CitizenTed

Damn, you're suave! Isn't he suave?

Did you ever meet a guy who is just so damn good-looking, so suave and elegant, and (even worse) so frustratingly intelligent and (here’s the worst part) so friendly and genuinely kind that you just want to turn yourself inside-out and BE this guy? That was my friend John Powers.

I met him about 4 years ago at Trivia Night. He, David Pillinger and I formed a top-flight team called The Triumvirats. We laid Roman siege to trivia questions. We won some, lost more and had a great time. I got to know this John Powers guy pretty well.

While most people struggle through life doing what they must to get by, John decided to chuck that attitude and dive headlong into something meaningful. Like most people sick of the rat race, John thought about what mattered most to him in life. What comprised his most cherished moments? What really fucking mattered?

The answer for him was “good times spent with those you love”. Some of his most satisfying moments in life were: sharing wine with a beautiful woman, listening to really great music and meeting cool, interesting people. Oh, and playing golf. Most everything else was just a burden.

Now all he needed was a business plan. He took up winemaking and set up shop at the bitter end of Chuckanut Drive, one of the most scenic spots in the United States, if not the world. As clouds rolled over the glittering waves of the Puget Sound, John set to work improving his skills at converting Washington State grapes into something worth sharing with a beautiful woman. It wasn’t easy to go from novice to expert in this very daring field, but brains and persistence are two things John had in spades.

After a few years and some success, he moved his tasting room into downtown Bellingham. Now that his wines were not just serviceable and saleable but pretty goddamn good, it was time to leave the empty islands in the shadow of the Chuckanuts and bring his smile and his wares directly to the people.

Yes, John, that thing is on.

He’d drive to eastern Washington to buy grapes, deliver them back to his humble winery in Ferndale, perfect them, then vend them at his humble little joint downtown. But wine is hardly the same without song, so John scratched out a corner of the tasting room to accommodate live music. Being a jazz fanatic, he tilted the names in that direction, but wasn’t afraid to host some of the more eclectic acts as he saw fit. If it worked with clinking glasses and happy faces, it was OK at Chuckanut Ridge Winery.

When you’re tall, handsome, smart, friendly and affable, it isn’t too hard to make friends and attract women. Friends he had in abundance, and his artist gal Jennifer is about as beautiful and kind and talented as any man could hope for. John wasn’t rich, or even successful in American business terms, but he finally had it all. His plan had come to fruition: freedom from the rat race, a respectful living that offered people the cherished moments he so enjoyed, and a beautiful woman on his arm.

That’s all any man needs, really. What’s really crazy is that I wasn’t envious of him. The man simply didn’t engender such a dark spirit from anybody. He earned only admiration. One would think this requires skill, with the tendency to be haughty too tempting for any man. But for John, it was effortless. He operated well beyond the simple tools of smiling and being accommodating. His charm and congeniality were sincere aspects of his personality. The man was preternaturally engaging and lovable.

Last week, at a charity golf tournament, John slipped and cracked his head on some pavement. It was just a freak misstep, but he landed hard. Obviously injured, he was rushed to the hospital where he remained in a coma for about a week. Today, John Powers died.

I can’t burn clichéd words of sorrow. It just isn’t in me, and John is worth more than that. Instead, I’d like to let everyone know that John Powers was one of those rare birds. Not only did he defy convention and carve out something that was meaningful for him and delightful in this blighted old town, he was also patron of the arts, as well as everything in life that makes it worth living.

See ya, Johnny. You will be missed.

Can you fucking hear me now?

Put the goddamn phone away. Seriously.

Day and night, you’re cramped over the thing, neurotically hammering out  yet another worthless text message or just futzing with the goddamn thing. You’ve just GOT to have your fingers wrapped around it, like a four-year-old boy who grips his penis incessantly.

God forbid you find yourself with more than 25 straight seconds of inactivity. You’ll have to reach for that phone. Is there a new text? Maybe it chimed and you didn’t hear it. No message? Hmm. Maybe you can go in and change one of the 8,000 possible parameters, like the one that lets you set your wallpaper to sequentially display the last 10 photos you took. Oh, look! You can even add some cool wipe transitions. Alright!

This is what you look like.

No message, no incoming calls, no cell phone activity at all? No problem! Just fire up any number of tiny-screen games or “apps” that help make your 3-inch life so much better. Why don’t you fire up Happy Dangy Diggy and blow someone a virtual kiss. How cool would that be?

Better yet: let’s get on the 3G network (the one’s that setting you back $110 a month) and try to look at some website that requires endless zooming and scrolling and paging and futzing. Anything to keep your face buried in that goddamn phone.

"Hey! Guess what I'm doing? What? Can you hear me now?"

Most of all, it’s critically important that you are talking to somebody about whatever, whenever. Solitude is for losers who don’t have a crystal-clear network, right? Nowadays, the concept of rudely ignoring those in your presence is known as “get over it”.

Making a purchase? The cashier can go fuck herself because you are within your rights to yap on the phone to your bestest friend about how much it cost to get your car fixed last week.

On a date at a nice restaurant? Whatever. That will.i.am ringtone means it’s Kayden and she just got botox! OMG! Touch touch TOUCH THE PHONE! That guy will get over it. Fuck him anyway. As long as he pays the bill and and settles for a blow job later on, he’ll be fine.

Speeding down the highway? That’s the best time to pick up a call from Jared. It’s really important: Jared just got home and he was wondering what you were up to. Like, not right now now, but, like, what you’re up to later. Yeah, so you weaved a little. Nobody got hurt, right?

Concentrating on what's important.

I’ve fucking had it. You people are crazy. Yeah, I have a cell phone. But its most powerful feature is the “ignore call” button that shuttles people to voice mail when I’m doing things like – you know – interacting with my fellow human beings, driving a car or just enjoying a bit of quiet time.

Texting? Fuck that. Not in a million years. I can understand why children like it; they can send each other messages like “Ur a FAG LOL!” and nobody’s the wiser. But if you’re an adult and you have something to tell me, you can call me if its urgent or email me if it’s not. Texting me is like saying “I can’t be bothered to talk to you, and your precious few hours away from a computer screen don’t deserve freedom from interruptions, so here’s a goddamn text message.”

At this point, I’m probably losing friends, but I don’t care. I refuse to become one of the dual-thumb craned-neck masses. Instead, I like to use my mobile phone as if it were (get this!) a telephone. I like to talk to my friends and family on it. I like to confirm times and dates and just chat about our lives. I love all of you. I really do. When we’re apart, it’s important to me that we can talk.

0110 1000 0010 0001!...............1101 0011 0010 1110!

What I won’t do, however, is join you in this mobile phone madness. When I’m out and about, I want to see, hear, smell and experience that hi-resolution interactive experience known as “outside”. No iPod, no ear buds, no tiny screens, no ads. We can talk, though. Just don’t be surprised and hurt if you go to voice mail. It’s not that I hate you; I’m just busy with real life at the moment and I’ll get back to you later, I swear.

Remember before cell phones? When we had a telephone in the house and if you weren’t home, people left messages? Was that life really so bad? Did thousands of horrible deaths occur because you couldn’t get a hold of Lori to tell her that “Pretty in Pink” sucked and Kathy Jenkins puked up buttered popcorn in the lobby?

Don’t get me wrong; I’m not a Luddite. Having a portable personal telephone was a futuristic dream that has come true. It’s easier to coordinate with people and share information. But do we really have to be buried in the things all day and night?

Hot or twat?

I was biking home a few weeks ago. Some assmunch with one of those kiddie trailers got in the bike lane in front of me. He reached into his pocket and started fiddling with his phone, swerving into the road a bit. He corrected himself and slipped the phone back into his pocket. Then, not 30 seconds later, he pulled the phone back out and started futzing with it again. He swerved once more, this time causing traffic to avoid him. Rather than put the phone away for good, he simply darted his gaze between the phone and the road more frequently. For safety.

It has gotten to the point where attending to our cell phones is more important than the health and safety of our children. Furthermore, we’re willing to pay hundreds of dollars a month for the sheer joy of being an oblivious asshole.

You’ll never hear me say this on any other subject, but in this case I believe innovation should be halted. Mobile phones should be re-purposed to be…telephones.

You may now commence with the hateful denunciations. I can hear you now.

Have you seen this man?

I’ve been making snide, snarky comments on public Internet forums for about 17 years. I even garnered some notoriety (nay, infamy) in the 1990′s for my posts to the Usenet group alt.tasteless. Oh, those were heady days full of sardonic barbs, razor-sharp quips and anecdotes about drinking dry the contents of a dead whore’s anal boil.

I also posted to sci.skeptic and a few other sundry newsgroups. This was back when your conversational skills meant everything and your cool avatar meant nothing. We didn’t even have avatars or icons. If you couldn’t express yourself in simple ASCII, you were road kill.

It was in this cauldron of writers, biters, raconteurs and saboteurs that I discovered the trolls.

A troll in the wild.

Even though I wrote some outlandish things, I always meant them to be genuinely sarcastic or humorous – I wanted everyone to laugh with me. I never broke into forums specifically to upset the locals and goad them into responding to a bunch of hyperbolic nastiness.

That’s what trolls do. They’ll go into a web forum for cancer survivors and extol the virtues of smoking cigarettes and eating lead paint chips and tell everyone to “stop whining”. Their goal is to see how many outraged cancer survivors they can get to rise to the bait.

Trolling is as old as the Internet – maybe older. And I hate it.

I worked pretty hard to get a reputation for being outrageous and funny. I don’t like it when some illiterate punk comes waltzing in with a kit bag of insults and no eloquence to back it up. They simply stir up the natives, have a laugh and move on. Lame.

They even had their own newsgroup where they could discuss the finer points of trolling a discussion board. Then out they would spread like a disease, infecting reasonable conversations worldwide – even reasonable discussions about drinking dead whore pus!

This is what you get from a GIS for "dead whore pus".

Well, the trolls may think they’re clever, but they’re not. On fark.com, they can sniff a  troll a mile away and even offer ratings for troll quality. A lousy troll (“Why don’t you go marry your Fartbama savior, libtard?”) will earn a 0/10 points while a good troll (“Just because I think Obama may not be a citizen doesn’t mean I’m wrong about global warming”) may earn a 8/10 points if it’s really, really subtle.

Sometimes, on very rare occasions, someone with true grit and a lexicon of steel can commit an act of trolling that resounds through the ages. This is so difficult that only true masters of this arcane art can pull it off.

Today, I would like to honor one of those über-trolls. If you have some time, I encourage you to read the saga of the Mall Ninja.

His name is gecko45, and to this day he maintains his cover as a bumbling, brash and hysterically funny fabulist. He infected a forum dedicated to guns and proceeded to introduce himself as a heavily armed martial artist who needed some assistance selecting assault rifles for his life-and-death vocation in  mall security.

His shtick was so good, so outrageous and so cloyingly sincere that the forum admins let him go for far too long, ending it only when the Mall Ninja (and his sock puppet supporters) started to interfere with the orderly conduct of the forum.

I really hate trolls. But sometimes from the mists comes a man so compelling, so wonderfully bizarre, that I must remove my hat and bow to his greatness. The Mall Ninja is that man.

Job well done, sir. You may return to your leaky bridge in the knowledge that you succeeded where thousands have failed.

I salute you.

Look how cute!

When I bring up Peak Oil with my friends, some of them leap onto the nuclear bandwagon. And unlike the old days, nuclear power proponents aren’t just cigar-chomping engineers with high-and-tight haircuts. No, the hippies have been warming up to nuclear, too. Why?

Because nuclear fission doesn’t dump pollution directly into our communities, it doesn’t add as much to our CO2 load as coal or petroleum and because it’s a well-understood technology. Furthermore, it would be a meaningful stepping stone to becoming fully energy independent in a glorious new electrical world.

We currently have about 104 operating nuclear power plants in the US. If we converted our ground transportation fleet, our industrial power needs and our heating needs to electricity, we could power it all – even with current growth trends! – with about 720 additional high-yield nuclear plants. That’s right: just 720 comparatively small sites that can be placed where they are needed most.

Nuclear fission FTW!!!

Sounds like a winner! Let’s start building now! Why wait?

Well, there are a few snags. First and foremost is the disposal question. What do we do with all the nuclear waste? The leftover heavy water and contaminated rods and other radioactive components are the most deadly objects on the face of the Earth. And they will remain lethal for tens of thousands of years. We currently can’t even clean up our previous messes. The Hanford Nuclear Reservation in Washington state is still working on getting rid of radioactive materials from 50 years ago!

Don’t get me wrong; the men and women working at Hanford and other Superfund sites are doing a bang-up job with this massive undertaking. It will take billions more dollars and a few dozen more years to get Hanford cleaned up. And they’re racing against time: if cleanup doesn’t finish on time, the Columbia river could become a radioactive death trap for every living thing in the northwest US.

Yucca Mountain - put the yucky in Yucca!

“Let’s just bury the shit in Yucca Mountain!”

This has become the rallying cry of nuke proponents. It’s true: Yucca mountain leads to a massively deep and solid ignimbrite base that can keep nuclear waste far from the water table and our kid’s sippy cups. We could put shit down there, slap on a few warning signs and just monitor the place for about 50,000 years and we’ll be fine. Sort of.

Trouble is, Yucca Mountain is the leftover remnant of an ancient caldera and an active tectonic zone. Fault lines extend throughout the area. One good earthquake, and we’ll be one nervous country. Who’s going to go down and see how things held up after the big quake? Not me.

OK, so maybe disposal is a problem we haven’t solved. But maybe we could solve it. Maybe we could find the perfect spot to bury the waste or maybe we could encase the shit in thick nano-carbon sarcophagi, then just rocket them into the Sun. Poof! Problem solved.

Almost. There’s another concern: uranium supplies. According to the German research organization Energy Watch Group, most of the world’s easy, high-yield uranium has already been mined. That leaves less-rich ores which are more costly and energy-intensive to process. At current consumption, cynics guess we have about 33 years of affordably extractable uranium left. More liberal estimates are a few centuries at current consumption.

Either way, there isn’t enough uranium for America’s gleaming new 720 power plants.

In my mind, none of this matters.

What bothers me about nuclear fission is the danger of leakage and contamination. No, I’m not Bruce Springsteen and no, I’m not going to lecture you. Instead, I’d like to tell you some real-life stories.

Sleep, my pretty. Sleep.

I’ve read several books about the Chernobyl disaster. I became interested in the subject from my personal interest in eastern Europe and from reading about various daring explorers who have posted photojournals of their visits to Pripyat, the Ukrainian city that was once home the Chernobyl employees and their families.

Among them are Robert Polidori, a cool collection from the folks at pripyat.com and the controversial motorcyclist Elena Filatova. Of course, you can also play any number of post-apocalytpic video games with creepy maps based in and around the Pripyat disaster zone.

Most nuke proponents scoff at the very idea that Chernobyl will ever happen again, because, well, “this time it’s DIFFERENT”!  (Hint: whenever anyone says that, it’s a lie.)

Yes, Chernobyl was not a poster child for safely-run nuke plants. And yes, we can avoid the same mistakes that occurred there. But nothing can alleviate the fact that the turning point that resulted in the Chernobyl failure was human error. Like many awful things, Chernobyl was caused by laziness. A stress test of the reactor’s cooling ability was being run, and when the day shift switched to the night shift, the night shift guys who took over didn’t realize the test was so deep into its cycle. It was a lack of communication between day and night crews. They let the test run and run. What could go wrong?

Um...this.

The core overheated and exploded, leaving the radioactive basin exposed to the air at full blast. And this is where we meet the heroes and villains.

Fire crews battled the blaze. Many of them reported seeing a green glow from the core that wouldn’t go out. They were, however, successful in putting the fire out. Nearly all of them died within a year from radiation poisoning.

The Soviet leadership from Gorbachev on down tried to put a lid on the story and failed to sound the alert – internally and externally. This reprehensible desire to contain the bad news is almost as criminal as the subsequent failure to adequately care for those affected by the disaster.

The real heroes are the men and women who gave their lives to contain the mess. Some of them were engineers and architects. Others were heavy equipment operators. Some were soldiers and nurses. Most were regular citizens looking for work in the moribund Soviet economy. All of them gave their lives to contain the disaster and their efforts saved untold thousands of lives.

In her book Voices from Chernobyl, writer Svetlana Alexievich interviews people who fought the Battle of Chernobyl. Nearly all of them died soon after giving their interviews.

Among the memorable and haunting stories:

• A Russian Army helicopter pilot who was among the first to start pouring airborne drops of concrete onto the smoking husk of the reactor.  As he hovered over the glowing wreckage and dropped load upon load of concrete, he could feel pins and needles shooting up through the seat of his helicopter. He died a few months later.
• A heavy equipment operator tasked with “clearing” the surrounding villages. He and his crew tore up the top few feet of soil in every village and farm for deep burial. When the contract was up, the government asked to take all his clothes for disposal. He gave them everything except his favorite hat. He gave the hat to his 6-year-old boy when he got home. The father died soon after from radiation poisoning. The boy died just a year later from brain cancer.
• A group of engineers in Moscow had some bold ideas to encase the reactor. They needed to tunnel below it and fill the tunnels with concrete. After long delays from the government, they were given the go-ahead. After several months of awful labor, the base of the reactor was encased in concrete. Many of the attending engineers and workers died soon after.

Meet twins Vladimir and Michael Iariga. Michael, on the right, is the older twin. Vladimir, on the left, is deaf.

The Chernobyl victims keep rolling in as people in Ukraine, Russia and Belarus continue to die in cancer clusters and children are born with profound genetic defects. Chernobyl released 400 times the radioactive fallout of Hiroshima.

This is what happens when you have routine human error at a nuclear power plant.

(An interesting aside: due to all the hard work of those heroes who cleared the immediate area, the ecosystem around Pripyat and Chernobyl has bounced back remarkably. Wildlife has returned and some villages are even inhabitable. It’s a wonderful case study for people interested in how our ecosystem bounces back from human folly.)

In sum: I know you may think nuclear power is comparatively clean and safe, but there is more to it than that. It’s non-renewable, intensely pollutive and very, very dangerous.

We must look elsewhere for answers.

Got 113 channels of shit on the TV

It’s cliche to say “I don’t watch TV”. Of course, it’s true for some people. But for most folks making this snooty declaration, it’s more hyperbole than truth. They fess up to occasionally watching “intelligent documentaries” and “important news” but they sneer at the very mention of “reality TV”.

More power to ‘em, I guess. I have a wholly different aversion to TV. I just can’t stand the sound of it.

It’s that over-compressed, drill-your-ears wall of presence that just irritates the crap out of me.  I just can’t hack it. As a result, I watch very little television. I’ll go months without seeing any TV at all.

Thanks. I will.

Want irony? For many years I was an electronic technician whose specialty was projection TV. I know more about TV broadcast and display technology than anyone else you know. Really. For many years my workday was in a huge room surrounded by the glowing eyes of multiple televisions staring down at me, burning in their new components and proving to me they wouldn’t fail after their owner came to pick them up.

I know TV. But even when I was a tech, I could hardly stand the sound of them. My TV’s all ran silent. I’d play the radio to keep myself occupied. I recall fondly the many moments when the music on the radio played counterpoint to the bilge on the screens.

Like most Americans, I grew up with TV. When I was a little kid, we had an old black and white Zenith. We lived in the NYC area, so we had seven channels that delivered The Munsters, Speed Racer, Get Smart and the Beverly Hillbillies.

As the 1970′s flowered, we got a new TV and enjoyed the Brady Bunch and the Mod Squad in living color. Then, when I entered high school, my TV viewing started to peter out. I was much more interested in beer, pot and teen girls than TV. I wasn’t home much, and home was the only place I’d watch TV.

Throughout my 20′s, I had a love/hate relationship with the thing. Staying up late to get stoned and watch Nightflight or SNL was a treat, but being surrounded by the glowing eyes every day at work was a total drag. My TV-phobia had begun.

By the late 1980′s TV had reached new levels of brainlessness. Popular music wasn’t much to rave about, either. Culturally, I had shut down. I was living in California, where the sun always shines, so it wasn’t hard to find other things to do.

My indoor recreation involved boinking various women and hanging out with my pal Dale, who turned me on to the joys of getting blazingly high and watching VHS kung fu flicks and horror movies – the cheesier the better.

Was this fare “smarter” than TV? Maybe. Maybe not. But it was nowhere near as irritating as TV and far, far more entertaining.

In the early 1990′s, I moved to Bellingham. My new roommates had no TV, which suited me fine. Most of my new friends didn’t own TV’s either. I felt I had truly found the place where I belonged. But yea, the draw of the idiot box is strong.

My gig as lead tech for an electronic outfit afforded me plenty of second-hand gear, including fancy speakers, top-end audio components and – of course – as many free TV sets as I wanted.

My then-girlfriend liked TV, and being the adoring boyfriend I brought home TV sets of ever-increasing screen size and capability. We’d watch TV together. Our favorite was E.R. We’d hum along to the theme song and dance around the living room. It was fun.

When we went our separate ways, the TV went with her.

Since then, my TV viewing has dwindled to a tiny trickle. Don’t get me wrong: I still own a TV. A big, fancy HD screen.  But I don’t watch TV on it. I watch DVD’s and Netflix streams.

I just can’t fucking stand TV. And my hatred goes beyond just rolling my eyes at “reality” TV or grinding my teeth at yet another GM Canyonero commercial. The very fucking sound of television burrows into my spine like a meningitis tap. I get the same reaction from TV that most people get from fingernails scratching on a chalkboard. I fucking hate it.

Now, it’s not good to hate TV that much. Americans watch more TV than any other culture on Earth – by a huge margin. Thus, nearly everyone you know watches more TV than just about anyone else on Earth. If you are fully ignorant of TV, you must be a religious nut or a hippie. I’m neither, but I live in a community and I need to be conversant with my community.

What I'm missing.

So, how can I maintain cultural ties with my community when I don’t watch TV? By reading about TV! I have never seen Jon and Kate Have 8. But from all the hilariously evil and awful comments on fark.com, I know that Kate is a harridan, Jon is an idiot and they squirted out 8 kids for some stupid reason. There you go! Instant membership to the peer group, and I didn’t even have to show anyone my belly or let them sniff my butt.

Fortunately, media convergence continues apace. I love South Park, and every episode is available online. A friend recommended Mad Men, so I rented one of the DVD’s and I sometimes watch recent episodes on Chinese websites. It’s a really good drama, even with Chinese characters scrolling across the bottom.

Maybe one day I’ll watch TV again. But for now, no.  It’s the goddamn sound of it. That screeching, compressed, noisy, irritating, idiotic buzz that just drives me up the fucking wall. No TV. Not in my house. Instead, I’ll bitch about it online, rent movies, listen to music and read books.

After all, while most of America learned new details about Jon and Kate, I learned how the Ottoman empire very nearly toppled the Austrian empire in 1683. Would Jon and Kate be as compelling speaking Turkish? I think not.

Forget the hearse 'cuz I never die!

It was to my horror that I recently suffered a major WordPress glitch. Unable to restore this bedraggled website, I turned to a professional. And that would be my beloved friend Sommer. She is the coolest and most professional webmaster/troubleshooter EVER. If your organization or small business needs a modern web presence or even a third hand to do remote IT stuff, Sommer is your girl! Hire her now! http://www.precisiondw.com/

In the mean time, I have a funny joke for you:

Why does Snoop Dogg carry an umbrella?

Fo’ drizzle!

HA HA HA HA HA!!!! I’m the best!

More Citizen Ted fun coming soon. So stay tuned!