from the colonial period. Any boy who wanted to be Han instead of Luke (most of us) was choosing the pirate life. Likewise, a ninja is not necessarily an assassin from feudal Japan. James Bond is essentially a ninja that doesn't bother to hide his face. Or his methods. Or his name.

I never said he was a good ninja.

At this point, perhaps a list is in order.

What a Pirate Is:

A guy with a ship that is used to smuggle stuff
A criminal to some government somewhere
A member, or leader, of a group of such criminals
A "free man", at least in principle
Usually for hire

What a Ninja Is:

Sneaky
Tricky
A good fighter, especially unarmed or with a sword
A master of many skills
Usually for hire

Almost as important as what a thing is, is what it isn't. Important to note here is that many things people associate with pirates or ninjas don't necessarily have to apply. A ninja doesn't have to dress in black, fight samurai, or carry smoke bombs. In the same way, a pirate doesn't have to say 'Arrr!', bury treasure, or own a parrot. Those things are associated with ninjas or pirates because they either flow from one of the essentials (ninjas wear black because it helps them sneak around at night; pirates bury treasure because hiding the goods is a part of smuggling) or are related to the generic setting we're used to seeing, or to the common historical or literary model (samurai were the bodyguards of feudal Japan, so of course historical ninjas fought them; parrots were common in the Caribbean, so some idiot writing pulp pirate novels in the 1800's had to draw every freaking pirate captain with a parrot on his shoulder).

Of course if all we had to go on was the common popular conceptions then there wouldn't be as much debate: historical pirates and ninjas are much farther removed from one another than the culture-infused versions, and it would be easier to choose. But, movies, comics, and video games have made it an entirely different situation. Ninja and pirate characters have been removed from their historical settings and distilled to their essential characteristics so often that it is now entirely possible to define them in terms outside of their origins.

And in fact, young boys have been doing that ever since ninjas became important enough (in the late 1970's) to contrast with pirates. Film makers picked up on this right away; that's why our first ninja movies were things like "American Ninja", which for the most part disregards the whole Japanese thing in favor of American attitude. The movie sucked, but the point is the people behind it knew that guys were already prepared to take the general concept of a ninja and leave off all the extraneous stuff.

And the pirate thing, well, there have been sci-fi space pirates for basically ever, so the idea of non-seafaring pirates has been around. And of course there was that movie a few years ago. You know, the one about the pirates. That brought the whole thing to the fore. Not necessarily for the better, either, since before the pirate/ninja decision was more or less a private thing between friends. Now, good luck with that.

Next time: it's one or the other.

Or is it?

Yes it is.

Sort of.

Pirates vs. Ninjas: a Lifetime Dilemma

2007-03-06T14:41:00.000-05:00

How many of you have faced this situation: it's time to dress up in a costume to go to the supermarket. You go to your clothes pile to pick one out, and once again find yourself down to a choice between the crusty coolness of the pirate, or the total bad-ass concealment of the ninja.

What to do?

Me, I can never decide. I usually end up so confused I just throw on jeans and a T-shirt and tell myself "next time you'll make a decision; next time." But I never do. And I doubt I ever will. The fact is, this decision is a lifetime dilemma for men; it starts in boyhood and carries through to the creaky old man years.

Let me say first that by limiting the discussion to pirates and ninjas I don't mean to disparage all the other fine manly role models out there: God bless the knights, soldiers (often real soldiers wearing their combat fatigues, but don't think for a second that they aren't happy as hell that they have a legitimate reason to wear them), superheroes and cowboys, and to a lesser extent, the indians, medieval outlaws and samurai. I do mean to exclude the no-no's that are often confusedly lumped in with these others: rappers, goths, police officers, wizards, and those gay, gay cowboys.

Yes, cowboys fit in both categories.

Now, the "good" boys will go for soldier, knight, or superhero. "Not as good" boys pick between ninja and pirate. Consider: the "good" choices all share the same general concept: a brave warrior with masterful fighting prowess and the desire to protect the innocent. Pirates and ninjas share those first two traits, which are essential to boyhood, but they also know darn well that saving the innocent on your own is usually more trouble than it's worth -- better to hire your services out and let your employer take the credit or blame for your actions.

Not saying pirates and ninjas can't do some good, just that they can do some not-good, and no one's going to care.

For example, a bunch of soldiers torturing prisoners at Abu Graib makes for hand-wringing and headlines. A gang of pirates torturing prisoners at Abu Graib is more likely to elicit hand-clapping and headspinning! In awesomeness, I mean. Soldiers are questioned before a military tribunal, whereas the only question people would ask the pirates is "how did you get way out in the desert with that pirate ship?"

Or, if you will, recall the never-ending historical controversy over the Crusade knights. But if a ninja clan had sacked Islamic Jerusalem, boy-howdy! That would be an event no one could disagree with. Not even Muhammed himself. He'd be all like "these dudes attack in silence, move like the wind, and disappear into the night? Why can't MY guys be like that?!"

Not that Mohammed was at the sack of Jerusalem. Just that, you know, if he was, he'd totally say that.

So you see my point. Pirates and ninjas have a certain immunity from judgement, and yet are praised more highly for doing good than the actual good guys, because no one expects it. That's every young boy's dream.

And in fact, it's every grown man's dream, too. The appeal of the good bad guy is undeniable. But when it comes down to which one you choose, now that's a problem. Unfortunately, what we can learn from history and culture doesn't really help out much.

I'll get into the specifics of both manly possibilities in my next installment, which I'll get around to whenever I damn well feel like it. Or maybe I'll do it this evening, in the dead of night, when no one expects it.

I can't decide . . .

Blog 101

2007-03-02T13:17:00.000-05:00

I've never been good at diaries. For one thing, the word itself is kind of gay. "Journal" is better, but while it may conjure up images of explorers or soldiers or what have you, it also reminds me of grade school when we had those month-long projects that included a directive to "keep a journal of your progress". That wooshed any kind of cool adventure hero right out of "journal" and replaced him with an amateur scientist (I can hear some of you, like my wife, saying right now, "but what's wrong with amateur scientists?" Dorks.)

The good thing is that so far, blogging has seemed like a different activity all together. A diary is totally private, a journal serves the purpose of recording a specific thing, but a blog is just a bunch of random crap, and as such is close to having my own private Cwod magazine (on the very remote chance that there's someone reading this that doesn't know what that is, follow the appropriate link under "Friends"). It's a given that you are writing for others to read it, even if in practice you know very few people might. That effects both what you write, and how much you write it.

The thing is, I don't really know what to do with a blog yet. It's interesting for me to see how my friends do it, though. Bridget is doing the "regular weekly topic" thing; in her case childhood stories on Wednesdays. Ryan goes the commentary road by picking off news headlines and improving on them. Ben and Mike write about things they know about: art and crackpottery, respectively.

OK, fine. Some of Mike's conspiracies are less crackpotted than others. Happy, Mike?

Anna tends to blog more like I currently do, a combination of updates and general reflections. Nick does the same, when he bothers to update. Ahem.

And it seems like everybody plays to their strengths; Bridget has the Irish gift of storytelling, Ryan is always at his best when he makes fun of stuff, and so on. I'm just not sure what my MO should be, or if there should even be one. I guess it'll work itself out.

The Silicon Jungle

2007-03-01T22:43:00.000-05:00

First things first: I know it's not Monday. Unfortunately, our internet problems persist and may do so for a while, so I figure if I'm going to try and keep up with the blog, I might as well post while I'm currently able to do so. Onward.

The term "concrete jungle" is often used to describe the feeling of wilderness that can accompany the modern cityscape. The phrase came into particular use when skyscrapers and other huge structures became the dominant feature of the American city in the early 20th century. The irony of the phrase is, of course, that if it's made of concrete, it is man-made and should therefore feel familiar and safe, but it doesn't.

The same concept was used in Upton Sinclair's The Jungle. Sinclair, a socialist, was concerned with the "plight of the lower-class", and wanted to show the reader that then-modern folk in a then-modern setting (late 1800's modern) could live lives that more resembled a lack of civilization rather than progress toward it.

And of course, Axel Rose relied on the same metaphor for his inner-city tour guide song, "Welcome to the Jungle".

So I was in the bathroom this evening, trying to enjoy a rare moment of "don't have to do anything" but only being able to muster a kind of "oof; I think I'll sit down" sort of thing. I started talking to God, asking for some kind of attitude adjustment so I could deal with all the stuff that happens. Computer problems, car problems, house problems, complicated financial issues.

"Is this how Americans suffer, Lord?" I asked. And you know, maybe it is.

Example: I have a computer and the internet. That enables me to do many, many things that couldn't be done by ancient Romans, medieval peasants, or my own grandparents. But that doesn't mean my life is automatically better. It's not the mere invention of new technology that makes it useful, but the responsible use of it. And it's all too easy these days to slip into irresponsible use. And of course we have so much, but every new addition brings a huge number of potential problems.

How much work productivity is lost these days from employees pissing around on the internet beyond what could be normally expected? It's not that they're bad employees, it's just that the tool at their disposal is too easily abused. But how many farm hands two hundred years ago shirked their duty with the help of a steel plow? How many civil war-era American parents ignored their children at night so they could play with the new cotton gin?

Personally, my internet use is about 50/50 in terms of proper usage. For example, I can do my job in a way that I otherwise wouldn't be able to do without it. Then again, I spend a good (meaning bad) amount of time playing video games I never would have had access to just ten years ago.

And then when things happen like the internet going down, it makes you think: all this calling techs on the phone, dismantling computers, pulling wires, replacing them, writing, erasing, and rewriting programs, repeat, repeat, repeat, all so I can use the internet for . . . what? If it never existed, I could still have found a job doing something else.

Now of course, I'm not anti-technology. I'm not the Abacus Peasant, after all. It's just that there's a kind of law of diminishing returns that comes into play. So, for example, 50 years ago I would have had the same phone problems, but none of the benefits of the internet. But 150 years ago I would have the same internet benefits as 50 years ago (meaning none), but none of the phone problems.

Of course I wouldn't have the phone benefits either, and that's the problem with the whole "wouldn't it be nice if we all rode horses" argument. There really have been great advancements, and I'm one of those that believes God is generally in favor of them. He allows us to share in His creative process, but unlike Him we face the challenge of having to master all the things that we create. That doesn't mean we shouldn't create them, but it does mean we should expect complications and choose wisely when we create, or when we accept new creations.

Of course the ultimate goal is to "regress" in some areas when we've moved beyond the need for a particular step on the tech ladder. We used to read books out under the old cherry tree. Then we decided to play video games in the living room. Now we can play video games out under the old cherry tree, and when our batteries run out we can catch up on that reading. Or, you know, we could still start out with the book.

What it all comes back to for me, though, is that I'm an old-fashioned kind of guy. I like the new ways, but I like the old ones too. The result is that many of the steps we currently have to work with feel alien to me, and so despite their man-made origin they can make me feel like I'm lost in the woods.

And here's the ironic part -- our progression is so fast now that cutting corners has become the norm in many things, because we know the next step is right around the corner anyway and the current one will be old and abandoned soon. It's expected that there will not just be bumps and bruises, but sizeable ones, and we accept it because we know it's only temporary and something better will come along soon and we only have to deal with this for a few years. People buy new video games knowing they'll have to download a patch to correct problems almost immediately. We get new computers knowing we'll be paying for upgrades in a matter of months. New cars might last us ten years if we're lucky.

The result is that even the experts aren't so sure what they're doing anymore. They may not be lost in the woods, but they aren't the forest rangers, either. That fact just heightens the sense that all this is a kind of liberty, and as that crackpot Jefferson said (correctly), the price of liberty is eternal vigilance.

In our culture and in our own lives, we need to observe carefully how we deal with technology and its impact. That sounds trite and obvious, and of course we have to deal with the annoying tech calls every so often in order to get the simplified work schedule/excessive video gamage. But it's important to think trite and tired old concepts over every now and again: like technology, they might be annoying but we've grown to need them.

And in this case, we should be careful not to confuse technological advancement with civilization; a barbarian with a computer is still a barbarian.

Well. That was on the "serious reflection" side of things. I promise that my next post will be about something ridiculous, stupid, and/or inane. Until then, inspired by the idea of a barbarian with a computer, here's a bunch of squirrels with lightsabers:

And a Nintendo Wizard

And Jesus on a dinosaur

This Has Been My Week

2007-02-28T17:42:00.000-05:00

See you on Monday.

February's Last Battle

2007-02-28T12:38:00.000-05:00

I'm sorry, but I must leave you with a boring post today. My internet went out yet again, and after much time on the phone with the techs, they finally realized the problem was with their equipment, probably due to the power outage, which I told them was going to end up being the culprit over a week ago.

Well anyhow my internet will only be sporadically connected for the next couple of days, so this will have to be the last post for a bit. And, since I'm so behind on work because I've been on the phone all day, I won't be able to post anything but . . . uh . . . what I just posted.

But, I have a lot of great ideas for blogs when I come back. Well, maybe they're only good ideas. Like, um . . .

I read a pretty good comic book today. Star Wars.

Yeah.

Next Monday, look out!

February Strikes Back

2007-02-27T10:19:00.000-05:00

Yesterday was that day. You know the one. Everybody has them now and again.

Those days where all the crap that didn't happen during the other days happens. Often on a Monday. And strangely, more than one would expect, during February.

Mine was yesterday. It started with a toilet backlash -- my daughter woke me up to tell me there was water all over the bathroom floor. Turns out the town was cleaning a sewage pipe at the crapshack next to our house, and in the process excess pressure just "happened" to cause all the other toilets on that line to expel water. All over my bathroom floors.

Then the internet went down. I spent literally half the day on the phone with tech support walking through process after process trying to eliminate possible problem areas. They would "fix" something, I would hang up, and half an hour later it would be down again. It didn't help that every call back included a 5 minute wait before talking to a person, and that our only house phone is a cheap K-Mart cordless that needed to recharge every 20 minutes or so, giving me about 15 minutes to reiterate the problem, walk through the first few basic steps, and then attempt some new solution with each new tech.

Know what the problem was? The old gray phone cord.

Which is strung all the way around the room. Stapled to the wall.

After we finally got everything figured out I had only about an hour to do work, and no time to prepare for the karate classes I was teaching last night, which had its own annoyances. One parent who hadn't paid yet sent an envelope in with their kid, but having missed a couple classes, they opted not to pay the full monthly price, despite the fact that that was not an option. Also, the adult class was moved, for the time being, into a new room just barely small enough to be officially too small.

And finally I came home and worked all night.

The worst part about it all is that yesterday will follow me for the rest of the week: I still have to mop the bathroom floors, pull out the old phone wire and restaple the new one, have a DSL tech come to our house and repair the inside line, write a letter to the miscreant parent, find a solution to the "small dojo" problem, and make up all the work I missed during evenings and on Saturday.

Thank God it's almost March.

For Ryan and Bridget

2007-02-25T15:51:00.000-05:00

My Oh My

2007-02-25T14:02:00.000-05:00

What a wonderful day.

At least, that's what Uncle Remus would tell you. For those of you unfamiliar with the Disney classic "Song of the South", that's him with Br'er Rabbit.

Unfortunately, if you've never seen this then you probably never will, at least if you live in America. Perhaps I'm overstating things; if you're a believer in torrent sites, you can find a not-too-crappy video transfer version there. And if you live close to me, you can borrow my remastered DVD when it arrives. It's a bootleg version; I usually don't go in for those (in fact it's the only bootleg I own, other than "The Star Wars Christmas Special"), but in this case I think an exception is warranted.

Why this is widely unavailable is sadly obvious: the politically correct machine got ahold of it and never let go. As a result, Disney said it would "never" release this commercially on DVD (despite that, a few DVD versions exist, mostly in England, and it was released in America previously on laserdisc and VHS).

The compilation on which this was based is also largely unavailable in unabridged format. Joel Chandler Harris, an American author born in Georgia in the mid-1800's, took the folklore of the slaves and ex-slaves, wrote them down in dialect, and released them as periodicals in a popular magazine of the time. They were very popular and were for a time considered American classics.

More recently, of course, they've been attacked as offensive, similar to "Song of the South". And, just like with "Song of the South" the attackers are shooting themselves in the foot. Harris wrote down the stories because he thought they were creative, colorful, and a good way preserve some of the folk tales he remembered from his youth (also, to make money).

In the Disney film, all the black people are kind-hearted, friendly, and smarter than the white people in all the ways that count, whereas all the bad, ignorant, silly people are all Whities. Not that the movie is some kind of anti-southern screed; there are several well-meaning southern white folk, and one wise old white grandmother who, like Uncle Remus, is always right. In both cases respect and admiration for colored people was pretty much the point: it was made obvious that "the stories you are now enjoying come courtesy of good black people".

It seems the bias today comes from two different camps: those who adopt the social insanity doctrine that says we should never notice when different people are . . . you know, different; the other from a segment of the black population that insists these stories are awash in racist history: Harris stole the stories and made all the money, the dialectical writing denegrates and makes fun of the largely uneducated slaves, the unabridged tales contribute to white misunderstanding of black culture, blah blah blah.

Seriously, if I thought all black people were like Uncle Remus I'd move to Harlem. As it stands, I think my views on race are pretty accurate: the black race, like the white race, can claim its fair share of overly-sensitive wusses who ruin it for the rest of us.

It's the truth. It's actual. Everything is . . . wait a minute, is "satisfactual" even a word?

The Tax Man

2007-02-24T20:28:00.000-05:00

So we just did our taxes. Or, more accurately, had our taxes done.

We're getting money back this year, but less than before. In fact, it seems like every year we're getting back less money. This year, though, it's because I apparently didn't pay any federal taxes, so there was nothing to get back. I know that means I got more money during the year, but since I've already gotten used to spending it, that's not much relief.

I suppose we'll just have to get used to the idea of not having that fat tax return we were used to the first few years. So long home improvements.

At least tax time provides an opportunity to hang out with our old friend Jay. It's a yearly tradition -- he comes over to do our taxes, we buy him Chinese food. We gave up trying to pay him real money long ago (he constantly refused it), so now we pay him in MSG.

Yeah, I know they say there's none in there, but come on.

Unleashed

2007-02-23T22:26:00.001-05:00

Everyone else has one. Why not me?

After all, I've got plenty of things to say. Things like . . . uh . . . "trebuchet." Which is, ironically, both the name of my font of choice as well as a medieval seige engine. A fitting start for the Internet Peasant.

I came by that name pretty much accidentally. Late on Fat Tuesday last, my wife and I were visiting our friends the Hatkes, who rent out their basement to our now-new-friends, the Powells. Bill Powell and I were discussing the various and sundry problems and possibilities in America, particularly governmental and economic. At one point I was searching for a suitable term that would describe someone who was both a member of an everyman, lower-class social strata, and yet a product of modern society. And the Internet Peasant was born.

It struck us both as such a great name for a blog that I considered it a sort of sign; I've been told often that I should blog, and I've been meaning to blog, but I never really got around to it.

So now I have.

Let's see if I can keep it up.