Friday Thoughts

1) If I were a dictator and was privately thinking of retiring, I'd stage one of my usual sham elections and have the numbers work out so that my chosen successor beats me by a few points.  Then international observers will all be like "hey, maybe all those elections where he got 100% of the vote were real, too!"

2) Cars and trucks with bad blind spots should have signs on the back that say "bad blind spot, watch it".

3) City bike lanes should be on the sidewalks instead of the roads.  An accident involving a car and a bike is usually a lot worse than one involving a pedestrian.  Although it should be pointed out that pedestrians don't have the benefit of side view mirrors.

4) Pedestrians should have side view mirrors.  You'd not only be able to spot bicyclists coming behind you, but you'd be able to catch bike gropers more quickly, and toss a stick in their spokes so they can't escape to do more groping.

5) Speaking of bike gropers, I love how people say the alleged groper was "not who you'd expect" because his Facebook page makes it look like he's a normal guy.  Is a perpetrator ever "who you'd expect"?  Like they catch some hunchbacked, googly-eyed monster-ape-person, and then the papers can say "perpetrator pretty much who you'd expect".

6) Why is it that the political correctness that pushed us to say "chairperson" and "layperson" has not changed the word "gunman" to "gunperson"?  You gotta take the good with the bad, persons!

7) They say "the worst day fishing beats the best day at the office."  This is completely stupid.  The worst day fishing involves getting eaten by sharks.  The best day at the office is when your office is a brewery and you spend the whole day testing new batches and need to take a cab home.  Maybe it's just me, but I'd choose that over being eaten by sharks.

The 12th Amendment Sucks!

In the 224 years since we've started electing presidents--ranging from great Americans like Washington and Lincoln to war crinimals like Jackson and FDR--there's a somewhat alarming statistic.  We've had 43 men serve as president (Cleveland gets counted twice in history books which is why they say 44), and in nine cases the president has left office (through death or resignation) mid-way through his term. 

That's a better than 1 in 5 chance that the president you elect will leave office and their VP will take over.  And that doesn't include cases where presidents came close to being removed from office (Andrew Johnson was one Senator's vote away from being removed) or nearly died in office (a few inches away and Ronald Reagan would have died mere months into his first term).  So the choice of a Vice President is one that should be very serious and well-considered--it's an excellent chance that the person picked for VP will be running the Oval Office one day.

And that's when it gets scary.  Say what you will about various incompetent or unscrupulous presidents--the Warren Hardings, the James Buchanans, the JFKs--they were for the most part better than the crop of VPs we've had over the years (some of whom managed to make it to the presidency).  This list includes:

1) John Tyler, who did become president, and the only one not buried with U.S. honors because he happened to become an official in the Confederate government later on.

2) John Breckinridge, who later ran on the Southern Democratic ticket in 1860, then he too became a high ranking official for the Confederacy and had to flee the country after the Civil War.

3) James Calhoun, who didn't live to join the Confederacy but was the sort of father of secession and treason.  Plus, he was a big booster of the disastrous War of 1812.

4) Aaron Burr, another treasonous scoundrel who only escaped prosecution because his conspiracy never got moving.

5) Eldridge Gerry, who brought us gerrymandering.  Thank him for the fact that politicians now can choose their voters and not the other way around.

6) Schuyler Colfax, who was a total jerk.

7) Henry Wallace, who was completely duped by the Communists (though in his defense, he repented in the 1950s).

To be fair, we've also had some great men serve as VP--Jefferson, Teddy Roosevelt, John Adams--but it almost seems they were in that slot by accident.  In fact, Jefferson and Adams both served as VP at a time that the VP was elected separately from the President (as in, not on the same ticket) and as for TR, he was a reluctant choice forced on then-President McKinley. 

The problem is how VPs are chosen.  No presidential candidate (or political party, back when the party's delegates had a say in the selection of the VP) has been able to see the VP selection as simply one of "this person would be a great president".  Rather, the pick goes something like this: "is this person plausible enough as president that the voters won't laugh me out of the room?" and if you're John McCain you don't even ask yourself that question.  If the answer is "yes" then the overriding question is "how will this person scare up a few more votes for me?"  In the old days, it meant nominating a very rich man for VP, so they can help fund the campaign.  These days, it's about appealing to a consituency that the presidential nominee needs--Sarah Palin was intended to help McCain with women, Al Gore was supposed to help Clinton burnish his Southern Moderate cred, Joe Biden was added to give Obama some humor.  The problem is, if we manage to get a great Vice President, it'll be more by accident than by design.  We always vote the top of the ticket, and just hope the bottom half isn't so awful it drags the entire ticket down.

How to fix this state of affairs, considering the high likelihood that a VP becomes a P?  Repeal the 12th Amendment.

Can't Wait to Buy Monica Lewinsky's Book! This is Relevant to my Interests!

Ah, the innocent late-Clinton years, when the economy was still booming and a truly despicable human being sat in the White House and reaped the benefits of a peace dividend and tech boom that he neither caused nor ruined.  When the biggest threat to the political career of the president wasn't a major hurricane or lagging economy, but a young woman named Monica Lewinsky. 

Just in case you're thinking "why bring her up now?  This is about as relevant to 2012 as Blues Traveler", well join the club.  But apparently Ms. Lewinsky has gotten a $12 million book deal which says more about our book-buying public than it does about her.  I can't blame Lewinsky for this--hey, why not cash in? 

I just can't say I agree with the article's author though--why feel sorry for Monica Lewinsky?  She basically is financially set at a young age, unlike the proverbial Bangladeshi rope farmer who would have to work for sixteen thousand years to earn $12 million.  Plus, it's not as though she was just going about her duties as a White House intern--a post you have to be pretty well connected to get, incidentally--and Clinton just went and forced himself on her (he had other victims for that--Monica never claimed anything happened against her will, though I haven't read her book).  You choose to get involved with Bill Clinton, you become notorious. 

Yes, it's true that Monica Lewinsky could direct an Oscar-winning film, develop a cure for cancer, and take over as head of IBM and yet still the only thing she'll be known as is the curvy woman who [insert childish euphamism but we all know what we're talking about] with Clinton.  But in the grand scheme of things, worse things have happened to better people.

Now Owning a Prius

Over the weekend I went out and bought a Prius, with basically one goal in mind--high MPGs.  With a new job starting next week that will require a lot of driving, the prospect of having to stop for gas less than half as often makes it worth it.  So far the car is great--and I have the following tips for any prospective Prius owners:

1) Accept the fact that there is absolutely no way to look cool in a Prius.  The Prius was simply not designed to look cool.  You could even paint flames on the side and attach cattle horns to the front, it's still going to look like you're apologizing to everything else on the road.

2) New car smell is great.  Avoid letting any of your grubby friends bring fast food into the car.  Fast food kills new car smell like nothing else.

3) You might want to put an NRA sticker on your bumper to help balance the fact that you're driving a Prius.

4) Gas mileage is great--around 50 mpg--and you can jack it up from there depending on how you drive (gradual acceleration and braking, etc.).  What makes it even better is there's a readout letting you know how you're doing mpg-wise, so you can adjust.

5) When going at very slow speeds (residential streets, traffic jams) the car uses just the electric motor, so it's whisper quiet like some ninja-car.  This would be a great car to stalk someone with.

6) Don't stalk people in your Prius.  It's illegal, and morally wrong! 

7) The Prius is a hatchback car, and one thing about a hatchback is that unlike a trunk you can't just put all your stinky smelly stuff in the trunk because it'll smell up the inside of the car.  Not that I condone disposing of bodies in other cars, but the Prius would be a terrible car with which to dispose a body.  This is why mobsters don't drive Priuses.

8) Plural for Prius is "Priuses".  Call it a "Priii" and people will think you're an idiot.

If You Like Having All Your Fingers, Don't Drink At Smith Point

During my nearly twenty years of drinking in bars, I have never been in a genuine altercation with bar staff unless you count the time I was served a terrible excuse for a Murphy's Stout and asked them to switch it with something else and they refused because they were jerks.  But I have seen people ejected from bars on more than one occasion, and can say that the best type of bouncer gets the unwanted patron out with a minimum of violence and fuss.

But every now and again some bar bouncers will have a case like this which somehow results in a customer's finger getting lopped off.  In this case, the patron wasn't some twenty-something dudebro but rather a 50 year old Arlington attorney.  The bar itself--Smith Point in Georgetown--does of course have the dudebro vibe, so there's that.

The story doesn't make clear exactly how the patron's evening went from being served a very strong Red Bull and vodka when he merely ordered a beer to his being ejected in such a way that his finger was sacrificed to the Red Bull gods.  What is clear is that by his own admission, the patron had already had seven beers when he arrived at the bar, and so while the bar "overserved" him he was already pretty heavily served to begin with. 

Also striking to me is that the bar claims to have given him the unholy Red Bull and Vodka drink because they needed him to reach the $30 minimum for credit card purchases.  This is bullhockey--first, McDonalds lets you use a credit card with no minimum purchase.  Is Smith Point a superior establishment compared to McDonalds?  I think not!  McDonalds caters to a higher class of clientele than Smith Point and yes I'm including that homelacking fellow who mutters to himself in the booth near the window.  Second, okay, so you have a $30 minimum for credit cards--how about serving the customer something that is not a total abortion?  Red Bull and Vodka are what you drink before getting into a fistfight with a truck.

I would hope some additional details emerge in this matter--a finger isn't just something you lose in the normal course of being shown to the door.  But whether it's the fault of an overzealous bouncer--and more than a few bouncers really should be in another line of work, such as intimidating debtors for the Mafia--or the patron himself will have to be worked out in the course of the lawsuit.

150 Years Since Antietam

If anything should have turned Americans into hard core pacifists, it should have been the horrible carnage of the Civil War.  Battle after battle where the tactics of lining up to advance across a clearing into the enemy had not kept up with the technology of faster and more accurate firepower, leaving tens of thousands dead or horribly wounded, should have taken all the glamour out of combat.  The fact that merely camping out with thousands of other soldiers under 1860s conditions could also mean likely catching a deadly disease would be just icing on the cake.  It's no wonder that we avoided major wars for almost forty years after that mess, and even then picked a weak enemy like Spain.

Today marks the 150th anniversary of the bloodiest day of that war--the Battle of Antietam, Maryland.  Over 23,000 killed, out of 131,000 engaged--giving a soldier in that battle about a one in six chance of perishing there.  And even after that horrible day, there'd be a few more years of war and a lot more young lives lost.  All pretty much to teach the South a lesson--when the state of South Carolina leads the way, don't follow!

The blood of Antietam was a high price but helped a great deal in ending the war.  General Lee's first advance into the North was checked, and his strength sapped--giving Lincoln enough cred to call it a victory and issue the Emancipation Proclamation, which discouraged a number of foreign governments from providing aid to the Confederacy.  It also meant that winning the war was not just a matter of keeping the states together, but ending slavery.

But what still stands out for me about that battle--as well as the entire war itself--is how easily the expectations of a short, relatively bloodless victory can be dashed when an enemy was underestimated.  And clearly both sides underestimated the other here--Northerners figured the rebels would be put down within months with a swift march on Richmond and the rebel forces would scatter; Southerners figured once the Union's nose was bloodied they'd be allowed to secede without further trouble.  The foolishness of glorifying war without expecting the unexpected is a lesson we should all carry with us--particularly in these days of pundits and politicians calling for strikes on Iran--and the field of Antietam is the best example of this.

No Film is Worth a Riot. Unless It's a Laugh Riot and the Film is Blazing Saddles.

Another day, another round of turmoil in the Middle East over something incredibly stupid and petty.  No, not food shortages or oppressive governments--that was so 2011--we're back to idiocy on a par with "offensive" Danish cartoons.  Yes, the Mideast is exploding over a trailer for a low quality film.

The film--apparently called "The Innocence of Muslims"--has a trailer available that you can watch here.  In case you don't want to waste 13 minutes of your time watching this, it's a poorly dubbed, greenscreened farce that looks like it's going for the humor and edginess of Mel Brooks at his best, while portraying the Prophet Muhammad as a surfer-dude type who is also a crook, fraud, and pedophile.  Obviously, the sort of film intended to piss off Muslims--it's difficult to imagine anyone seeing it and saying "that really opened my eyes and maybe it's time to have a reasonable discussion about one of the world's major religions". 

That said, any mature group of sensible adults who happen to be Muslims would see this, laugh it off for its amateurish patheticness, and say "at least I didn't waste ten bucks plus popcorn on that".  In all likelihood the vast majority of the billion followers of Islam would react just that way if they viewed this.  But then, it only takes a small number of crazed, insecure dillweeds to have such a fragile sense of their own religious identity that some film trailer so silly that it could barely reach into the "offensive" category to riot and loot and murder.  This turmoil has caused a number of deaths already--including U.S. diplomatic personnel in Libya--and is likely to cause more before this blows over.

The makers of this film ought to be ashamed of themselves for creating something so stupid--there's nothing wrong with a film that takes a critical look at any or all religions, but this one seems the equivalent of schoolyard taunting.  But if you're going to take something like this seriously enough to be offended, it seems you do far more good for your cause by denouncing it as crap--and anyone watching it would have to agree--and going on with your life, rather than fulfill the stereotype of easily set-off fanatic who is willing to kill and die over a poor man's "Life of Brian".