I read Barbara Ehrenreich’s outstanding Nickeled and Dimed, and among other things, got inspired by one of the scenes she describes. She was working for a cleaning service scrubbing shit from the toilet bowl of a well-to-do mom who spent her time tracking her investments and her baby’s bowel movements. Think of it: a nice little spreadsheet with columns for date, time, volume, aroma, color, texture… I decided I wanted to borrow a page from her play book but with a linguistic twist. I counted all the words I could think of in my 19+ month old daughter’s vocabulary. Stuffed ’em in a MySQL database table because of my geeky proclivities.

I didn’t cheat. These here are 72 genuine active vocabulary items, not random shouting or mimicking, observed as of 31-December-2004. I probably missed a few.

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I heard on NPR this morning that drug traffickers working in and around Guatemala are using the Global Positioning System to locate points where they drop off and pick up 25-kilogram, bouyant, water-tight packages of cocaine in the ocean. It warms my heart to see another technology, originally developed for inherently evil military purposes, being used for something constructive. All the folks here at Vernon T. Bludgeon Consulting would like to salute our colleagues in the narcotraffic industry and wish them all success.
For let us not forget: the illegal drug trade — and its sine qua non, coercive prohibitionist policies — creates employment, opportunity and prosperity for countless thousands. Not to mention the pleasure that quality product brings to so many recreational users who enjoy drugs, and suffer negligible adverse social and health consequences! Yes my friends, from producer to processor, transporter to wholesaler, retailer to end user, just about everybody wins — including, of course, our thriving correctional-industrial complex. But the prison boom is hardly the only side-benefit of the multiplier effect. Drug dealers and manufacturers with money to burn drive the demand for all manner of consumer and industrial goods and services — think of the high-end tennis shoes favored by many drug retailers, or the precursor chemicals a Colombian processor orders from a German firm, or the speedboats those fellows in Guatemala are using, or the laundering services provided by so many financial institutions ranging from the mom-and-pop remittance agencies to the biggest names in the banking industry.
Of course drug prohibition has negative social impact on a few people, but that’s just the way of capitalism, folks. You can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs! It’s clear that the benefits of the illegal drug trade and our apparently (but not really) failed policies far outweigh the costs.

When I see these ladies together — that would be my daughter and my wife — and see how profoundly they love each other, I feel an emotion for which there is no one word in the English language. The very opposite of jealousy, it’s the satisfaction you experience when you see a relationship flourish between two others.

Cabe mencionar de paso que el español también padece la misma laguna léxica, que no hay ninguna palabra que signifique lo contrario del celos (A mi buen saber y entender (-:)

I have trouble talking to those speech recognition voice mail things. I find it vaguely humiliating, embarassing, degrading — perhaps because it is! It is particularly irksome to do it in front of others — rather like being bladder-shy, unable to pee in front of an audience. Pushing buttons, that’s bad enough. But speaking to those things? Maybe it’s like the very early days of telephone answering machines — if you’re old enough to remember, dear reader. When they were new and rare devices, some callers felt inhibited about recording messages. They got used to it. Will I likewise get used to talking to the voice mail robot?
I’m probably not the only user of such systems to discover that you can get “please hold while I connect you to a customer service representative” by screaming fuck you at the damn thing. Apparently it has yet to evolve far enough to understand fuck you.
Meanwhile, “for quality assurance purposes your call may be monitored or recorded.” Two implicit lies are embedded right in there, to insult your intelligence: (1) recording and monitoring has some positive impact on quality; (2) quality is their objective. Customer service is exactly what they are firmly committed to avoiding. Fuck this, put the robot back on the phone.

Three prostitutes were seated across from me on the Port Authority Trans Hudson Interstate Rail System last Saturday night as I was on my way into New York City. From left to right they were: very pretty, mildly slutty and sort of middle class normal looking (and extremely attractive); very slutty but clean (and attractive); and extremely slutty and down-and-out looking. Naive and un-streetwise fool that I am, it takes me a couple minutes of staring to realize that these young ladies are on their way to work. Selling themselves in the street. Not having been laid for a while, and being a horny bastard even on a good day, I find the whores rather provocative, but also depressing and, in the case of the one on the right, repulsive. If I were their dad I would not want them sucking men’s dicks for cash. At their age, they should be college students or something respectable like that. Then again, perhaps their dad is dead or in prison or too drunk to give a fuck. It’s so sad. I wonder what they charge for a blowjob. I wonder how that figure compares to the amount of cash in my pocket.
Thus lost in so much pointless thought, I miss my stop at 14th Street and end up amazed to find myself getting out of the train with the whores at 23rd Street. So I walked back downtown.

Vernon T. Bludgeon Consulting is pleased to welcome the newest addition to its executive staff.

Two little anecdotes illustrate the point of our title.
Anecdote 1:
I’m at work and one of the geeks and I are playing around with a Dell laptop running Mandrake Linux 10 and trying to get its display output to a VGA projector. This should be trivial, but it wasn’t. I readily acknowledge that I don’t know shit about laptops and this guy does. But as he’s struggling and fumbling around for minutes after minute, I say, hey maybe it wants to be rebooted. No, he says, that’s not it. More minutes go by before he tries rebooting. Bingo.
Anecdote 2:
A client for whom I do web development emails me a spreadsheet in which there is a column of numbers that is supposed to match id numbers in a database table. I start fooling with the sorting and unwittingly commit the most bone-headed mistake any fool who knows spreadsheets knows not to do:  I highlight a column and say “sort..,” and when the dialogue pops up and prompts me to “widen the selection” I say, “bah, I know what I’m doing” and bypass it, and fail to notice that it sorted only the values in that column and left the rest untouched. Being a database guy used to saying “select * from some_table order by foo,” I suppose I just expect all the data fields in a row to stay together. But no excuses — I continue to examine this spreadsheet, see the ids have apparently been randomly re-assigned, and start mentally accusing the clueless ones of somehow screwing something up, and proceed to waste numerous minutes of their time with emails trying to encourage them to get it right, because they don’t know shit, and I do. Uh huh.

I finally, finally gave in a few weeks ago and got a mobile phone. I held out as long as I could on the grounds that (1) I was a contumaciously independent-minded eccentric who disdained herd mentality consumerism, and (2) I didn’t really need one.
But I guess I said WTF and joined the herd. And right away I learned something interesting:   getting a mobile phone does not automatically make you more popular! Especially when you don’t tell anyone your number. And here I was expecting the cute sexy little device to be ringing off the… hook?
Whatever, if you’ll pardon the expression.

Don’t you hate it when you wake up at 2:45am after a nightmare in which some invisible assailant is trying to kill you with a bow and arrow, and you are trying to defend yourself with a pool cue? And tens of minutes after you’ve forgotten about the dream, you’re still fully awake, feeling all tense and weird? And you get off your high horse and pop one of those legally obtained, prescription anti-anxiety pills provided by Big Pharma via its drug dealing proxy, your physician, and thus join the ever-swelling ranks of the pitiful bourgeois neurotics too lame to just drink and street-drug their way out of their malaises? And the next day you sit around blathering on about it in your fucking blog?
Actually I don’t mind it all that much, I find it rather entertaining.

While driving, I heard the first report that Nicholas Berg’s body had been returned to the US. I wondered out loud – what about the head? I did this many times that day as it went around on the various news channels. I am still wondering about the head.
Jesus ate and drank but did not defecate.
– Valentinus
Yes, it is wonderful that the church cleared that up; but what about all the other bodily functions? I must say, I am impressed that they cared enough to clear that detail up. What have they had to say about wet dreams? I’m sure someone has mentioned that.
Al is a mean cocksucker for sure but I can’t help noticing that he gets out of bed in the morning, in his obviously unlaundered long-johns and proceeds to piss in a chamber pot. He is getting back-splash all over his feet. Try it and then tell me I’m wrong. Louis XIV at Versailles, used to piss out the window and try to hit someone walking by. I would have written that into Deadwood – can’t you see Al doing that? They should have consulted me.
One of the best boxing ring names I have heard in a long time: “Concrete” – Kind of sums it up. “And then, I makes the mutha-fucka kiss the curb”
“Blood Meridian” is now available as a “modern library” edition in hardback. Harold Bloom has written the introduction. Makes me want to take his class at Yale.
I am so happy that gas prices have gone up so I can have the pleasure of laughing at the assholes driving SUV’s to pick up bread and milk at the grocery store. I have been waiting to find one of those monsters with a save the enviroment bumper sticker or something similar. Guns are a good thing.
As President I would raise the gas price to $5.00 a gallon and use the extra to undo the damage that little w has done to the economy. The whiney business men who cry foul because they use there “cars” for business? Fuck em. They can write it off on their taxes. Poor people? Around here they take the bus or walk to “work”. Lets keep in mind – the excess from the gas tax. I think I can figure out how to cover the truely disadvantaged.
Why do we face the doors on elevators? I have taken to getting in a corner away from the doors and making sobbing noises. Makes the trip much more interesting.
How about those Minnesota Twins!