Found in Email

I'm cleaning my email and I found this gem:

The only downside to that is that people *want* to believe this stuff
so badly that they'll just stop sending it to you instead of listening
to reality. So, you'll stop getting useless bullshit, but the other
people involved won't stop believing it.

That's been my experience.

It's in reference to my wife debunking one of those worthless chain mailings. It couldn't be more true.

Steps and Missteps to Cord Cutting

After some setbacks to my cable television independence, I've recently climbed back on the horse. This time I have some new weapons and a new strategy: ownership. I'll get to that in the next post but for now I'd like to summarize my attempts to cut the cord.

This all started about 4 years ago. I made a change to our cable plan and I let the nice CSR sign me up for the $100/month "Triple Play" service that includes Internet, phone, and Cablevision's extended "optimum" television line up. She also threw in a second DVR, free for a year and made it so the first DVR was billed as a regular cable box. All told it was about $120/month, but for that money I got a lot of services and perks.

Then the introductory period ran out after 12 months. Those perks that seemed so nice for $120 didn't seem so great when the bill started closing in on $200. I took a step back and questioned how much I actually needed these services and which ones I could afford. I kept the Internet services, as theirs is the best in my area. I returned the both DVR boxes. I cut my cable back to their lowest plan, which isn't much more than a rebroadcast of channels available over the air (OTA). I even tried getting a better antenna to see if I could switch to just OTA, but apparently I can only do that if I speak Spanish. Also, I switched my phone service to Broadvoice.

These changes brought my total back down to a more manageable $80. I didn't sack the extra money away in the bank, though. I knew if I'm to make this work I need to invest in some other forms of entertainment. I do have a child, and I'm a guy who likes to watch TV and movies. So I bumped up my Netflix membership to 4 discs and made it a point to buy my son DVDs every couple weeks. I augmented my viewing with online streaming services like Hulu, and I started watching a lot more fansubbed anime. This worked well.

...For a while. Then my mother moved in for a month or so. She's hopelessly addicted to TV. In her house the TV runs 24/7. Often on one of those blathering, vile, manipulative news channels. I'm sure you know the one. So we had to reinstate a broader cable line-up. We kept our separate cable service, though. No DVR this time. A couple months after she left, we dropped our television service back to previously low levels.

...For a while. Next up came my wife's research project. Her concept was to monitor some of those blathering, vile, manipulative news channels and write about how they influence one's worldview. I'm sure it was interesting, though she never let me read it, and she got a good grade. However, this meant we needed to increase our service level and add a DVR. At the time my son was approaching his third birthday.

Big mistake. Once a habit formed of recording shows on the DVR and watching them later we became stuck. Sure, we can always just get rid of the thing and deal with him when we do. That's annoying, though, and it's a little unfair to him. He's just a kid and he likes some shows that have a limited or non-existent DVD presence. We limit the time he watches TV, but kids seek out new things so the shows he watches will drift over time. Two shows in particular seemed troublesome: Nickelodeon's Bubble Guppies and Disney's Jake and the Neverland Pirates.

That brings us up to a week ago.

Here's a quick rundown of the setup:

Service	Provider	Cost/Month	Notes
Cable	Cablevision	$70	including DVR
Internet	Cablevision	$50
Phone	Broadvoice	$15	No Long Distance
Rentals/Streaming	Netflix	$28	4 disc plan

Since we're all caught up now in my next post I'll go over some changes I've made, others I plan, and what the long term picture looks like.

Charles Bukowski: The Happy Outcast

Charles Bukowski died March 9, 1994. In honor of this I've decided to renew my series of reprints from my coursework. This piece was part of my research anthology project for my college writing class. Included is the original work, though I received a fair share of criticism from the professor for some of it.

Charles Bukowski was an American author and poet. He was an odd, ugly man who believed that beauty was hidden in the drunks, pimps, and whores. He spent his time in bars lamenting those who would resign themselves to work eight hours a day. Bukowski, who lived an alternative lifestyle and never conformed to societal norms, was considered ugly, and was more comfortable in the company of misfits, wrote The Genius of the Crowd as a brutal reaction to how he was treated socially and how he viewed supposedly normal people.

The further away from the human race I am the better I feel. Even though I write about the human race, the further away from them I am the better I feel. Two inches is great. Two miles is great. Two thousand miles is beautiful. As long as I’m able to eat. They feed me because I feed them. I don’t like to be near them. When somebody even so much as brushes against me with an elbow in a crowd I react.

I do not like the human race. I don’t like their heads. I don’t like their faces. I don’t like their feet. I don’t like their conversations. I don’t like their hairdos. I don’t like their automobiles. I don’t like their dogs or their cats or their roses. (Bukowski)

Charles Bukowski was once described as the “human embodiment of a raised middle finger” (Miles). He could never quite fit into the mold. As a young adult he had many blue collar jobs ranging from dishwasher to truck driver. He hated these jobs. In Bukowski’s words, “I could not accept the snails pace eight to five, Johnny Carson, happy birthday, Christmas, New Year-to me it’s just the sickest of all sick things.” Instead, he chose to live in abject poverty with no job so he could dedicate himself to writing.

Charles Bukowski looks like someone beat a toad into his face. Those are my words, not a quote. I watched many hours of interviews of Bukowski between “The Charles Bukowski Tapes” and “Bukowski: Born Into This.” During that time I thought about how to characterize his looks and came to this conclusion: if you take an average person and beat a them over the face with a toad long enough to do permanent damage, you may look like this guy. Others are no kinder, Paul Ciotti of the Los Angeles Times said Bukowksi had, “a sandblasted face, warts on his eyelids and a dominating nose that looks as if it were assembled in a junkyard from Studebaker hoods and Buick fenders” (qtd. in The Poetry Foundation). As a child he was bullied and rejected by girls due to his complexion (Gale Literary Database). I am intentionally cruel, because that is the attitude that Bukowski faced for much of his life. His appearance set him apart and changed the way that society treated him.

It was these kinds of interactions that drove Bukowski to alcohol, he was a notorious drunk. He was also unashamedly drunk, often speaking passionately about the beauty of alcohol and his time spent in bars. It infected his work as well. Take, for instance, the poem Here I Am... in which he begins, “drunk again at 3 a.m. at the end of my 2nd bottle/ of wine,” (Bukowski 1-2). His semi-autobiographical character, Henry Chinaski, who featured prominently in several of Bukowski’s books as well as the movie Barfly, was an alcoholic. He chose alcohol over work and dive bars over coffee houses.

With the booze comes the bars, and with the bars comes the patrons. Bukowski was at his element with the people who have nothing better to do than sit in a bar and get drunk all day. He was proud to be a vagrant. In “The Charles Bukowski Tapes” he often refers to pimps and prostitutes as his “people,” complete with a segment in which he drives around West Hollywood pointing out various people on the side of the road to declare them as friends. At this point he had published numerous books and was known to cavort with some of the Hollywood elite. His true calling was with the Hollywood underbelly.

Charles Bukowski did not need to take revenge against those who misunderstood him and treated him poorly. He was perfectly content to go get a beer instead. Yet, when he was alone with his typewriter such resentment was sure to show. I believe that Bukowski felt the he was almost robbed of the chance to write, and to live a life of debauchery that he thoroughly enjoyed, by the average person and their desire to keep the status quo. If he was threatened he surely was not one to act, he didn’t see a point in such behavior. His weapon was his words.

On the attack of the normal, he has many poems. I believe that The Genius of the Crowd best exemplifies this idea. Other poems with similar themes include: 40,000, Another Day, Be Kind, Let It Enfold You, and Pull a String, a Puppet Moves. Over the course of his life Bukowski wrote thousands of poems and hundreds of other works. His works are often very direct, and quite blunt. The life he led and the people he encountered influenced him greatly. In sampling his catalog one can find countless examples on this theme, and I leave you with a selection from one - Some People:

some people never go crazy.

what truly horrible lives

they must lead. (Bukowski 20-22)

Failure is Great

The other day as I was describing a failure of mine to my boss I realized that I really enjoy those instances. I like when the current me is able to go back and fix some failure the past me created. I like admitting to stupid mistakes, and I like correcting them.

I wanted to write a long-winded post about this and talk about various failures of mine, but every time I start I would let myself be distracted and stop. It's sat like that since the day referenced above. Thus, this post is in essence a microcosm of the phenomenon it describes.

The one failure I originally set out to address that I will include is that of my grand scheme to post juvenile friend descriptions about people in my Facebook friends list. I started everything, beginning with a spreadsheet listing every person from the friends list. Then I used the random number generator to pick 10 people. The first was my niece Angela, and I was instantly discouraged when I realized that while I know Angela well enough I don't know that I care to write about my grade schooler niece whose account was created for FarmVille.

Then there was the brief Facebook meme that solidified my resolve to scrap the project. You might recall those couple of days where people would ask for someone to send them a random number and then they'd post a status about them. Given the similarities, my idea was suddenly far less edgy. Without the edginess all that was left was the immaturity and pettiness of it all. So I gave up.

I'm embracing the failure, though. Next time I'll put more effort into my petty juvenile ideas before I announce them, that way I'm more likely to follow through and I can have even greater failures than the past. Who knows? Maybe one will be a success instead.

Michael Vick

The Michael Vick story is a great example of a terrible problem in American society. Just not the one you're thinking of. It's a story of someone who took the punishment for their crime, and yet most of society wants him to fail on the other side. It's the story of how the criminal justice system is failed by society just as much as society is failed by the criminal justice system. It's also an example of how the basic moral of forgiveness escapes both our religious and secular populations.

The Obligatory Non-Defense Paragraph:
I am not defending Michael Vick's past actions, nor am I attempting to trivialize them. Nothing herein should be construed as a defense of such repulsive behavior. I like dogs. I don't understand dog fighting (or the culture around it, which is another under-reported aspect of this). I believe it is possible to defend Michael Vick without condoning these actions, and as such I will try.

So, we all know what Michael Vick did. We should all know that he admitted his guilt and rather than have some prolonged legal battle in which he'd likely have prevailed on some technicality or lawyer wizardry, he admitted his guilt. We should all know that he served time in prison that was not only deemed appropriate by the justice system, but is excessive when compared to others who have committed like crimes.

It isn't so clear why this means that Vick should no longer be a part of this society. The way he's regarded by some is baffling - whether it be various media members questioning the morality of appreciating Vick's football talent or random people on Facebook who must remind us of how horrible Vick is as a person every time he's on TV. I can see why someone would take such a stance against Ben Roethlisberger since he wasn't punished for the highly corroborated allegations of rape, but Vick's life was ruined after his crimes were exposed. He lost essentially everything he had. He lost a year of his life in prison. He's been thoroughly punished by the media, the courts, the NFL, and continues to be punished by society.

That's not enough for everyone, though. Some want to push it further and demonize anyone who would dare to support Vick's attempts to be a productive member of society. If you like how he plays you are a bad person because you've forgotten what he did.

Such a mentality is pervasive everywhere towards ex-cons. Social justice in our society is one that punishes first, but never forgives and rarely forgets. The punishment for a criminal record is to become a second-class citizen. You have to divulge it every time you apply for a job, or they'll likely find out anyway. Good luck getting that job at that point, unless it's something lowly that no one else wanted. Even so, this is occasionally more understandable than not. I understand that you don't want someone whose already committed fraud working in the banking industry. How does having a past involving animal abuse disqualify you from throwing a football? (Save the pigskin puns.)

If Michael Vick cannot contribute to society in the field of sports, for which he has tremendous and unique talent, then we need to throw out the entire justice system. We should switch to a system in which crimes at that level result in a quick death penalty. Why should we let these people out of prison if we've predetermined that they must not be able to positively contribute? If we're not letting them out then we may as well just off them now rather than sheltering them for dozens of years. This is society saying that the justice system is a failure, and it is a failure precisely because society deems it such and refuses to give ex-cons a chance.

That is also society's way of never forgiving. Forgiveness is a basic Christian value. The Koran prescribes swift punishment for certain actions, but forgiveness after. Culturally, it's a principle that has been important for millenia. Here is a case where forgiveness seems not to apply. After all, how can you forgive a man enough to let him throw a football when he's only been to the extent of the law, become a pariah, and lost most of his fortune? He clearly hasn't suffered enough, where "enough" is determined by the harshest sentence any member of the public can imagine for him. No, we can't forgive a man who has admitted he was wrong and paid the price, because such an action in our society has become taboo. Instead, we should forgive those who admit no wrongdoing and are never punished, or at least we should forget and then act enraged when reminded. Vick admitted his guilt and thus he should be dead to all of us, or maybe just dead.

What good is a failure for society? Why should we want someone to slip into destitution and obscurity when they do something wrong, even if they are punished for it? If Michael Vick were left with no football career do you think he is more or less likely to commit further crimes?

Personally, I hope Vick succeeds. I think his can be a success story, someone who made grave mistakes and lost it all but was able to bounce back after atonement. We almost never get to root for the ex-con, this is our chance.

Two Big Take-Aways from Last Night

I could write a lot about the importance of the elections last night or what went wrong and what went right, but I'm honestly in no mood. I'll summarize my thoughts like this: if you spoke to me two years ago I would have told you that the Republicans will take Congress back in 2010, and I'd be happy about it.

Of course, in the meantime the Republican party has become a vile piece of shit pressured by some of the most self centered people in the country to be even more vile, so I'm no longer happy about what happened. The Contract with America and the Silent Majority ended up being good for the country, even if they didn't really achieve their goals. I have a hard time believing that the Tea Party and whatever you want to call their radicalized bullshit will yield similar results. Back to the point...

Two things stand out in my mind more than anything else from last night:

John King needs an election results screen to be happy.

I mean, good for you, John. You looked so enthusiastic last night. I was delighted to see you in front of the touch screen again. You can point, click, pan, zoom, circle shit, and even write on it. You looked so very at home. I hope you have one of those things in your bedroom. If not, get one soon because I have a feeling you'll never be happier.

We don't have to worry about hard line Tea Partiers winning too many big races.

While they may be able to take individual districts and push the House far, far to the right last night showed that the larger the population is the less well the TP group does. In other words, every Democrat should be hoping for a strong TP influence in the next Presidential cycle. That will make Senate races easier to win (even Sestak almost won and he was running from the left, I have no doubt that Spector would have taken that race). More importantly, a radicalized, half-literate, batshit crazy Republican candidate or running mate guarantees a Democrat win for President.

The biggest proof of this is in Nevada. Reid was terribly unpopular. Almost anyone could have beat him. Sharron Angle is an extremist. She's not politically savvy. She has few populist views. She only came close because Reid has been demonized for the last two years, especially by Faux News and the conservative radio alternate universe. The Republicans worked hard to trickle this agenda into more mainstream and center targeted sources, at the very least presenting it as such that some hidden group of moderates was actually unhappy with Reid's specific performances, never mind that they were really unhappy because they were out of work and the only way the government can create jobs in a recession is through deficit spending, something the Republicans were set against even though it was the backbone of Reagan's fiscal policy. Yet, they were unable to beat him despite years of electioneering against him.

We'll see more of this. Definitely. It'll be like this in 2012. When it is, in an election that should have far greater turnout, we'll see even more defeats of radicalized Republicans. And it will be good.

Social Experimentation

Now that I've detailed how many friends lists are maintained, and how I maintain mine, it's time to put this to the test.

The theory: I believe that my social network is comprised of well known associations and that I can make a legitimate justification for each of these.

The test: I will randomly select friends from my friends list. For each friend that I select I will write an entry about them. I plan for these entries to be candid and informative, they will probably consist largely of descriptions about how I know the person but many people will also include some personal stories. If I cannot explain how I know someone and why they're on my list then I will defriend them.

By picking at random I hope to avoid any bias toward people with whom I have a deeper and easier to explain relationship. I'd like to get some of those more awkward relationships out into the open without waiting until the end. If I defriend anyone I will write about it.

I've already entered my current friends list into a spreadsheet. Using random numbers from Random.org I've selected 10 people so far. First up, my niece Angela.

Since this is a public blog I'll use first names only, or first name last initial. I don't want people to be listed in stories on the open Internet without their consent but I don't think it's worth getting consent first. When this is reposted on Facebook I will tag people.

That's about it. I'll try to work my way through my friends list. I realize this is the sort of thing that a teenage girl might do, and that makes it so wonderfully awkward. I can't promise any sort of a schedule, but now that I'm committed I have to at least do a few.