Betsy Devine: Funny ha-ha and/or funny peculiar

Did the Bush team have a constitutional right to pay telemarketers to ask South Carolinians if they knew that John McCain “has a black child”?*

Luckily for George Bush and others like him, they can still exercise that right without restraint by your signing up for the pesky new “Do Not Call” list–political calls are exempt.

Not good enough, says the ATA lobbying group (that’s American Teleservices Association to its friends). They have filed suit to block the
“unconstitutional” Do Not Call List.

A recent Dave Barry column suggested that readers exercise their own right to free speech by calling the ATA with their comments on this. Thousands of readers did so, prompting a hurt response from the ATA, as reported by Yahoo:

“It’s difficult not to see some malice in Mr. Barry’s intent,” said Tim Searcy, executive director of the ATA, who said the added calls will be costly to his group because of toll charges and staffing issues.

Barry hardly sounded apologetic.

“I feel just terrible, especially if they were eating or anything,” he said. “They have phones like the rest of us have phones. Their attitude seems to be if you have a phone, people are allowed to call you.”

Surprisingly, Dave Barry is mistaken. When Slashdotters took up the story, they quickly learned that the ATA had added its own number to that wicked “Do Not Call” list. Shocking.

The number Dave Barry printed is now disconnected. And of course it is illegal as well as wrong to make prank phone calls. The law stands firm against the kinds of jokes played by 9 year-old kids!

But surely it’s a fair use of free speech to call the ATA’s legislative branch, whose toll-free number is listed on their contact page as (866) 500-4272, and urge them to lobby for better Do Not Call laws.

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* Yes–shockingly, the McCains had adopted a little girl from Bangladesh. Calls like this will be even more important in the 2004 election, with all those new picky restrictions on parts of campaigning policemen can get a look at.

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Picture this–on my first day in Sweden, I try to get Swedish cash from a bank machine. No, absolutely nothing, forget it, zero–the bank machine ignores my ATM card. Hmmm–I picture two weeks in a foreign country, with only the few US dollars left in my wallet.

Then I found out–Swedish ATMs expect bank cards to have their magnetic strips facing up. Of course, this is completely upside down from what every ATM in the US expects.

Because guidebooks are written by people who don’t remember the dumb mistakes newcomers make, here are a few more tips about life in Sweden:

Ask someone “How far?” and they answer, “100 meters.”

Anything Swedes think is within walking distance is described as “Only 100 meters.” Of course, anything within a couple of miles of where you stand is considered to be in walking distance, so “100 meters” is very, very elastic.

Unless you teetotal, bring wine or beer with you to Sweden.

The cheapest bottle of rot-gut red in a restaurant costs $30. OTOH, you can get nice lasagne-and-salad for $7 in student dives.

You have to learn less Swedish than you expected.

Just about everyone speaks English very, very well.

You have to learn more Swedish than you expected.

If you want to get off your train at Uppsala, you’ll hear the announcer pronouncing it “oop-SAW-LAW.” “Gevle” is pronounced “Yev-lay.” “Dj” is pronounced like the y in yes. “Rs” is pronounced like the sh in ship.

Zen bike riders inhabit quantum space.

Swedish bike riders share the streets in a way kamikaze Dutch bikers surely could not. Oop-SAW-LAW has many bike riders and few bike lanes. Bike riders move through space with peaceful expressions, looking as if they are pondering higher truth. I often saw bike riders on apparent collision courses, idling toward the same bit of an intersection–then, with no fuss and no hurry, they don’t collide. I never could figure out how the heck they did it. If we could run foreign policy as they ride bikes…. sigh.

There you have it, the very few bad bits of Sweden, from A to Z. The best bits, much more important, I blogged yesterday.

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There’s more to Sweden than Legolas and Linnaeus.** For example:

Swedish cakes

The cake itself plays only supporting parts–the star of the show is Swedish marzipan frosting. Don’t be put off by pale greens and purples evoking a witch’s tricky sticky gingerbread–it’s really MMMMMmmmmmarzipan.

Swedish road signs

Sweden marks major highways with simple, clear signs. Even better, when you’re lost in a city and longing to find a highway, clear simple signs are there to show you the way.

Swedish design in general

Elegant, minimal, clever ways to solve ordinary problems. For example, about 9 million ways to lock a restroom door–and make sure you figure out which kind each restroom uses, unless you feel like showing off your bare bottom.

Swedish pedestrians

Outside of Sweden, I’ve seen two kinds of pedestrians. One kind waits robotically for a “Walk” sign–even at 2 a.m. on an empty street. The other kind mostly plays chicken with passing cars. Swedish pedestrians will cross at “Don’t Walk” sign–but they try hard not to inconvenience drivers. Just try not to faint when you see them doing it. And that’s just one small example of how nice the Swedes are…

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*But do look in your guidebook for the Falun copper mine, the Vasa Museum, the Nobel Museum, and Linnaeus’s summer house at Hammarby.

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** Linnaeus’s theories about plant sexuality stunned his contemporaries.
“Who would have thought that bluebells and lillies and onions could be up to such immorality?” demanded one of Linnaeus’s critics, who went on to claim that such “loathsome harlotry as several males with one female would not be permitted in the vegetable kingdom by the Creator!”

Another critic protested: “A literal translation of the first principles of Linnaean botany is enough to shock female modesty. It is possible that many virtuous students might not be able to make out the similitude of Clitoria.”

Linnaeus himself was incredibly interesting–I loved Wilfrid Blunt’s charming biography of him.

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If you have these symptoms, the virus has already hit you:

1. You suddenly notice you sent the same email twice.
2. You suddenly notice you just sent a blank email.
3. You suddenly notice you sent email to the wrong person.
4. You realize you just sent an email right back to the person who sent it to you.
5. You realize you somehow forgot to attach an attachment.
6. You realize you just hit “SEND”–before you were finished.
7. You realize you just hit “DELETE” instead of “SEND.”

Norton and MacAfee don’t know how to stop this sinister virus, which seems to attack mainly users born before 1953.

It’s called the “C-Nile Virus.”

I usually hate getting email with virus news, but I’d really like to thank my brother Kevin for this timely warning.

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1. release formerly profitable software for free
2. ???
3. Profit!!!

…to quote a joke from today’s Slashdot thread about news that Google will give away “Blogger Pro” software.

Good old Slashdot loves to poke fun at dot-bomb business models, but a few of us there with longer memories can remember that this business model worked darn well for Microsoft when it set out to kill Netscape’s browser software with its then-much-worse product.

In related news, I did some unscientific “Google research” on various strings about weblogging software:

“I hate xxx” + weblog

xxx = blogger 121

xxx = radio 39

xxx = manila 0

xxx = movable type 0

“I love xxx” + weblog

xxx = blogger 233

xxx = radio 212

xxx = manila 101

xxx = movable type 160

“xxx is down”

xxx = blogger 760

xxx = manila 1

“something is wrong with xxx”

xxx = blogger 27

xxx = radio 0

xxx = manila 0

xxx = movable type 1

“xxx just ate”

xxx = blogger 279

xxx = radio 2

xxx = manila 0

xxx = movable type 0

“xxx sucks”

xxx = blogger 1070

xxx = radio (here I added ‘userland’ to eliminate stuff like “Denver radio sucks”) 136

xxx = manila 45, many of them referring to a city in the Philippines

xxx = movable type 58

If Google had done some similar research, I can’t help wondering if they would have bought Blogger in the first place…

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…first you must xxx

xxx

retro games and music

thanks to Simon Willison

The Bush team once again shows its support for our troops–by demanding reserve troops spend a full year in Iraq. Remember, reserve troops are the kids who signed up expecting to do their duty on weekends while holding down jobs–plus maybe some summer weeks in hardcore “training.”

I went to see what Lieutenant Smash thought about this news, which only Reuters was publishing when I found it. (I found his live-from-Iraq blog months ago, and he sounds like a decent, hard-working, honest guy.) I was pleased to see he’s already made it home, away from the 120 degree summer heat and the duststorms and bombs and bullets.

I then checked out Smash’s blogroll of other “live from Iraq” types. Nearly all are home or else on their way home. The squeaky blogger gets the discharge?

Report: U.S. Army extends tour of reserves in Iraq

WASHINGTON (Reuters) –The U.S. Army has ordered thousands of National Guard and Army Reserve forces in Iraq and nearby countries to extend their tours of duty to a year, The Washington Post reported Tuesday.

The new order, requiring 12-month tours, means many Guard and Army Reserve troops could have their original yearlong mobilizations extended for anywhere from one to six months, the newspaper said, citing unnamed Army officials.

The Army issued the new policy late Friday night but made no formal announcement of the change, the report said.

While defense officials have had authority since the September 11, 2001, attacks to activate Guard and reserve troops for two years, most have been called up for only a year of total service, the newspaper reported.

A Pentagon spokesman was not immediately available for comment early Tuesday.

There are 122,000 Army personnel in Iraq, including 3,000 National Guard soldiers and 5,000 reservists, Army officials told the Post. Another 5,000 Guard soldiers and 7,000 reservists are serving in Kuwait.

Army officials told the newspaper that the scarcity of active-duty forces and security concerns in Iraq made it necessary to keep a large number of Guard and Reserve troops in the region as long as possible, The Post reported.

“Because of the dynamic situation in theater, we had to take a look at our overseas forces to make sure we were maximizing their deployment opportunity,” one Army official was quoted as saying.

The newspaper reported that the new deployment policy only applies to those now serving in Iraq and will not affect Guard and Reserve troops deploying in the future, including two National Guard brigades scheduled to deploy on six-month tours in coming months.

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Copyright 2003 Reuters. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

 
Find this article at:
http://edition.cnn.com/2003/WORLD/meast/09/09/sprj.irq.reserves.reut

 

Why do elephants paint their toenails red? So they can hide in cherry trees.

I once bought a book of surrealist humor, and boy, non sequitur jokes lose flavor faster than yesterday’s gum unstuck from your brother’s bedpost. Terry Pratchett has mastered a different, funnier trick I call a “con sequitur”, with “con” as in “con man” or “confidence trick.”

That is, Pratchett sets you up with some confident sense of what he’s about to say–then, just as you glimpse the banana peel under your foot, he sneaks up and pulls the rug out from under it. You end up someplace you never expected to go–though it makes perfect sense, now you come to notice. Some examples:

(The wizard) “drew himself up to his full width…” (Equal Rites, 181)

(Granny Weatherwax thinks about bringing her goats to the slums of Ankh-Morpork) “The smell might be a problem, but the goats would just have to learn to deal with it.”  (Equal Rites, 165)

“Granny had nothing against fortune-telling as long as it was done badly by someone who had no talent for it.”  (Equal Rites, 187)

“…the far reaches of the multiplexed cosmos known to the few astrophysicists who have taken really bad acid.”  (Mort, 49)

My own non-sequitur here: I discovered Discworld just before leaving for Sweden, and I was disappointed that Uppsala’s English bookstore had no Terry Pratchett in its sci fi section. I was disappointed until I noticed they had given Pratchett his own separate little bookcase. Woo hoo! If you aren’t already an addict, I urge you to try one–just one. I started with Light Fantastic. But I can quit anytime I want, honest….

Frank says there are two kinds of politics–real politics and pop politics–he says it’s like the difference between “real” music and pop music. Pop politics is aimed at some part of us all that lies well south of our brains. It’s pop politics to try to make Bush off limits to criticism because he is “O*U*R President”–while forgetting the venom Republicans spewed at Clinton.

But I digress—

Threre’s a hot political battle now in Sweden. Because I don’t read Swedish, all I can pick up on is the “pop politics”–the images and slogans from both sides. Also the money–it’s very clear that one side of this battle has spent about ten times more money than the other. I see this as a foretaste of the next presidential elections, where Bush will have almost unlimited funds from his supporters.

The Swedish battle is all about the Euro–should Sweden give up its old currency (Swedish kronors) and use the new European money now shared by most of the EEC, though not by England. The “Vote yes” group has so much more money than their opponents (mainly organized labor) that I can’t help wondering how they expect to get back all the money they’re spending.  

This computer just ate a couple of paragraphs about the ding-dong battle of Yes versus No, with the Yes team’s loud professionally-orchestrated “D*I*N*G” omnipresent in billboards, busstops, and subways. The No team response is a pitiful “dong”–(insert “maximize-your-mini-package” joke here)–three poster designs and a few orange t-shirts.

Slogans on both sides are pure “pop” politics. Yes! Euro is the future–without Euros, Sweden will be a pitiful lonely outcast. No! Accepting the Euro means losing control over our economy to foreign bureaucrats who don’t care about Swedish workers, children, old people–you get the idea.

The “No” team mounted a final “surprise” effect on Thursday, putting up a bunch of their posters so that for the first time they had, maybe, as many as one-tenth as many as those urging “Yes”.  The “Yes” team’s final push is a lot more impressive–about ten well-scrubbed good-looking young people the Uppsala City Square, handing out leaflets and wearing buttons that say “Ask me about the Euro”. I imagine a similar effort is going on all over Swedish this week–the vote is ongoing, but ends Sept. 14.

With no grasp of the principles involved, I await with enormous interest the final result. It’s amazing how loudly money talks in elections–and when you don’t speak the local language.