Quartz City

It’s no great secret that I hate the Baby Boomers - in short, I despise their self-righteousness, their sanctimoniousness, their whining sense of entitlement, and a series of economic, social, and political plagues that my generation (and the ones following) are going to have to mop up. I can’t help but snicker at any “stick it to the Boomers” story, so when Alan Greenspan’s comments to the House Budget Committee hit the news I happily pictured him as a cackling Richard Widmark in Kiss Of Death kicking the Boomer wheelchair down the stairs.

The Long Beach Press-Telegram had a superior headline in their print edition: “Greenspan to Boomers: We Can’t Afford You”

(nota bene: I fully expect Social Security to be a non-entity by the time I’m old enough to be eligible for it. I’ve resigned myself to accept that the money I’ve paid into Social Security is lost and if given the choice I’d rather not pay into it at all.)

(imagine this blog post written in 72 point Futura-Bold for full effect) Eddie Clontz, the editor-in-chief of the Weekly World News and the creator of Ed Anger and Bat Boy, died on January 26th, aged 56.

The obituary in the Economist is a must-read:

Sheer chance seemed to bring Mr Clontz to this strange outpost of journalism. After dropping out of school at 16 and trying his luck as a scallop fisherman, he became a copy boy on his local paper in North Carolina. He moved next to a Florida paper, and from there to the disreputable corner office in the Enquirer building, in a run-down resort near Palm Beach, from which he was to entertain and terrify America.

His own politics were mysterious. Under the pseudonym “Ed Anger”, he wrote a News column so vitriolically right-wing that it possibly came from the left. Anger hated foreigners, yoga, whales, speed limits and pineapple on pizza; he liked flogging, electrocutions and beer. No, Mr Clontz would say, he had no idea who Anger really was. But he was “about as close to him as any human being.”

Mr Clontz also always denied that his staff made the stories up. It was subtler than that. Many tips came from “freelance correspondents” who called in; their stories were “checked”, but never past the point where they might disintegrate. (”We don’t know whether stories are true,” said Mr Clontz, “and we really don’t care.”) The staff also read dozens of respectable newspapers and magazines, antennae alert for the daft and the bizarre. When a nugget was found, Mr Clontz would order them to run away with it, urging them to greater imaginative heights by squirting them with a giant water-pistol.

Yet he also showed care for authenticity. If a story resisted tracking down, he would give it the dateline “Bolivia”. If it relied on “scientific research”, he would make sure the scientists were Bulgarian. Writers who made up the names of Georgia natives terrorised by giant chickens would be asked to check in the telephone book to make sure they did not exist. Loving editorial attention was given to the face of Satan when he appeared in a cloud formation over New York.

Please tell me someone is writing/has written a biography of him, as he was probably the last glorious huckster left of earth. Anyone who coins the phrase “Nothing gets me more pig-biting mad than…” and comes up with “Bat Boy steals car - and goes on three state joy ride!” is a hero in my book. I hope Clontz gets to have that beer with Elvis for real.

As a product of an amazingly tough series of high school English grammar classes, I cringe whenever I see words and punctuation abused. Especially when the abusers are people who really should know better (including myself). So I laughed long and hard over this news tidbit from the remarkable events occurring up in San Francisco:

SAN FRANCISCO - Conservative groups trying to stop the city from issuing marriage licenses to gay and lesbian couples failed to win any immediate action today in two separate court hearings.

Superior Court Judge James Warren told plaintiffs late this afternoon that they would likely succeed on the merits of their case but said he would not issue a court order until they corrected a punctuation error in their legal filing.

“I am not trying to be petty here, but it is a big deal. That semicolon is a big deal,” Warren told attorneys, according to an account by Associated Press.

In documents filed with the court, the Proposition 22 Legal Defense and Education Fund had requested a court order that would force the city “cease and desist issuing marriage licenses to and/or solemnizing marriages of same-sex couples; to show cause before this court.”

“The way you’ve written this it has a semicolon where it should have the word ‘or’,” the judge said. “I don’t have the authority to issue it under these circumstances.”

For the first time in well over sixty years, a new character will be added to the Morse Code. Not surprisingly, it’s the code for the @ sign, so Morse users can finally tap out their email addresses. The code is dot-dash-dash-dot-dash-dot which is a combination of the signals for “A” (dot-dash) and “C” (dash-dot-dash-dot) with no space between them. The new “@” character goes by the name of “commat.”

In 1961, presidential candidate Sen. John Kerry played bass guitar with a band called The Electras. Less than 500 discs were made of their self-released album, but you can bid on one.

“Senator John Kerry and The Electras” would make a great garage rock band name.

Update: Washington Post article on Kerry’s band.

If you take pictures and write about your activities, prepare to get arrested:

It was a Web site filled with dark images of abandoned homes, factories and buildings throughout New Jersey.

The site displays photographs showing buildings, walls and cars with the date and time the pictures were taken and describing the locations in detail.

But police say the designer of the now-defunct site, www.abandonedandbeyond.com, also was breaking the law.

Fairfield police arrested 25-year-old Robert Pless of Wayne on Tuesday and charged him with burglary and criminal trespassing after the owners of a vacant factory in Fairfield discovered someone had broken into their building and posted pictures of its interior on the Internet.

Speaking as someone who can be classified as an “urban explorer”, I have conflicting feelings about this. The charges are ridiculous, especially the burglary charge because:

Police were unable to offer a motive for the break-ins, since it did not appear that items were stolen from the sites.

However there’s a related issue bouncing around the UE (urban explorer) community on the pros and cons of making this information public to begin with. Why? People can’t be trusted to be responsible. For instance, the old fire truck at the long-abandoned Flushing Airport which sat relatively untouched for fifty years until it appeared in Forgotten New York in 2001. Three years later, the poor truck is stripped to the bone.

Similar deterioration has occurred out in the western ghost towns. Old ghost town and mining camp guides from the 60s spoke of extensive ruins and “movie set quality” sites that by the time I got there in the mid-80s where nothing more than charred remains and ATC tire tracks. What to do? I’m not sure… I don’t trust people to do the right thing, and I certainly do not trust Authority, who’s response will either be prosecution or a realization that such sites are a commodity. I suppose the only thing to do in the near-term is to retreat back to obscurity. And be sure to password-protect those web sites.

On the other hand, I firmly believe that this is an abomination:

An exciting new Discovery Channel series to air in 2004 is casting for the following:

1) An adventurous, dynamic, structural engineer –interest in urban exploration & archeology is a plus.
2) A hip, buff female rock climber/extreme athlete
3) A dynamic, young caver
4) A quirky cutting-edge electronics whiz

All should be telegenic, engaging, with unique and memorable personalities, interested in trying their hand at urban exploration. We’re looking for people with the desire and charisma to become national TV celebrities.

This series will explore the culture of urban exploration – going into abandoned structures, tunnels, bridges, towers – the hidden zones in our cities where mere mortals fear to tread – or at least have no idea that they exist. We are assembling an “A-Team,” 2-3 unforgettable individuals with particular areas of expertise who will set out on various exotic urban adventures. At each stop they will meet members of the local urban exploration community, who will help them along their way.

Can there be at least ONE geek hobby left alone without being co-opted into trash? It was bad enough seeing robot combat degenerate into the hideous sub-WWF “Battlebots”, and this just sends me into adrenal frenzy. For Cthulhu’s sake… please don’t cooperate with these assholes.

Or else the CPRR, sorry, the Central Pacific Railroad Photographic History Museum will literally beat you senseless with their twenty pound terms-of-service agreement.

I dare anyone to post an inline image from their site.

I make my living as a network admin/tech support manager and this article in the New York Times is completely on the money.

Many of the computationally confused say they suffer from genuine intimidation and even panic over how to handle the mysterious machines they have come to rely on for so much of daily life. Virus writers, spammers and scammers, they say, are the ones who should be held accountable for the chaos they cause.

But as the same people equip themselves with fancy computers and take advantage of the Internet for things like shopping and banking, critics say that their perpetual state of confusion has begun to get tiresome. And while the Internet’s traditional villains remain elusive, those inadvertently helping them tend to be friends and neighbors.

…..

And some, tired of being treated like free help lines, are beginning to rebel. They are telling friends, relatives and random acquaintances to figure it out on their own.

More to the point, I think it’s simple common courtesy. It’s not acceptable to approach a doctor or a lawyer outside of their office for free advice and I see no reason why IT folks shouldn’t be treated the same way. Otherwise I’ll be happy to help… at a price.

Meanwhile, this person strikes a blow again gender stereotyping:

But his girlfriend, Miriam Tauber, 24, makes no apologies for her lack of computer knowledge. To her, computers are like “moody people” who behave illogically. If people like Mr. Rubenstein expect her to understand them, she suggests, perhaps they should learn to speak in a language she can understand, rather than ridiculous acronyms and suffixes.

“There are these MP3’s and PDF’s and a million other things that you don’t even know what they are,” Ms. Tauber said. “I don’t feel like I need to figure out computers, because my instinct is there’s just no way.”

Then may I suggest that you don’t use a computer ever.

This news item on LA Observed is a perfect nutshell description of Los Angeles:

That traffic snarl on the southbound I-5 near Santa Clarita yesterday was caused by CHP officers and L.A. County Sheriff’s deputies arguing on the freeway over which agency got custody of three jail escapees. At one point, several Sheriff’s cars boxed in the CHP cruisers to block them from transporting the suspects, said Fox 11 News; on TV there looked to be 20-plus official cars on the scene. After a deal was struck to have the CHP take the bad guys to a Sheriff’s station, a chagrined LASO supervisor told Channel 11 the embarrassment wouldn’t happen again. Channel 5 also had the story; neither the Times story or the Daily News story on the arrests mention the jurisdictional squabble or the traffic impact.

It’s been a couple weeks since the last squid story, therefore:

A squid that shines like a torch could lead to a new generation of optical tools. Scientists have been studying the Hawaiian bobtail squid which aims a beam down from its belly as a searchlight when looking for food. It also helps protect the squid from predators by reducing its tell-tale shadow on the ocean floor. The creature’s light-producing organ is powered by glowing bacteria. But the beam is produced by stacks of reflecting plates which surround the it.