Category Archives: Random Musings

Google Voice Is Hilarious

Those of you who use Google Voice for your voicemail system know that much hilarity can ensue when comparing the voice message to the Google voice-to-text message.  I have never seen one quite as bad as this though.  A colleague from work called me last night while I was on the phone trying to resolve a work problem so I missed the call.  This colleague is of Indian descent and has a medium Indian accent.  His accent takes some getting used to, but it is perfectly intelligible.  Unless you’re Google Voice apparently.  Check out this verbal vomit and see if you can guess what the message is about:

Bye. Hey J. P Agreement that I love you. I do see that you’re okay. I just received a call. I think it Love You do need a job names. Although I’m not very much. I was not showing up, but I thought he said something about. I haven’t had a lot. So, I think maybe we could not get the file from the clean the icon, system messages 5 so I don’t know the I don’t know what the contact is bad and stuff like that. Daniel Pick a quick look at it and let me know if you need anything else but we did lower work and I think I’m going back home from work right now. I should be at all, and of FedEx played he put it on the small. I just. I don’t have the train so if you could use. I don’t hear back from you, but I’m not as I have a lot and then see what I can book work alright. Thanks. Bye.

 

You Know, I’ve Never Won The Lottery Before

I’m just throwing that out there because I was commenting to a friend last Friday about how there doesn’t seem to be any mosquitoes around this year and that I hadn’t been bitten even once.  That all changed on Saturday.  With a vengeance.  I believe I have a mosquito bite on every tender spot of my anatomy.  Ankle?  Check.  Knee?  Check.  Finger?  Check.  Even worse, the one on my ankle is at exactly the right height to be irritated by my shoe every time I move my foot.  You win this round, mosquitoes!

The weird thing is they are these tiny round red bites.  I don’t remember mosquito bites being this small.  Maybe mosquitoes are more immature than usual this year.  And by immature, I mean “Hey Joe, I dare you to bite that human on his ankle so that when he walks the bite gets irritated by his shoe!” immature.

When Does One Become A Writer?

In my post yesterday about the evil invention known as the telephone, I was going to write a paragraph wondering whether using the telephone is a common anxiety for writers in general.  I balked.  Writing such a paragraph would imply that I consider myself a writer.  That just seems…wrong.

But what does one have to do to consider oneself a writer?  It seems like such an amorphously vague title.  After all, everyone is capable of writing and many do.  Everyone and their cat has a blog these days.  Is blogging enough?  Is keeping a diary enough?  Is it amount of time spent?  Is it number of words written?  Is it if you’ve been published?  Is it if you’ve been paid?  Is it how many people have read your words?

All this thinking about what it means to be a writer got me wondering how much I have written.  It turns out that today is a momentous day for my blog as far as pointless milestones are concerned.  I have had the blog since Novermber 2012.  Today, I have reached 5,000 page views and written just over 100,000 words.  The former is fairly meaningless, but the latter is…wow!  That’s a novel.  Over 1,200 individuals have read my words.  Someone from every state except Montana, North Dakota, and Kansas has read my words.  Someone from 40 other countries has read my words.  All of that sounds awfully writer-y.  Yet, still I balk at the title.

Maybe, to be a writer, you have to write something that you consider useful.  It doesn’t have to be shared, it doesn’t have to touch anyone except yourself.  You put pen to paper or hands to keyboard and scribble or clickety-clack away and look over the final product and say “I made that!” with pride.  Yeah, I’m definitely not a writer yet.

The Telephone Is My Enemy

Jen over at Blag Hag recently came clean about her massive anxiety over talking on the phone.  Boy, can I relate.  I don’t think I’m as bad as poor Jen, but I can identify with every point she makes to some extent or another.

I did not get a cell phone until long after they were in vogue.  Why would I want to pay double for another device that I don’t want to use in the first place all give other people the privilege of contacting me at times when I don’t want to be contacted?  I had the same issue with text messaging for a long time.  I refused to get it on the principle that I don’t want people I am not hanging out with to be able to be in instant contact with me.  Obviously, that changed when I realized that cell phones were practically a necessity and texting could easily replace a phone call.

As far as I know, my entire family has this anxiety.  You should witness the conversations my brother and I have on the phone.  “Hello?” “Hey, movie Sunday?” “Sure.” “Movie X is showing at Y.” “Sounds good.”  “Ok, bye.” “Bye.”  We rarely do anything except text these days.  Same holds true of Mom.  The minute she got a phone with texting, she picked it up like she had been doing it her entire life and left phone calls only for special occasions.

Besides the general anxiety, the thing that bothers me the most about phone calls is that they feel like trying to talk to someone while partially deaf and completely blind.  Hearing modulated snippets of someone’s voice and not being able to visualize body language and facial expressions is beyond frustrating for me.

Maybe when holographic conferencing becomes common place I’ll change my mind about phone calls.  Till then, don’t call me, I won’t call you.

It’s Time For a Pointless Quiz

Sometimes I like taking those stupid quizzes that you find online.  A friend of mind who I trust not to waste my time posted a decent one.  What’s your Social Attitude?  It asks you about some general and some specific political/philosophical/economic topics and then ranks you.  Here is my result:

Radicalism    96.75

Socialism    62.5

Tenderness    53.125

These scores indicate that you are a progressive; this is the political profile one might associate with a university professor. It appears that you are skeptical towards religion, and have a pragmatic attitude towards humanity in general.

Your attitudes towards economics appear socialist, and combined with your social attitudes this creates the picture of someone who would generally be described as a political centrist.

To round out the picture you appear to be, political preference aside, a centrist with several strong opinions.

I think I broke it.  I’m a progressive centrist socialist university professor.  Is that possible?  And are the last two redundant?  Ooooh, university professor slam!

Why Are Chemical Weapons A Red Line?

I am well into Things I Don’t Understand™ territory here so forgiveness ahead of time if I’m talking out of my ass.

President Obama said a month or two ago that the use of chemical weapons in Syria by the Assad government was a “red line” that could not be crossed.  It wasn’t specified, but people have rightly taken this to mean that the use of chemical weapons would be the deciding factor in U.S. intervention in Syria.  Well, chemical weapons have almost certainly been used in Syria now and the Obama administration is, thankfully, hedging and saying that we don’t know for sure if chemical weapons were used and, if they were, we don’t know who used them.

That’s all fine and dandy, but why the “red line” on chemical weapons to begin with?  Why is a chemical attack so greatly reviled while a 2,000 lb bomb is not?  It seems completely arbitrary to me.  Do chemical weapons produce more secondary casualties than cluster bombs?  Do the effects of a chemical attack linger longer than depleted uranium ammunition?  Do chemical weapons cause massive infrastructure carnage on top of the loss of life?  Do chemical weapons produce much larger amounts of casualties than conventional weapons?  Is losing a loved one more devastating because they died from a chemical weapon?

The only thing that I can think of is that chemical weapons are more psychologically devastating to those of us 10,000 miles away.  What little we see from the devastating effects of conventional war can be written off in our minds;  oh, that person had his limbs ripped off and suffered a massive head wound, of course he’s dead.  The same can’t be said for many chemical weapons.  The body is intact, often whole.  Large groups of perfectly formed dead people causes a mental block in our heads; these people shouldn’t be dead, they look so whole.  Dead is dead, though.  How they got that way is immaterial.  The fact that the dead most likely didn’t deserve death is all that matters.

Now She’s Playing Mind Games With Me

One of the joys of having a cat companion is getting to clean up cat vomit every once in a while.  Lindy is no exception in this respect.  She’s a long haired cat so hurked up hairballs are a common occurrence.  The noise she makes when barfing up a bezoar is the the stuff of nightmares.  It sounds like HUG-GAHK-HUG-GAHK-GUH-GAHK-BLEAAAaaaaaaaaaaaaach only with more sliminess.  That this occurs 50% of the time at night only makes it more nightmarish.

Last night was such a night.  I did what I usually do when she performs her midnight retching ritual, I startle awake, I make sure she’s not on the bed, I listen to the spit up symphony, and I go back to bed.  In the morning, I’ll grab some paper towels and clean up the mess.  Only, this morning, I look and I look and I can’t find vomit anywhere.  Nothing on the floor, nothing under the bed, nothing on the stairs, nothing in the hallway.  Nothing.  Lindy was all innocent like, “What vomit?  I didn’t vomit.”

The way I see it, one of three things is true.  Either I dreamed the whole thing or Lindy has found a special new spot to throw up or my cat is gaslighting me.  Given that she’s a cat and therefore by definition evil, I am leaning heavily towards the gaslighting.  So if I am committed to an insane asylum murmuring about cat vomit and nothing to clean up, you know the reason.  Don’t let Lindy to to me what Charles Boyer did to Ingrid Bergman.

Broken Keyboards

It’s been a few weeks, but Lindy has finally gotten her revenge for my locking her out of the apartment overnight.  When I am on the computer, she is in the habit of sitting in the space between the keyboard and the monitor.  It is not a large space and her girth will push the keyboard slightly off the desk as she settles down into her spot.  It doesn’t affect my typing at all and it’s cute so I let her be.  Yesterday, though, she did her usual and all was fine until I turned away for a moment.  Lindy took that opportunity to full on sprawl in the confined space.  The result being the keyboard went flying off the table and one of the flimsy plastic collapsible stand pieces broke off.

We’re even now, cat.

What This Country Needs Is A Benevolent Dictator

And who better than me to get the job?  Don’t answer that.

Seriously, though, we have so many “third rail” political issues that need to be fixed but never will be because so many politicians are more interested in keeping their jobs than tackling issues that need attention.  So here is what I would do during my benevolent dictatorship.

Corporate taxes would be zero.  No corporate payroll taxes, no hiding money offshore, no benefit write-offs, no armies of international tax accountants finding ways to flaunt the laws by taking advantage of loopholes.  Money can flow smoothly where ever corporations want it and individuals will be free from the corporate binds that often tie them to a specific job.

To balance that, we would scrap the minimum wage and replace it with a living wage law.  The living wage law would be tied to the poverty level originally and would change yearly based on inflation.

Individuals would be taxed on total income from all sources and all income would be treated equally.  There will no longer be any deductions for anything.  People that get paid with stock or other non-cash offerings would pay taxes on the full value of the offerings at the time of the offering.  Any income below the poverty level will have a 0% tax level and the brackets above will be similar to what they are now only with a few extra brackets at the top.  Payroll taxes will be paid on all income.

Copyrights would expire after 50 years. Patent laws would be changed to make patenting thing like software impossible.  Also, patent holders must show that they are putting forth some effort to make the patent into a salable product or mechanism to make a salable product or else the patent will become void.

Voting for Representatives and Senators would cease to exist.  Instead, the entirety of a district or state is eligible and the winner will be chosen by random drawing.  Representatives would have their term extended to three years and one-third of Representatives will be “elected” every year.

Immigration would require just one prerequisite; a company willing to hire you at the average compensation in the U.S. for your position for a term of five years.  The company must pay the whole five years regardless.  At the end of the five year term, the immigrant and his/her immediate family are sworn in as citizens.

As my last effort as Benevolent Dictator of the United States, I would take over Canada.  Because they’re just asking for it…

Sometimes You Lose A Cat

So I wake up this morning and my cat, Lindy isn’t on the bed.  “That’s strange”, I think, “Lindy never doesn’t sleep on the bed at home.”  But I think no big deal, she’s probably just changing her habits as she is wont to do from time to time being a cat and all.  I go through my daily morning routine and Lindy doesn’t show up throughout.  Now I’m starting to get worried.  Maybe she’s sick.  I look in all of her usual hiding spaces and can’t find her anywhere.  Then I think, “Did I even see her last night when I got home?”  No, no I hadn’t.  Uh oh.

I’ve lost Lindy in the house before.  There are not many places to hide, but there have been a few occasions when I’d go looking for her and not find her anywhere.  I’d check the hallway and she wouldn’t be there either.  This could go on for tens of minutes, me looking for Lindy, only to have her walk out of a hiding place that I swear I’ve checked a dozen times already.  I don’t know how she does it.  But I had checked all the usual spaces and not found her.  It was time for me to check the hallway.

Now, there’s something you should know about Lindy.  I have had her for five years now and she has always shown absolutely zero interest in exploring the hallway.  None.  I will come home and she will be sitting right next to the door waiting for me and she will kind of just stare out into the hallway a little and then scamper back to the counter for her welcome home petting.  This doesn’t happen all the time because she’s a cat, but it happens frequently enough that it’s almost habit.  So when I got home from volleyball and lugged my bike into the apartment I gave zero thought to Lindy even considering escaping into the hallway.  I was tired from volleyball and I had a bit to drink so I took a shower and fell almost immediately to sleep.

I walk out into the hallway and search around for her and she’s nowhere to be found.  But what I do find is a note taped up next to the elevator:

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I am a horrible father.  The little frowny cat face is absolutely priceless.

So, yeah, Lindy escaped out into the hallway for the first time in forever.  She’s back home safe and sound and doesn’t seem at all traumatized.  Right now, she’s sitting in her usual spot where I will have the most likelihood of tripping over her.  The upstanding gentleman who found her said that he was taking out the garbage and just saw her in the hallway.  It turns out that this happened not very long after I had gotten home so she didn’t spend much time in the hallway.  He said that she didn’t cause any trouble and refused any remuneration even though he gave me some cans of cat food.  I didn’t think of it at the time but maybe he once owned a cat because they were three different types of food.

Hurray for cool people that look out for neighbors!  Here’s Lindy attempting to imitate the frowny cat face:

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