Mad Times

Taxing for Transport

Here in King County we have a rather inscrutable "advisory measure" on next Tuesday's ballot. It's basically a poll with no binding consequences on how King County voters would like to have a regional transportation package funded.

If you're as baffled by the available choices as I was, you'll want to head right over to the Cascadia Scorecard Weblog where resident Really Smart Guy, Alan Durning gives his take on the implications of the various choices.

So lonely...

Apologies to anyone who's seen Team America: World Police

Immortality

Over on Seedlings & Sprouts, Julie talks about driving by the site where a 16-year-old girl was killed in a car crash earlier this year on Bainbridge Island. Julie points to some articles that bemoan the fact that the tragedy doesn't seem to have affected the level of self-destructive behavior in the teen community.

I grew up in a kind of island community. It wasn't surrounded by water, but the nearest town of any size was over an hour away. Not only that, the town where I lived was so sprawled that my nearest friends were three miles away, and some were as far as twenty! You couldn't be part of the teen social world in my town until you could drive or had friends who did.

I remember dozens of times riding with friends or driving them myself when we took life-threatening risks. Sliding around corners on twisty mountain roads, ignoring the center line, ignoring hundred-foot cliffs with no guardrail, ignoring ice patches, ignoring the effect of a couple of beers. It's amazing how few mishaps we actually suffered.

When I was a senior in high school, a girl I'd known since 1st grade died in a car crash on her way to school. She looked away from the road to adjust her stereo and hit another vehicle head on. I remember that morning at school hearing about the accident and being shocked that someone my own age was gone. I remember people crying and a subdued atmosphere around the school that day (and probably longer).

What I don't remember is whether we acted any differently afterwards. I sincerely doubt it.

I remember how my brain worked when I was that age (partly because I haven't matured all that much since then ;-) It's not so much that I actively thought of myself as invincible, it's more that the possibility of my mortality was completely inconceivable. I can't imagine any evidence to the contrary that would have convinced me otherwise. It's my theory that this cluelessness is hardwired in the human psyche. I think this behavior has been selected for in millions of years of evolution. You can see how the ability to act without thinking in dangerous situations would be useful to the survival of the species.

But I think there's something more insidious going on here as well. The way we talk about death-by-car (and, actually, the way we talk about all the negative effects of the automobile on our society, but that's another rant) encourage us to think of car crashes as being fault-free events. We call them "car accidents". Articles about crashes always talk about the car taking actions "the car crossed the center line", "the car struck the pedestrian" as if the car were in charge, the person behind the wheel just an unwitting accomplice. It's another layer of unreality on an already unbelievable situation. Why should I change my behavior when crashes just happen?

Here in Issaquah there have been at least four teen traffic fatalities (see the euphemisms we use to distance ourselves from these things?) in the last few months. It seems like more than usual. It makes me wonder if the current state of the world is a factor as well. Kids see terrorists spending lives recklessly for indeterminate messages. They hear about over 1000 young men and women not much older than themselves dying in a country that it turns out could not have harmed us if it wanted to. I have to wonder if their recklessness is partly bred from seeing such a rampant disregard for young life in their elders. Or is it acting out in response to the fear of how uncertain their futures must seem. "We may die tomorrow, so why worry about dying today?"

Maybe the only way we can hope to get kids to take their mortality seriously is to, as Gandhi said, "Be the change you want to see in the world." If we caused our government to place a higher value on the lives of our young people, maybe they would follow suit.

100 reasons not to blog

1. Firefly
2. reading blogs
3. sleep
4. too much trouble to resize picture
5. comment spam
6. Buffy
7. picture not good enough
8. didn't take a picture
9. work
10. nice outside
11. weboggle
12. too far behind
13. can't decide which entry to write first
14. have started not watching movies because it would lengthen the backlog of movie reviews I need to write and post, and anything that can make me do something that stupid shouldn't be supported
15. ditto books
16. should make lunch
17. need to empty dishwasher
    
18. cat box needs cleaning
    
19. my blogging isn't as interesting as other people's
    
20. people might read it and see what a dork I am
    
21. too busy working on the campaign
    
22. should be working on the campaign
    
23. nobody reads it anyway
    
24. yeah, okay, three people
    
25. they probably should be doing other things too
    
26. too much trouble to find and edit in all the links I want to add
    
27. need to redo my templates and style sheets first
    
28. have to upgrade Moveable Type
    
29. or maybe I should switch to Word Press
    
30. or Grey Matter
    
31. too busy writing in my Live Journal
    
32. can't decide whether it should go in my blog or my Live Journal
    
33. might embarass my family
    
34. maybe I completely missed the point of that movie
    
35. looking at the stars
    
36. need to fix my bike's rear brakes
    
37. the car needs new tires
    
38. who needs to hear another political rant at this point?
    
39. might start another series that I'll have to obsessively keep up with
    
40. I have a new niece: Fiona Eileen Curley born 10/14/04
    
41. kitties want to play
    
42. could use a shower
    
43. rather read a book
    
44. The Daily Show (on tape)
    
45. blogging doesn't pay the bills
    
46. blogs don't cuddle
    
47. what have i got to prove?
    
48. i could be selling all my stuff on ebay
    
49. shisensho
    
50. lawn needs mowing
    
51. hardwood floors would be nice
    
52. no wifi on my palm
    
53. tiger mountain is three blocks away
    
54. always wanted to learn to kayak
    
55. The West Wing (on DVD)
    
56. portland is only three hours by train
    
57. vancouver is less
    
58. if i did it today they'd expect it every day
    
59. no gloves
    
60. some psycho might deduce where i live and steal all my good stuff
    
61. keep thinking i should pick up trash along my commute route
    
62. wastes electrons
    
63. people in china don't have blogs
    
64. girls might think i'm sexy if my blog was cooler, but i'm happily married so i'd have to turn them down and they'd be sad
    
65. might accidentally give away how self-absorbed i am
    
66. could use up all my allotment of good ideas
    
67. might lead to having to talk to people
    
68. need to find a good recipe for baked beans
    
69. Angel (on DVD)
    
70. batteries going dead on laptop
    
71. windows crashed
    
72. Six Feet Under (on DVD)
    
73. maybe i should jump on the NaNoWriMo bandwagon
    
74. I think i'm going for a walk
    
75. can't fit post in 4k palm memo
    
76. have to learn to photoshop pictures into betterness
    
77. haven't posted all the other things i've got a draft for yet
    
78. might wake up Becky
    
79. have to return some email
    
80. need to delete a few thousand emails
    
81. vocabulary too limited
    
82. not enough time before I have to leave the house
    
83. post will be longer than anyone could reasonably be expected to read
    
84. no one will leave any comments
    
85. should I really be displaying my neuroses for all the world to see?
    
86. might get some comments
    
87. wouldn't exercise be a better use of the time?
    
88. Carpal Tunnel
    
89. this chair makes my butt fall asleep
    
90. I'm late
    
91. preview templates in moveable type don't look anything like the final version
    
92. need to surf the blogs I read yesterday to see if anyone has responded to the comments I left
    
93. have to look up the html to cause the list to continue across the extended entry
    
94. or maybe it will just work
    
95. have to get ready for work
    
96. should check work email before I go to lunch
    
97. hey look, I have gmail
    
98. have to try out Google Desktop Search
    
99. wanted to revise my site stat collector
    
100. I really am late
     

Become a Patron of the Arts

One of my favorite writers and editors is in the final stages of finishing his latest novel and has taken to posting the latest draft for comment on the web.

But the really fun part is that he is auctioning off three positions in the dedication of the published novel, and two positions as cameo characters in the book. There's links to the five auctions on his blog

The text of the auction descriptions is pretty entertaining all by itself, so take a look.

You Have the Power by Frances Moore Lappé and Jeffrey Perkins

The subtitle is "Choosing courage in a culture of fear." The fear is not so much the big fears like natural disasters, death and disease, or terrorist attacks, but more the little fears that are far more crippling in everyday life. The tiny unnamed fears that keep you from talking to strangers or trying a new restaurant or following a dream.

The biggest thing I've taken away from the book is something from the introduction where Jeff Perkins explains how he had come to see that in our relatively secure lives, the instinct of fear that causes us to cringe into inaction whenever we're afraid is outdated and counterproductive. He proposed a new interpretation of fear, that it means you're aproaching new territory, that you're about to learn something, that there's an opportunity to make your life richer. He said "Fear means go!"

The book elaborates on this theme, exploring the ways that people have defied their fears to attain better, more meaningful lives while making the world a better place.

It's a tiny little book with a big impact. Good stuff.

Lost Glove #27

I'm trying to decide how obsessive to get about this whole lost glove thing. So far I've posted a picture of every glove I've seen since the first one back in January of 2003. Well, I decided not to post the rubber glove I saw last week.

I think it would help if I posted some non-glove pictures to mix things up a little. Maybe soon.

Lost Glove #26

Bookmarks

I've never really liked the built-in bookmark facilities in any of the browsers I've used over the years. Hierarchies just aren't very good for classifying things.

I started using another Moveable Type blog as a bookmark system. I called it Mad Hammer since my abuse of the weblog tool as a bookmark tool reminded me of the adage "When all you have is a hammer everything starts looking like a nail" and since I liked the pun on Mad Hatter. I had planned to give it a title picture showing a hammer with a tag on it saying "In this style 10/6" to complete the reference. (which reminds me that Mad Hatter Day is coming up next week). It was convenient since the bookmarklet I already use to blog a site could be used to bookmark a site, and because the bookmarks entered into it were available from any computer anywhere (in particular the three different machines I use regularly). But the category support in MT was clumsy enough that I never got around to adding all the categories I really wanted, and the support for having multiple categories on a single entry is prohibitively complex.

Anyway, I finally saw enough people using del.icio.us that I went and tried it out, and I think I've found my bookmark solution at least for now. The del.icio.us bookmarklet lets you assign any number of tags to each entry just by listing the words. You can include a comment about the link. It's easy to edit stuff once it's in there, and search it too. It's web-based so it's visible from whatever computer I'm on. Plus you can see other people's bookmarks too, including easily seeing who else has bookmarked a particular site. It's really pretty spiffy. Best of all, nobody had snagged the handle "jeffy" yet. I've added a link to my area in the link section of my main index template if you want to check up on my bookmarking activity.