Ramblings of a Wayward Code Slave

I'm currently watching the presidential debate on television while I'm typing this and I'm just horrified at what passes for a debate these days. Thanks to the campaign staffers who have written into the debate agreement that there is no free debate and no directed comments and/or rebuttals, we've effectively got 90 minutes of rehearsed sound bites. This isn't any way of determining who's the better candidate -- it's simply a way of televising their platforms with minimal damage from the other person. I want a candidate to have the guts to say "to hell with the choreographed format" and push for a free debate like what happens in Great Britain. These candidates might both have the courage of their convictions, but their staffers have no faith in their ability to bring them to light effectively. If the staffers of both sides are afraid that their candidates are idiots then what does that say? I know that free debates are ad-libbed, so people are going to stutter, people are going to flub a line here and there, but they'll have to talk from the heart and you'll not only know what their platform is but who there are as well.

At least they both sound fairly articulate. Past presidential debates were sometimes the Battle of the Rain Men. My problem with this election is that I agree with Bush on the economy but I agree with Kerry on the mistake of invading Iraq without U.N. support, troops, and ultimately, governance. So what to do? I think the main issue for me in selecting the candidate to back is the future rather than the mistakes of the past and character issues.

And yes, I've already made up my mind. And no, the debate isn't really changing it. Analysis of past debates have conclusively shown that they don't affect polls any if at all, so I don't think that my lack of sensitivity to the debate is anomalous. I think Kerry would be better for foreign policy but that Bush would be better for the economy. Since the economy is my primary concern this election, I'm leaning toward Bush. However, having said that, Kerry is much more informed than I thought he would be and I found myself agreeing with him more than I was expecting to. At the same time, Bush spoke from the heart (after he quit harping on the flip-flopping thing) and I respect that. Both candidates' stock went up a few notches with me after this. While I despise the format and the controls on the debate, I'll definitely be tuning in for the next one.

By the way, don't forget to vote. If you don't vote then you don't have the right to complain about national policy for the next four years.

The other evening I was watching one of the X-Men movies on television -- X2 to those who would care -- and there was this woman holding a fellow in midair and spinning him around while another woman was blowing stuff around and making lightning bolts erupt, i.e., Jean Grey and Storm to those who would know. As for myself, the only reason I know is that I'm a sucker for a sci-fi movie, even one with Capt. Picard in it.

Anyway, so I had seen X2 the other evening and just yesterday I received an e-mail from a friend reminding me of my own devious and diabolical super powers. I make pro sports teams lose. Okay, okay, so I'm not going to be running around making stuff blow up or have red lasers shooting from my eyes, but variety is the spice of life, isn't it?

I first realized that I had this power around the same time that I realized, with a certain amount of fear and apprehension, that I was a New Orleans Saints fan. For those who keep track of such things, this coincides with their tenure in the '80s as the worst team in the NFL. The Saints were the only team that Tampa Bay could beat, yet another dismal reminder of the "paper bag" golden era of New Orleans. The team could be winning 17-0 in the 4th quarter and as soon as I saw a helmet with a fleur-de-lis on it they started dropping the ball, tripping over their feet, forgetting which way to run, and just completely blow their lead to finish 1-2 TDs short. You laugh, but I've had people call me on the phone within minutes of my turning on a Saints game -- or just seeing them as I was flipping through the stations -- and ask me about it. If I see a pro team on TV and root for them then they might as well pack it in and hit the showers.

Now you might offer up the Saints' rise as a defensive powerhouse and their subsequent rise from the gutter of the NFL as proof that my powers don't exist. Oh grasshopper, you have so much to learn. You see, in the late '80s I went to college and was pulling 18-19 hour semesters plus 3-6 in the summers, so I didn't have time to watch. In other words, I stopped watching and they started winning. I really didn't get back into it until I started watching some games with Eric, a pal of mine from college, back in the 1995 fall season. My powers were so strong that they announced to the world that I would start watching again even though I had yet to do so. As a result, the NFL accounced the team-level salary caps and the entire defense as well as Morton Anderson -- the only reason the Saints won most of the games they did -- left New Orleans for places that would/could pay for them. So when I started watching with Eric, Anderson had moved to Atlanta and most of the defensive line was now in North Carolina.

This power of mine saw the demise and departure of the Houston Oilers, turning them into the Tennessee Titans, which makes me think of a missile silo in Dolly Parton's backyard for some reason. It's also the reason that the Astros just can't ever seem to hold 2nd place or better in the NL Central.

My powers are barely controllable. All it takes is one innocent glance at a pro team on TV that I would root for and they start falling down, wandering around like Ray Charles in cleats, and otherwise acting like 6-year olds with salaries. So when Eric e-mailed me yesterday he told me that the Astros were doing better and that I should watch the Cubs and the Giants so they'd lose a game and we'd have a 3-way tie in the NL Central. I'll be watching...

There is one positive note to all of this. When Ditka became manager of the New Orleans Saints in 1997-1998 and kept bad-mouthing the team and the city, he incurred the wrath of many a New Orleanian as well as many a proud paper-bagging Saints fan. Including myself.

Color 27" television set ... $300
Cable television service ... $80
Paper bags ... $1
Seeing Ditka fall flat on his ugly face and go crawling back to Chicago ... priceless.

When I was eleven years old two events occurred that just blew me away. The space shuttle Columbia made an appearance in Houston while I was out there and Star Wars hit the theaters. I remember my first time seeing the film well. I went with my cousins to a theater with surround sound, which was brand spanking new back then, and the theater was so proud of it they had their Spinal Tap amp set on 11. As a result, the movie was so loud that I had my hands over my ears for much of it. Hearing the lightsaber noise just about made me deaf, but I still loved the movie and still do. The original trilogy came out separated by a couple of years between installations and stood the test of time even though special effects got better and Harrison Ford's acting got better.

Then, in 1997, we got the 20th anniversary re-releases of the trilogy. This is where Lucas jazzed up the special effects, made the sound better, and put in extra footage. The infamous "Greedo first" cantina scene supposedly debuted (I didn't notice it) as well as the "Jabba the walking slug" scene. We also got a new Death Star explosion with the expanding ring of fire. It was all okay -- the Greedo scene in Star Wars was a change as was the "screaming Luke" scene at the end of Empire, but this was minor and I could live with it.

We now, finally, have the DVD set of the trilogy available after years of pestering Lucasfilm about it. Now I find out that it's been edited yet again. Boba Fett now has the voice of Jango Fett from Episodes I-II, which is okay since that's a minor continuity thing. They also replaced the emperor's holographic face in Empire with Ian McDiarmid's face, which is fine since that was already a continuity killer between Empire and Jedi. What's killing me are the other changes. In the "ghost Jedi" scene at the end of Jedi, the stately old guy playing Anakin has been replaced with Hayden Christensen. Blasphemy! Putting that 90210 pretty boy with his pouty lips in Jedi is an affront to everything good and right with the world. Anyway, Anakin would be an older man since he got himself Vadered up when Luke was a newborn, so the older guy could have stayed in and the Jedi we grew up with could have remained a bit more unaltered. Then, at the end of Jedi, we don't get the Ewok song with the forest pullback going to credits. We get this "let's sample the celebration on many worlds" scene that's not even in there for the sake of continuity -- it's just a complete rewrite and reshoot to make Lucas happy. Double blasphemy! I hate the Ewoks almost as much as I hate Jar-Jar Binks, but you didn't hear of Michelangelo saying "No, no, no, that's not what I wanted. I"m going to repaint that corner of the Cistene Chapel and put a velvet Elvis there." I'm not necessarily comparing Lucas to Michelangelo, nor the Star Wars trilogy to the Cistene Chapel, but you get the idea. His changes are unnecessary and sometimes incongruous. The Force may be strong with Lucas, but it's actually just chronic creative diarrhea -- some Pepto Bismol and a long vacation will fix it.

So we now have the following Star Wars films:
1. Espisode I
2. Episode II
3. Episode III (to be released next May)
4. Episode IV(a)
5. Episode IV(b)
6. Episode IV(c)
7. Episode V(a)
8. Episode V(b)
9. Episode V(c)
10. Episode VI(a)
11. Episode VI(b)
12. Episode VI(c)

where (a) is the original, (b) is the 20th anniversary jazz-up, and (c) is the DVD release. People talk about politicians flip-flopping on things, but geez, we have 6 episodes and 12 films. How can Lucas decide what tie to wear in the morning? Ordering at restaurants with him must be an agonizing event for the others involved. "Uhhh, yeah. I know I ordered the steak medium-well, but now that I see it I think I want it medium instead and can you replace this baked potato with something else? Hmm, maybe...maybe...hey, how about a bag of corn chips?" Incongruity illustrated.

I have two hopes about the future, the first being that he won't revise Episodes I-III in the same way as he did the other films. They're already second-rate when compared to the original trilogy, but we've learned to accept them and having to stomach three different versions of each of these films would just cause us all to take way too much Mylanta. My other hope is that Lucas doesn't digitize poor dead Peter Cushing just to put Tarkin in Episode III along with Christopher Lee. I know they both did horror flicks about the undead -- many together -- but that would just be too creepy.

And, by the way, I bought the original IV(a)-VI(a) series on VHS back in 1996 right before the 20th anniversary editions came out. From what I hear, they're not available anymore. So at least I have the originals and, when Blu-Ray gets perfected, perhaps I can put them on high-capacity DVDs and watch them while thumbing my nose at Lucas and his changes.

Haven't you seen it in the backyard? It's that big tree that looks like an oak except that it has $100 bills for leaves. What, money trees don't exist? Well, given the way that people keep asking us for money one would think that they did and that everyone in town in need of a fast $20 knows it's here.

When we bought this house we knew it was in a neighborhood that wasn't the best in the world, but when you're a pair of teachers and want a home of your own you can't necessarily get something too upscale. This is a decent middle-class neighborhood, populated with a lot of teachers and faculty from the university, probably due to the affordability of the homes here. North of the interstate homes are about $60-$65 per square foot, but here they're more like $30-$35. So why do we get picked on by everyone in need of money? I guess it's because we fixed our house up about a year ago, having a lot of woodwork done on it and having the whole thing repainted. It cost about $27,000 to do, but we didn't actually pay for it. Julie got an advance from her trust fund to pay for it and, in return, we had to sign a demand note against it for tax reasons. So we did pay for it, but not in the traditional way. The only reason we even got the work done was because the wood was rotting or rotten due to old paint and bad maintenance from the previous owners. It's not like we just had a few $10,000 bills in our pockets...

But because of that and because of the BMW that my father-in-law bought Julie before we met, people think we have money. And we get every hobo in a 20-mile radius knocking on the door asking for handouts. Now I'm all for charity, but organized ones that do good work. Most people who knocked on the door for money and got it blew it on cheap beer and cigarettes -- we've seen them do it since the Citgo station is visible from our back windows and most of them weren't bright enough to go to another place out of our line of sight. And they all talk to you like you're a complete idiot and buy all of the nonsense that's coming out of their mouths. Please. We're teachers. We've already heard it all...

There was the fellow walking down the street who was driving through on the interstate from Dallas to Jackson and broke down south of town -- his family was in the car and he was looking for a samaritan to give him $20 for gas. Of course, why would the car be south of town headed toward Alexandria when the interstate goes east-west through the center of town? This fellow didn't even look like he ever was able to afford a tank of gas much less a car that worked. Also, I don't know about you but I usually check to see if I have enough money for gas to make a trip before I start it -- that usually increases your chances of getting there a whole lot. The pity is that if he'd just been honest we might have helped him. Maybe he needed money for food, maybe he needed money for his power bill. I'll pay someone's power bill (once, if I can afford it) if they're needy and are about to live in the dark, but I won't fund liars.

There was also the guy who didn't want money but was in a complete panic to get my wife to drive him to the courthouse to help him get our lawnmower man out of the jail. Now the courthouse was three blocks away, so in the time he tried to convince Julie of taking him there he could have been there already. It turns out that this fellow knew who our lawnmower man was and his scam was to hitch rides with people and then steal the car at knifepoint, putting the driver out on the side of the road. My, how lovely.

Then we also have a recurring pest who just comes up to the house and demands money and until you give it to him he just stands on your porch and harasses you. I've called the cops out on him several times, so he doesn't bother us much anymore. Also, from what I've heard, until you give him enough money -- $50 to $80 -- he won't leave. The first time this fellow bothered us he had my wife cornered in the yard and started harassing her. She didn't feel like she could walk past him, so she gave him $20, which was all she had. He actually had the nerve to be upset at her for not having more. Believe me, when he came by the second time and I called the cops, that was a moment of complete enjoyment.

Julie was so scared of these people that initially she'd pay them to leave. These folks know how to intimidate people indirectly, like where to stand and how to push for what they want. So they'd get between Julie and the house and start in on her, and she'd be worried that they'd come back and hurt one of us or the dogs if we sent them away or called out the cops. This, I think, is what got it all started. I think we got the reputation as an easy target. After the first one or two got what they wanted, we got a flood of people.

Now Julie is a soft touch. She hates telling people no and easily gets intimidated. I used to be that way, but after 7 years of hearing how the goldfish ate the homework and how the test was missed because of the dead grandmother (I had one student whose grandmother died twice, once in each of the two courses I taught him, and it was the same grandmother!) the sad stories don't work on me anymore. I've had 3-4 people come up to me in the truck in our driveway while waiting on Julie, knocking on my window to get my attention so I'd roll it down and hear their hard-sell. First of all, beating on my truck window like they're trying to wake up a deaf octogenarian really doesn't put me in a sympathetic mood. Then giving me some lame story and just drowning me out when I try to talk is a real mistake. I've gotten to the point where I just hold up my hand and say "Nope, sorry! Look somewhere else." and cut them off before they have a chance to launch into their story. That usually works. We've heard from the lawnmower man that there are actually people in the surrounding neighborhoods who are scared of me; this really surprises me since I'm a partially disabled obese man who can't chase them across the lawn much less down the street. Perhaps they think I'll throw the truck in reverse and drive over them...

Now are some of these people honest folks who are in a bad situation and are about to tell us a true story? Perhaps. But, to be cliche about it, a few bad apples do indeed spoil the bunch. And I think it's a lot more than a few bad apples. I learned the importance of charity from my parents, but I also learned the importance of honesty at the same time. My mother was (and still is) charitable to people who need help, but if they approach her with a story then she tells them that she'll pay for food or pay a bill but not give them cash. I think that's the best thing to do -- buy food, pay a bill, purchase gas, et cetera, but not just give people cash earmarked for that. This is how you wind up funding an alcoholic's 3-day bender.

Of course, I'm cynical about it all due to having been taken for a ride so much in the past by people with sad stories. I don't tend to trust people I don't know, and I always view someone with their hand out with a certain amount of skepticism. Julie is still really trusting, so I guess this is one of the ways where a marriage balances individual tendencies. I keep her from being a doormat and she keeps me from being an ill-tempered jerk. As with many things with my wife and I, we each have extreme and opposing tendencies which become balanced thanks to the influence of the other.

I'm going to have the money tree cut down. Oddly enough, there are probably several people walking down the street who'll do it for a modest fee in advance...

Yesterday I became my parents. I was teaching class yesterday afternoon, I opened my mouth, and my parents started speaking. It was on procrastination. To me, the word always sounded like an ailment requiring an antacid or laxative, but according to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, the etymology of the word is Latin: pro, meaning "forward", and crastinus, meaning "of tomorrow". Well, it must be good to be moving forward to tomorrow, eh? It sounds so at least. But I learned two things years ago: procrastination is evil and procrastination is human nature. So that begs the question if it's human nature to be evil, but I digress.

So anyway, my jaw dropped down, noise started coming out of my mouth, and I heard my mother talking. "Don't put things off until the last minute! Do it now while you're thinking about it and have time. That way, you'll finish early and be able to relax instead of rushing at the last minute." For 21 years she couldn't understand why I agreed with the logic of this and yet never applied it to anything I did. I understood it perfectly. I needed the stress.

Of course, when advising my students to work on their projects before the last minute, I was holding back that I've always been one of the worst offenders when it came to 11th hour programming. I just always knew that I could do it and get it done at the last minute. While I'd like to think that all of my students are just like me, mileage varies and my faith in their abilities is somewhat tempered by my desire to not see them in the same class a second time.

Why is it that I've always put things off until I couldn't any longer? I still do it to this day when I can get away with it. Doctors have long been telling us about the bad effects of stress on health, so it would seem logical to try to relieve as much of it as possible. In my case, for some inexplicable reason, I need a certain amount of stress to function. It defies logic -- my logic, at least -- but with an open-ended task and no pressure at all I just lack the motivation to work on it. I need the stress from a deadline to be productive. In fact, when I code against a deadline I produce a better product than when I just code for the heck of it.

Perhaps it all comes down to focus. One unifying talent of all good programmers is their ability to block out everything else and focus on solving a problem. I remember working on programming projects in college where I'd get up one weekend morning at home, start working mid-morning, and it would be dark the next time I looked out the window. That's the kind of focusing I'm talking about. Now those were marathon coding sessions, but any productive coding requires the same level of concentration. Perhaps something has to click in our heads to voluntarily get us into that mode of thought and perhaps stress is the catalyst for getting "the click" to occur.

For whatever reason, I'm the Grand Master of procrastination. It's occasionally hurt me, especially when I've tried "pushing the outside of the envelope" with it, but properly harnessed it's an effective tool and it's made me a much better coder than I otherwise would have been. People mistakenly think that being a good coder requires only knowledge and experience. While these two things help, focus is what makes the programmer. And so, I suppose, stress and procrastination play their respective roles in developing it. Of course, managers know this already, which is why project deadlines are always too early -- it inspires the employees to produce.

So now that I've become my parents and have given the procrastination speech, I wonder just how we're supposed to teach this. Some procrastination is good. Too much results in bad assignment grades. I suppose they'll learn like I did. This much worked okay. That much and I fell flat on my face. Take a bit of time here, add a bit of time there. It's one of those self-taught lessons that requires experimentation and experience to master. I just hope that they don't experiment too much this early in the game. But, of course, I did and so will they most likely.

Like my father jokingly told me as a kid, "Do as I say and not as I do." Hey, wait a second. Are you one of my students who should be programming now? Quit reading and get back to work! Don't think for a second that this droning monologue just cut you any slack...

This afternoon after I was finished with work for the day my stomach woke up and decided to remind me that I had put nothing in it the entire day. Checking my wallet resulted in finding a dollar and raiding the ashtray-turned-coin tray resulted in about another $2. 'Twas time to head to the last bastion of cheap eats, Taco Bell. I was fearful at first, remembering the last time I made a run for the bath... uh, border, but once we got those seat belts installed at the house it wasn't so bad.

I pulled up at the drive-thru and saw their new el-cheapo special menu, so I figured that I'd get the most for my $3 that I could. From my years as a graduate student -- when my stomach was more ironclad and could take repeated punishment -- I knew that the burritos were the way to go for the most bang for the buck, no pun intended. So, on the new el-cheapo menu there was the 1/2 lb. bean burrito especial, the 1/2 lb. beef and potato burrito, and the 1/2 lb. beef combo burrito. As the bean was $1 and the latter two were $1.29, I opted for the beef combo and the bean. Whoa, were these things massive! And they were hot and fairly tasty too, both quite uncommon for our local Taco Bell. Of course, being the chilehead that I am, I had to dump hot sauce all over them. Little did I know that was just fuel for the fire.

That was when I heard a faint echo saying vaya con Dios and I threw caution to the wind. Funny I should mention wind. I'm now paying penance for my ride on the wild side this afternoon and have once again renewed my pledge to stay away from beans at Taco Bell. Thus ends the story of my latest Taco Bell hangover.

If you can't find me this week, I'm ducking the EPA.

"The Hot Sauce Burrito Blues"



I ate the greasy beef

and the refried beans too,

I ate the whole tortilla

then went runnin' to the loo...



I got 'dem blues,

I got 'dem hot sauce burrito blues...

Oh Lord the pain

is killin' me again

and I don't know what I'm gonna do...

My wife spent $95 at Wal-Mart a couple of nights ago. It sounds like a lot of money, and it certainly is for us. The irony of it all -- and what's prompting me to say something about it -- is that we got remarkably little for that price. Some of the items included a gallon of milk, a pound of butter, some baking potatoes, a bottle of cranberry juice, and hamburger and hot dog buns. There wasn't much more than that and we spent $95. That's outrageous. The milk alone was $4.50.

It just seems that the cost of living is spiraling upward at an uncontrollable rate. Since my salary is more or less fixed with no cost-of-living increases, it means that I effectively get paid less to do more. Julie and I need to eat decent food in order to get proper nutrition and not gain massive amounts of weight, but it seems that the most affordable foods are the ones that are just caloric filler designed to fill both your belly and your waistline. Now I'm not talking about serving up filet mignon and lobster every night -- just regular things like broiled fish, pot roast, salad, the occasional meatloaf, and some other things in that vein. Decent food is now expensive food. The more affordable stuff includes things like pasta, rice- and noodle-based casseroles a la Hamburger Helper, and other things that are high in calories unless you eat like a bird. I know that the economy is limping along and this affects things, but it's just out of control.

Regardless of who goes into the Oval Office next January, I certainly hope that the economy is near the top of the "short list" of things to get kick-started. Employers are loathe to give cost-of-living salary increases since that's more money out of their pockets and I for one am getting tired of my paycheck buying less and less. I work hard for that money and I don't want it flying out of my pocket at a faster rate than I can bring it in. My retirement accounts have lost money every quarter since I opened them up, I'm struggling to get out of debt so I'm flush with everyone, and I just want to be able to live without sweating over my bank account balance the last week of every month. It seems that in America, the Land of Opportunity, that this would be easy for someone with 26 years of schooling and 9 years of full-time professional experience to accomplish. But this is the New America, the Land of Lost Opportunities. It's time to go back to the old way that worked, whatever that was.

...is the sound of our IT jobs flying overseas. The outlook is grim, with over 400,000 jobs in IT lost between March 2001 and April 2004, shrinking the job market by almost 19%. Over half of the jobs were lost after the recession was declared "over" in November 2001. You can read the article in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. This info is courtesy of /. by the way...

There's this Weather Channel reporter on my TV right now and he must be some real idiot or else he's getting paid enough money to act like one. Hurricane Ivan is about 3 1/2 hours from landfall and this moron is broadcasting from the closely upcoming ground zero in Pensacola, showing us what wind and rain look like. I liken this genius to myself. Here he is, standing in defiance of 135 mph wind, horizontal rain, and 30 foot waves just because. And here I am, looking to leave academia for industry, having a Ph.D. with the ivory tower stigma that it carries (the "this guy must be a pompous windbag who can't find his butt with both hands and a hunting dog in the real world" issue) and trying to get employers to see past their stereotypes. I'm not a numbskull, I've worked in industry before, and while I'd like a decent and fair salary I'm not looking for a hyperinflated one that would make a CEO go to the board for approval. Are we both -- the Weather Channel reporter and I -- idiots or are we just poor fools looking for a paycheck twice a month? Time will tell...

Well, it looks like Hurricane Ivan is headed for Mobile Bay, which is a pity since I sorta liked Mobile from what I remember of it. I went there a few times and visited the U.S.S. Alabama (a WWII battleship) and some submarine docked next to it. It's also close to Gulf Shores, which is described by many as the "poor man's Florida" but was always good enough for me and my folks. The last time we vacationed with my grandparents was there and I have good memories of us sitting on the beach and floating in the water. It'll be a shame to see that area whalloped by 140 mph winds and 15-20 feet of storm surge.

My parents are gearing up for power outages since they're in Laurel on the western fringes of the storm and are expecting tropical storm winds there. They're also expecting about a foot of rain but aren't worried since they live at the top of a 50+ foot hill. The big thing for them is preserving the food in their fridge and freezer since they buy up a lot of stuff and then stock up. Mom called me yesterday and mentioned that they got two coolers that are about 4-5 feet long. It's good that Laurel still has an ice house because Pop is going to be putting a serious dent in their supply.

Up here in Ruston we're only supposed to get 10-20 mph gusts. I know it's from Ivan because it's supposed to be from the NNE and our weather always comes from the west. If Ivan had hit Louisiana head-on then we would have had a lot more than that even though we're 4 hours from the Gulf at Vermillion Bay. I'm glad it missed Louisiana -- we would have been okay regardless, but I have friends in Lafayette and a Category 4 hurricane would have turned the city into a rubble-filled lake. A good thunderstorm that dumps 1" floods out quite a few intersections in the city, so I can just imagine what 12-18" of rain would do.

So while I'm really sorry about the projected path of Ivan, at least it didn't hit Louisiana and it didn't hit the Florida peninsula. Although, on that note, we now have Tropical Storm Jeanne which is projected to become a hurricane in the next day or so and is forecast to take the same path as Frances. Talk about getting kicked while down...

Gee whiz, now that we've scraped the bottom of the barrel are we scrubbing it with steel wool and sulfuric acid for any last few molecules of what might have been in there? I remember the film title Reality Bites. I never knew what it was about, but the title seems appropriate these days.

We first had Survivor. What an idea. Put people on an island in pathetic and somewhat degrading circumstances and then film them and let viewers vote on who gets the boot each week. Only some idiot on Madison Avenue could have come up with that turkey. That spawned lookalikes including, but not limited to: The Osbournes, where heavy metal's rat-chewing devil-man is now a domesticated oaf whose dog craps on the floor and whose kids can't say a sentence without the f-word; Joe Schmo 2, where one of these "let's pretend and then laugh at the idiots for believing us" bombs just wasn't enough; and, lest we forget, Growing up Gotti, where being the daughter of a ruthless and bloodthirsty mobster with an ego the size of Manhattan is apparently enough to land you a show. He's even dead already, so we can't cut the producers slack by saying that they owed him a favor.

The latest ones are getting more and more ridiculous. We have competing boxing reality shows, one with Sylvester Stallone backing it. I guess he's a boxing expert since he played one on TV. If so, does that give Arnie a Ph.D. in robotics? There's another one with this low-rent redneck with a mullet doing his job as a skip-tracer, rounding up the trailer park trash for various bail bond agencies. That's going to advance the image of the Southern man by a few decades...in the wrong direction.

I'm tired of reality shows. I get enough reality with where I live and what I do every day. When I turn on the television, I don't want reality. Reality bites. I want fantasy. I want new Star Trek shows year-round, get another series if you have to. And they'd better be good, dammit, none of this Xindi crap. I want mindless entertainment with actors and not real people in it. I want Regis Philbin banned from TV for life. I want to see things fly around and blow up. I want a scary movie channel that shows good stuff 24 hours a day with none of that stuff that lands on SciFi because a better network wouldn't pick it up. And I want to be the one who takes an electric dog trimmer to the bounty hunter's mullet. These things would make me happy.

In all seriousness, how long are we going to watch this nonsense? As long as we sit in front of the box mesmerized by reality shows with no depth at all we're just asking for more of the same. Television isn't creative, it's just designed to give you more of what people think you want so that you'll watch commercials every 7 minutes for cars, toothpaste, paying off your credit cards with your home, and so forth. I mean, they have to cater to us if they're going to expect us to watch commercials with Bob Dole talking about Viagra. The mere thought of that gives me the dry heaves. The problem is that we demand so little in return. We can't be the cattle that I'm thinking that they think we are. If so, then we're doomed.

My idea of good TV probably isn't yours. That's why we have 300 channels. The problem is that these reality shows are creeping onto cable as well. The Amazing Mullet Man is on A&E, and The Osbournes has been a staple item of MTV for the past two years. Maybe one or two reality shows could be chalked up to the novelty of the concept, but with the Gotti woman and Mullet Man we've turned a corner. Reality TV is now a caricature of itself, and it deserves a shallow, unmarked grave where it can silently wallow in the dirt where it belongs.

Well, a lot of misspellings and other things, if it's mine. My full name is Albert Edwin Alexander, having been named after my father (Albert) and my maternal grandfather (Edwin). This explains why I go by Edwin since two Alberts would have been confusing and I'm not a Junior.

Over the years I've gotten items in the mail that were meant for me but were addressed to a virtual plethora of fictional characters. Some people insist on sending me mail as Albert, which I don't appreciate since that's not my name as I present it to people, but they're either stuck with that because of inflexible computer software or they're a government agency and just don't care. So I'll start with Albert. Variations I've seen have included Alberto (Senor Alexander???), Alberta (where I'm now a Canadian province), and the mysterious Alberth. Gee whiz, how hard can Albert be?

Now Edwin throws people for a real loop. It's not a common name and people just insist on misunderstanding it. I've received mail addressed to Edwina (nope, no sex change for me thank you), Edwine (where I'm apparently a fermented grape), Edwi (Scandanavian?), and the unfathomable Edbert and Egbert. How anyone can get Egbert out of Edwin is beyond me.

Now we get to Alexander. The most common misspelling turns me into a Frenchman, i.e., Alexandre. I've also gotten mail addressed to Alexandere, Alexand, and other such variations that I've thankfully forgotten over the years.

The worst misspelling involved all three names: Alberta Edwi Alexandre. So my name in this instance is a Canadian-Scandanavian-French monstrosity. Geez...

Incidentally, Edwin is a derivative of the Anglo-Saxon phrase "ed wynne" meaning "rich friend." Before you show up with your bills take note that I was named this 37 years ago before anyone could examine my checkbook for truth in advertising.

My last name is an interesting story. We were originally the MacDougal clan in Scotland until one of our rabble-rousing ancestors, Alexander MacDougal, decided that he wanted to get rid of the King of England. He did such a horrible job of it that instead of being put to death he was stripped of his surname, becoming Alexander Alexander, and sent packing back to Scotland. Thus, the branch of the MacDougals forming the Alexanders was born.

I always finish this story with a few high notes since it's not a particularly auspicious beginning for the family tree. The first such high note is that one of my ancestors was William Alexander, noted 17th century English statesman and poet as well as the 1st Earl of Stirling; this title remained in the Alexander family after our transition to America in the mid-18th century but has remained latent. William Alexander was a counselor to James I and Charles I and served the latter as Secretary of State.

The second high note is that more of our rabble-rousing ancestors -- specifically, the bunch who settled Mecklenburg County, North Carolina (Charlotte) -- declared their independence from England before the colonies did. In fact, they drafted a declaration of independence that was later used by Thomas Jefferson as a template for the official Declaration of Independence for the 13 colonies. Nobody in my family knew this until a lady from the University of Southern Mississippi called us up to ask us a few questions. She was getting a Master's degree in Library Science and her thesis was on our family history. I wish I remembered her name so I could credit her for the information, but it would have been a MLS thesis around 1990-1992 if memory serves.

So, my family history went from an incompetent assassin, to a Scottish Earl and famous poet, to the original drafters of the DoI, to...me. How the mighty have risen and fallen again. I'm certain that I'm far from the first who wonders if he's lived up to the expectations of his ancestors, but my family has had some great moments and I often feel like a pause in the greatness. Maybe I'm just a late bloomer.

The Great Experiment is an attempt to see if people on the Internet actually read this thing. To figure out if this is the case, I just modified the template on this blog page to include a counter. When I originally started posting things here I thought that I'd be the only one reading it. Come to find out, this blog is indexed on Google. How on earth did that happen? It must be something that blogger.com did, because I certainly didn't.

I don't mind people reading this by all means. I know of a few people -- a couple of former students, a friend down in Lafayette, another in Illinois, and one of my cousins in Houston -- who have seen it, but I've gotten e-mail from people as far away as New York about it. Wild.

I made this site for myself, as a way of writing down things that mean something to me, as an outlet for my sarcastic sense of humor, as a way of voicing my complaints without bending anyone's ears involuntarily, and as a general means of putting things down in a way that I can go back later on someday and see where I was and what I was thinking at the time. Writing entries here every now and then has been really theraputic at a time when I need something to help bring some focus and order into my life. My first attempt at a blog was a complete failure due to a lack of committment to it -- it started off great, but the well dried up quickly. Back then, I created it for other people to read and it just felt, well, forced. This time, the blog is for me and I just write whatever comes to mind whenever I care to write it. If I don't put something here for a week, so what? If I put five things here in a day, ditto.

Moral of the story? I don't know. Perhaps it's that when you create something for other people it lacks a personal attachment, but when you create something for yourself then it's a labor of love. Like it or not, you are your favorite subject just like I'm my favorite subject. Being self-centered from time to time isn't necessarily a bad thing. In fact, psychologists have determined that everyone's favorite word is their own first name; they actually hooked people up to various gizmos, measured stuff (to be technical), and came to that conclusion.

I personally think that I read this blog far more than anyone else does. The counter will tell...

[Note: I later discovered that LCD displays are measured horizontally, not diagonally, so this actually makes sense -- even though they fudged 1/2" on us. It wouldn't be the first fudged dimension someone claimed... --E]

I was poking around the Best Buy website just a few moments ago, looking at those high-priced goodies that I won't be able to afford without a second mortgage on my house. In particular, I was drooling over the new flat-panel HDTVs and especially the new 50" Samsung model HPP5071. With a price tag of around $8,000, this beauty is strictly online technonerd eye candy. I noticed something strange about it, though.

It was a 50" television with a 16:9 widescreen aspect ratio and it's dimensions were 49.5" x 29.1". Say what? I know that television size is measured on the diagonal, so it's no surprise that the width was less than the stated size; however, the numbers just don't add up.

A 16:9 aspect ratio essentially is a big 3-4-5 right triangle. Now the 5-side, the hypotenuse, is 50" from the specs. Okay, so that means the width of the display not including case would be 40" and the corresponding height would be 30". Uhhh, that means that each side of this television would have a case edge 4 1/2" wide and, well gee whiz, the height isn't even enough to cover the display much less the case.

So if one is to believe the numbers that Samsung/Best Buy give on the BB website, the case on each side is as wide as the palm of your hand and some idiot carved the top inch off of the display. How's that for getting the numbers right? Obviously, either the 16:9 aspect ratio is wrong -- which is doubtful since that's necessary to get widescreen to work right -- or else the 50" claim is bogus. It wouldn't be the first time something was measured and came up a bit short...but it's not common with electronics, at least.

Of course, the magnetic energy used to power the display could be altering the gravitational properties of the surrounding area, causing the curvature of the universe to be altered and thus allowing the screen to be larger than itself. I'm sure that's what they meant...yeah, that's it. If that's the case, then the 84" whopper that Samsung just made should turn into a singularity when powered up and just suck up your entire home with you in it. Maybe Steven Hawking can help with this...

Well, after the cable box went back to working for a few days, it's now stuck on Showtime. For the next two hours, we get the pleasure of watching the "Showtime Fight Night" live from Las Vegas. Holy cow, how could a guy be so lucky? You think that to be sarcasm? You're right.

I've never been much of a sports fan, mainly because I've never been good at sports. Any of them. I think to appreciate a sport you have to enjoy playing it. My parents put me in a parochial-league football team around the age of 5 or 6, and all I can remember of it is running my butt off in the searing Houston heat while wearing a helmet, shoulder pads, full padding, and cleats so tight that they could be construed as a form of capital punishment in some states. Did the coach teach us the different positions and the rules of the game? Naw. He just ran us to the point that we'd stagger home and not be a problem for our parents for that evening. So our training was more or less like the athletic equivalent of Percocet.

For all of that effort, I got to see action in one play of one game the entire season, warming the sideline grass the rest of the time. But for that one play, I kicked butt. I was a defensive tackle and the coach made up for his lackluster training by saying "See that fellow? Tackle him!" as he sent me into the game. So I did exactly what he told me to do. Unfortunately, he didn't say "stop when the whistle blows" or offer up some other sage counsel. So after the snap I started lunging for the QB and the offensive guard did his job and held me off. The play ended, the whistle blew, the OG relaxed, and I made my move. I slammed past him heading for the QB -- who now had his back to me -- and nailed him at full speed, driving his helmet into the dirt like Dick Butkus would after just getting flipped off. I was so proud of myself that I didn't even notice that the coach was less than thrilled at my performance. Hey, I did what the idiot said to do. I can't help it if I didn't learn how to play football during my formative years -- I was a bit preoccupied with things like learning the English language, toilet training, learning to read, basic math skills, and other such things. My folks really stressed that stuff over how many downs you get in which to move the ball ten yards. They were funny like that. I guess I was supposed to pick up football from watching it every Sunday when my parents and I didn't have it on the television. If I was supposed to learn by watching, I wonder if I would have also picked up a Budweiser or Miller habit at the same time. I can just see the headline..."Age 6 Football Star in Rehab: Says Lifting Buds Easier than Lifting Weights."

Now my cousins liked baseball and played in leagues for years while growing up. I never played in a league, but I enjoyed playing baseball/softball/stickball at my elementary school. I was even fairly good at hitting the ball, good upper-body strength always having been one of my few good points physically. But put me in the outfield and it was like Ray Charles trying to field a ball. I think I might have caught one once or twice -- a few just hit me and bounced off -- and the rest either landed in the dirt or the people in the adjacent positions covered for me knowing that I was about to dance a Stevie Wonder soft-shoe number in center field. That was the position I always got. They didn't trust me for the infield, and if I took left or right then I couldn't have people from both sides converge for my soft-shoe numbers.

It's ironic that the only game I like to watch on television is baseball, going back to my premise that you only watch what you like playing. But I don't actually like baseball per se, but Astros baseball. Rooting for the 'stros is sort of like being a Saints fan but with the paper bag headgear optional. They've got some really good players and have had some amazing ones in the past (Nolan Ryan, among others), but they always seem to struggle to get into 2nd or 3rd place in the NL Central. I think the reason I like them so much is that I remember games in the Astrodome from my youth. Now it's Enron Park, oops, Minute Maid Park (what a lame name for a baseball stadium) with the retractable roof. Cool concept, but the Astros and the Astrodome were like a matched pair. I don't know if I'll ever see another live Astros game, but I'll definitely miss seeing them play in the 'dome.

Now we come to the reason I'm writing about sports tonight. Boxing. The cable box is still locked on "Showtime Fight Night." Egad, what a thing to have stuck on a television. And what a stupid idea for a sport. It's as if someone came along and said "Hey, let's have two people pound each other into hamburger, sweating and bleeding profusely, while we all watch and cheer on the carnage!" Boxing isn't a sport, it's blatant barbarism that caters to a violent and bloodthirsty crowd whose higher brain functions have gone on indefinite hiatus. One notch above knife fighting, it's back-alley brawling that reminds me of what happened when kids didn't pony up their lunch money to the elementary school bullies. I know that people look up to these champion boxers, but the only thing that they do that's of note is beating other people senseless. Is this an argument for Rousseau's Right of the Strongest?

We also can't forget hockey. This is carnage on the team level and the audience isn't really happy until the ice turns red. Boxers break noses, bust lips, and generally make each other look ugly; hockey players whack each other in the face with nasty-looking sticks until people are spitting teeth out onto the ice. And they call Canada a kinder, gentler nation. But hey, we in America, having seen the savagery and gore of this sport, have gleefully adopted this import as our own. And why not? People only look at NASCAR and Indy racing to see the wipeouts and mass crashes. With this kind of violence on the television in sports, why do people complain when Schwarzenegger or Stallone blow up a city block in their latest special-effects flick? At least there it's simulated. Sure, Arnie may have ripped the heart out of some poor schmo, but it's a fake heart. But if you're concerned about violence in cinema, just let your kids turn on ESPN. You're right, it's better programming...the violence isn't as pronounced...it's a better alternative...sure it is. Would I lie to you?