I work for an organization whose employees include people than some people would just love to assassinate, so we have security for serious reasons, not just for paranoia or for keeping the unwashed masses from wandering into the building. We employees have electronic swipe cards and photo IDs and all that good stuff. Whenever the Ministry of Fear in DC raises the Terror Level, we have what I call crackdowns, during which times the security people at the entrances have orders to do “100% ID checks.” That means you swipe your card and display your ID. But here’s the ridiculous part. The security dudes quickly get bored and stop really looking at your creds after you’ve successfully swiped in, especially when they’ve seen your face several hundred times. I carry a little leather cardholder thingy containing stuff like aMetroCard and a photo of my baby daughter, as well as my employee ID and swipe cards, which are obscured by the former items. So I wave my baby picture/MetroCard at the security dudes and they nod and say thank you. “It’s OK:  he’s got a MetroCard and a cute kid.”
However, if I forget my creds, then I have to go through the metal detector like an ordinary mortal — usually. In such cases I invariably think, yeah right, the day I come unglued and bring my firearm to work with homicidal intentions is the day I will also forget my creds and be thwarted by the metal detector. Knowing me, that’s probably exactly what I’d do:  forget my swipe card and ID. And with my last flicker of rationality I would think, ah fuck it, let’s come back tomorrow and kill everyone when we have both our gun and our ID .
I don’t mean any disrespect for the people whose job it is to watch our back. Most of them are decent people doing a necessary job honorably. But I can’t help but sneer every time I look out my office window at the garage entrance below me, and see the perfunctory pro forma trunk inspections the guys do on cars coming into the building. I don’t know about you, but whenever I install a car bomb, I mount it someplace discreet like under the car, instead of like, you know, leaving it hanging out in plain sight in the trunk? Cause it like so totally blows when the security dudes find your bomb?

Let’s continue discussing some of the questions raised by my right honourable friend dark-eye in his last post.
I take it we agree, then, that there’s no point in being nasty to the checkout slave for using the harmless phaticism “have a good one.” I think it’s likewise anal-prescriptivist, and a waste of energy, to fulminate over people saying “where’s it at.” English varies by region and social class; different variations obey different systems of rules; so what?
It isn’t so much annoying that people use clichés and buzzwords as it is distressing that they can’t do any better. Too many Americans can’t express themselves worth a shit or tell you in what century the Civil War took place. Why?
I think that’s a complex question with no definitive answer, just competing theories. Part of the cause must be that fools sit around staring at the veg box for too many hours of their lives — that’ll make you stupid, for sure. Part of it is undoubtedly due to failures in the public education system, which in turn are attributable in large measure to severe underfunding and our policymakers’ fucked up spending priorities. The way stuff like U.S. history is typically taught in school gives students little reason to remember it — a series of disconnected factoids, trivia. Who cares? Chomsky called it right when he said (don’t ask me exactly where) that school is a system of enforced ignorance. That’s no mere eccentricity — it’s literally true in too many cases.
For people like dark-eye and me it is nonetheless appalling how ignorant people are. We’re Old School. The fact that your history teacher sucked is no excuse. The fact that whenever you please, you could go onto the Web and find out when the Civil War was is no excuse. There are some things that people should know Just Because.

The comedians over at the New York Times must bust a gut when they are composing those headlines. Today’s edition has this belly-buster:

Bush to Establish Panel to Examine U.S. Intelligence

As Homer Simpson said of one of the films screened at the Springfield Film Festival: It works on so many levels!

I can go almost indefinitely without cocaine. I can go for little more than 24 hours without coffee.
I can get up in the morning and consider leaving the house for work without first doing a blast of cocaine. I can’t bear the thought without a blast of espresso.
I can concentrate on my work without my brain interrupting me to demand a line. I can hit a wall, fall on my ass and stay there for want of coffee.
If I wake up in a motel or someplace where there is no coffee I will go out and get some without even brushing my teeth, and persist in my quest for coffee until I score. Even on a bad day you won’t see me out there copping a bag.
Therefore, coffee is more addictive than cocaine. QED.

I was a first grade student in a middle class white Maryland suburb in about 1966. Think Johnson administration, automobiles with fins.
I befriended a kid named Dennis Godbald. Note the unusual surname, which I’ve never encountered again. Godbald was not from the same socio-economic stratum as most of the kids. He was white welfare trash. And he was “bad” — a bit of a discipline problem. Maybe his home life was more dysfunctional than most — maybe. In any case, I don’t think he was stupid. He had a rebellious spirit and a well-developed sense of humor.
One day Godbald and I were walking through the schoolyard discussing the possibility of doing something — I forget what — and I remarked that our teacher, Mrs. Leroy, would probably disapprove. And Godbald said these exact words: “Aw, shit on Mrs. Leroy.” I laughed at the disrespectful attitude and the blunt way it was expressed.
Shit on Mrs. Leroy has informed my thinking about authority ever since. Not that all authority is to be disrespected; rather, the burden of proof is on authority to prove its legitimacy. A test which the perhaps well-meaning Mrs. Leroy failed, from young Dennis Godbald’s point of view.

You’ve noticed that when sportcasters are calling boxing matches on TV, they always tell you which fighter is which based on the trunks they’re wearing. Occasionally the trunks are quite similar. “Héctor Rodriguez is the fighter in the white trunks with the blue piping, and Tyrone Jackson is the fighter in the the white trunks with the blue piping and little gold accents on the outer seams.” Ever wonder why they don’t say what everyone already knows, which is Héctor Rodriguez is the Mexican guy and Tyrone Jackson is the black guy? I’m sure the networks’ answer is: Because that would be racist.
Racist? You mean there is something shameful and unmentionable about having physical attributes that are characteristic of certain races and ethnicities? That attitude itself is insulting.
Then, is it because they don’t want to portray the fight as a fight between an black man and a latino? We can already see that for ourselves.
OK, so suppose both guys are, say, black. African American, if you please. So now you need to distinguish them by their trunks, even thought the ring announcer just told you who they were (“fighting out of the corner to my left…”)? Why? Because they all look alike?

Oh shit ®. That’s what Vernon has to say, and he is now saying it at long last. In other words Vernon T. Bludgeon has finally gotten around to starting his blog. Let there be blogging.