the frig blig

Half-past midnight, only a little behind schedule, I pull the red hatchback rental car into my parents’ front yard, cut the motor, and pull the door handle to get out…but the door is locked and won’t open. I can’t find a door lock button in the dark, but there’s the remote buttons on the key, so I push the ‘lock’ button, hear the mechanism click and try again — it’s still locked; click it a few more times with no joy. What the heck…I lean over and try the passenger door, of course it’s locked too, what was I thinking? I hit the button again and the horn starts honking and the lights start flashing — I set off the car alarm. Hastily I crank the engine hoping that will stop the alarm but no. Now that I’ve woken up the entire neighborhood and the darn alarm is still blasting, I put it in reverse and figure I’ll drive away so as to be less of a nuisance but after moving a few feet the alarm stops, thankfully. What to do next? Held prisoner in my own vehicle, a techie bedeviled by technology.

If you’re not sick of them yet… might as well get a chuckle:

We’ve received more than average snowfall in the past few days. Here’s a few photos from the hood for my friends and loved ones who are far away:

Have you ever heard a phrase your whole life and thought you knew what it meant… only to discover one day in a flash that its meaning was different that you thought? That just happened to me with the old song For He’s A Jolly Good Fellow.

But first, why was this song even in my head? Well it was like this: I was reading amendments to the U.S. constitution to see when women got the vote, and after observing that right was granted 50 years after blacks and former slaves were granted the vote… I saw the 18th amendment and got curious how long prohibition lasted. Fourteen years, it turns out. Which got me wondering about how this thing got passed, so I researched the Temperance Movement (which originally started by advocating moderation, not abstinence). And saw an old lithograph called ‘The Drunkard’s Progress’, with the phrase ‘jolly companions’ included at the apogee.

That was enough to start the old song playing in my head. It banged around in there for a couple of days (in fact it’s still going, darn it!) and just a few minutes ago it hit me — there’s a missing comma in the phrase ‘that nobody can deny’. The actual text was probably written ‘that, nobody can deny.’ But when sung, the meter flows better without that comma.

The problem is that without the comma, the phrase ‘that nobody can deny’ can be interpreted as saying ‘nobody can deny this fellow…something’. Which is a little bit bewildering — who is trying to deny what from him — more liquor? — but who cares, it’s a fun old drinking song.

Adding the comma make the alternate and true meaning clear: ‘nobody can deny that this is indeed a jolly good fellow’. Whew. Makes me wonder how many other phrases I’ve got wrong in my head. And I’ll probably never straighten out before I die.

If this post’s title doesn’t make sense to you, you are free to leave now. American go players, however, should be familiar with the phrase as the generic proverb on judging how far to extend from one’s stones — e.g. if you have a 2 stone wall, you should extend 3 spaces across etc.

During last night’s kyu klass at the Seattle Go Center, Jon Boley shocked this student by stating that the “proverb” is wrong. In a sample fuseki Jon demonstrated how a four-space extension from a three-stone wall on the third line was open to invasion, making the wall heavy. In that case the correct extension is three spaces.

After I got home and the shock wore off, I realized that I missed the opportunity to ask Jon if this was just an exception to the rule, or if the rule is wrong so frequently that it should be completely discarded. It still seems to make sense in many situations, but now that it’s been shown to be faulty I’ll certainly think twice before automatically calculating the length of future extensions.

Per the old Firesign Theater, everything you know is wrong.

International banking firms are reporting billions of dollars lost to the self-described Ponzi scheme of Wall Street trader Bernard Madoff.

“The allegations made appear to point to a systemic failure of the regulatory and securities markets regime in the US” said London investment firm Bramdean in a statement reported by the BBC.

The bigger picture is that not just financial oversight, but all US federal regulatory agencies have been systematically defanged and redirected by Bush-appointed heads to “ease up” on their ostensible missions over the past eight years. For agencies where such tactics were less feasible — the FBI, for instance — budgets were cut to assure that the agencies had insufficient resources to adequately perform their job. This ‘fox in every chickenhouse’ strategy was entirely intentional and consistent with this administration’s goals, and was probably viewed by them as a great success.

What’s sad is the degree to which this story has been under-reported by the domestic US media. (Could increasingly concentrated ownership of the mass media by a few corporations play a part? Might media owners benefit from less regulation and oversight — obtaining bigger, less competitive markets perhaps?)

That grinding sound emanating from the Potomac is coming from those federal directors with half a clue, trying to see how many documents they can shred before leaving office to slow down the discovery of more potential scandals.

I saw a reference to this video on The Old New Thing and since I’m too lazy to write my own post today, am sharing this with my four faithful readers. (Also I couldn’t come up with anything even close to this in quality.)

Federal agencies will no longer have to consult scientists about whether projects, such as the building of dams or mines, would harm wildlife, according to this report published by the BBC.

Weakening the Endangered Species Act when so many critters are already facing destruction of their habitat as a result of mining, drilling, clearcutting, toxic dumping, and other civilized activities strikes me as the equivalent of hitting a man when he’s down. The kind of man who would push legislation like this is the kind of man who wouldn’t hesitate to hit a woman if by so doing he earned a few bucks for his pals. Disgusting.

I saw this scooter parked outside the Lighthouse this morning and its owner was honored that I liked the sticker enough to snap a photo. He said he picked it up in England. Nice.