Ultranormal

  • Perplexing Post From Politicos

    So that’s what happened. I wondered why I received a picture of the President (wearing a gigantic belt buckle, I might add), and two other solicitations from the GOP in the past couple months. I knew it couldn’t have been my subscription to Utne or Mother Jones, or maybe my donation to the ACLU or Amnesty International. I figured maybe because I voted in the 2000 Republican primary, but quickly dismissed it because I would have been getting mail, especially during the 2002 mid-terms.

    I suspected that someone at church had given my name (and maybe others) to the GOP. You know, if they did, I’m pretty upset about it. Every year, there’s a letter from the First Presidency read that says that the Church doesn’t endorse political candidates or parties, that all members of the Church should be active in their communities and vote their conscience. Also, Church membership information is never to be given to political organizations (or anyone else for that matter), and we’re not supposed to hold political functions in church buildings. It’s one of my favorite things about the Church – the separation of Church and State is understood as being fundamentally important to a religious and free nation.

    I’m not sure I’m going to pursue finding out if someone gave my name to the Republicans. I kind of like the idea of Ed Gillespie wasting postage sending me mail. I may even write him back, and send it back in the pre-paid envelope. I haven’t yet, because my conscience is gnawing at me. Why? Because I would feel guilty for sending them a letter in their envelope in bad faith. I’m not answering them in the “intended” use of the envelope, and therefore I’m an active participant in wasting their money. In my mind, it’s fine if they want to waste their time and money sending me mail, but not if I waste their time and money sending it back to them.

    Maybe I should e-mail him and tell him how much their fundraising letter reminded me of the shrill tone of the blogosphere, and made me even less likely to vote for GW in November (OK, it would be really hard to make me more likely to vote for GW anytime, ever). Maybe I should write him an e-mail about the disgusting ad on the Bush campaign website that used that MoveOn submission with Hitler in it, and in attacking the Democrats, actually became the first campaign to use the Hitler comparison. For background, the infamous Hitler ad that everyone got so excited about was a submission to a contest, never endorsed by any campaign, and quickly pulled by MoveOn. But, the GOP thought it important enough to put in a commercial, and the first campaign to endorse using images of Adolf Hitler in an ad. That’s “elevating the debate”, “bringing honor and decency back to the White House” and all that other BS.

    And I know, to offer “equal time” even though I don’t have to (because it’s my blog, after all), the Democrats say some pretty unkind things. But, Hitler? That’s really ratcheting it up a notch, don’t you think?

    By this point, you’ve realized that I’ve gotten completely off track. So far, in fact, that I’m stopping here and I’m not even going to try to link everything back up into a nice little package.

  • Crazy Web Standards Guy

    I just have to share this. So, my cryptic and stupid post about me being a pirate was all about this little group I helped start (with Kimberly and a couple other people who I don’t think have blogs). I’ve been writing a bunch of articles for this new site we’ve put up, and I just had to share the opening of this one that tries to dispel the myth that tables are bad. I think I’ve gone crazy…

    One of the mantras of those of us who love web standards is “don’t use tables!!!”, which may confuse people who hear us mid-diatribe. I’m here to clue you in on what those three words mean to us standards cultists. We don’t hate tables. In fact, we love tables. We accept them as part of the HTML and XHTML standards, and glory in their accurate and meaningful execution (not “bang you’re dead” execution either).

    Now that I’ve confused you further, let me clarify. We like tables when they’re used to display tabular data (you know, spreadsheet stuff). The problem we have with tables is that people abuse tables and use them for layout. We feel this is abuse of our little misunderstood friend and think it should stop right now.

    You’re shocked now, aren’t you? I thought you might be. Some of you are gasping for breath and asking yourself, “What? No tables for layout?! That’s insane!!” You’re right, or at least you were right a couple years ago. I won’t go into it, because it’s painful, but there was a time when the only way to get websites to look the same across the stone tablets we called web browsers was to use complex table soup for layout. This was OK because it was really the only way to do it. There was no other option. We were handcuffed by the poor standards support in those early browsers (Netscape 4.x and IE 3, the Statler and Waldorf of the web). Now that Moses has come down from the mountain, smashed those stone tablets and brought us a whole new set (IE 6, Mozilla, Safari, Opera, etc), we no longer need to use tables for layout!!! (and there was much rejoicing)

    Now that we have decent (or at least with bugs we know about and can work about… ::cough:: IE 6 ::cough::) standards support in these modern browsers, and 99% of the web is using some flavor of modern browser, we can get away from the old ways and move to the wonderful world of standards-based design.

    If you want to read up on why you should move to standards-based design, and its benefits, we addressed that in this FAQ article and this one too. The how is a little more difficult. We addressed some of that in … OK, we haven’t addressed that yet. We’ll get there, really. It’s the next item on my list, I swear on a stack of Jeffrey Zeldman‘s hats.

  • Fahrenheit 9/11

    I went and saw Fahrenheit 9/11 on Friday, in an absolutely packed theater. I have mixed feelings about the movie. Right after it was over, I loved it. Then, after I thought about it, the doubts started creeping in. There are parts of this movie that could convince anyone, no matter how much they love the President, that going into Iraq wasn’t worth it. Unfortunately, there are other parts of the movie – the ones you’ve been hearing about from the right-leaning commentators – that will deflate the impact of the last third of the movie.

    The stuff about the Carlyle Group and the Bushes doesn’t really matter in the long run, does it? It’s interesting, and I hope people go track down the source information. But, there wasn’t enough time in the movie to go into all of it. It also doesn’t advance the emotional meat of the movie.

    The stuff at the beginning about the 2000 election was great, and done with a real sense of humor that belied the seriousness of the charges leveled. It was a great way to open the movie, even though the section that came after it was a bit uneven.

    The last half of the movie was what really affected me. I had posted Thursday about the real price of the war. The numbers blew me away, but seeing the images in the movie just cemented it for me. While many on the Right will have a problem with the happy pictures of Baghdad in March of 2003, those scenes weren’t staged. Yes, Saddam was horrible, and horrible things happened, but the images were of average Iraqis living their average Iraqi lives. The images of the “collateral” damage of the war that came after that were just as real. Those things really happened. Those children were injured, along with thousands of their countrymen. That old woman really lost her family, and really said those things. It wasn’t staged, and the numbers aren’t fake. Someone said to me this morning that the movie fails because it doesn’t mention the “good” things that have happened. You know what, it doesn’t have to. We’ve never seen those images in the U.S. media, and we should. We should see them for the same reason we should see the flag-draped coffins as they arrive at Dover. That’s the real price of war.

    The segment on Lila Lipscomb, and the images of the soldiers in Iraq was even more powerful to me (I know, it shouldn’t have been, but I was). The images of the amputees in physical therapy were too much, and watching Mrs. Lipscomb grieve was more than I could handle.

    And those are the parts of the movie that everyone should see. I can understand why people don’t want to see the rest of it. It’s inflammatory, and doesn’t tell (or try to) tell the “whole” story. No one’s telling the whole story, so expecting a two hour movie to is silly and overly partisan. Where the movie succeeds, it does so with more power and impact than anything I’ve seen. Where it fails, it fails only because of the voice it’s delivered in and the time given to laying out the evidence. It was an excellent review of the past three years, no matter what lens it was given in. The build up to war, the lies, the half-truths, the chest-thumping declarations… they’re all there.

    I think the movie will have an impact on the election, not because it shows Bush as a doofus or evil (I don’t think either is true at this point, which is another post). It will because it shows the true price of war, a price that the media and the Administration have failed to show us in the past year. We should all see what’s being done in our name, under our flag. 60,000 people wounded and killed, never to be the same. And why? For what?

    I hope the movie influences people to find the truth, to honestly seek it. Go see it, then go find the truth – not the truth as presented by either side, but the truth as it is. It’s complex, and difficult to find, much less understand. Every target is a spinning top, endlessly spitting out their description of intent and motive, trying to influence how we see what they’ve done and why. I’m done caring about the “why” and the motive. It doesn’t matter. The consequence is more important to me. Seeing the consequence of the President’s action in Iraq is enough for me to cast my vote for Kerry this November.

  • Baby Brian Gets Chubby

    A selection of pictures from the past couple weeks. Enjoy!

  • I’m a Pirate

    pirate flag in my office

    I have a the Jolly Roger up in my office, and the sign next to my door says, “Kevin P.* Lawver *the ‘p’ is for ‘pirate’”. I’ve had the flag for a while now (got it from Archie McPhee), and decided one day to put it up so everyone who walked past my door could see it. I wasn’t initially sure why I did it. I had it, and I put it up… simple as that. My manager asked about it yesterday, and here’s pretty much what I told him (flowered up for the it-ner-net).

    I realized I was never going to influence the way the company does things by doing it the same old way. I’ve tried convincing people one at a time, and it was taking too long. I needed to do something subversive, something brash and stupid and “out there”. I decided to become a pirate. I realized that picking off one at a time wasn’t going to get me anywhere, and I needed an army of pirates. I am the fast ship in a world of gold-laden galleons. So, I collected a couple other like-minded people (who don’t realize it, but they’re pirates too), and we formed a pirate club. We put out a pirate manifesto, and now we’re collecting pirates. We’re recruiting them from the ranks of the very galleons we’re going to come back and take over. We’re going to take them off of the Same Old Thing and the That’s Just The Way It Is (which are crappy names for ships if you ask me). We’re going to train them in our pirate ways and then send them back to their ships to incite mutiny.

    Why does it have to happen this way? Why am I forced into piracy? The ships are too big to be influenced by a single voice. They need to be taken from the inside, changed from within. The sailors know their one way of doing things, and because it gets them to port, and keeps the captain off their backs; that’s how they do it, and nothing else really seems to matter. I can’t infiltrate every ship and take it over. That would take too long. I need other folks to go in and do it for me.

    Here I am, with my musket, eye patch and preachy parrot, to say there’s another way. All those galleons they’re so fiercely protecting are about to sink. The rocks ahead are sharp and the water is getting shallow. It’s time to throw some of that old stuff overboard and learn some new tricks.

    I’m a pirate. I’ve got tricks a-plenty. I’m forming a pirate army. We’re taking over.

    (this is all about web standards… pretty anti-climactic, huh?)

  • Is It Worth It?

    60,497

    That’s a big number. It’s not a million, and it’s not a billion, but it’s big. It was almost the population of Pittsylvania County, VA in the last census (61,745). What is it? That’s the conservative end of the estimate for the number of people, civilian and military, that have been wounded and killed in Iraq.

    That number’s going to stick with me for a while. The next time I see those cool pictures of explosions on TV and think of all the damage we’re doing to those terrorists and rooting out the “evildoers”, I’ll remember that 60,497 have been wounded and killed in this adventure, most of them civilians who will never get a moment of silence during the nightly news, who we’ll never mourn because they aren’t “like us” and don’t come from here.

    The next time a President says, “We gotta go get the bad guys.”, I’ll think of that number, of that little boy who lost all but one of his limbs, of all the pictures of corpses, of the list of soldiers I see on the news, all of those sonless mothers and brotherless brothers left to mourn, those pictures of amputees learning to walk all over again with a leg that’s not their own.

    Is it worth it? Are we bringing “freedom” to anyone with this war? Are we winning the war on terrorism? Does it matter?

    note: I used the lower of all estimates given, and got the numbers here.

  • New Policy

    Yeah, so, how are you?

    Me? I’ve decided to institute a “don’t blog angry” policy here, which means you may not hear from me a whole lot.

  • How To Buy Sushi

    You’re Google is my command. So, I’m on the first page of yet another weird query at Google. This time, it’s “how to buy sushi“. Since I aim to please, I’m going answer this one. Not because I’m an expert with sushi. I’m not. I’m a pale chubby American, like I assume the person who ran the query that brought them to this page on my site (which really had nothing to do with buying, but with NOT buying sushi). Since that post didn’t help anyone, maybe this one will.

    Kevin’s Suggestions for Buying Sushi

    • For your first sushi experience, go to a Japanese restaurant, better yet, go to a sushi restaurant. I know, if you live in Vicksburg, Mississippi, this may take some travelling. It’s worth it. Anything you buy in Piggly-Wiggly will be a real crappy first sushi experience (if it can be called “sushi”).

    • For your first pieces, stick with rolls (they’re the ones with the seaweed wrapped around them). Start with a California roll, or some variation on it. They usually contain cooked fish or crab and are a good place to start.

    • Go really easy on the wasabi (the green stuff). That little bowl that came with your sushi is to mix a healthy amount of soy sauce with a little bit of wasabi. And make sure you mix it in well. You don’t want an errant chunk searing your nostrils closed.

    • If you dig the rolls (and you will), move on the tuna and salmon. I love tuna sashimi. I love salmon sashimi. You will to. Remember, dip in soy/wasabi mix and pop the whole thing in your mouth.

    • After you’ve conquered your fear of raw fish, you should check out red snapper and yellowtail. If you’re still up for an adventure, try octopus and eel (I personally don’t like octopus – it’s like eating a big pink eraser).

    You will find fairly early on that sushi is surprisingly filling. It’s all the rice. Trust me, you won’t need a lot to make your belly happy. OK, I hope that helps the next person that comes looking for tips on buying sushi. My work here is done.

    UPDATE: To address Tim’s comment, you can get sushi that contains fully cooked fish!! A lost of the rolls, and other pieces use cooked fish. If you’re concerned about it, ask at the restaurant. They usually have a whole section of the menu for you chickens.

  • Why Not France, Indeed!

    Why not vacation in France? I couldn’t agree more! I suggest the south of France, especially Mandelieu-La Napoule. It’s small, not as touristy as Cannes (although it’s a five minute train ride away), and the restaurants are to die for. You won’t see a McDonalds or Burger King around, and you’ll be surrounded by the sea, the mountains and lots of really friendly French people. I highly recommend the hotel I stayed in on my trip, L’Ermitage du Riou. The hotel’s restaurant is world class, and extremely reasonable considering the quality of the food and service.

    While you’re there, you should definitely take the tour at the Chateau La Napoule, and walk around the town. It’s gorgeous.

  • Told You So

    Now do you believe me?