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in the abstract, i knew there was a “loquacious” switch located somewhere within the toddler brain.  still, the actual flicking of that switch to on is quite an experience.  in other words, macduff has undergone the change from stoic and (mostly) silent to a proper chatterbox.  quite entertaining actually and good that he’s finally able to speak his mind, feverishly racing though it be.

 all this is to say that i now know there is a dinosaur in the downstairs bathroom.  you can hear him when the heat kicks on.

 oh, christmas photos!  soon (er, eventually).  also, new washer and dryer!  hooray for appliances!

two weeks out of pocket:  blissful, but now, sadly ended.  in a just world, i’d be helping dinosaurs attack a train, instead of sitting in front of this damn screen.

i’m trying to clear the backlog in my moderation queue and behold!  actual comments, buried amongst the penis enlargement/mayan end time/indecipherable (to me) russian spam!  so, hi guys.  and sorry kat, i did seem to mark you as spam.  oops.

in actual fall cleaning news: saw people make our neighbor’s leaves magically disappear (well, for a day or two) so we called for a fall clean-up quote.  three hundred dollars?  three hundred fucking dollars?  i hate raking, but christ, i can buy my own leaf blower for that sort of money.  lunatics. 

on the good news front, we’ve finally settled on a price for the house and will hopefully close by turkey day.  magically transforming from renters to owners, all without moving (hooray!).  perse & wee macduff continue to do well (despite an attack of the sniffles).  life is good.

so much for another trip to the world series.  boston played like crap.  frankly, we deserved to have our asses handed to us.  2 outs in the 9th, up by 2 and at home, with papelbon pitching?  yeah, if we can’t pull that off, we don’t deserve to win.

anyway, here’s hoping the angels beat the piss out of the yankees.

here’s some new baby pics!  from the fair:

i don’t understand anymore. 

lose a bid for the olympic games to come to chicago = hooray! 

win the nobel peace prize = this is terrible!

what the fuck?  seriously, i don’t understand anymore.  not that certain lunatics hold idiotic opinions like this.  more that such blatherings are picked by the media and treated as valid, rational and representative of public opinion. 

times like this, repeatingly banging my head against a brick wall seems the only sensible thing to do.

likely i’ve mentioned my loathing of politics before.  still, one cannot escape it, since nearly every medium blares the godawful stuff at you constantly.  mind you, that is one of the reasons for my loathing.  another would be the oxymoronic lunacy that shat itself onto my tv last night, in the form of a paid political advertisment (for some silly PAC, as far as i could tell).  i have this annoying habit of paying attention to what people say, even if it is a commerical.  what these people were saying (via a bad actress dressed as a doctor) was stupid.  they are against health care reform and spewed forth the typical talking points about government rationing of care (cause insurance companies don’t) and fabrications about existing systems of socialized medicine (ie: canadians wait up to a year for “vital” surgeries, if, by “vital”, you mean “elective, non-emergency” surgery.  and by “a year” you mean “about 2 months”).  what really got me, though, was the take-away message: don’t let the goverment get between you and your doctor [by reforming health care to include a public option], tell your congressperson to focus on funding medicare.  i’ll let that sink in a bit, before the befuddled “what the fuck?”.

 i’ll admit to be a regionalist.  frankly, i consider the northeast too intelligent for this crap to fly here.  apparently i think too highly of my fellow new englanders. 

back to the message.  i just don’t understand how groups like this think.  what are they trying to say?  no government run health care, except for the elderly?  it makes my brain hurt, to try and unravel the madness.  now, my understanding of a public healthcare option might be off, but it is just that: an option.  the government sets basic criteria for insurance plans (which, um they already regulate), offers a public plan that is the baseline and people have the option to choose the public plan or a private plan.  i know the fear: it will put private companies out of business.  kind of like how public universities have done away with private ones (wait, they haven’t?). 

 well, so fucking what?  hey, i work for an insurance company (not health insurance, but insurance nonetheless).  they exist to make money by investing your premiums.  insurance is a hedged bet, particularly health and property/casualty insurance.  term life insurance too.  you pay to have coverage in case something bad happens.  the more likely it is that something bad (sickness, car accident, etc.) and covered will actually befall you, the more you are going to have to pay.  if a company feels you probably won’t ever make a claim, they are fine with charging you lower premiums.  lower risk, after all.  the ideal form of the business model is that people pay for insurance and never make a claim.   the goal is to avoid paying out.  this is something we should strive to preserve…why, again?  consider, if you will, what happens if insurance companies don’t make money off a particular form of coverage.  flood damage, for instance.  homeowners insurance never covers it.  you have to buy government flood insurance.  why?  because the risk is too high for insurance companies to want to cover it.  no profit in it.  why, again, would we want to make sure these companies thrive?

the whole thing makes me angry.  like education and dependable public transportaion, health is something we should consider part of the nation’s infrastructure.  i’m not a fan of having to pay taxes, but since i have to, the things i want them spent on are making sure everyone can get an education (free, up to a bachelors, if they desire), get to where they need to and receive the care they need to stay healthy.  maybe thinking the government should provide the baseline for these things makes me a socialist.  so be it.  public versions of education and transportation haven’t eliminated private versions.  i see no reason why the same shouldn’t hold true for health care.

heisted from keifus, here’s my tally (bolded) of what i’ve read on the list of 100 best banned books of the 20th century:

1. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
2. The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
3. The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
4. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
5. The Color Purple by Alice Walker
6. Ulysses by James Joyce
7. Beloved by Toni Morrison
8. The Lord of the Flies by William Golding
9. 1984 by George Orwell
10. The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner
11. Lolita by Vladmir Nabokov
12. Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
13. Charlotte’s Web by E. B. White
14. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce
15. Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
16. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
17. Animal Farm by George Orwell
18. The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
19. As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
20. A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway
21. Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
22. Winnie-the-Pooh by A. A. Milne
23. Their Eyes are Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston
24. Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
25. Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison
26. Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
27. Native Son by Richard Wright
28. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey
29. Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
30. For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway
31. On the Road by Jack Kerouac
32. The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway
33. The Call of the Wild by Jack London
34. To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
35. Portrait of a Lady by Henry James
36. Go Tell it on the Mountain by James Baldwin
37. The World According to Garp by John Irving
38. All the King’s Men by Robert Penn Warren
39. A Room with a View by E. M. Forster
40. The Lord of the Rings by J. R. R. Tolkien
41. Schindler’s List by Thomas Keneally
42. The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton
43. The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand
44. Finnegans Wake by James Joyce
45. The Jungle by Upton Sinclair
46. Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
47. The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum
48. Lady Chatterley’s Lover by D. H. Lawrence
49. A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
50. The Awakening by Kate Chopin
51. My Antonia by Willa Cather
52. Howards End by E. M. Forster
53. In Cold Blood by Truman Capote
54. Franny and Zooey by J.D. Salinger
55. The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie
56. Jazz by Toni Morrison
57. Sophie’s Choice by William Styron
58. Absalom, Absalom! by William Faulkner
59. A Passage to India by E. M. Forster
60. Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton
61. A Good Man Is Hard to Find by Flannery O’Connor
62. Tender Is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald
63. Orlando by Virginia Woolf
64. Sons and Lovers by D. H. Lawrence
65. Bonfire of the Vanities by Tom Wolfe
66. Cat’s Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut
67. A Separate Peace by John Knowles
68. Light in August by William Faulkner
69. The Wings of the Dove by Henry James
70. Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe
71. Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier
72. A Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
73. Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs
74. Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh
75. Women in Love by D. H. Lawrence
76. Look Homeward, Angel by Thomas Wolfe
77. In Our Time by Ernest Hemingway
78. The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas by Gertrude Stein
79. The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett
80. The Naked and the Dead by Norman Mailer
81. Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys
82. White Noise by Don DeLillo
83. O Pioneers! by Willa Cather
84. Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller
85. The War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells
86. Lord Jim by Joseph Conrad
87. The Bostonians by Henry James
88. An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser
89. Death Comes for the Archbishop by Willa Cather
90. The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame
91. This Side of Paradise by F. Scott Fitzgerald
92. Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand
93. The French Lieutenant’s Woman by John Fowles
94. Babbitt by Sinclair Lewis
95. Kim by Rudyard Kipling
96. The Beautiful and the Damned by F. Scott Fitzgerald
97. Rabbit, Run by John Updike
98. Where Angels Fear to Tread by E. M. Forster
99. Main Street by Sinclair Lewis
100. Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie

a bunch of these were for class.  d. h. lawrence, for example.  some, i’ve read stuff by the author, but not the specific books listed.  some, i was young and foolish (ayn rand, for instance).  anyway, i suppose i should feel like my count is higher, but i don’t.  besides, i’ve got discworld books and a re-read of brother cadfael mysteries to attend to before hitting something like ulysses.

just picked up TMBG’s “here comes science”, supposedly for my son.  i suspect i may also have gotten it for myself, as listening to it just puts a big smile on my face.  highly recommended to TMBG fans (even moreso if you actually have children).

from the bbc: Twitter tweets are 40% ‘babble’

to which i reply: “only 40%?  i’d have thought it was far more.”

turns out that “conversational” twits are not considered “pointless babble”.  the short of it is this analysis company determined around 9% of the twits to be “of value”.  from the article (again):

Instead, it found that 40.5% could be classified as pointless babble, 37.5% as conversational and 8.7% as having pass-along value. Self promotion and spam stood at 5.85% and 3.75% respectively.

granted, no one bothers to explain what the fuck “pass-along” value is.  one would assume it is information deemed important enough to share with others; however, that is a rather subjective criteria (moreso than usual). 

i don’t use twitter, mostly because my pointless babbling tends to run on the wordy side.  still, it’s impossible to avoid knowing what is it.  given the entire concept is “say what you are doing right now, in 140 words or less”, one might (rightly) surmise it exists solely to pointlessly babble.  only, it isn’t quite pointless.  at least, not to those interested.

 see, there is a profound truth that most people miss about the internet.  particularly the media and marketers.  it’s a niche market.  always has been, always will be.  the assumption is that, since one is available to the whole world, one is trying to speak to everyone.  not so.  most of what goes on across the web is what always goes on amongst people: small knots sharing interests and not paying attention to the others.  it’s just easier to find the knots that interest you.

the web is public the way a crowd is public.  sure, you can listen in, or join into any conversation.  but you are really just going to wander around, trying to find a conversation that interests you.  mainstream media still persists in thinking of the internet as some seperate entity, something more than a tool.  it is not.  it is simply connections.  connections between information and between people.  that’s all. 

frankly, most people aren’t all that interesting, except to those who know them.  take this site.  except for those who know me, who the hell is going to swing by and look at baby pictures (or read the occassional rant)?  no one.  nor do i expect them to (or want to, for that matter).  sure, the possibility is there, but the probability is low (this seems a reasonable point to mention that, if i do have any unlikely new readers/commentators, my apologies.  there are nearly 50K messages in my moderation queue: too many to mass moderate.  i can only do 20 at a time, so if there is actually something other than spam in there, it’s not seeing the light of day.).

anyway, the point is, twitter is a service developed specifically to post pointless babblings.  telling people that most twits are babbling is, well, pointless.