Peter Krupa

Gauche addresses the 20-something, 21st century decision of “what sort of a cog you should be.” I started wondering this myself upon the creeping realization that I’ll probably never be great, so maybe I should think of life not as going anywhere, but just being. Hence, the cog thing. All that just to point out my favorite paragraph of the month:

This is to missed chances and regrets, to the ugly one that would have loved you forever, to wondering whether that dog might have made it if you hadn’t put him to sleep, to shabby couches and beat-up card tables and passing out on the porch, to diamonds, cold and hard. A diamond can cut through butter, but here’s the thing: you like butter.

Every time I read something like this, I realize that most of the media I consume on a daily basis is utter shit.

I remember when I was studying for my English lit degree, a professor (I think it was Dr. Whalen) told us about a character in a Victorian novel - one of those philanthropist matrons - whose particular project was to raise money to send waistcoats to naked little African children. Her thinking was that they’re naked, so of course they need waistcoats. Doesn’t everyone?

Which brings me to the so-called “third-world laptop.” I’m sure you’ve read about it somewhere by now, but in case you haven’t the New York Times today has a big long front page piece about it. The gist of it is that some MIT whiz-kid/rich guy has designed a stripped-down laptop that can be built for around $150. The goal is to distribute it to students in developing countries and spread education through access to information.

I’m posting this so that, five years from now, when everyone looks back and says, “Well, that was a stupid idea,” I can point out that I thought it was a stupid idea a long time ago. Of course, I’m not the only one trashing it. None other than Bill Gates, “Microsoft’s chairman and a leading philanthropist for the third world, has questioned whether the concept is ‘just taking what we do in the rich world’ and assuming that that is something good for the developing world, too.”

Not that Bill Gates is always right, but he has a point. This sort of idea frustrates the hell out of me, because even though the problems with it are so goddamn obvious, the professional do-gooders charge on ahead. Think about it: What’s the first thing a poor family is going to do when their 6-year-old comes walking through the door clutching a shiny new laptop? That’s right, they’re going to sell it.

Or they’ll use it to prop up a corner of the bed once that loony Wi-Fi “mesh” proves to be as useless as it sounds. I mean, shit, I can barely get my laptop to work, and I have a steady power supply, literacy skills, a college education, and cable internet. With all the training sessions these kids are going to need to use the damn laptop, they could be learning algebra.

Of course, proponents will argue that once the children have the laptops and know how to use them, they will teach themselves algebra using the internet. Which, you know, is what everyone does with the internet.

And that’s to say nothing of the pedagogy of the whole thing. Obviously I’m not the most qualified person to riff on that, but in third-world education systems with few teachers, fewer classrooms, and cultural and structural issues like AIDS, violent crime, and rampant corruption, it strikes me as unlikely that giving laptops to children is going to do any good at all. It’s sort of like icing without cake.

Or waistcoats without clothing.

Just doing a little research on Hillary Clinton, and this quote from a speech at a United Auto Workers conference struck me as amusing:

When Sputnik went up in 1957 - many of you weren’t around then, but I was - when Sputnik went up Americans were shocked. No one thought the Soviet Union could beat us into space. So what did we do? Sit around and let the market take care of it? I don’t think so. We created an agency within the defense department, poured billions of dollars in it and began to win the race for space. We need to do the same thing in energy.

Hey, kick-ass! Screw the free market, the key to winning the Cold War was government spending! We beat those damn Russians, and we “poured billions of dollars in it” and we got ourselves all the way to the moon, and then stopped and asked ourselves, “Wait… what are we doing on the fucking moon?”

On second thought, maybe we should let the market take care of it.

I was thinking earlier today that the Russians must be pretty stupid (or bold) to poison a former KGB agent with a rare radioactive heavy metal found mainly in nuclear complexes and named after 19th-century Poland. It’s not like your average everyday hoodlum is going to have bits of polonium-210 kicking around in his pocket lint.

On the other hand.

It turns out that, like exotic pornography and rare episodes of the Howdy-Doody show, polonium-210 can be had on the internet for a paltry $69. This is because although it has no cure and destroys you from the inside once ingested, its alpha-particle radiation will not penetrate skin and poses no threat from a distance of more than a few centimeters. Therefore, no regulation.

Turns out those Ruskies were smarter than I thought, and can have their cake whilst eating it - bumping off former KGB agents with both plausible deniability, and super-cool exotic poison.

(Hat-tip to DefenseTech.org and Information Week for the original story.)

UPDATE: This poisoning thing is pretty damn fascinating. ArmsControlWonk.com has a nice play-by-play. Turns out my first thought was right: polonium-210 is almost impossible to obtain in lethal quantities unless you have a particle accellerator in your backyard. The $69 sample mentioned above? Yeah, you would need about 45,000 of those, which would run you in the neighborhood of $3 million. And given its 138-day half-life, good luck putting all that together before it disappears. Bottom line is, someone very powerful and wealthy must have been behind the poisoning.

Synaesthesia is a rare condition in which people’s senses become crossed: for example music takes on colors, 5+2=orange, etc. But in an even rarer variety, reports the New York Times, certain words have flavors attached to them:

It can be unpleasant … One subject, Dr. Simner said, hates driving, because the road signs flood his mouth with everything from pistachio ice cream to ear wax.

And Dr. Simner has yet to figure out any logical pattern.

For example, the word “mince” makes one subject taste mincemeat, but so do rhymes like “prince.” Words with a soft “g,” as in “roger” or “edge,” make him taste sausage. But another subject, hearing “castanets,” tastes tuna fish. Another can taste only proper names: John is his cornbread, William his potatoes.

They cannot explain the links, she said. There is no Proustian madeleine moment — the flavors are just there.

But all have had the condition since childhood, so chocolate is commonly tasted, while olives and gin are not.

I wouldn’t consider myself a Type-B personality. In fact, I think the existence of a so-called “Type-B” personality group is a myth foisted upon us by a very small, hellish group that really does exist: the Type-A’s.

Type-A personalities exist all right, and the “A” stands for “asshole.” They exist to take the fun out of everything. These are the people that make lists, set their watches five minutes ahead, keep datebooks, shave and moisturize daily, and never, ever stop tapping on their fucking Blackberries. They also develop expensive, obsessive-compulsive tastes in everything from wine, coffee, and sheets, to olive oil, heirloom tomatoes, and, I don’t know, bridesmaid gowns.

Which brings me to the current object of my visceral hatred. Now that the Type-A’s have ruined weddings by making the prospect of planning one so terrifying that there exist professional “wedding planners” (who, I might add, are also Type-A’s - a conspiracy, I imagine), they’re now going after our escape plan: elopement.

Yes folks, there is now a correct fucking way to elope, and a fucking Web site to help you “plan” your elopement. It’s called “Let’s Run Off! Elopements Made Easy.” Thanks, but it already fucking was! This is a sure-fire sign of Type-A involvement, because only Type-A’s feel the need to make simple things really goddamn complicated (”10 easy steps for the perfect Mac & Cheese!”).

Apparently, to make elopement easy you need a series of checklists (O, joy!), a bunch of advice on how to make it “perfect,” and a pile of suggestions for how to “celebrate” your elopement with parties.

Eloping used to be the way to escape an evil step-mother, or marry that common girl who your family does not approve of, or marry that 45-year-old Greek man who works the late shift at 7/11. There were no parties, no gifts, and no Hawaiian vacations. But there was a lot of sex, post-coital cigarettes, and convenience-store champagne, all in the safe confines of a $40-a-night motel room off I-80 on the way to Denver.

What’s my point? Just that the Type-A’s are ruining America. What are the phrases you find in every single job advertisement? “Ability to multi-task. Strong organizational skills. Must enjoy working long hours for meager pay in a goal-oriented environment.”

It’s enough to make me want to elope… back to Costa Rica.

The Calorie Restriction diet has been making the media rounds since that New York magazine article, most recently popping up on Salon.com. I fear it really will be the next fad diet, only this time instead of making people constipated, it will kill them of starvation when they miscalculate their daily nutrients.

For the people who practice it, the CR diet is a perfect reflection of the society in which they live. That is, post-religious, hyper-individualistic, work-a-holic, obsessive. For one thing, it takes an unbelievable amount of dedication and after-hours discipline - you can never take a break, and you like it that way. Neither can you have children because the diet kills the libido of men and stops women from ovulating, but that shouldn’t be a deal-breaker for a hyper-individualist.

As for the post-religious, CR comes along at the perfect moment in history. It’s scary to think that we are mortal, and ours is the generation that didn’t even go to Sunday school. CR fills that gap. It fulfills the human brain’s peculiar need to convince itself of its own immortality.

Sure, 150 years isn’t very long. But if you start starving yourself at 35, it might seem like an eternity.

Those geniuses over at DefenseTech.org are having a wonderful award contest called “The Deadlies:” a quest to find the most dangerous technology of all time. A typical entry is General Electric’s inflatable space escape pod, which is more or less guaranteed to kill any would-be escapees:

To use it, an astronaut first would don a spacesuit and remove the 200-pound packaged escape system from a large suitcase-sized container aboard the spacecraft.

Then the person would unfold a 6-foot-long bag made of clear Mylar plastic and step into one end of it.

Attached and bonded to the rear of the bag was an ablative heat shield about one-quarter inch (6.3 millimeters) thick. Inside the bag were two canisters of white polyurethane foam, a portable rocket motor with twin exhaust nozzles that protruded through the Mylar cover, a parachute, radio equipment and a survival kit.

Once inside the bag, the astronaut would don a harness, zip the bag closed and float out the hatch of the spacecraft.

Out in space the astronaut would activate the foam canisters, which would inflate the bag into the shape of a blunt cone within a few minutes.

Then the astronaut would orient the bag with the rocket motor so that the blunt end faced towards Earth. That way, atmospheric heat upon reentry would char only the heat shield.

Sounds like fun. You go first.

Other entries include the Davy Crockett nuclear bazooka, a car whose breaks are controled with a BlueTooth wireless connection, a personal helicopter powered by what appears to be a lawnmower engine, and the Hungry-Man All Day Breakfast, which contains 1,030 calories, 64 grams of fat, and 2,090 mg of sodium.

Check out the rest of the entries, and feel free to send suggestions.

Michael Richards’ career is over. Or at least it definitely should be. Last Friday, he went on a five-minute tirade on stage during a stand-up routine after two black guys heckled him. The same people who brought you the Mel Gibson crack up (TMZ.com) are hosting a video of the Richards incident, and as one of my esteemed colleagues here at work put it, “Wow. He makes Mel Gibson look like Martin Luther King Jr.”

Specifically, during this five-minute tirade, Richards repeatedly - repeatedly - called the men “niggers,” at one point saying, “Shut up! Fifty years ago we’d have you upside down with a fucking fork up your ass!” followed by “Throw his ass out! He’s a nigger!”

I stopped watching the video about half-way because it was making me nauseated, but you can see it here if you want.

Last night, Richards went on David Letterman and assured us, “I’m not a racist. That’s what’s so insane about this.”

It’s a bit like killing someone, then marveling to the judge that “I’m not even a murderer! That’s what’s so insane about this.” Say goodnight to Michael Richards. He’s lucky he’s already a failure or people might be making an even bigger ruckus about this.

The common assumption these days is that the Democrats swept to victory because Americans want out of Iraq. Assuming that’s true, and that Democrats - as their name would imply - will rush to do the will of the majority, what does this realistically mean for Iraq? The New Yorker offers a chilling prediction:

The argument that Iraq would be better off on its own is a self-serving illusion that seems to offer Americans a win-win solution to a lose-lose problem. Like so much about this war, it has more to do with politics here than reality there. Such wishful thinking (reminiscent of the sweets-and-flowers variety that preceded the war) would have pernicious consequences, as the United States fails to anticipate one disaster after another in the wake of its departure: ethnic cleansing on a large scale, refugees pouring across Iraq’s borders, incursions by neighboring armies, and the slaughter of Iraqis who had joined the American project.

As bad as invading Iraq may have been, I can’t help but think that leaving it to plunge itself into genocide would probably be worse. Unfortunately, as a party, and as they’ve demonstrated with their shifting positions on the Iraq war, Democrats, rather than leading us anywhere, can primarily be relied upon to echo disgruntledness. And so even if it is a matter of choosing genocide, they might be willing to yank the rug out from under Iraq, and to hell with it all.

This wouldn’t be very liberal, or humanitarian. But unfortunately, it might be popular.