Category Archives: Life

Grimmauld Place

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This is nice.

When West Anchorage resident Janna Wilcox, 12, heard earlier this year that her unnamed home street would soon get an official designation, the wizarding world of Harry Potter immediately came to her mind.

“When we got the letter that the street was going to be renamed, I’m a huge Harry Potter nerd, so I was like, ‘What can I name this that’ll be like Harry Potter?’” Wilcox told Anchorage Assembly members at a Tuesday meeting. “And I thought, ‘Grimmauld Place.’”

It ended up being approved. (The policy, when there’s a tie, is to flip a coin.) Kudos to Wilcox for seeking the goodwill of her neighbors by making them brownies.

I’m surprised it was permitted, though. The library used to have big quote above its main doors, that read “When in doubt, go to the library” and attributed to “J. K. Rowling.” About a year ago, they repainted it to attribute it to “Ron Weasley, The Chamber of Secrets.” I asked staff people about it and they professed not to have noticed. (Possibly the painting was done by stealth at night.)

Let Elon Musk Run TSA

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This is rich. One of the Thousands Standing Around who do security theater in airports says that they need a raise.

People tend to take our jobs for granted. You’re more likely to hear about long wait times or annoyance about taking off your shoes than you are about the important work we do. What you don’t hear about are the weapons we confiscate, the threats of violence we deal with, and the grueling work hours we endure in order to keep America’s skies safe.

Actually, we hear a lot about the weapons you don’t confiscate, and the snow-globes you do. And when we want to know, how, exactly, strip-searching grandma and three-year olds keeps our skies safe, you say you can’t tell us because Terrorists are watching.

What’s up with this bitching about a raise, anyway? Is it throwing out a high bid so we can negotiate back down to where we are now, instead of cutting your pay and eliminating headcount like you need? Because, as employees in a public union, you need a pay cut and worse hours.

Until 2011, our union even lacked the right to bargain over workplace conditions. While some bargaining rights were granted, we still lack many of the same rights that most federal workers are entitled to.

Organizing labor against the Federal Government is (by definition) organizing against the representatives of the people. It should be illegal. And a strike should be given the same treatment that Reagan gave PATCO.

But if I was in charge, the first thing I’d do would be to dismantle the deep state. The agency I’d start with would be the DHS, and I’d use the TSA as poster children. But if people aren’t willing to embrace my proposal, let’s at least let Elon Musk take over running it. Deadwood like this complainer would be the first ones out the door.

Early Impressions of the New Administration

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Watching speeches by the new president reminds me so much of Star Trek (the Original Series). Specifically this episode:

Note: I am not not NOT saying that anyone in the administration, much less the president, espouses the tenets of nationalism-socialism. (“Say what you will about them, but at least it’s an ethos.”) If you’d seen the episode, you’d know that. And if you haven’t seen it, maybe you should before you make inferences.

(I wonder if that episode could be aired today. The iconography seems so triggering by modern standards.)

Trump’s Exit

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I don’t think what Trump said was a high crime or misdemeanor. But I do wish he would leave office. In fact, I wish he would leave office, and then Mike Pence would also leave office. I’d like Nancy Pelosi to take over the presidency, per the constitution, and run out the clock on the 2016-2020 term. It would give her a historic first (female president).

Kennedy-Johnson 1960

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John F. Kennedy was elected after a campaign critical of the Eisenhower-Nixon administration’s “Missile Gap,” aided by a friendly press and voting irregularities in Chicago. As it turned out, the gap was illusory, but his campaign required Kennedy to govern as a cold war hawk. The Bay of Pigs invasion was followed by the Cuban Missile Crisis. The situation in Viet Nam also worsened, especially after the CIA-sponsored coup against Diem.

Way back in 1957, then-President Eisenhower had federalized the National Guard to enforce court-ordered desegregation in Arkansas. But Kennedy, perhaps because he owed his victory in part to pro-segregation southern Democrats, was slow to enforce the law. Not until the middle of Kennedy’s third year in office did his administration move to a stronger pro-Civil Rights position.

Kennedy did not finish his first term. He was replaced by Lyndon Johnson, who won election in 1964 but who was so unpopular both within and outside his party that he did not seek re-election in 1968.

Wuhan Coronavirus COVID-19

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This bothers me: if people can test negative and then go into quarantine for 8 days, and only then test positive, that argues for continued extreme social distancing until better treatment and/or a vaccine is developed.

But this also bothers me. If even the left (albeit the British left) can see the problems that accrue from continued lockdown—which accrue primarily to those at the bottom of the ladder, then what should we do?

And there’s this from Nassim Taleb. I can live with a society where people wear masks whenever they think they might be sick, or that a substantial fraction of the people they encounter might be sick.

It would be nice, too, if we had some level of widespread agreement on what we’re trying to accomplish, and what can be allowed to supercede it.

However, there is one inconvenient truth that cannot be disputed: more black Americans have been killed by three months of coronavirus than the number who have been killed by cops and vigilantes since the turn of the millennium.

Thomas Chatterton Williams in the Guardian

I’m so old, I can remember when the goal was the flatten the curve. But we live in an era where everything has to be politicized, even epidemiology.

Configuring Useful CLI Utilities

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This is a sort of directory to help me remember what I want to install on new machines (or new operating systems)

★★★ Cowboy’s dotfiles (like the init.d files but for a regular user)

Hackernoon’s Favorite CLI Utilities

BKuhlmann’s Mac OS configuration

Nate Landau’s bash_profile (described here)

fzy fuzzy finder

colout – a sort of g/re/p tool but colorizing the matches

xsv – csv manipulation

Crystal – I have to try porting some of my slower Ruby utilities to it.

renameutils – would you believe “utilities for renaming things?”

DIY init-style status messages

Heinlein’s Juveniles — Silly Book Challenge, #2

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The second book in this very occasional series is … well, any of Heinlein’s juveniles. The cover is from the final book in the series, Have Space Suit, Will Travel (1958). It features bug-eyed monsters, space pirates, and a plucky hero who saves the earth from alien invaders over Labor Day weekend and still makes it back in time to get a free-ride scholarship at M.I.T. and throw a milkshake at the antagonist. Plus, we are taught a handy mnemonic for the order of the nine planets (see below) and a parable about frogs that isn’t the one about boiling them slowly. (Sorry for all the spoilers, but you’ve had 62 years.)

For this posting of my #2 fiction book, I could have picked any one of the series. They’re all great (except, I guess, Rocket Ship Galileo, the first). I mean, they were great when I first read them, starting in junior high school, when the science was only a little bit dated. (Venus had turned out not to have swamps, for example, and Mars never had canals. Jupiter’s EM environment would probably make Ganymede a poor place to farm.) Starting in 1953, after a few books set in our solar system, Heinlein got wise and set his stories somewhere more romantic.

But despite that, the juveniles are still great. Honestly, they’re better than most of Heinlein’s non-YA fiction. Practically all of it. Especially if you see Starship Troopers as the YA fiction that it ought to have been.

What are you waiting for? Get started! For a complete list, see the wikipedia article (search “heinlein juvenile”). But you’ll need to get them new. We never put the old ones back into circulation.