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Bring it on! Let's roll! Duh! Sunday, February 26 2006
I spent another day wide awake hurding someone else's code toward a distant dusty destination. Coyotes attacked the stragglers and those lines not ending with semicolons while unbalanced curly quotes (is there another word for "curly quote"?) forced occasional delays altogether less extreme than, say, the fording of the Platte.
When I write, I can enjoy music but I cannot listen to spoken words. Yet when I paint or do crazy plumbing hacks, I love to listen to spoken word (such as stuff from the extensive This American Life archive). Writing code is evidently more like manual labor than writing is, because I have no trouble listening to the news while doing so. This must reflect something fundamental about the organization of my brain; the part that is working out the logical syntax of a program is not the language part of my brain. Nor is it the "music appreciation" part of my brain. But the act of writing and of listening to spoken words are both handled by the same neural circuits and putting any focus on one of those activities destroys my ability to do the other.
The moronic behavior of the Bush administration continues to provide entertainment. Take the Dubai port brouhaha as the most recent and ever-so-unexpectedly delicious example. Not that I like them any more, but I happen to agree with the Bush administration on this one. This company based in the United Arab Emirates is probably as good at running ports as any other multinational corporation. Perhaps they're even better, since they can't survive a terrorist incident on their watch. But these Bushies, oh the work they've done to implanted racist fears into the minds of lugnut Americans! Every time Bush talked about how terrorists "lurk", every time Ashcroft paraded another bunch of hapless swarthy men in front of the cameras, or whenever Cheney drew connections between Saddam Hussein and 9/11, the implication was always, "Well, they're from that part of the world so they're all equally-guilty, let's blow 'em up!" Americans aren't too swift when it comes to geography, a lack-of-swiftness that has paid big dividends for the Republicans during Bush's re-election as well as two off-year elections. But when you play that strategy in a globalized world in which "some of your best friends" really are Arabs, inevitably the day will come when you find yourself on the wrong end of the jujitsu you've unleashed. I love it that moron-America is up in arms about an Arab company running our ports. "We're 'merican, what we doin' with A-rabs runnin' our ports?" Bring it on! Let's roll! Duh!
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