David Erik Nelson's Blog, page 35
February 21, 2013
"Sticks and Stones" . . .
. . . is a load of bullshit. A broken bone was easily ten times better than being teased and bullied on the daily. Once a bone is broken, normal humans start to get a sense of what they're becoming and back off. But the words, they'll just pile up until they block out all the light in the Universe.
Pro tip: Don't ever tell a kid "sticks and stones may break your bones, but words will never harm you." Say, "Fuck them; that sucks that they're being assholes!" Say, "I love you."
To This Day: Watch video about bullying based on Shane Koyczan poem. (VIDEO)
February 11, 2013
I think this is maybe your longread for today: First-person account from the man who shot Osama bin Laden
This article begins "The man who shot and killed Osama bin Laden sat in a wicker chair in my backyard, wondering how he was going to feed his wife and kids or pay for their medical care" and ends "'Once you're on their list,' he says, 'you never get off.'" In the middle there's this:
The Shooter | Center for Investigative Reporting
I thought in that first instant how skinny he was, how tall and how short his beard was, all at once. He was wearing one of those white hats, but he had, like, an almost shaved head. Like a crew cut. I remember all that registering. I was amazed how tall he was, taller than all of us, and it didn't seem like he would be, because all those guys were always smaller than you think.
I'm just looking at him from right here [he moves his hand out from his face about ten inches]. He's got a gun on a shelf right there, the short AK he's famous for. And he's moving forward. I don't know if she's [PMjA Ed.: the woman ObL is pushing in front of himself] got a vest and she's being pushed to martyr them both. He's got a gun within reach. He's a threat. I need to get a head shot so he won't have a chance to clack himself off [blow himself up].
In that second, I shot him, two times in the forehead. Bap! Bap! The second time as he's going down. He crumpled onto the floor in front of his bed and I hit him again, Bap! same place. That time I used my EOTech red-dot holo sight. He was dead. Not moving. His tongue was out. I watched him take his last breaths, just a reflex breath.
And I remember as I watched him breathe out the last part of air, I thought: Is this the best thing I've ever done, or the worst thing I've ever done? This is real and that's him. Holy shit.
Everybody wanted him dead, but nobody wanted to say, Hey, you're going to kill this guy. It was just sort of understood that's what we wanted to do.
His forehead was gruesome. It was split open in the shape of a V. I could see his brains spilling out over his face. The American public doesn't want to know what that looks like.
February 6, 2013
A Little Garfunkel-&-Oats-Shaped Gift from Mojonaut Milt
Our dear long-time co-conspirator Milt brought this video to our attention, and now we're bringing it to your attention. 'cause, you know, we love ukulele songs.
Fuck Me In The Ass Because I Love Jesus - YouTube
*thx milt!*
January 28, 2013
Maine, 1985: A teenaged LL Cool J teaches children about hip hop
This only has 11,694 views right now, which I find shocking. I just love this footage so damn much!
LL Cool J in 1985 at Colby College in Maine: watch amazing early concert. (VIDEO)
January 23, 2013
UPDATE: Your Calamari Is Almost Certainly *Not* a Pig's Rectum
Like many blogs, we linked last week to one of many posts about calimari and hog bung (here's ours: Poor Mojo's Newswire: Sometimes calamari is just a pig's asshole). I'd listened to--and enjoyed--the TAL segment in question and, although I don't have a beef (pun!) with eating squids or intestines (fact!), I found the claim that bung was regularly--or even occasionally--served in the US to be highly suspect. The major issues being this: Bung is regular in diameter and has no tentacles; I've eaten pound upon pound of fried squid in my life and *never* recieved a platter featuring naught but identical--or even similar-sized--rings. So, I was gratified when the piece closed by saying basically: "You've almost certainly *never* eaten bung being passed as calamari, but I'm rooting for bung slipping through, because bung is an underdog."
But that's not what many folks got from that piece. As near as I can tell, what they got--despite the TAL producer directly saying the contrary--was something like, "ALL CALAMARI IS LIPS AND ASSHOLES!!!1!"
So, in the interest of knowledge and erudition:
A friend told me the other day that she’d heard a horrifying report on public radio: You know those deep-fried, chewy rings of calamari? Sure. Well, they’re sometimes served in imitation form, made from slices of a pig’s rectum. Wait … what?! And so it happened second-hand, as these things almost always do: An urban legend hatched and spread its wings.
My friend had heard the story from radio producer Ben Calhoun, who put it in his segment for the Jan. 11 episode of This American Life. You should go listen: It’s not an expose but a charming, funny paean to the hog bung. (More on that in a bit.) Calhoun doesn’t really think that buttholes have surfed into our seafood—”If I had to bet money on whether it’s happening [in the U.S.], I would absolutely bet money that it’s not,” he told me earlier this week . . .
. . .
There were no eyewitnesses at all, in fact, and all the other evidence was circumstantial: A recent activist report found signs of modest seafood fraud—one kind of fish mislabeled as another—and a taste test showed that switching rectums for calamari might indeed go undetected. Calhoun did not try to hide the weakness of his case: “Just to repeat one last time,” he said at the close of his radio script, “I have no proof that anyone, anywhere, has ever tried to pass off pork bung as calamari in a restaurant … “
Does Safety Dictate Making Quiet Cars Loud?
I was initially moderately annoyed by this; we have a Prius, really *like* that it adds so much less noise to our environs, and I'm frustrated that chronic headphone users and texters seem to be driving public policy (we live in a college town). Now that I've both read the actual rationale and heard some if the sounds, I'm coming around. I actually sorta dig the eerie Jetson's-hover-car sound of sample three. I'd like my future to start sounding a little more futuristic.
One lingering concern: I regularly get my bike going 18 to 20 mph; why isn't that a concern? My chain and tires are quieter than our Prius going 10mph, and I can't stop my bike nearly as quickly (or, at least I don't think I can. Guess I'll go do some trials once it thaws.)
Because hybrid and electric vehicles operate so quietly, particularly at low speeds, they are more difficult for pedestrians and cyclists to detect when a vehicle is coming. This problem is even bigger for the visually impaired who rely on sounds for guidance.
The Pedestrian Safety Enhancement Act sought to fix that, and yesterday's proposal is the result of NHTSA enthusiastically taking up the challenge. The proposal is now open to public comment for the next 60 days, so stay tuned for an update later this year.
Under the new standards, vehicle sounds would need to be detectable under a wide range of street noises and other background sounds when a vehicle is traveling slower than 18 miles per hour. At that speed and above, vehicles make sufficient noise to allow pedestrians and bicyclists to detect them without added sound.
January 10, 2013
In which we are reminded that a gun is an instrument, not a tool
Proof that Concealed Carry permit holders live in a dream world, Part One - YouTube
Over the Winter Holiday of Your Choosing we visited my in-laws--who live on a bunch of fallow acres in West Michigan--and I brought my pistol, a Belgian-made Browning Challenger. These .22LR target pistols were made in the '60s and '70s; mine was a gift from my father, the gun he learned to shoot on, and on which he subsequently taught me to shoot. He was the original owner, and bought it in the mid-1960s, back when these pistols were still hand-machined from a single block of steel by an actual human. Primarily I'd brought the pistol to my in-law's because my father-in-law had recently purchased a Browning Buck Mark (which is descended from the Challenger, but is CNC-machined from 7075-T6 aluminum), and was curious about the comparison between the two. But also my son, who is in first grade, had taken an interest in the war games my nephews (who are older--middle school and high school) play on Xbox, and had been regaling me daily with accounts of the "HALO" games he and his friends re-enacted on the school playground. If he wanted to talk about guns, to imagine guns, to play at what guns are and do, then I wanted him to shoot a gun. He'd seen me shoot plenty of times, but had never pulled the trigger himself.
As it turned out, this foray was wonderfully instructive. We went out into the field, where my father- and brother-in-law have built their shooting range. The day was bitter cold. I hadn't shot my .22 in several years, and it kept misfeeding, only squeezing off three rounds successfully (I later discovered that the barrel screw was a touch loose; these guns are accurate because they are built to tight tolerances, so even a little shifting will muck things up). The Buck Mark similarly misfed and misfired (although at a lower rate)--this, I think, because of the lighter aluminum unevenly contracting as it made the shift from a warm house to a cold field. But my boy got to shoot (with my father-in-law guiding his hand). And what he found was what is true: Shooting can be stressful. A gun--even a plinky little .22--is *loud*, and it jumps in your hand like something live and nervous. It's hard to use; most of his shots sailed into the dirt two yards in front of the target, even with an adult steadying his hand. And guns are unpredictable: Many shells turned out to be bad (they were bought bulk, cheap), or were crimped useless when they were slammed crookedly by the misfeeding slide. And even though we were shooting at a steel target made for .45s, I broke the damn thing with a "lucky" shot that was a touch high and happened to catch the ironwork at its seam, sending the heavy target sailing away. Even this little gun was fearsome; it brought a touch of dread to the boy.
Because a gun isn't a tool--it's not a hammer or a drill that you can pick up, use to solve a problem, and put away until you have the next problem you want to solve. It's an instrument, like a guitar or piano, it requires constant care, it requires checking and tuning before each use, it requires an intimate relationship with its mechanisms, with its parameters, with what it can do and what it should do and what it is meant for. It requires care and feeding. And it requires *practice,* near constant practice for you to be any good at doing anything with it.
It's not a tool, and it doesn't solve problems; it is an instrument, and it expresses feelings. When I'm shooting skeet, I have to feel that clay in my heart before I can smash it, I have to feel how it soars. The hard part isn't the shooting--that's just a swing of the arm and twitch of the finger; I never even think about it. The hard part is the *seeing*, really seeing the orange disk, not just assuming I see it, or thinking I see it, or seeing my idea of the disk and its location, but really and truly seeing the world for what it literarily is. It's harder than you think, because most of us go most of our days without beginning to appreciate how little we see the world, and how completely we rely on our *ideas* about the world without checking them against what our senses are actually reporting. (In light of this, it should come as no surprises that the most natural shots I've ever met have all been artists, 'cause that's the only other human endeavor that's so much about perceiving the world as it is, rather than as we'd have it be.)
When you pick a gun up--just like when you pick up a ukulele or a violin--even if you are "just practicing," you are saying something about yourself, about the world and your place in it, about the connectedness of things, about our human tendency to build things beautiful and destructive.
So the shooting--out in the cold, with real guns that were loud and destructive and erratic--was stressful for my son, and reminded me of the first time *I'd* gone shooting with my dad, when I was in my 20s. I'd never touched a gun--although he'd always kept them in the house--but I'd grown up an American, and so I had *ideas* about guns. And the gun I used that day was *his* preferred gun at the time, a Beretta 9mm. I couldn't hit a thing with it--literally. As I recall, the paper target was entirely unscathed. And I'd had to force my finger to curl around the trigger each time, because each explosion was tremendous, each felt like the Worst Thing I'd Ever Done, and with each shot I couldn't help but imagine that bullet tearing into me, piercing my chest, breaking my bones.
But afterwards, I'd wondered, and we went back with the .22--an impractical gun, in many regards, low-caliber, too bulky to conceal, the barrel long for accuracy, the grip thick for comfort and steadiness, the sights absurdly pronounced for a pistol in America. But it fit my hand like no other object I'd ever touched, and every shot went exactly where I wanted it, where my eye placed it. I never thought about my hand or my chest or my heart or my bones, just my eye and the sights and the target. Just the world.
After we were back inside and warmed up, I asked my little boy what he'd thought of the shooting, expecting he'd repeat what he'd said when he was three and watched me shooting skeet with my dad--"Too loud!" he'd cried, despite wearing my big spare ear protectors.
But he didn't. He was thoughtful, and he smiled, and he said it was good. And since we've been back home, it doesn't seem like he's been playing "HALO" at school.
Anyway, that's what this video got me thinking about, how maybe the most fundamental flaw in our national discussion about guns is that so many of us think of them as tools that we can--or should, or might, or must--use to solve problems, instead of seeing them for what they are: Instruments through which we express ourselves, for better or worse.
January 7, 2013
Dave-o Has a Story in the Current Asimov's!
What with all the seasonal hubbub, I totally forgot to shamelessly hype that my short story "The New Guys Always Work Overtime" is in the current issue of Asimov's (technically the "Feb 2013" issue, it's on newsstands now and will stay there until mid-January-ish). It's your standard time-travel/labor relations/supply-chain management/crappy corporate job/boy-meets-girl story, and leverages basically every bit of German I know (Yes, *both* phrases!) It's available in dead-tree format only, which is actually pretty quaint for a time-travel story set in an iPad factory. Better hustle on down to your local bookstore and trade paper money for paper stories.
CORRECTION: Duh; things have changed a little since the last time I had a story in Asimov's. The magazine is now available for Kindle with a *FREE* 30-day trial--so if you just wanna check out "The New Guys" you can do so with no risk *and* no leaving the house. Score one for leaving in the terrible dystopian future! Asimov's is a pretty solid magazine--if you're into "soft" SF--so it's worth the $3 "risk" if you flake out on canceling the trial subscription:
December 24, 2012
Happy Christmas Whatever to All-Y'all that Happen to Be into that Sort of Thing!
P.S. Never too late to get your special someone an ebook. Just sayin':
December 19, 2012
Westboro Baptist Church: Religion or Business Model?
A Kansan’s thoughts on the Westboro Baptist Church -- Occupy 316
As I said, the church is really nothing more than a front for the law firm. The Phelps family and their hate group do not protest based on any belief system. This is a business model for them. They purposefully seek to protest in the most offensive places so that municipalities will infringe upon their First Amendment rights.
Once this happens, they sue, and they win. Most people in Kansas tend to ignore the Phelps family and their church, because we do not want to give attention to these people.
This claim started popping up on Facebook today, and got me googling. Verdict?
The Phelps Chartered law firm is sorta old news; they started out doing a lot of solid civil rights work, and then Phelps himself got disbarred for being a seething dickweed when cross-examining someone he was suing. As for the above claim, that the Westboro Baptist Church doesn't really believe the terrible things they say, but is really just a con to make money? Frankly, I'd *love* to believe that--but a spate of articles from 2011 (here's just one) tend to indicate the opposite:
The Phelps firm is large and does a *ton* of business for folks who hold their noses when they need a vicious courtroom attorney. Meanwhile, the First Amendment cases amount to just a few "tens of thousands of dollars in court fees." That sounds like a lot, but keep in mind that even a mid-grade lawyer charges $250 per hour--in other words, their First Amendment work over the years amounts to just a couple weeks of regular old lawyering, and is probably break-even, in terms of work.
In other words, these aren't canny, unscrupulous business people; they're a nauseating family of hate-mongers. Frankly, I'd rather have a country full of good ole criminal lawyers than folks like these.
