|
|
drivetime radio Wednesday, June 7 2006
setting: Woodland Hills, California
This was the first morning that mother duck was not in evidence in and around the pool. It seemed she'd given up on the possibility of finding her ducklings. The phases of dealing with loss, whatever they are (and I don't remember) have been conditioned by many winnowings of evolution to always conclude with acceptance. Without that, mother ducks who lost their young would never get their shit together and start making another nest.
Drive time commute talk radio in Los Angeles, at least the stations Luc turns in, are all uniformly right wing. Bill O'Reilly even has a talk show which he uses to not, as he says, spin, whatever that means (once he's done not spinning its meaning). Orwellian statements come even easier to these people than lies.
Not that Luc himself is right wing; he seems to be more of a Bush-hating libertarian. He finds his taxes somewhat painful living in the bracket he does, but he drives a Porsche, which is, as everyone who buys one intends it to be, an indication of discretionary income, the sort that a just society taxes heavily. Though I myself drive a used Honda Civic without power windows, who's to say what I'd be driving if I was paying a six figure tax bill?
At work today Luc and I found ourselves spending a huge amount of time dealing with a single apostrophe being spit out by an XSL template into the middle of a apostrophe-encapsulated string inside a Javascript expression. In the end we had to use the XSL translate function to convert all instances of ' into ' (for some geeky entertaintment, you should see how that looks in the source of this page). I remember dealing with sort of nonsense before and wondering what moron invented a templating language that is actually harder to debug than it is to learn to develop in a real language to begin with.
For linking purposes this article's URL is: http://asecular.com/blog.php?060607 feedback previous | next |