Tennis Anyone?

I started playing tennis again recently.  I didn’t really start playing tennis until around 10 years ago when I lived in the burbs.  Then I moved into the city and took lessons for a while, but the classes I knew about were pretty easy and I didn’t have anyone near my level to play so I stopped going.  Then a friend mentioned that she was taking lessons and I was all like “I should do that too!”  So I did.

We joined a level three class which went only for a month and the first two classes were embarrassing at how much I had forgotten, but I quickly got back into the groove after that and settled in nicely.  But then, due to the weird vagaries of the park district, there was a month off before the next class started and the next class was two months long.  Despite the fact that I signed up only a day after registration started, the level three class was full so I figured I would just try the level four class.

The level four class is kicking my ass.  Two weeks in and I’ve gotten a blister on my thumb in different places both weeks.  I cannot remember the last time I’ve had a blister on my hand and now I have one two weeks in a row.  Revenge of the programmers hands, I guess.  This is mostly because I am easily the weakest of the players in the class.  My only saving grace is that I have really good reflexes and anticipation.  The class itself is very good for me because I am actually being challenged.  It’s not just an hour lesson, it’s an hour workout.  By the time I’ve stopped playing because I tore open my blister, I am gasping for breath.

The level three class that I would have joined runs at the same time as ours and I look over there every once in a while and it really is amazing at how much of a difference there is between the two levels.  There are a few level three people that are about my skill level, but most are much worse.  It’s like level three is filled with people who want to waste an hour playing tennis and level four is filled with people that want to play tennis.

All that to say, if you know me and you’re decent at tennis, we should play sometime.

Self-Serving Russia Bests Self-Serving America

The events surrounding Syria over the past few weeks have been absolutely fascinating.  Someone, likely someone within Assad government, uses chemical weapons against the rebels killing hundreds of people, many non-combatants.  America does its saber-rattling threatening Assad with some sort of maybe-useful-but-limited-and-that-is-all-we-swear retaliation for the use of chemical weapons (which, by the way, Syria has never signed on the the general ban on the use of chemical weapons).  The American public wants no part in it.  Republicans both complain that Obama should have attacked Assad much sooner and shouldn’t attack Assad at all and either way it proves that Obama is weak.  Democrats mostly stay quiet.  Then Secretary of State John Kerry, in what has been described as an off-the-cuff remark, kind of snarkily mentions that all Assad has to do is turn over his chemical weapons and no bombings will happen, like that is ever going to happen.  This is quickly walked back by the State Department but not before Russia jumps all over it.  Now we have Russia brokering talks between Assad and the United States trying to come to a peaceful resolution.  Assad seems amenable to the idea and has even said that Syria will sign the Chemical Weapons Convention if the U.S. promises not to attack.

I don’t think anyone could have predicted this chain of events occurring.  Of course, getting this far is one thing, going any farther is another.  It would be a true diplomatic coup for both Russia and the United States if all of Syria’s chemical weapons are turned over.  Everyone gets to pretend to be strong and then save face.  Winners all around.  Well, except for the Syrian people, they’re screwed either way.  And with over 100,000 already dead, it’s a stark reminder that the world stage is populated by megalomaniacs more concerned with how they look than what damage they cause the people unseen, unheard, unknown.

File This Under Sucks To Be You

(via)

Imagine you are a medical photographer at the University of Birmingham Medical School.  You go about your business day after day documenting patients and their medical conditions and head back to your darkroom to develop your prints.  It’s 1978, you’re young, all is right in the world.  Suddenly, you fall ill and develop a rash on your body.  No big deal, you think, everybody falls ill occasionally.  Only you get worse and are admitted to the hospital.  There, the doctors tell you, “You know that, perhaps, greatest achievement of the 20th century where we totally kicked smallpox’s ass and now it doesn’t exist anymore?  Yeah, well, it turns out it still does.  In you.  Surprise!”  Poor Janet Parker.

On September 11th, 1978, Janet Parker became the very last person on Earth to die of smallpox.  She didn’t work with it, but the hospital did and her darkroom just happened to be just above the laboratory where they were working with it.  It turns out that their containment procedures at the school were a little lax.  A few others close to Janet also contracted smallpox from her, but none of them died.  The sad part is that, thirteen years earlier, this exact same thing happened to another medical photographer that worked in the same darkroom!  That also resulted in a tiny outbreak, but no one died.

Oddly enough, the one thing that struck me the most about this is the name Janet Parker.  This was a woman!  There was a female medical photographer in 1978.  That has to be a bit of a rarity for back then, I would think.  Or maybe they were kind of the same thing as nurses back then.

Book Review: The Last Colony by John Scalzi

Jean-Paul’s Rating: 4/5 Stars

“The Last Colony” is another excellent book in an excellent trilogy.  The others being “Old Man’s War” and “The Ghost Brigades”.  This book is the least hard science fictiony of the three.  There are still cool new technological gadgets and such, but the book mostly draws on the science from the previous books for the most part.  It is missed because John Scalzi describes cool science gadgets really well, but it also gives Scalzi ample room to shine in his other writing talent, sarcasm and biting rejoinders.  This first half of the book is packed with them.  I found myself chuckling more than a few times and smiling throughout.

This book also delves into the internal politics of the Colonial Union much more than the other two.  Much of the plot surrounds the way the Colonial Union manages its colonies and uses them as pawns in a six dimensional chess game against the other colonizing races.  With each book, it becomes harder and harder to excuse the actions of the Colonial Union and this book actually had me rooting for the Conclave.

Like the other two books in this series, I thought the first half was quite strong, but the second half was missing something.  I think my issue is that, with each book, John Scalzi creates this complex series of events and then the solutions just seem to work themselves out in a simplistic way.  Unlike the other two books, I found the ending to this book quite satisfying, if a little far fetched.

And the “Old Man’s War” trilogy comes to an end.  There are other books set in the universe, but these three apparently stand alone.  Though I will read the other books, I will sorely miss John Perry and Jane Sagan.  I wish John Scalzi had spent more ink talking about their relationship.  It is an interesting and complicated one.  There are hints of love and hints of problems.  Neither are well explored.  None of this takes away from the story, but it’s one of those road not traveled things.  I wonder how much John Perry/Jane Sagan romance fan fiction is out there.  Not enough to actually look, but just wonder.

 

Three Blind Mice

The Republican Comedy Tour just finished their Egypt gig.  Louie “Terror Babies” Gohmert, Steve “Calves the Size of Cantaloupes” King, and Michelle “Pray the Gay Away” Bachmann recently traveled to Egypt to impart their democratically styled principles upon the lucky inhabitants of Egypt.  What followed is exactly what you’d expect when the three craziest members of the House get together to talk about something they clearly don’t understand.

With dreams of American coups dancing in their heads, they praised the Egyptian military for following the will of the people and ousting the democratically elected President Morsi.  Comparisons were made to George Washington leading the Revolution against England.  They also praised the military for the brutal crackdowns on protesters which led to the death of at least one thousand protesters (just like George Washington did. Oh, wait.).  They then seemed to suggest the Muslim Brotherhood was behind the 9/11 World Trade Center attack, because, you know, the word Muslim is right in their name and Muslims attacked us ergo the Muslim Brotherhood attacked us.

The only real lesson for the Egyptian people is this: Sure you elected Morsi and he really sucked.  People in the United States elected these three screwballs too, some of them multiple times, and we’ve been a democracy for hundreds of years.  Luckily for the U.S. their power is pretty limited to saying stupid things in foreign countries.  You can be forgiven your Morsi election, just try not to let it happen again.  If you ever actually get another election.  Here, have some weapons.

Gendered Pronouns: Great Evil Or Greatest Evil?

I have long despised gendered languages.  Partly because it makes them more difficult to learn, having to memorize both a word and the gender that goes along with that word.  Mostly, though, because it’s always struck me as fairly sexist.

The language we speak has been shown to change the way we think about things.  There have been studies of gendered languages which show that if a noun is feminine in one language and masculine in another, it actually changes the words individuals use to describe the noun.  As a made up example so you understand what I’m talking about , take the word “chair”.  If “chair” is a masculine noun in a language, people were more likely to use more masculine descriptions like “sturdy” or “solid”.  If “chair” is a feminine noun in a language, people were more likely to use more feminine descriptions like “elegant” or “dainty”.

Because of the lack of gendered nouns, I have always thought of English as superior to other languages.  English is illogical, self-contradicting, and phonetically unpronounceable, but at least it doesn’t have gendered nouns!  It does have gendered pronouns, though.  They’re really just as bad.  Maybe worse, even.  At least gendered nouns aren’t talking about an individual. Gendered pronouns change the way we think about an individual and reveal our own prejudices.

Think about this sentence: She jogs in the park every morning.  The word “she” in that sentence offers zero pertinent information into the forming of the sentence.  What it does is form a picture in your mind of a female jogging.  Chances are, if you’re a cis male, that female is also shapely and well endowed and bounces in all the right places.  It’s certainly a pleasant image to have, but it is also likely nothing close to reality.  The sentence itself has altered our reality.

It’s a fairly benign example.  Try this experiment, though.  Take a sheet of paper and a pen and write down the first things you think of when you read this sentence:  She was raped.  Get it all down before you go any further.  What did you write?  If you’re like me, it would be a laundry list of victim blaming nonsense interspersed with some sympathetic words.  I am one of the least likely to victim blame, but our culture is so infused with victim blaming that they’re the first words that come to mind.  Now try the same thing with this sentence:  He was raped.  For me, it was much more difficult to come up with things to write.  Did you have the same experience?  Maybe you wrote something about prison or dropping a bar of soap?  Why does the altering of a pronoun so greatly change our view of an unforgivable act?

I wonder how completely neutering our language would alter the way we think about things.  I’ve spent some time trying to come up with genderless pronouns for the English language but everything just sounds weird.  Making up words is harder than it sounds.  ‘It’, as a pronoun, already has connotations of non-humanness that would make it impossible to use as a replacement.  I’m somewhat partial to using the Italian word ‘lei’ because I’ve always been fascinated by it being both the word for ‘she’ and the formal word for ‘you’ and I like the way it sounds.  I also like the word ‘ser’ which is ‘to be’ in Spanish because it sounds English-y and already has a etymology of being built into it.  What words would you be in favor of?

It would be a fascinating experiment to take public domain works and replace all the gendered pronouns and nouns with genderless equivalents and see how it changes our thinking of the stories.  Imagine a love story where you’re never quite know who is the male and who is the female character.  Imagine a poem where you’re not sure if it was written for a male or a female.  I think we would find that our gender prejudices are much deeper than we suppose them to be.

A Little Bit Of Progress

We finally got the city inspectors to come out and approve the sewer and water lines. The good news is that we didn’t have to dig up the sidewalk. The bad news is we had to dig up the street. The other good news is the city didn’t charge extra for digging up the street. Now we are waiting for another inspection for the drain tile before laying the concrete floor in the basement. Fun.

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Google Voice Is Hilarious

Those of you who use Google Voice for your voicemail system know that much hilarity can ensue when comparing the voice message to the Google voice-to-text message.  I have never seen one quite as bad as this though.  A colleague from work called me last night while I was on the phone trying to resolve a work problem so I missed the call.  This colleague is of Indian descent and has a medium Indian accent.  His accent takes some getting used to, but it is perfectly intelligible.  Unless you’re Google Voice apparently.  Check out this verbal vomit and see if you can guess what the message is about:

Bye. Hey J. P Agreement that I love you. I do see that you’re okay. I just received a call. I think it Love You do need a job names. Although I’m not very much. I was not showing up, but I thought he said something about. I haven’t had a lot. So, I think maybe we could not get the file from the clean the icon, system messages 5 so I don’t know the I don’t know what the contact is bad and stuff like that. Daniel Pick a quick look at it and let me know if you need anything else but we did lower work and I think I’m going back home from work right now. I should be at all, and of FedEx played he put it on the small. I just. I don’t have the train so if you could use. I don’t hear back from you, but I’m not as I have a lot and then see what I can book work alright. Thanks. Bye.

 

Oh, The Horror!

This past Monday, in honor of Labor Day, I did what every other Real American was doing.  Not work.  It’s a Labor Day tradition.  Unlike most American, I decided to memorialize the current sorry state of Labor in America by watching a couple of horror movies.  Both movies were less scary and contained less blood than working at McDonald’s.

The first one was “Tucker and Dale vs. Evil”.  This has been on my suggested viewing Netflix list for a long time but I never really gave it much thought since it didn’t seem up my alley.  Boy, was I wrong.  This is one of those movies that has an idea so great you’re surprised no one has ever thought of it before.  The horror is comedic and the blood is over the top.  If you’re expecting a serious horror movie, look elsewhere, but if a horror movie with lots of laughs sounds about your style, I highly recommend it.

The second one was “Dead Snow”.  This one’s foreign so those of you who don’t like subtitles should look elsewhere.  If you do look elsewhere, though, you’ll miss the Nazi zombies.  And the Nazi zombie entrails.  And the dude hanging off the cliff by Nazi zombie entrails.  And many other cunningly creative blood and guts play.  This one quickly turns into a gore fest and doesn’t let up.  Fun for the entire family.  If your family’s idea of fun is smashing in Nazi zombie heads.  What’s wrong with your family?