Calling Out an Audible

Peeve: Sign Typos

Ok. I misspell stuff. I punctuate wrong. I have a running battle with the Real Change editorial staff over whether periods and commas go inside the parentheses or outside. I want to do parentheses like we do in math, they want to do them like they do in the New York Times. "Screw the New York Times," I say. "Screw you," they say. Round and round we go.

Still, I consistently manage to produce 666 words of copy each week with no more than five, six, or seven typos (according to THEM.) [Or I should say: (according to THEM).]

That's a typo rate per wordage of about one per cent. I don't even get paid to pull that off. Plus, we're talking about ephemera. The paper circulates one stupid week, then is pretty much forgotten.

Now let's say some government agency, like, I don't know, Metro King County, puts out a sign with 15 goddamn words. Not ephemera: it's a sign meant to last for years. One per cent of 15 words is about one seventh of a word. How stupid do they have to be to not proofread said fucking sign and get rid of the typo of one whole wrong word that is equivalent to me misspelling 50 words in one of my idiot columns?

Audibly? You might be audibly recorded? As in, you might hear the recorder while you're being recorded? Stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid.

[Above: Sign seen at the International District Tunnel Station Plaza, and also visible (as opposed to visual) on many Seattle buses.]

Peeve: "Poor Have Too Much"

When I talk to middle-class people, sometimes I hear complaints like, "It isn't fair that poor unemployed people don't pay income taxes." Or, "Gee, it must be sweet to never have to pay a mortgage, rent, or house payments. I wish I had it so easy."

They really get worked up when they find out that some poor and homeless individuals have had good fortune. When a homeless guy wins the lottery, I have heard housed people bitch, "It isn't right, that they win big while I have to work for a living," even as they're putting a dollar of their own down for a shot at the same good luck.

It would totally suck that poor people have the occasional good fortune if their lives were a bed of clover aside from it.

A case of misplaced poverty envy occurs every year when the Seattle Seafair Torchlight Parade goes past Anitra's room, and we open the blinds and watch it from the comfort of bed. The other parade observers outside on the street often make comments to the effect that we have it too good. Ha! One evening a year, maybe!

So many poor people live in Pioneer Square because decades ago Seattle made the decision to sweep all of its poor into this neighborhood and forget about them. That it was discovered to have historic charm and turned upscale around me is not my fault. That they route the parade past our bed is not our fault.

Once the parade started people turned and watched the parade instead of us, and I took some videos.

This first video is ironic, in that the sirens heard at the beginning are just a reminder of the sirens we hear every 20 minutes on average all year round, 24-7. So we're supposed to regard all those sirens at once as a treat?

Hot Cycles



Anitra says a bad word. I respond by bad-mouthing clowns and poking fun at the lederhosen-ed. Before anyone gets their panties in a bunch, I clown in print and I'm part German myself. So ease up.

Color Commentary



The ability to live in a neighborhood where dragons may often be sighted is also a benefit of living in the Iron Triangle.

Torchlight Dragon

Peeve: Epistemic Incompetence

Our schools blur the distinctions among Knowledge, Memory, Intelligence, and Cleverness. We've invented the meaningless quality "Aptitude" and test our children for it. We test IQs and pretend we've tested intelligence, actually a broad ensemble of attributes that we know can't be assigned to a linear scale without choosing to scale the different factors against each other, which opens up opportunities to institutionalize our own culturally based values.

So for example, since losing my Hawaiian, I have never again succeeded in achieving fluency in another language besides English. This failing goes undetected in IQ tests, and my scores are off the charts.

It should be the main job of our schools to teach kids how to think and how to know. Instead we give them the impression that it's just a matter of amassing facts.

Because I have a doctorate in math and use it for comic effect in my column, and because irony-impairment is epidemic, and since the irony-impaired are also very often the epistemically incompetent, people will say the darn'dest things to me.

I had a guy suddenly, out of the blue, blurt out "εν αρχη ην ο λογος και ο λογος ην προς τον θεον και θεος ην ο λογος" to me. When I said, "Excuse me?" he said, "Surely with your doctorate in math you MUST recognize that." Turns out it's the Ancient Greek of John 1:1 "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God." Oh yeah, right, that Analysis 611 seminar was TOTALLY devoted to memorizing Biblical fragments in dead dialects. You simply can't expect to understand the Spectral Theorem until you know your spectra, and you can't know your spectra until you're on intimate terms with the God, the Word, Jesus, and the Holy Ghost. In Greek.

There's one guy I know who is so epistemically incompetent he should be the EI Poster Boy. I don't want to use his name because he is incredibly thin-skinned, so I will call him TS.

An example illustrating TS's severe EI, taken from my recent life:

"Hey, Wes, isn't that the new 2008 Focus?"

"What are you talking about, TS?"

"You know what I'm talking about."

"I don't. Tell me."

"You MUST know what I'm talking about, you have a doctorate in mathematics. You know everything."

"Great. Humor me. Tell me what it is I know."

"That car, parked out there. It's the new 2008 Focus, right?"

"How the hell would I know?"

"But you've driven, Wes. You used to be a cab driver. You MUST know cars."

"I haven't been behind the wheel of a car since 1987, and even then I barely noticed the differences in how cars looked. I only paid attention to how differently the ones I drove handled."

"OK, but you can look at it now. You can see the difference between that and the 2007 Focus, can't you?"

I was so pissed at that point that rather than tell him that there is no way I could tell a Focus from a late model Honda, I instead told him that there has been research done that shows that guys like him that can instantly recognize car models are doing it using the same parts of the brain the rest of us use to distinguish faces. Therefore I said, "Since you know car models so well, you don't see the variety of women I do. How sad."

In his defense he actually said, "I can tell women apart well enough. They're either pretty or they aren't."

"Exactly. So sad."

[Below: A Ford Focus. Test your Car Model IQ! Guess the year of this Focus! Check your answer by clicking on the image. If you get it right, it will mean you can barely tell women apart!]

Peeve: Lent

So, what are you giving up for Lent? I want to give up poverty.

It's like the day after Thanksgiving, No Buy Day. If you're poor, every day is No Buy Day, unless there are big sales with massive discounts. Let's think of a day of the year that has big sales with massive discounts. Hey, I know, how about the day after Thanksgiving? Thank you Concerned Middle Classes. Enjoy those big screen TVs and X-Boxes you buy the day after the day after Thanksgiving with the extra money you have that we don't.

Lent's like that. When the churches that push giving up for Lent do without tithes and collections for forty days, I'll believe they know what they're asking of people. It doesn't have to be the same forty days. They could still gouge people during Lent, while backing off during Advent, so folks would have more money for Christmas. And post-Thanksgiving and post-Christmas specials.

Let's see the Pope wear plain clothes and live in a single room at a Motel 6 for 40 days. Then he can tell harried housewives they shouldn't touch that Valentine's Day chocolate.

[Left: Only 12 miles from the Golden Gate Bridge, San Rafael's new Motel 6 is ideally located to serve the needs of the major religious leader during any Advent papal cut-back. Above: Of course, his home-sweet-home will still be there when the 40 days are up.]

You may wonder why I care. "Wes," you may be saying, "we know you don't consider yourself a Christian, so why do you get worked up about Lent?"

This is a good question and I am glad I asked it. The fact is that Christianity is part of my ambient culture whether I like it or not. They even baptized me without my expressed consent!

While I'm at it I can't resist relating the etymology of the word "noon", which I found by reading the Catholic Encyclopedia entry on Lent. The original phrase was Latin nona hora, meaning the ninth hour of daylight by Roman reckoning, meaning 3 PM.

When the church started you were supposed to eat only one meal a day after nightfall. But already by the 5th Century it was acceptable to break the fast at the none hour.

By the 9th Century the "none hour" came to be understood as a duration which began around 2 PM and ended at 3 PM.

[Right: Nobody tells Charlemagne "Big Charles" he can't start breakfast by 2 PM.]

Following that, people simply started their none meal sooner and sooner.

By the 12th century it was common for the word none to refer to noon.

A shift in spelling and pronunciation later, and "noon" means noon.

Ironically, I don't even get up most days until after noon and I take my breakfasts between 3 and 5 PM. My wake up times are post-industrial, depending on the availability of artificial light, but at least during Lent my breakfast times are right in step with the Middle Ages. Cool.

Peeve: Primaries

Here's a peeve where I break with a lot of my liberal & progressive friends. Most of them want a return to the old Washington State primary system, on grounds that "that's what the people want."

Well, screw that. We're not just democratic, we're a constitutional republic. That means we don't always let the people have what they want every single moment. We make them think long and hard about it and force them to arrive at a partial consensus before changing the fundamental rules.

One of the fundamental rules that the people haven't taken the trouble to change is the one acknowledging the right of the people to assembly. The 1st Amendment told Congress not to mess with peaceable assembly. A later amendment took that to the states.

The argument the parties used to end the Washington State primary was based on that. The parties have a right to assemble. Those assembled have a right to choose their new members. They do not have to tolerate party crashers. But the old system let people vote Democrat on one slate, Republican on another, Green on another.

The parties were right to make that objection and I'm glad the old system was struck down. But that decision didn't go far enough for me. I want to see presidential primaries of all kinds outlawed in all states.

Why should taxpayers pay for a process designed to help the major political parties read their minds? If they want to poll us to figure out who among them is electable, let them pay for the polling. There should be no state-run presidential primaries to determine who the parties should nominate. If a party can't do its own nominating it's not a party.

Also, look at the results of yesterday's Super Tuesday primaries and caucuses on the Democratic side. Obama won almost every single caucus (he lost in American Samoa.) Clinton won a couple more primaries than Obama did. This is exactly what I would expect. The people who participate in caucuses tend to be more passionate partisans who don't mind getting up and arguing for their candidates. The people who vote in primaries include the political couch potatoes who are less likely to follow politics and more likely to vote for an old familiar name. Or, in many contests, they aren't even members of the party in questions.

I just heard Mark Shields assert that party partisans support Clinton and that Obama's strength is with youth and independents. Mark Shields is confusing party partisanship with age. The people who voted for Obama at rates of 3 to 1 and 4 to 1 in state caucuses yesterday proved their partisanship.

The presidential primaries favor candidates that are relatively centrist, because they must appeal to independents and cross-overs. It is no coincidence that we have been having closer presidential elections just as the parties have been resorting more and more to primaries. By trying to appeal in their nomination process to voters outside their own parties, the two major parties have created an institution that compels them each to resemble the other.

So "Democratic" and "Republican" end up being mere brands, and the people have fewer choices, and candidates with bold new ideas that break with the thinking of the general public don't get a chance to be nominated by either party.

The purpose of the 1st Amendment was to prevent the government from taking actions that would suppress the free flow of ideas. Primaries look democratic, but by helping to take people with new ideas out of play they actually undermine democracy, by reducing genuine choices.

Finally, a caucus is a place for people to argue their views and try to persuade other voters to their candidates and platforms. People say that's an argument against caucuses.

Oh, gee, it's the United States of America of 2008, and we can't be bothered to speak out about our views. We have to do politics anonymously?

You all do know don't you that even states with primaries still have caucuses and it's the people who attend them that argue the platforms of the parties and decide what directions they should go in?

By dispensing with argument, primaries add to the impression that people have no real political voice.

The voice is there, you just have to use it.

Peeve: I Am What I Am

Hardly a week goes by from Fall through Spring that this doesn't happen: I get on a bus downtown. I sit facing sideways at the front of the bus for the sake of the arthritis and the long legs. There's a guy staring at me. Sometimes he's grinning. Sometimes I get some kind of a sign, like an AOK, or he wants to give me five.

I know it can't be because he's read my column and recognized me by the accompanying picture. And sure enough, the first words out of the guys mouth are, "75th Ranger Regiment!" "Who?" I say. "You!" he says. "No, man, it's just a hat," I say.

It's not even a US military design. I picked the black beret I wear to suit Seattle's windy weather, not to resemble something military. If it's a reference to anything it's to my Gaelic heritage. I have a theory that the beret probably got invented in either Ireland or Brittany -- someplace like Seattle, wet and windy, especially windy. It's the ideal head-wear for a man with arthritis who doesn't want to be chasing his Stetson through cow pastures, bogs, or through the streets, every five minutes, dodging traffic.

[Right: I wear a black version of this, adorned with light gray, white, and light brown, cat hairs. It's actually a Basque style beret. Some people say the Basques invented berets. Like Ireland and Brittany, the historic Basque Country faces the Atlantic. Tell me it's not windy.]

Getting back to the peeve. So I explain all this to Mr. Presumptive, and what do you suppose the response is? He says, "No, you're a Ranger alright!"

At which point I'm wanting to kill him with my bare hands. He is in effect calling me a liar. He's saying I'm lying to him about my OWN FUCKING SELF. But I don't kill him with my bare hands because I know that with his last dying breath he'll say, "See, I told you you were a Ranger! If you weren't how could you have done that? --*cough*, *cough*, bleh, feh, FEH, **urk**." I wouldn't want to have to hear that.

The gist of the peeve is, if we're talking solely about me, I'm the authority. Especially if you're a stranger and don't have any experience to go on.

If I say I saw Dr Kildare on TV in 1958, that's not solely about me. You can come back with, "No you didn't, it wasn't on yet," and I can answer, "Not the series -- it was one of the old movie versions," and that could be the start of a fine enjoyable argument.

But if some dunce says, "You're gay," and I say, "No, I'm not," the next words out of the dunce's mouth better not be, "Yes, you are, I can tell." Maybe you CAN tell, but you MAY NOT. You don't have authority in that department. IT'S MY CALL.

It applies to other people. If the woman in front of me looks like a dude but says she's a woman, that's her call, not mine. I'm not the authority on other people's mind-sets, and I can't know how gender identification works because the science doesn't exist yet.

I am what I am, and that goes for everyone else.

Peeve: Symbol Abuse

Resolution #11: I will rant more, and more often. To help me accomplish this one, I am starting a new category of post, the peeve post, of which this will be the first. (Or third depending on what you think you're counting.)

I thought of trying to think of my greatest peeve, and then my next greatest peeve, and then my next, numbering them 1, 2, 3, &cetera until I ran out at 500 or so, but then I realized that I would have to have many of them listed in front of me before I could order them so well.

Also, I have often exposed my peeves in columns and other posts here. So I'll want to leave those in the archives and present many of my more obscure peeves in this new category.

I've decided to begin with one of my most obscure peeves, one which gets hardly any sympathy from people I've mentioned it to.

Symbol Abuse is what you get when unintelligent people, i.e. most everyone, can't or won't distinguish a symbol from that which the symbol symbolizes. Another name I have for it is Stupid Cat Mind, so named because when you try to point something out to a stupid cat he stares at your finger.

I've been a geometer and an artist. Two not so unrelated activities. I have a huge love of the visual and the graphic. So it really pisses me off when perfectly good simple graphic images, innocent inoffensive geometric figures, are treated as criminals.

[Above Left: Swastikas interlocking or disconnected create interesting planar tilings. Interlocking swastikas were often used to create ornamental friezes in pre-WW II architecture. Seattleites can see an example of such a frieze encircling the Smith Tower at 2nd & Yesler, near the top.]

The most egregious instance of this kind of Symbol Abuse was conducted by Hitler when he co-opted the swastika from Hinduism and some other Indo-European cultures to identify the NAZI party with a fictitious pure proto-Indo-European master race. (We now know that the earliest genetically pure ancestors of the Indo-Europeans were protozoa. Probably African protozoa.)

So first, Hitler spends a couple decades smearing an innocent symbol by linking it with racism, genocide, totalitarianism, fascism, and attempted world conquest and subjugation.

THEN, when it's all over and the aggrieved symbol should have been free, what do we get? Six decades plus of blaming the victim. People hate the swastika, instead of hating the bastards who raped it.

[Above Right: When is a symbol of fascism not a symbol of fascism? Context matters.]

Or, it goes the other way. People who SAY they care about what the US flag stands for, in practice only care about the flag itself.

The flag is NOT what it stands for. It's a symbol. It's no different than a word or a name. It points. Pay attention to what the pointer points at, stop looking at the pointer.

[Below: A US Military urban camouflage American flag patch. How symbol abuse bites you in the ass. Used to be, Americans marched into battle waving the Stars and Stripes. Now, because the symbol has become a talisman of loyalty and patriotism, rather than a communication to enemies and allies, our guys go to battle with disguised flags. Next they'll be carrying them on key chains in their back pockets. Instead of talking to the world, we're talking to ourselves.]

Logos, Blogos

Over on Adventures in Irony/Bloggery I recently threw a temper tantrum that vented a long boiling pet peeve regarding an intellectual analysis of some social phenomenon or other. It may not surprise any of you that I have many, many, such pet peeves, and there are many more temper tantrums within me that I can throw.

Let's do the big one. The Mother of all intellectual analyses of all social phenomena or other. Let's throw a temper tantrum over the concept of "culture"!

My first encounter with culture, as an intellectual analysis, was in a sociology class I mistakingly took at the University of Washington. I was foolish enough to think that sociology was an "logy," therefore something you could talk about, as "logy" comes from "logos" meaning words, or talk. So when the professor said that by definition culture consisted of social institutions or artifacts that are passed from one generation to the next, I naturally asked what were the antecedents of this definition. Why was this definition chosen and not another? I was told "That's the definition we're using in this course. If you have a problem with it maybe you shouldn't be here."

At the time, I thought I was just facing a particularly stupid or surly professor. I now realize that all discussions of culture tend to end similarly because there is no such thing.

There is nothing to talk about. This fact concerning culture can not be admitted by sociologists and anthropologists who teach courses on it.

The closest sociologists and anthropologists seem able to come to acknowledging that culture doesn't exist is in courses entirely devoted to the definition of it. Such courses seem to be very popular these days, and I take this as a positive sign.

However, a really sharp thinker might figure out that if it takes an entire quarter or term to lay out all the popular definitions of culture down through the past 15 or so decades and discuss them each briefly and talk about which ones might be most suitable for basing a science of humankind and collective humankind behavior, then maybe, just maybe, this is a thing that doesn't exist at all, except as a pretty word in search of a neat definition.

The word "intelligence" comes from the idea that smart people discern well. Before discerning something, there ought to be something to discern. I call it looking for Nature's cleavage. If you see cleavage, there is something to point to. There is that which lies to the right of the cleavage and there is that which lies to the left of the cleavage.

But if there is no cleavage, then there is nothing to discern, and "intelligence" consists in moving on. [Picture: Science!]

Feel the Clove

Here's a huge pet peeve of mine. Why does every single trained cook on the planet overcook garlic? What's up with that? You've got geniuses with friggin' DEGREES in cooking. They haven't heard of Al Dente? They think he's just about pasta?

Let me tell you how to cook garlic. There's nobody else here who's going to tell you, obviously.

Step one. Get over your 20th century idea that microwave ovens aren't real ovens. I could go on and on about the molecular resonance frequency of H-2-O and how heat is heat AND IT ISN'T NUCLEAR RADIATION and so forth and none of it would ever sink in BUT THE BOTTOM LINE is GET OVER THE IGNORANCE.

There's no better way to cook garlic than this: put an entire head, or bulb, if you prefer to call it that, and stick it in your modern microwavicular oven set on high and "zap" it AS IS unskinned in any way for between 20 and 30 seconds, depending on the size of the head. Little head, 20 seconds, big head, 30 seconds. Unless it's Elephant Garlic, in which case figure it out yourself, I don't eat elephant.

Step two. There's no step two. Separate the cloves, peel them, and eat them. You're done. You'll notice they aren't mushy, the way they are in every restaurant. You'll notice they still have some snap when you bite into them. There's your Al Dente. And the burn isn't completely gone, it's just manageable.

While I'm on the subject a recent study has announced that garlic doesn't really lower cholesterol. The so-called scientists who authored this study based it on an experiment in which they fed a whole bunch of people the equivalent of six cloves of garlic a week. (One a day with a day off "for rest.")

Oh PLEASE. Any serious garlic eater can tell you one clove a day is nothing. It takes a head (or bulb, if you prefer) to really clean your pipes, if you know what I mean, and if you've had a head a day, you know what I mean. These scientists clearly know nothing of the kind, if they think a lousy clove a day is going to make a dent in your grease deposits.

One final observation. If you have difficulty eating garlic, because of its bite, I'll bet it never occurred to you to mince it up and mix it with your raspberry Jello. That would help.