Random Thinking

Merry Christmas to all!

Good news for Michel’s dad. The clot in his leg has cleared and he has circulation in his foot. With some luck he could be home in a few days.

I read this on Bryan Appleyard’s blog and it is just too good not to share especially after our recent discussion of irony.

Thomas Midgley, Jr., an American chemist, “had more impact on the atmosphere than any other single organism in earth history.” None of this impact was good. Midgley first discovered that adding TEL (a lead additive) to gasoline prevented engine “knocking”. Thus Midgley polluted the atmosphere with lead ultimately leading to severe pollution problems in most major cities around the world. But Midgley wasn’t satisfied with just being the TEL guy, he next looked at refrigeration and discovered Freon, thus providing the world with a depleted ozone layer.

So where is the irony? Midgley was striken with polio in 1940 which left him severely disabled. He invented a series of pullies and ropes to help him lift himself from his bed. Four years later, at the age of 55, Midgley got himself caught in the ropes and strangled to death.

Technorati Tags: irony, Thomas Midgley Jr.

It’s happens to every author, I am sure. You get a lousy review for your book. Your characters are one-dimensional. The plot is predictable. Nothing new, right? Britt-Marie Mattsson, a Swedish crime novelist, got a review just like that from Kristian Lundberg in the Swedish daily, Helsingborgs Daglad. Only one problem… the book hasn’t been written yet. The book was in the publisher’s catalog but because of personal reasons, Mattsson hasn’t actually written it.

Lundberg found himself fired but he wasn’t very sorry about the whole thing. He told one Swedish magazine that he, “got worked up in advance about Britt-Marie Mattsson because I detest her so very greatly. But let’s hope the book is published so I get the chance to say it for real.”

Hat tip to Maxine over at Petrona.

Technorati Tags: books, book reviewing, Britt-Marie Mattsson, lousy reviews

I was listening to the radio on the way to work and the two hosts of the radio program were discussing irony and how no one knows quite what it is which reminded me of the Alanis Morissette song, Ironic:

It’s a traffic jam when you’re already late It’s a no-smoking sign on your cigarette break It’s like ten thousand spoons when all you need is a knife It’s meeting the man of my dreams And then meeting his beautiful wife And isn’t it ironic… don’t you think A little too ironic… and yeah I really do think…

Except that none of the things in the song are actually examples of irony. Although as Wikipedia says, “it is arguable that the song is ironic in and of itself – there is a fundamental incongruity in a song titled Ironic which ultimately contains no irony.”

So the two guys on the radio were debating over whether Jon Stewart or Stephen Colbert were ironic. The conclusion was that Colbert is satire and Stewart is irony. How did they reach this conclusion? And what is the difference?

Well, what exactly is irony? There are lots of different types of irony but the word most often found in definitions is incongruity, that is a difference between what is expected and what actually occurs or between what is said and what is actually meant. But there must be more to it than that… The American Heritage Dictionary’s usage panel found it unacceptable to use the word ironic to describe mere unfortunate coincidences or surprising disappointments that “suggest no particular lessons about human vanity or folly.”

So the fact that Monet, the painter, went blind, and Beethoven, the composer, went deaf is ironic. But the fact that you are caught in a traffic jam when you are already late is not ironic.

I will give the last word to George Carlin:

Irony deals with opposites; it has nothing to do with coincidence.

Irony is “a state of affairs that is the reverse of what was to be expected; a result opposite to and in mockery of the appropriate result.” For instance: a diabetic, on his way to buy insulin, is killed by a runaway truck. He is the victim of an accident. If the truck was delivering sugar, he is the victim of an oddly poetic coincidence. But if the truck was delivering insulin, ah! Then he is the victim of an irony.

Darryl Stingley, the pro football player, was paralyzed after a brutal hit by Jack Tatum. Now Darryl Stingley’s son plays football, and if the son should become paralyzed while playing, it will not be ironic. It will be coincidental. If Darryl Stingley’s son paralyzes someone else, that will be closer to ironic. If he paralyzes Jack Tatum’s son, that will be precisely ironic.

Update: I found out that Jack Tatum lost his left leg because of diabetes and now uses a wheelchair. Is that irony?

Technorati Tags: irony, George Carlin

Another day of running around for Michel. She ran over to the hospital with her mom to see her dad. Then she went to work leaving her mom at the hospital. Then to Beth’s school to get Beth and then home to get Mikey. I spoke to her around 4 PM and her leg was throbbing and she was melting down. The whole mess is getting to her.

So I get home and we run off to the hospital to get Michel’s mom and see her dad again. Now to appreciate what’s next, you have to realize that this is a huge hospital with two towers (although they are connected at each floor) and it is a long walk between the towers. So Pop is supposed to be in the PACU because he had a procedure on his leg so we get to the hospital and run up to the second floor. Actually we didn’t run… we took the elevator and we walked slowly because Michel could barely walk and she refused a wheelchair. Anyway, we get to the PACU but he isn’t there. So we go back to the 1st floor for information. They tell us the computer shows that he is in his room on the 7th floor. So up to the 7th floor we go but he isn’t there and no one actually knows where he is. But the guy who brings the food around to the patients says he thinks Pop is in the MACU on the 5th floor. So we head off to the 5th floor. Not there either. We try calling Michel’s mom but it turns out her cell phone is dead. So we wander around and finally find someone who calls every department to find what they did with Pop. It turns out that he was being brought up to the CTU which was right next to the PACU where we started!

Anyway, Michel got to spend a few minutes with him and we made it home just in time for Rosalyn to leave. The procedure they did yesterday might clear the clot but if it doesn’t then they will do the bypass today. It’s just more and more fun.

Uncle Tom’s free advice for the day: Don’t ever smoke!!!

On October 25th, we were “absolutely winning” according to our president. Now, apparently, we aren’t actually winning but we’re not losing either. “We’re not succeeding nearly as fast as I wanted … and … the conditions are tough in Iraq, particularly in Baghdad.” And you thought the conditions weren’t going to be tough, Mr. President? Your advisors told you what? That it would be a breeze? A walk in the park?

And the president’s solution is that maybe we will send more troops. But he doesn’t know yet. Meanwhile, $350 billion tax dollars have been spent on screwing up Iraq. Think of all the good places that tax money could have been spent.

In a moment of reflection, Bush said, “The most painful aspect of my presidency has been knowing that good men and women have died in combat because of my incompetence.” Well, OK, he didn’t say that last part… but he should have.

Technorati Tags: George W. Bush, Iraq, incompetence

Rats: Observations on the History and Habitat of the City’s Most Unwanted Inhabitants
by Robert Sullivan

This is a curious book. To start with, it is short. Without the Notes section, it is about 220 pages. There is no index or photographs or illustrations. The text has the feel of a random selection of magazine articles thrown together. There is an attempt to hold the whole thing together with the author’s own personal observations of rats in an alley in lower Manhattan, but the author tends to spend more time discussing what he was wearing or drinking than about the actual rats in the alley. I am fairly certain that you could rearrange many of the chapters in virtually any order and the book would not significantly change. The writing style is occasionally humorous but for the most part seems like an attempt to be erudite rather than an actual success.

As to what you will actually learn about rats, there is very little here. You will learn more by going to Wikipedia, and the writing there is no worse. Many of his “facts” are prefaced by, “According to one study…”, “By one estimate…”, “One rat expert theorizes…”. This might not be too bad if the source of these “facts” were cited but they aren’t so there is no way to verify any of the information provided. And when an author is making fairly outrageous claims such as that one-third of the world’s food supply is eaten by rats, the reader would like some support other than just the author’s word. Also, the author tells us early on that there are only about 400,000 rats in New York but then he interviews an “expert” that he admires who tells us that there are millions of rats living deep under the city who never come to the surface. Is there any support for this? Is it 400,000 or millions? And even when he gets his facts right he gets them wrong. For example, the author writes about the rats link to the Black Death but fails to note that the Brown rat that is in the city is not the rat that carries plague and in fact, probably can’t carry plague. The rat of the Black Death was the Black Rat which is not the rat the author is writing about.

Which brings up the side trips on the journey. Almost anyone in New York who has something to do with rats is a potential target for a chapter. Many of these people are not the least bit interesting and the claims they make are unsupported by any evidence but the author simply reports them as fact. His writing fails to cover any subject in any depth. He writes a chapter about John DeLury, for example, who was the head of the sanitation worker’s union in the 1970′s with very little detail beyond what you would expect in a typical obituary. And then he ends the short chapter with excitement that a friend of a friend is a grandson of DeLury. Ho-hum. He tries to interview people who might remember so-and-so who had some remote link to rats years ago but the interviews go nowhere. A typical response he gets is, “I didn’t know him personally but I understand that people spoke highly of him.” Excuse me? Why is this even worth writing down? Is the author that desperate to pad his book?

Overall the book does not educate the reader about rats, does not provide much in the way of historical detail, and barely entertains. I would not recommend that anyone waste their time on it.

Technorati Tags: books, rats

We have been running around the last few days getting things arranged for Michel’s Dad to go into the hospital. She took him to the doctor on Friday and he wanted to admit him today, run some tests, and then probably do a bypass on his leg. So we drove Michel’s mom and dad back to Brooklyn on Saturday and then picked them up again yesterday. Today Michel took her parents to the hospital, made sure they were settled in, and then she went off to work.

Michel had a patient discharged from the hospital today so she had to get her set up when she got home. But Michel had to leave work early because she had to go to traffic court. She had received a speeding ticket back in October. The ticket said that she had to appear at traffic court on November 1st. So she dutifully appeared at the court on the assigned date. They have metal detectors and Michel’s shunt set them off. The guards amused themselves by passing their handheld detectors around her head. After a little while they took Michel to front of the line so she wouldn’t have to wait. She pled guilty and was told to sign the ticket and that her fine would be mailed to her.

A couple of weeks ago, she received a note from the county saying that she would be in big trouble if she didn’t show up in traffic court since she had blown off her court date! Of course, Michel was nervous that she was in trouble so I called to find out what was going on. They told me that they had no record of her having shown up on her original court date. The woman on the phone told me that Michel would have to show up today but she also told me that Michel should not plead guilty! She said that if you have a good driving record that if you plead not guilty that there was a good chance they would reduce the penalty and the fine. But if you pled guilty there was nothing they could do for you. I reported this information to Michel.

Michel headed off to court and had to wait forever just to get in the building. Finally she got to see the judge’s assistant who you plead to and she told him that this was her first ticket ever and that she didn’t realize that the speed limit had changed on the section of road where she was and that she was a nurse and was going to work to care for her patients and she has a disabled child and please don’t find me guilty. So he reduced the charge to failing to signal! Only 2 points on her license instead of 6! So if she goes for the defensive driving class her license will be cleared. So the screw up basically saved Michel 4 points on her license and saved us several hundred dollars in fines! About time that something good happened!!!

Technorati Tags: traffic court, speeding tickets, sucking up to judges

I wrote a little script for Hanukah. I added an image of a Menorah on the front page of the downsyn forum but I needed to update the image each night to light the next candle. Instead of having to remember this, I wrote a script (derived from the BAFAB countdown) that looks for the date and displays the correct image for that day.

Here it is in action:

Pretty cool, huh?

Technorati Tags: Hanukah, menorah

The sample image:

I have been using phpBB2 since the summer for the forums on DownSyn.com and I’m very happy with it. I have been able to find all types of enhancements to the base software that have made the forum easier to use and more feature rich. One of things that I was looking for was the ability to create polls that allow for multiple selection. For example, the poll could show a list of 10 items and you can pick 3. The polls in phpBB2 don’t support this but I found the code on the phpBB web site. The only problem was that if you messed up your vote and either picked the wrong choice or left out a choice, phpBB2 doesn’t have a way to un-vote. So I wrote my own enhancement to the board that gives you a link to use after you have voted in a poll. This link simply removes all your votes from that poll and lets you vote again.

You can see the link in the lower right-hand corner of this image:

Enhancing the phpBB2 software is fairly easy. It certainly is a much better board than the old version of vBulletin I was using.

Technorati Tags: forums, phpbb