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8 Phoebus, 82 p.s.U. (Apr. 08, 2003) - 1:17 p.m. Chained to the Fast Lane in the Red Queen's Race......and other reasons I don't update often enough anymore. The evening after I posted my previous entry, my dad decided to remove a piece of spyware that our existing firewall software was under standing orders to block, and that wasn't hurting anything by trying to start up and being shot down. In the process, he apparently removed the part of that computer's OS that was responsible for telling the computer where the CD drives were located. As a result, that computer became unworkable, and we had to buy our first non-preowned computer since we had a TRS-80. It has all the capabilities we'd managed to build into the machine that died, and probably a few more it hasn't occurred to me to look for. Sadly, a lot of files I was keeping on that machine's hard drive were lost, among them some Hero Machine descriptions and (more importantly) the original version of the entry that bears this title. Basically, it was a discussion of why I post here so sporadically anymore. The primary reason, of course, is that I sit down at the computer meaning to update before I leave, then I get up a couple hours later, still haven't updated but have spent the time checking the update status of my favorite sites. There are other, lesser reasons, but they feed off that big reason (and it off them, perhaps). One is that I'll mean to blog about a piece of news, start writing an entry on it, then be distracted by something else; by the time I get back to it, the world has moved on to the point where the entry is meaningless, or at least requires continual revision (hence the Red Queen's race, where you may recall it takes all the running you can do just to stay in the same place). Another applies mainly in the political field, and that's that trying to dissect the statements of the American right is like nailing jelly to a tree; there's little or no substance to their arguments, so no good way to refute them. (Daniel Davis, when he was doing Shorter Steven den Beste, remarked that getting signal out of SdB's noise was sometimes very hard, particularly when a post basically consisted of the written equivalent of a white noise generator's output.) But the next most important, after my sheer lack of attention span, is my ability to say things, without even realizing I'm saying them, that hurt the people I care about — one such person in particular. It's bad enough she has to see those things without the whole world seeing me stick my foot in my mouth and start chewing. The earlier version of this post had a number of links I'd been saving for a while, illustrating some of those reasons. For the "changing face of the news" aspect, I had a succession of stories from the period when Erik Gandalf Chauvelin was going to be taking over as Dumbledore — no he wasn't, it was Saruman the Tyrannus — no he wasn't, it was Maigret — no, Warner hadn't officially announced anything yet. To paraphrase the guy from whom I got the title of this entry, when the David Lynch film of Frank Herbert's masterwork was being subjected to studio politics: Gambon's in, Gambon's out, surf's up, shut your pie-hole! For the jelly-nailing, I had a comment from the D-Squared blog's comments section. Something to the effect that a neocon can spew out a hundred "talking" points in the time it takes a rational being to refute ten of them (and by "refute" I mean "demonstrate their foundation in either lies or nothing"), and unless you refute all 100, Joe Sixpack is going to assume you left the other 90 alone not because you ran out of time, but because they were true. (And may I just add, in that connection, that when somebody says "If you're of the view that humans are evil, nasty creatures that are DESTOYING THE EARTH OH MY GOD WE'RE ALL GOING TO DIE UNLESS WE START DRY HUMPING THE FORESTS RIGHT FUCKING NOW SO GET ON YOUR MOTHERFUCKING KNEES AND START PRAYING TO MOTHER NATURE YOU UNGRATEFUL HEATHENS!!!! Sorry. I'll go now, before I embarrass myself again. I have a link, of sorts, for the "things I say to piss CB off" aspect. It's not a direct link, but at least a parallel. -30-
last time, on The Slack Shack - our next inciting exstallment 
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