entirely safe and fun

If your elected representatives voted for H.R. 5122 — and you can check here to see — you probably ought to vote for someone else on the Seventh. Your Senators didn’t care to hold a recorded vote on the issue, so why not just toss every single one of ‘em? It seems like a good plan!

The worrisome portion of H.R. 5122 is Section 1076, “USE OF THE ARMED FORCES IN MAJOR PUBLIC EMERGENCIES.” Tucked away in between a tweak to the H-2B visa program and the utterly innocuous Section 1077 (”INCREASED HUNTING AND FISHING OPPORTUNITIES FOR MEMBERS OF THE ARMED FORCES, RETIRED MEMBERS, AND DISABLED VETERANS”), 1076 authorizes the President to override state authority with respect to the National Guards, and use the Armed Forces for domestic law enforcement more or less at his discretion. It deeply weakens the Posse Comitatus Act, one of the most important protections of our civil rights.

Anyhow, Vote Freshman. Freshmen don’t have a track record of selling us out to tyrants.

Update: Wikipedia already has a hotly-debated article outlining the changes. Yay Web 2.0!

Sometimes, the correct number of tacos is four.

Last night, I picked up some dinner at the Tacos del Mar right near Matchplay, Mountain View’s best place to play Magic. To be exact, I acquired precisely two chicken tacos. Since the beginning of the draft was drawing near, I brought my repast into the store and prepared to tuck in. Since I was drawing my food from an opaque sack, the magnitude of the feast wasn’t clear to the people in the store, but only Victor cared enough to ask about it. I replied that I had the correct number of tacos.

“I guess it’s better than a negative number of tacos,” Victor replied.

And this set me to thinking. There are tacos of which I wish I had eaten a negative number, foul tacoids whose uneating would have given me greater pleasure than any I could derive from merely digesting them. But that wouldn’t really be eating a negative number of tacos — it would just have been breaking even. “Eating negative tacos” is an act that would consist in (perhaps) eating a stack of saltines and a handful of dirt, then after some mysterious metabolo-­alchemical transmutation, producing from one’s gorge a warm, filled, garnished, and above all whole taco. For maximum awesomeness, the taco would be sheathed in aluminum foil, which could be derived from the abundant aluminum in the Earth’s crust. Wax paper would be an acceptable, organic alternative.

I shared my vision with all present, to a decidedly poor reception, except from Victor. He imagined having such a power, and being driven power-mad by it, but above all having the opportunity to share it, with the battle-cry and summons to dinner, “Sup from my taco-hole!”

It was futher agreed that the nose would be a serviceable taquito-hole, but would not serve well or comfortably in the taco-hole role. It only occurred to me much later that there was no occasion in my life on which I wished I had eaten negative taquitos.

CNN.com headline: “3 out of 4 say Congress is clueless.” In other news: 1 out of 4 non-Congressthings is clueless. The Pope is still Catholic, Canada still borders the US to the north, and the sun will rise and set as usual tomorrow. Exclusive film at 11.

The lovely Punam is currently reading the Book Whose Name We Shall Not Speak. The title may have something to do with a written character, which is deep red, but beyond this I can say no more, as I value my safety and the soundness of my mind. To do any more than hint at the Book’s True Name — and especially to speak Its dread title aloud — might attract Its fell attentions. The rites to appease It, once It has been aroused, are inconvenient at best, dangerous at worst. The author, the “Mad Puritan” Nathaniel Hawthorne, travestied his own fine short story, “The Minister’s Black Veil,” for elements of the plot, and that reckless act may have cost him his life fourteen short years later.

I suspect that most who read the Awful Book do so only when required, usually in high school. Punam, encountering It outside of that context, is able to keep Its power in check by laughing at It regularly, and It is withering under her dismissive reading eye. As she reads each leaf in her 1939 paperback edition, it crumbles and falls away from the binding; her ministrations have tramsmuted It from a Volume Entire into a Pile of Pages. The Book repels all but the staunchest reader, but Punam is simply too mickle a sorceress for even Its sanity-blasting revelations.

Proud to serve his country, no doubt

Bob Ney (previous entry), the soon-to-be former Republican congressman from Ohio, has plead guilty to charges of accepting bribes from the Jack Abramoff apparatus. His plea was strictly pro forma, an attempt to salvage some dignity under the weight of a mountain of evidence — “At least I told the truth that one time, in court!”

He invoked the popular “But I’m an alcoholic!” defense. His alcoholism made him accept gifts from Abramoff, and, apparently, cash from a Cypriot aircraft parts manufacturer. Next time I’m having a beer, I need to remember whether it makes me solicit bribes and then attempt to carefully cover my tracks. Quoth the Times:

Another person familiar with the department’s investigation said at least one of the criminal charges in Mr. Ney’s guilty plea would involve the accuracy of his claim in a House financial disclosure statement that he won $34,000 in a private London casino during a trip in 2003.

Those winnings were also under scrutiny by the Justice Department, in part because the amount of the winnings coincided to a surprising degree with the amount of debt outstanding on Mr. Ney’s credit cards. Mr. Ney’s host on that trip was a Cyprus-based aviation company that was seeking Congressional support for sales of airplane parts to Iran.

That’s what alcohol does to a man. Certainly it couldn’t have been the case that Bob Ney had been lulled into hubris by a long career of not being caught accepting inducements beyond what is appropriate? Nope! Obviously it was the alcoholism, which is a real medically recognized disease. Bob Ney is wholly lacking in character flaws!

And there’s no chance that he had come to believe that his seniority in our government insulated him from consequences — a belief bolstered by our seniority-based legislative rules and electoral regulations bent to ensure re-election. No, Ney isn’t a tyrant wannabe – he loves freedom and the democratic ideal, but he’s sick, can’t you see?

The good news is that the increasing popularity of the “But I’m an alcoholic!” defense (as invoked recently by Mark Foley) correlates strongly with more freshmen entering Congress. It’s great when people choose to Vote Freshman; it’s even better when every candidate for an office is a freshman!

update 16 Oct: Jeff Rowland weighs in on “But I’m an alcoholic!” at Overcompensating.

Much prettier to look at than Metallica themselves, honestly

The XBox 360 ships with a highly non-trivial music visualization application, called Neon, built by category captains Llamasoft. It is sufficiently non-trivial, in fact, that it has a manual. I was surprised when I grabbed my controller and the graphics seemed to be changing in response to my joystick maneuvers, and then really just kind of bemused. Now I’m enjoying it – it’s a little bonus game, in effect, which happens to showcase 360’s ability to maintain a steady frame rate at any resolution, and to give additional weight to the 360’s ability to read music files (in a somewhat disappointly narrow range of formats, which sadly does not include FLAC) from its LAN-mates.

All it needs now is to expose its web browser functionality — I would not be unhappy to see a third-party browser, either — to be the very best device ever to wear the “set-top box” tag.

Do ya think I’m… sexy?

Cingular’s DNS (name lookup) service has all the celerity of… celery. It’s slightly slower than glacial creep, but a hair faster than the San Andreas fault. Occasionally, it fails in its mission to provide same-day service. If you use IE, perhaps you’ve stared at the “Locating…” message in the status bar, waiting for any omen that you’d be connected to your desired host at some point. I recommend action.

OpenDNS is fast and free. Its creators make many (perhaps extravagant) claims on its behalf, but none of those claims is as interesting as the brute fact that their DNS servers don’t suck yard after yard of floppy folivore phallus, like those of a certain wireless carrier. To configure your Windows Mobile 5 device to take advantage of their service, start the Settings application and go to Connections, GPRS, and whatever your GPRS connection is called. Scroll down to the Primary and Secondary DNS text fields, and input 208.67.222.222 and 208.67.220.220, respectively. Restart your phone, and send those randy sloths elsewhere. Yay! DNS, FTW, kthxbye.

Previous entries in this series: prequel, part 1, part 2, guide