Not a Potted Plant

I plugged in some SWAGs to the CNN delegate calculator. I assumed that the Gingrich campaign would eventually run out of steam by the end of March, that Ron Paul would continue on to the end doing about what he’s been doing, and Santorum would appeal to the grassroots and Tea Partiers, and Romney would do well in most other places and especially strong in the Mountain West (lots of Mormons) and in outlying areas (lots of money and organization).

I wound up with: Romney 1109, Santorum 959, Paul 230, and Gingrich 184. That’s a brokered convention, with Gingrich and Paul holding the cards. Which got me sort of excited, until I realized that I’d apportioned more delegates than actually exist. One would think if this happened that the behind-the-scenes pols would jigger around with the rules so that the convention was locked up before it started, inspiring outrage from the supporters of whoever it was that got locked out (likely Santorum, if it’s the establishment folks pulling the strings).

Religions are, by definition, metaphors, after all: God is a dream, a hope, a woman, an ironist, a father, a city, a house of many rooms, a watchmaker who left his prize chronometer in the desert, someone who loves you–even, perhaps, against all evidence, a celestial being whose only interest is to make sure your football team, army, business, or marriage thrives, prospers, and triumphs over all opposition. Religions are places to stand and look and act, vantage points from which to view the world.

– Neil Gaiman

Singers loved nothing half so well as the sound of their own voices.

– George R.R. Martin

…[P]arents who protect their kids from accurate feedback teach them that they deserve special treatment.

– Lori Gottlieb

My old Thinkpad R32 laptop, purchased in 2002, finally bit the dust. It had a long and winding life. Dropped repeatedly, a five-foot drop onto a hard surface at a coffee place spelled the beginning of the end. That was in 2006. It was a long end. Some pixels started blinkering out. The TSA mishandled it (despite my specifically telling them that it was fragile) and a bunch more did. Nonetheless, 70% of the screen was still visible. It was no longer a primary laptop by that point, but it still served its uses in various capacities when it served a couple years as the TV computer and then its final years manning the printer(s).

I don’t have the heart to throw it away. A part of me really wants to buy another used R32 and be able to take the upgrade parts and put them to use. It would cost less than $100, but, for the life of me, I cannot think of what I would do with another decade-old laptop. Upon its death, I already had a newer machine (T43, made in 2005) I could immediately put on printer duty. I have a newer-machine still (made in 2008) that is primarily on backup-emergency duty. Another 2008 that is packed and ready to go when I want to take a laptop somewhere without packing my primary one. Two other laptops, a 2008 and a 2009, that share TV duty (one waiting in the wings so that if I need to do something with one, I have another manning the television).

Not long ago, I threw out a motherboard that I bought in 2007. The motherboard was never right from the moment I got it. I celebrated a little when it died and made absolutely no effort to figure out what was wrong with it. I feared that if I discovered what was wrong with it, I would try to fix it and be stuck with the motherboard that never worked right to begin with. I still haven’t thrown it out, though. I look at it and think to myself, “You don’t work, and I never proved otherwise”… not that I tried. I have a couple older machines that I have kept in good working order, but have not turned on in more than twice since 2008.

The progress of technology is an absolutely amazing thing. As a computer geek, I love it. I have loved each smartphone more than the previous (though I am stuck on a 2009 model, they don’t make the kind I want anymore). The cell phone I adored when I got it now sits there completely unused, despite technically doing just about everything my current phone does. I could go on eBay and sell it, but nobody wants it. It’s several times faster than my first Windows PC with the same screen resolution and a lot more memory, but it’s probably never going to be used again.

The triumph of technology never ceases to amaze me, yet the obsolescence never stops saddening me.

We were travelling through a region where practically all the older men had served in the Confederate Army, and where the younger men had all their lives long drunk in the endless tales told by their elders, at home, and at the cross-roads taverns, and in the court-house squares, about the Cavalry of Forrest and Morgan and the infantry of Jackson and Hood. The blood of the old men stirred to the distant breath of battle; the blood of the young men leaped hot with eager desire to accompany us. The older women, who remembered the dreadful misery of war–the misery that presses its iron weight most heavily on the wives and the little ones–looked sadly at us; but the young girls drove down in bevies, arrayed in their finery, to wave flags in farewell to the troopers and to beg cartridges and buttons as mementos. Everywhere we saw the Stars and Stripes, and everywhere we were told, half-laughing, by grizzled ex-Confederates that they had never dreamed in the bygone days of bitterness to greet the old flag as they now were greeting it, and to send their sons, as now they were sending them, to fight and die under it.

— Theodore Roosevelt

…[F]or a judge to impose the penalty of whipping until the body oozed blood was a mark of condign severity. … Symbolic overtones cam forth easily from that red substance, but being ambiguous or polysemous, they muddled the sharp differences between religious and penal connotations, all the more so in that the imagery of blood had a prominent place in the rituals of everyday life.

— Lauro Martines

I’m not entirely sure what to think about this story. On the one hand, I want to be respectful of other peoples’ religious beliefs. On the other hand, seeing members of two different religions get into a pissing match over unreality is surreal at best and silly at worst.

The Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter-Day Saints has a practice by which the souls of the dead are posthumously baptized. Apparently there’s some sort of centralized list kept on a computer somewhere about who is to be baptized next. Also apparently the posthumous baptism has to be done on an individualized basis and with some degree of understanding about their geneaology — it can’t be done en masse for all dead people generally. But there seems to be a subculture within the LDS community that likes to do this in the name of people who died in Europe in World War II, particularly Holocaust victims, and this has a lot of contemporary Jewish people upset.

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{{The following is a reproduction of an old Hit Coffee post, reproduced because I have recently seen a few people get it wrong.}}

Outside the South (and commonly inside it) people have some mistaken impressions about the flags of the Confederacy. The most commonly attributed flag was never actually the flag of the would-be nation:

The above is the Navy Battle Flag, the Southern Cross, the Battle Flag (or an elongated version of it), the Rebel Flag, or the Confederate (Navy) Jack. The recognizable emblem would be used on later flags, but what we consider “The Confederate Flag” has mostly persisted not because it was the official flag of the Confederacy, but rather because it is the most instantly recognizable. The official flag of the Confederacy was considerably more forgettable:

That would be the Stars & Bars, which was the official flag of the Confederacy until people began confusing it with the American flag on the battle field. So they replaced it with a white flag that was subsequently confused with a surrender flag and then, about the time they were actually surrendering, they put a red bar on it.

But enough about the Confederacy for a moment, let’s talk about Georgia. In 1956, Georgia replaced three horizontal bars on their flag with the Confederate emblem. It doesn’t take a whole lot to figure out why, in 1956, Georgia might be so motivated. Flash forward forty years and Georgians are stunned and outraged to discover that their black population doesn’t so much like their state flag including an emblem from an era that, to say the least, was not one they were particularly nostalgic for.

Eventually something was going to have to give, so at the turn of the century they designed what is considered by flag experts to be the most poorly designed flag in history. It allowed the Confederacy-boosters to keep the emblem somewhere on the flag, but kept it as small as possible and part of the old Georgia among a collection of mini-flags below the state emblem. Pro-Dixie whites were angry cause the Confederate emblem was so small. Black folks weren’t satisfied cause it was still there.

So they went back to the drawing board. It was seeming as though it was going to be impossible for the flag designers to come up with something that could please everybody. Then somebody got a clever idea.

Black folks don’t mind it because it doesn’t have the emblem. Pro-Dixie types like it cause it’s their little inside joke. The design of one and the number of stars from the other. Brilliant.

…[E]ven though this process strengthened the Roman army and expanded the labor force at a time when both were needed, it presented Roman authorities with a fundamental problem: The Germanic immigrant population was not being assimilated. Italy, particularly in its northern regions, was evolving toward a dualistic culture wherein the Roman population lived under established Roman law while the Germanic population lived under a parallel set of Germanic customs.

— Charles Killinger