So a friend of mine says that formerly deeply-held religious beliefs seem like kindergarten now. Imagine that.

But kindergarten is where you learn the context to be able to understand primary school, and primary school similarly leads to middle school, and so on until you’ve got your PhD.

It’s the same with any other endeavor. Any knowledge leads to other knowledge, if only through context. And if you get enough context, you’ll start being…

…wise.

A ‘blog about nothing but the fact that listening to Sigur Ros makes me happy.

Oh, and they’re having a contest where, if you come up with the best ‘translation’ of one of their songs (which is sung in a made-up babble language), you’ll win a broken violin bow signed by the band. Of course I must enter.

Listening to Sigur Ros. Laying in an antique queen-size bed in what used to be my room in my parents’ house.

When I was a little kid, this room seemed to be made of a number of small places, all connected somehow. Like, the closet place, each of the corner places, the left window place, the right window place, the behind-the-door place.

I used to have a bunk bed almost completely in front of the door. To come into the room proper, you’d have to go around the bed, like a maze. I think I even hung sheets down the door side sometimes.

I had a little card table in here, and I’d build models sitting at it. For some reason, I built tanks and other war-oriented vehicles, from WWII. I thought I did a pretty good job with them, but thinking back on it they were probably horrible messes. Or, perhaps, I was as self-critical then as I am now, and that’s what I remember.

Anyway. Now there’s blue carpeting and off-white paint on the walls, and a nice shelf over the window. There’s this lovely bed and the lovely antique chest of drawers, and the Edison phonograph I inherited from my grandfather but which hasn’t made it to Seattle. A small red wicker chair. Wooden blinds. Oh, and on the wall are some certificates that are part of the extended family history: two very elaborate marriage certificates, and another document. This other document is about a foot by two, and is printed in an outlandishly official-document sort of script. The printed script is right-handed, with blanks for various pieces of vital information, which have been filled in by hand. A left hand.

Post Office Department

George B. Cortelyou
Postmaster General of the United States Of America,

To all to whom these Presents shall come, Greeting:

Whereas, on the 28th day of September, 1905, Isaiah J. Estopy was appointed Postmaster at Bard, in the County of Greene, State of Arkansas, and whereas he did on the 28th day of September, 1905, execute a Bond, and has taken the Oath of Office as required by Law:

Now know ye, That confiding in the integrity, ability and punctuality of the said Isaiah J. Estopy, I do commission him a Postmaster, authorized to execute the duties of that Office at Bard aforesaid according to the laws of the United States and the Regulations of the Post Office Department: To hold the said Office of Postmaster, with all the powers, privileges, and emoluments to the same belonging, during the pleasure of the Postmaster General of the United States.

In testimony wherof I have here unto set my hand, and caused the seal of the Post Office Department to be affixed, at Washington City, this twenty eighth day of September, in the year of our Lord one thousand nine hundred and five, and of the Independence of the United States the one hundred and thirtieth.

F. H. Hitchcock
Postmaster General
(Seal affixed)

It’s so charmingly bureaucratic.

The other wall has woodcuts my sister did in junior high school. They’re printed on paper which has faded with time.

1905 to 2002, we’re all here in my parents’ guest room.

Part Of Why I Don’t Go To Starbucks

Sambuck’s Coffee of Astoria falls prey to legal action from Starbucks, who claims their customers are confused by the name.

Well, sure. If your name is Samantha Buck, and you open a store called Sambuck’s, and you’re five miles from the nearest Starbucks, then sure. Who wouldn’t be confused?

Any of you Xangans out there in Oregon, please make the trip down the street and buy something from Ms. Buck!

I’ve been thinking about the stories we tell ourselves.

As in, if it might benefit you, you’ll tell yourself anything in order to convince yourself that what you’re doing is right. Or wrong. Or whatever. You have a story about something, and it helps you mould your own understanding of the world so you don’t feel so bad about what you’re doing.

Some folks talk about this as ‘self-deception,’ but that term implies, well, deception. I’m not talking about lying to yourself. I’m talking about a kind of justification that’s received.

Like, if I ask you what the opposite of Coke is, you’ll say Pepsi. The opposite of Democrat is Republican. The opposite of left is right.

But what’s the opposite of left/right? That is, if I reject both left and right, what remains? There’s no story for that, and that’s the most subversive story of all.

Politicians tell us stories about ourselves, in hopes that we’ll believe them. For instance, here in TX, there’s one hell of a governor’s race between Rick Perry and Tony Sanchez. Perry is accusing Sanchez of being involved with laundering drug money through a bank Sanchez helped run at the time. So what? Well, this story isn’t about who did what and when, it’s about what you’re willing to believe.

If you believe Sanchez did it, then Sanchez can’t say anything to convince you otherwise, and he’ll look like an apologetic fool to you. Likewise, if you believe he didn’t do it, Perry can only ever look like a schmuck for making the accusation. This kind of debate does nothing to further the greater public good, it merely acts to divide the populace along a largely meaningless line of distinction.

People fall for it, too. Even just mentioning it now means that everyone who reads this will want to have an opinion about it. You want to know the story, not the facts. The facts are boring, the story is interesting.

I want boring politicians. I want politicians who will do boring, killjoy, buzzkill things like develop meaningful policy, rather than campaign-promise crap that has to be overturned by every court it hits.

Politics is a specific of this generality I’m talking about.

We have these stories, all of us. And they keep us from doing stupid stuff, but they also keep us out of the danger of ever doing anything truly great. They limit us, as they should, but if the stories aren’t good ones, our limitations aren’t good ones, either.

There’s a story here in Houston. It goes like this: If you are bright and sensitive, you will never make a difference in anything. The city is too large, the ignorance too great, the culture too backwards.

I think that story is bullshit. I think that things could change a lot here for my tribe of sensitive sensible freaks. I think they’ve given up before really starting. However, I’m still leaving to go back to Seattle, where at least I can deal with my own shortcomings in the context of Puget sound and the Cascade moutain range.

If you’re sitting there reading a lot of ‘blogs and trying to figure out how to write something substantial, perhaps these comments from Neal Stephenson can help you.

I know they did me.

(I found them while looking up a subject I read about in one of his books, the massacre of Japanese soldiers in the Philippines in world war two. Trying to determine if it’s history or fiction.)

A propos of my last ‘blog, please be aware that I can only get email at the usa.net address. If you don’t know what that means, then it doesn’t apply to you.

Here’s something to consider.

Earlier today, I could boot off my Mac OS X partition just fine. Now, I can only boot off the OS 9 partition, because MY ETC AND VAR DIRECTORIES HAVE BEEN TURNED INTO SYMBOLIC LINKS.

Did I get hacked, or have I just gotten too complacent with sudo?

Here’s some good news:

Nature ‘pays biggest dividends’

The cash return from conserving wild places is far higher than the gains made from developing them, researchers say.

They estimate humanity loses about $250bn through the loss of the habitat destroyed in a single year.

That loss occurs in the year the destruction happens, and in every subsequent year, they say.

They put the benefit-cost ratio at more than 100 to 1 in favour of conservation.

The researchers, from the US and the UK, report their findings in the journal Science. Their work was sponsored by the UK’s Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB) and the UK Government.

The authors say an ecosystem’s economic value can be measured in terms of the goods and services it provides – climate regulation, for example, water filtration, soil formation, and sustainably harvested plants and animals.

[..]

Another author, Professor Robert Costanza, of the University of Vermont, US, said: “Enron and other companies got into trouble through bad accounting.

“We’ve been doing exactly the same on the global scale, counting the destruction of nature as revenue.”

I’ve been making this argument for quite some time.

Natural resources are the only real capital there is; it’s the source of all wealth. Having an economy without accounting for nature is like having matter without accounting for atoms.