I am so sick of this. I’ve explored all the reasonable alternatives, and found none of them to be reasonable:

I don’t think I’ve actually been able to quit iPhoto normally for a few months now. It manages to lock up before I’m done with it 100% of the time now.

St. Louis Post-Dispatch:

Police say they weren’t shocked to learn that a recent apartment blaze that killed two people in Jefferson County was sparked by a failed attempt to make methamphetamine. In fact, drug investigators say they’re surprised more meth cooks haven’t died in fires.

[...] It’s precision work carried out with imprecise equipment and by people with little knowledge of basic chemistry. On top of that, the so-called cooks often are high on the powerfully addictive drug that can keep its users in a distorted euphoria for days on end.

So this is unbelievably, incredibly dangerous work being done by people who are in a distorted euphoria for days on end, say the police.

But they are surprised that more of these people don’t blow themselves up. Could it just possibly be that the cops are either overestimating the danger, or underestimating the knowledge and skill of the meth producers?

Do you think? Naah. The police would never, ever exaggerate things just to whip up hysteria.

“This isn’t three guys in lab coats working in a controlled environment making pharmaceuticals,” said Cpl. Jason Grellner, commander of the Franklin County drug task force. “It’s more like three guys in overalls making moonshine . . . and not really having any idea what they’re doing.

And why is this? Could it possibly be because investing in proper equipment is pointless when the police can step in and seize all of it? Could it possibly be because, while meth production appears to be pretty lucrative, people with the best training will choose to do something else, rather than run the risk of an encounter with the cops?

The froth over the supposed dangers of meth labs — in 2004, 27 people (including three children) died in meth lab accidents, according to the DEA, which means that running a meth lab actually looks quite safe — rings a big hollow since most or all of these dangers would disappear overnight if it weren’t for the War On Some Drugs. Making whiskey also involves volatile evaporates, but I can’t remember the last time I heard about someone being killed in a distillery explosion, or about someone setting up a clandestine ‘whiskey lab’ in a motel.

So which is it? The culture at large seems to have decided that the cost of people getting high is so great that it merits laws that encourage clandestine, dangerous production of meth (which is apparently a fairly nasty drug and which is only in demand anyway because of other market-distorting actions of the DEA et al.)

So stop complaining about the unintended but entirely forseeable effects of your own bad policies.

I have read a number of things about the Whoopi Goldberg disclaimer — called an ‘introduction’ for some reason — on the new Looney Tunes DVD collection. I only saw the introduction — ‘disclaimer’ would be a better term — yesterday, because Santa left a copy of the collection for Nicole.

For two and a half minutes, Ms. Goldberg tells us that these cartoons are great. However.

However, the Looney Tunes and their irreverent brand of humor are products of their time. Unfortunately, at that time, racial and ethnic differences were caricatured in ways that may have embarrassed and even hurt people of color, women, and ethnic groups.

Now, nobody intended it, but that’s what happened. Now, some of the cartoons here reflect some of the prejudices that were commonplace in American society. Especially when it came to the treatment of racial and ethnic minorities. Now, these jokes were wrong then and they are wrong today. But removing these inexcusable images and jokes from this collection would be the same as saying they never existed. So they are presented here to accurately reflect a part of our history that cannot and should not be ignored.

Ms. Goldberg goes on to pat Warner Brothers on the back for how progressive its polices really were back then, woof woof woof.

You can see the video (in iPod video format, which should be playable by any computer with Quicktime 7 or the most recent version of iTunes) here.

I have mixed feelings about this disclaimer. If this is what’s needed for companies to be able to release cultural products from the past which are now regarded as entartete Kunst, so be it. Big companies like Time Warner live in stark terror of being accused of even seeming to be discriminatory in any way, probably because it’s almost totally impossible to defend oneself or one’s company against such charges. Time Warner is attempting to do so preemptively, by hiring famous black person Whoopi Goldberg as their aplologist. If they couldn’t do this, they wouldn’t release the cartoons at all.

If this works, it might be possible one day to again see Disney’s Song of the South.

But at the same time I’m personally offended by this disclaimer, because it seems to carry with it the implication that I, Tino, need this warning: that without it, I might think that it is suddenly okay to make fun of ethnic groups. Because certainly there’s nothing else in the culture that would indicate otherwise. Cough.

I must say that the only ethnic group I’ve seen made fun of on the discs so far is hillbillies. I’m sure, though, that there’s ten seconds somewhere on these four DVDs of a porter or bellman drawn to look like a monkey saying ‘Yazzuh, Mistuh Fudd, I’se sho nuff seen dat rabbit what yo lookin’ fo!’ or some such: and for that I have to listen to Whoopi Goldberg for two minutes and thirty seconds every time I put one of the discs in.

And I think that this has helped me locate the origin of most of the discontentment I feel and write about here: In too many of my daily interactions, I am given no credit for not being a child/moron/criminal/racist/jackass/scam artist/drunk/junkie/etc. — I’m assumed to be all of these things until I prove otherwise, and then that proof is only accepted grudgingly, and with suspicion. And I’m tired of it.

It’s not just me, of course, but the fact that you are also not given credit for not being a child/criminal/etc. is not my problem. But we have reordered, and we seem to be continuing to reorder, our society to primarily serve the needs of people who don’t really contribute to it. Children are nice, but they’re not in a position to make any meaningful contribution to society for twenty years or so: this is why we don’t let them vote.

Criminals by definition do not make a contribution to society, but take from it. And morons — which I mean to include real drooling idiots as well as people who cannot figure out that just because Bugs Bunny made fun of the Japanese in 1942 does not mean that we still have anything against those fine people — will only sporadically be useful to anyone else.

And yet things are arranged primarily for them! If only there were some setting on the DVD player where I could affirm that I am willing to take on the risk of Bad Mojo myself, and that would allow me to skip not only the Whoopi Goldberg variations, but the threats that inform me that this is one of those rare DVDs that may not be legally copied and distributed to all and sundry.

If only there were a chain of convenience stores with signs on the door that said ‘WE CARD UNDER 21 because after all those are the people we’re trying to protect from themselves and all’ instead of ‘WE CARD UNDER 30′, meaning that they fully intend to inconvenience a lot of legal adults lest they sell beer to a few particularly mature-looking 20-year-olds.

If only there weren’t even any need to put signs on the doors of establishments that would rather that your children not have fits on the floor: why on Earth isn’t ‘behave yourself’ just understood to be the rule everywhere?

All of this might be acceptable if it produced a new golden age, but I cannot help but notice that teenagers still drink (in increasing numbers, actually, depending on whose statistics you believe), that people still pirate movies and music, and that plenty of people are still racists. Perhaps it’s time to think about a different approach, rather than just continuing to ratchet up the surveillance, threats, and lectures another notch.

It took an unbelievable amount of toil and expenditure, but in a week we have managed to convert this house from a wreck full of horrible junk into something suitable for Christmas, if only barely.

Note the Domo in the tree.

The Christmas haul: entirely books for Tino, in part because some presents are probably waiting for us on the porch back at Tino Manor East. I expect that that’s mainly books, too, for two reasons:

1. Amazon has made buying books easier than buying anything else, and
2. There’s a shortage of new and amazing gadgets on the market. I could really use a new computer, but there are compelling reasons not to buy one right now — particularly if, as I do, one uses a Macintosh.

Where’s my flying car?!

Comments and Trackbacks are still turned off as they present opportunities for what are effectively DOS attacks by would-be comment spammers. Movable Type’s comment-spam-rejection tools have got much better — they appear to be doing the right thing very nearly 100% of the time — but they are so resource-intensive that the computer will get wedged for hours at a time after a particularly intensive spam attack.

They say that you spend a third of your life sweeping, but after the last couple of days I’m beginning to think it’s more than that.

We have been tearing up old carpeting, here at Tino Manor West. Old, as in ‘installed sometime in the mid-1960s’ old. In the high-traffic areas, the padding underneath had turned to dust, and then compressed into some kind of diamond-like material. It’s diamond-like in that it’s incredibly hard, until you scrape it off the floor, whereupon it crumbles into a million pieces and scatters all over the place.

It’s these pieces of carpet padding that I’ve been sweeping up. No matter how zealous we are with the shop-vac, no matter how careful we are to scoop up all the debris and get it into trash bags, it winds up all over the house. I’m looking at a piece of that’s somehow made it into the middle of the kitchen floor.

There are also a million splinters from the carpet tack strips, all of which have been laboriously pulled up to reveal that the hardwood floors don’t go all the way to the wall. Apparently, wood was so valuable in 1936 that you wouldn’t put any under the shoe molding when building a house: why, that’s your profit margin, right there!

So the floor looks like hell, and it will until the floor people come here to put things right. It looks better than it did with the carpet, anyway. Why on Earth anyone would cover up nice hardwood floors with uncleanable and dusty wall-to-wall carpeting is entirely beyond me. It was the style at the time, I suppose: undoubtedly in another ten years people will be driving staples into their floors again so that they can keep just a little bit of the dung on their shoes around for the next ten or twenty years. It’s so much more modern than those nasty old hardwood floors.

Our trip so far has gone something like this:

Saturday: Arrive in the afternoon. Do some basic cleaning and set up the Eddie Bauer Inflatable Bed. Eat a pizza. Go to sleep.

Sunday: Wake up cursing Eddie Bauer and his issue. Start pulling up carpet. Buy new shower curtain, bath mat, knife, cutting board, paper plates, etc., etc.: the basic bootstrap necessities of life. At 3 p.m., order new king-size mattress. At 4:30 p.m., take delivery of said mattress. Assemble new bed. Collapse.

Monday: Continue pulling up carpet. Lunch with friend. Run into cell-phone-talker in parking lot of restaurant. Wait a very long time for the police to show up because the other party ‘is going to school to be a cop and I know you have to call the police whenever there’s an accident’. Police show up and point out that this is not at all true. Return home and pull up carpet. Also sweeping.

Tuesday: Buy and install new toilet seat. Buy desk chair because I’m going to be incapacitated if I don’t. Buy red bow to zing up the wreath on the door. Buy more floor cleaner for the amazing amount of floor cleaning we’re doing. Clean unspeakable filth from all over the place.

Note that there’s nothing here about decorating for Christmas, or in fact doing anything in preparation for Christmas at all, like shopping. Presumably we will try to cram that all in tomorrow, along with shopping for some basic furniture, a TV, a phone, and all the other million and one things that we don’t have here.

And then for a nice relaxing holiday.

Now available at K-Mart in Front Royal, VA (and presumably elsewhere):

I have no idea what the hell this doll is supposed to represent, unless it’s a prostitute. You can’t see it in the photo, but those are very high heels, those pink shoes are.

And she’s not wearing any underwear (I checked).

Most problems that people have with These Kids Today, their clothes, their hair, their toys, and their music really come down to forest-for-the-trees issues. But I have to wonder whether this isn’t ridiculous and bad anyway.

What appears on Scripting News now:

The ‘him’ there refers to Adam Curry, former MTV hairstyle and current Podcasting mogul. Winer has a good claim on having come up with much of the idea behind podcasting, and he’s been getting bent out of shape on a regular basis lately, feeling that he’s not getting enough credit, particularly in the mainstream media.

What was originally written and posted, according to NetNewsWire’s ‘Highlight Differences’ feature:

I really don’t care who’s a tool or who’s a dickhead, though I suppose I can understand the frustration someone like Winer must feel seeing Adam Curry get all the attention largely because he’s better at self-promotion.

What Winer doesn’t seem to realize is that part of the cost of self-promotion is not being able to publicly call people dickheads and tools in public — or at least not being able to do it quite so often. Businessweek, the New York Times, Wired, etc. go to other people instead of to Winer because when they ask around they’re told that Winer is a nut. Winer wants the luxury of telling people exactly what he thinks is wrong with them, but he doesn’t seem to like paying to price for that luxury.

It’s interesting that he changed his tune here after initially posting a pretty nasty blast.

Today’s Washington Post ombudsman column is headlined ‘The Two Washington Posts’, and it’s about the distinction between The Washington Post itself and the washingtonpost.com website. The content is largely the same, but each is produced by a separate subsidiary of the Washington Post Company.

The point of the column seems to be about shifting blame: Deborah Howell, the Washington Post ombudsman, is not the ombudsman for washingtonpost.com, which in an important distinction in some cases. Frankly, though, the explanation of the distinction seems hollow and lame:

The Post Web site is owned by the Washington Post Co., but it is not run by the newspaper. It is a separate company called Washington Post-Newsweek Interactive, or WPNI, with offices in Arlington. [...]

There are cultural differences between the two newsrooms, which could be expected between a traditional newspaper and the more free-wheeling Web site. But Jim Brady, executive editor of the Web site, said he finds the Post newsroom “incredibly cooperative.” [...]

Political reporters at The Post don’t like WPNI columnist Dan Froomkin’s “White House Briefing,” which is highly opinionated and liberal. They’re afraid that some readers think that Froomkin is a Post White House reporter.

John Harris, national political editor at the print Post, said, “The title invites confusion. It dilutes our only asset — our credibility” as objective news reporters. Froomkin writes the kind of column “that we would never allow a White House reporter to write. I wish it could be done with a different title and display.”

Harris is right; some readers do think Froomkin is a White House reporter. But Froomkin works only for the Web site and is very popular — and Brady is not going to fool with that, though he is considering changing the column title and supplementing it with a conservative blogger.

‘Some readers’ think that Froomkin works for the newspaper, and this is presented as the readers’ problem. Each of Froomkin’s columns does say ‘Special to washingtonpost.com’ under the byline (instead of ‘Washington Post Staff Writer’, for instance) — but why should readers be required to unravel the Post’s organizational nomenclature to understand what they’re reading? Why is it okay for someone who writes for ‘washingtonpost.com’ to write things that would be irresponsible for someone who writes for ‘The Washington Post’? If the Washington Post Company were all that concerned about reader confusion and credibility, they’d call washingtonpost.com ‘The Clarendon Herald’ instead (WPNI Interactive is based in a part of Arlington, VA called ‘Clarendon’). Instead, they stick this on the top of every page:

If I stuck that on the top of Tinotopia, it wouldn’t be long before I got a letter from the Post’s lawyers telling me that my use of that trademark was likely to produce confusion. Maybe this is also contributing to this ‘reader confusion’ at washingtonpost.com, eh? Might be? You think?

I’m not entirely surprised to read this kind of sophistry, though. Every newspaper ‘ombudsman’ (with the notable exceptions, recently, of Daniel Okrent and Byron Calame at the New York Times) I’ve ever read has essentially been an apologist for his or her employer, rather than a read advocate for the readers and for accuracy. It would be nice to see the newspaper actually subjecting itself to real criticism, rather than just printing tepid columns from the editorial equivalents of the Post’s go-along-to-get-along traffic reporter, Dr. Gridlock.

But of course the newspapers don’t really want criticism. This is in fact one of the points made in today’s ombudsman column:

Some Post reporters don’t appreciate that links are put on the Web site to what bloggers are saying about this or that story — especially when the bloggers are highly negative.

The links that she refers to are pulled from Technorati, and it’s a brilliant scheme. When you link to a Washington Post article, within a few hours a link back to your website shows up on the Post’s article page.

The links don’t appear on the ‘printer’ versions of articles, so there’s a strong incentive for bloggers to link to the regular versions, which carry more ads. Bloggers win by getting more publicity for their websites, and the Post wins both by showing more ads and by providing a reason for bloggers to link to the Post’s version of a story rather than to, say, the New York Times‘. Readers win by having references to blog commentary on the story at their fingertips, which is another win for the Post because it’s a reason to read your news there rather than at the New York Times‘ site, etc., etc. Like I said, it’s brilliant, and the Post should be commended for doing it.

But it appears that some of the reporters don’t like it. This is interesting, I think. I would love for people to talk more about what I write here. As it is, I think about six other websites link to Tinotopia, and four of them are spamblogs. One would think that people who have made writing for the public their life’s work, rather than something they do in their spare time because they are bitter cranks, would be even more welcoming of people commenting on their output.

But no: ‘especially when the bloggers are highly negative’, i.e. ‘especially when the readers are not in agreement with the reporter‘, the reporters don’t like this. So either the reporters don’t care that the readers think that their news judgement, or their writing, is bad, or they think that the readers are wrong. Neither one bodes well for the newspaper industry.

I don’t make a regular thing of it — because it’s like shooting fish in a barrel — but a lot of the Post’s reporting, particularly on local issues, is very very lazy (see this example), not looking beyond the obvious for explanations.

The Washington area’s perennial lack of ‘affordable’ housing, for instance, is always caused by greedy ‘developers’ and ‘gentrification’, and never the result of restrictive building and zoning codes, bad planning, etc. I’m not saying that the ‘developers’ are totally without fault; but the Post implicitly says that the inept local governments are faultless, every time they write about the issue.

The paper reflects its community, so they write a lot about how there are no fancy restaurants etc. in Anacostia and Prince George’s County because of ‘racism’ — without seriously considering that there might be some other cause. The ‘developers’ are pretty ‘greedy’, but apparently not ‘greedy’ enough to want money from black people? What? Though of course if you built fancy stuff in Anacostia, you’d be denounced as a ‘gentrifier’. The Post rarely, if ever, examines these intellectual conflicts.

If reporters know that their stories will be presented alongside comments from opinionated readers, though, they might be more motivated to write about the bigger picture, rather than just parrot the statements and publicists and politicians.

One of the reasons I write things here is so that I can refer to my arguments and to their documentary evidence in the future. When the conversation turns to the problem of affordable housing — as it does a lot if you read the newspaper — I don’t have to bother myself about remembering what I read or said three years ago. I can just turn to Google and search for:

Tinotopia “affordable housing”

The top two results for that search (this and this) pretty much sum up what I have to say about affordable housing (though the second one might be more directly to the point than the first). It’s pretty convenient. To find out what I think of anything that I publicly think of at all, you can just type “Tinotopia + (topic)” into Google and you’ll get results.

Now, this morning at breakfast, in Burger King’s house copy of the Washington Post — why is it that Burger King and McDonald’s always have free newspapers, but that if you pay, say, $20 for breakfast you usually have to supply your own reading material? — I read an ombudsman column that I think deserves comment.

When I got home, I looked for it on the Post’s website, and have so far come up empty-handed.

The column occupies the top of the center part of today’s Post editorial page: that is, it’s to the right of the editorials themselves, and above the abbreviated Sunday letters-to-the-editor section.

I first looked to the Post’s page for the Outlook section. The paper version, pictured at left here, is a masterpiece of design. The online version (right) isn’t quite as good:

And it’s not just the drab appearance: the ombudsman column, which is definitely in today’s Outlook section, is not listed there.

This is probably because the Ombudsman column is in the Outlook section, but not of the Outlook section. Why this should matter to a reader, I don’t know: but it does matter to the Post, apparently, and so I must look elsewhere.

Let’s a try a search for ‘ombudsman’:

Oh, that’s useful. Let’s try the same search again from a different page:

I… see. Well, at least we’ve found the ombudsman column now, even though doing so required us to assume that the Post’s search feature was badly broken. So we’ll click on that, and get:

So far, so good: but this page doesn’t list the most recent column. The top item here is this column, from December 4.

Let’s search for the headline, which I happen to remember: ‘The Two Washington Posts’:

So let’s search for ‘Deborah Howell’ by name. This time, we get a useful result:

Though you’ll note that, despite being the most recent result, today’s column is still not listed at the top. Wonderful. Still, at least we’ve found the column, after only six attempts.

How likely do you think it is that a random reader, who wasn’t already aware of this column’s existence, would find it? The answer: not very.

Why is this so hard? I have no idea.

Now that I’ve found the column, though, at least I can comment on its content. Interestingly enough, today’s Post ombudsman column is largely about the paper’s website.

UPDATE: I have been informed that if you click on ‘Opinions’ in the Post’s menu bar, and not on the ‘Sunday Outlook’ subitem thereof, you get this page (warning: this link will probably only be accurate for a week), which does list the ombudsman column, but not identified as such:

I’m not sure whether this means that the site is better or worse than my initial evaluation.

Ladies and gentlemen, this is what fashion has come to. From page 47 of this month’s Lucky magazine:

Sleek, ladies and gentlemen, apparently involves wearing an ill-fitting, wrinkly jacket and pants that you stole from a hobo.

I do not think it’s possible to look sleek while at the same time appearing to have no feet at all.

Nicole subscribes to a whole bunch of magazines about clothes, but she often winds up making her own garments because so much of what’s out there is so awful.

And what’s more, it’s been awful for a few years now. What’s going on? I thought the point of fashion was to obsolete everyone’s wardrobe every 18 months or so in order to sell more clothes. But everyone’s been wearing bell-bottoms for years now; it’s to the point that the Gap doesn’t sell anything but bell bottoms — only they’re called ‘flares’ or ‘boot cut’ or some other such garbage now. I am not fooled.