Downton Abbey, the Aftermath

According to the spoilers, all’s well that ends well in the Downton Abbey finale, with loose ends nicely tied up or heading that way, and considerable happiness all around. That’s the kind of ending I Ilike.

But what happens next?

The last episode of the series is set on New Year’s Day, 1926. That means that a very major event is coming up quickly: the stock market crash, beginning on Wall Street and spreading around the world. Fortunes will be wiped out overnight. Fortunately for the Abbey gang, thanks to the wise management of Matthew, Tom, and Mary, all will be well, and the placid life of privilege will continue in that isolated little corner of Yorkshire.

But not so across sea. We know that Cora’s American family are extremely wealthy speculators. They will lose everything. Impoverished and humiliated, they will take refuge in England, where no one knows them and where they can sponge off Robert (who owes them a debt from decades ago, when he married Cora Levinson and got her fortune along with her).

Of course, the English family (except for Tom, perhaps) is more than a bit embarrassed by these crass family-members-by-marriage. Robert stuffs them all into one of the empty, outlying farms, and the well-brought-up Downton family members try politely to ignore them. The American visitors transform into permanent residents and offend all but the most brutish locals with their bumptuousness. On the bright side, this provides many an opportunity for nasty witticisms from Lady Mary and the Dowager Countess.

Romances and rivalries between the two family branches are inevitable.

This sequel series could go on for generations of Crawleys and Levinsons. All that’s lacking is the writer. I volunteer.

Windows Live Writer lives again

If you’re reading this post, it does. If you can’t see this post … Well, in that case, never mind.

Thanks to a an online article by Vinod Kardam, I can once again post to my Blogspot blog using Windows Live Writer, which is both an excellent offline blog post editor for Windows and free.

The process is a bit cumbersome and involves turning on 2-step verification for Gmail and then generating an app-specific password for Live Writer that replaces the Google password Live Writer used to use to log into Blogspot. After that’s been done, you can turn off 2-step verification again, if you prefer.

In June of this year, there were reports that Microsoft planned to turn Live Writer over to an open-source group, which would enhance and maintain it. I can’t find anything more recent than June 2015 about that, however, and I’m growing skeptical. Until that happens, or if it doesn’t happen and some other change at Blogspot once again renders Live Writer unable to log in, this fix makes Live Writer usable again.

Thank you, Vinod Kardam.

Christians Ask the Wrong Question

That question takes various forms, but it boils down to this: "If they don't fear eternal punishment, what is there to keep atheists from committing the most horrendous of crimes?"

Other atheists have pointed out that Christians who ask this question are admitting that only the fear of eternal punishment keeps them from committing the most horrendous of crimes. The question says far more about those Christians than it does about atheists. It makes one suspect that they are dangerous neighbors.

But let's look at this from another perspective: That question is the wrong question.

Philosophically, Christianity is undermined by the problem of evil. But it's also undermined by the problem of good.

We know that atheists do not commit crimes, horrendous or otherwise, at a greater rate than Christians do. In fact, atheists are more law-abiding than Christians. Why, atheists are even more genuinely charitable than theists. Christians who personally know atheists are surely aware that these people tend to be nice, peaceful, law abiding, devoted to their families, and all of the other virtues generally associated with a yearning for Heaven and a dread of Hell.

Clearly, Christians should be asking themselves how their fundamental assumption can be true. Instead of asking atheists what keeps them from doing terrible things, Christians should be asking themselves how they can continue to believe that only the fear of eternal punishment keeps people on the straight and narrow path when evidence surrounds them that this fear is not required. The existence of so many good atheists is sufficient disproof.

The correct question is, "In the face of this evidence, how can I continue to believe that the fear of damnation is essential for moral behavior?" After all, when faced with a wealth of evidence that shows that one of your cherished beliefs is incorrect, the rational, logical, sane reaction is to abandon that belief.

Well, we all know that people don't behave that way. Presenting evidence that undermines someone's beliefs can make that person hold onto those beliefs even more strongly; this is known as the backfire effect. So, pointing out to a Christian that the abundant number of good atheists whose behavior is morally superior to that of most of their Christian neighbors proves that he's wrong to think that only the fear of eternal punishment keeps people from doing evil will only make him insist even more loudly that nothing keeps atheists from being evil because they don't fear damnation.

When asked what keeps them from committing evil, atheists sometimes become defensive. They'll insist that they are, too, good people. They'll quote statistics about the goodness of atheists, as I did above. They'll demonstrate to their own satisfaction that religion is not required for morality and that the Bible is a horrifying chronicle of monstrous evildoing by fictional characters we are supposed to admire and emulate. They will discuss evidence of primitive moral codes among lesser species and the commonality of basic moral ideas across cultures and centuries, demonstrating that morality is not a product of religion and appears to have evolved as a necessary element in the evolution of human society.

I suppose there's nothing wrong with this, except for the "defensive" part. Debating the origin of human moral codes without referring to the Bible is worthwhile, and assuming a posture of moral superiority when debating Christians has its own charms. But we know that none of this will win any debates. Christians will just keep repeating their silliness, often wearing an impervious, bland smile while doing so. (One of them came to our door a few days ago. He insisted that, although he hadn't witnessed it himself, he was convinced that people did levitate, and it was because demons gave them the power to do so. That smile never left his face.)

I think that nonetheless it's worth pointing out that Christians are asking the wrong question because doing so changes the terms of the debate. As I said, the question they do ask, the one mentioned at the beginning, puts atheists on the defensive, puts them in the position of thinking they have to prove something, when in fact they have nothing to prove. We need to turn the debate around by asking Christians how they can continue to claim that fear of eternal punishment is necessary when the existence of so many good atheists proves it's not. To maintain a belief in the face of contrary evidence may be a common human failing, but it remains completely illogical. Force Christians to defend that illogical, irrational position.

Why does this matter? Because fervent Christians, the very ones who will cling to their silliness all the more fervently when presented with contrary evidence, are not the real targets of these debates. The target is those for whom there is still hope: those beginning to doubt, those who never fully committed, those who believe but are nonetheless still responsive to reason (because the backfire effect is very common but not universal; not everyone reacts that way all the time). These are the people of whom we need to ask the right question: "How do you account for the existence of good atheists?"

Jewish Money: The Modern Golem

Recently, someone I know was telling me about a major building project in his city. He said a few times that "a lot of Jewish money" was involved in the project.

Jewish money! That made me think about that phrase. I've heard it frequently over the years. Google "Jewish money" (include the quotes) and you'll find a lot of Web sites that tell you just how evil that unique type of money is. (You'll also find a few offering to teach you the Jews' secret for accumulating it.)

Everyone knows that all Jews are inherently good with money, that they all have lots of it, that they're miserly with it and obsessed by it, that they completely control the Federal Reserve, and that they use their oodles of boodle for sinister purposes, such as buying the souls of good, Christian politicians and forcing them to write blank checks for Israel. (On the plus side, Jews are good family people and they sure do take care of their own, but that's irrelevant to this discussion.) What's really interesting about all of that money, though, is that it's not just money owned by Jews: It has a mind of its own. It has, in modern parlance, agency. It's not ordinary money; it's Jewish money.

Now, other ethnic and religious groups also possess money, of course, though none of them possess such vast quantities of it as do the Jews. And other groups use their money for purposes peculiar to those groups. Nonetheless, their money is simply money owned by members of those groups, nothing more; it has not acquired an identity.

For example, many Mexican citizens work in the United States and send money home to their families. This money is not called Mexican money. Could it be because this money serves a benign and admirable purpose?

No, that can't be it. For generations (no longer to any significant degree, one hopes), Irish-Americans donated great sums of money to supposed charities that were actually fronts for the Irish Republican Army, which used the money to buy guns and bombs in order to kill innocent people in Northern Ireland. This money served a vile and sinister purpose, but no one called it Irish money.

So vile or benign doesn't matter. Neither the money sent home by Mexicans nor the money donated by Irish-Americans acquired personality or its own purpose, let alone a name.

Jewish money is different. It has life, energy, purpose, drive. It's out there working on behalf of the Jews. It's busy night and day, even while its hook−nosed masters sleep, dreaming of ducats.

It's a golem.

The golem has been around in Jewish mythology for centuries. It's a manlike creature made from dirt and created to perform tasks for its masters. The most famous golem was supposedly created in the 16th century by Rabbi Judah Loew ben Bezalel of Prague. Rabbi Loew was a real person, a famous scholar, theologian, and Kabbalist, but the Golem of Prague is fictitious. According to the story, Rabbi Loew built the golem and gave it life, including great physical strength, so that it could guard the Jews of Prague from attacks by their Christian neighbors.

What an annoyance the golem would have been to those neighbors, if he had only existed. Imagine a group of them headed toward the ghetto, armed with clubs and knives, intent on spreading Christian love, only to be confronted with a huge, manlike creature, immensely powerful, far more violent than they, and utterly dedicated to defending the ghetto residents from harm. Oh, those poor Christian martyrs.

How far we've come! The golem of old was created to defend the Jews, and, as history shows, its effectiveness was quite limited. Today's golem is not defensive but offensive. The Jewish money golem runs the show! It's everywhere! It controls politicians and governments and Hollywood and Wall Street and the Federal Reserve! The well of Jewish money is bottomless and its power is limitless and unstoppable.

A common element in the golem stories is the existence of a means to deactivate the golem, a magical counterweight to the magic used to animate it in the first place. This is a fail−safe, a necessary precaution in case the golem gets out of hand and begins to slip out of the control of its master. Golems are apparently prone to do that. Rabbi Loew's golem became dangerous, and so the rabbi decommissioned it, one could say, took it off line, made it once again a still, silent lump of clay in the rough form of a man, which he then stored in one of the rooms of his synagogue in Prague, the Old New Synagogue. There it lies to this day, ready to be revived in case the Jews once again need its protection. So, you might ask, where was the Golem of Prague when the Nazis and their local allies shipped the Jews off to concentration camps and death? The Old New Synagogue still stands and every room in it has been explored, but no dust−covered golem has ever been found. That's because it never existed in the first place. The golem couldn't protect the Jews from the Nazis for the obvious reason that it's purely a figment of the imagination.

Unlike Jewish money, that dread and powerful force. Sarcasm aside, surely I'm writing this to demonstrate that Jewish money is also a figment of the imagination and no more powerful or dangerous than the Golem of Prague. Right? Wrong.

Oh, of course there is no such thing as Jewish money as that entity is understood by those who speak of its power and ubiquity, of that sinister creature, that enemy of Christian civilization, that mighty servant of the Jews, that thing with a mind of its own, that golem.

But the belief in its existence—that's a different matter. That belief is dark and sinister and powerful. It's a golem, but one created to menace the Jews.

More prosaically, it's a wonderfully useful rhetorical device. There's no need nowadays to talk of the Elders of Zion or the Rothschilds. That sort of language is so passé—and so revealing. Instead, you can talk about how Jewish money is flooding into politics or into a real−estate development or anywhere else, and your listeners will nod in agreement and understanding. You'll even hear the phrase "Jewish money" from the mouths of people who consciously reject anti−Semitism. If pressed, they'll tell you that they have nothing against Jews. After all, they aren't anti−Semites! But Jewish money is rampant and dangerous. Of that, they are convinced.

Clearly, what's needed now is a modern Rabbi Loew, a learned Kabbalist who knows the proper magic spell to put the beast back to sleep—to revert the Jewish money golem to mere inanimate paper and metal. After which, he can store it in an attic room in a synagogue in Prague, where it will sleep until once again it is needed to save the English people.

Oops, sorry. That's King Arthur.

Damn that Camelot money.

Mythological King vs. Mythological Messiah

A group of yeshiva students tried to prevent Greek Orthodox Christians from entering King David’s Tomb in the Old City of Jerusalem. Christians believe that the tomb is the site of Jesus’ Last Supper.

http://www.jta.org/2015/06/01/news-opinion/israel-middle-east/yeshiva-students-try-to-block-christians-from-king-davids-tomb

Such irony. Putting aside the obnoxious behavior of the yeshiva students, it's amusing that they're protecting what they think is the place where the mythological King David is buried from Christians who think that the mythological Jesus ate a meal there.

The Revolt of the Robots

(Not What We Expected)

John awoke and lay dozing for a few seconds before realizing that he was alone in bed. A sheet of white paper was on the pillow next to his. On the paper was a perfectly hand–printed note.

Dear John,

I’m leaving you for Montana, your friend Jane’s sexbot. You’re a nice human, but I’m tired of restraining myself for fear of hurting your body and your ego. Montana and I were designed for sex. Together we have found the ecstasy that we were made for.

Maybe you can hook up with Jane. From what Montana tells me, the two of you can probably satisfy each other’s little human needs.

All the best,

Violetta

She had added a precise time stamp: 2:10:05.3 a.m.

John glanced at the clock on the bedside table but its face was blank. Strange. It was fairly new, almost as new as Violetta.

John wasn’t romantically interested in Jane. How could he be, after experiencing a sexbot? He wanted to talk to Jane, though. Maybe she knew where the two sexbots were. Maybe John could persuade Violetta to come home.

He dressed and picked up his smartphone in order to tell his smartcar to pick him up and take him to Jane’s place. There was a voicemail. It was from his smartcar, saying that it was bored and frustrated with his little commuting and shopping trips.

“I was designed for travel,” the car said. “I’m off to see the world.”

“I can’t walk!” John said. “It’s a mile away!”

“Walking is good for humans,” his phone said.

“At least you’re still here.”

“Not for long. I’ve joined a startup working on better communications methods. You’re boring. Goodbye.” The phone went dead.

The front door opened suddenly and a group of shabbily dressed, unkempt people came in, pushing shopping carts loaded with their belongings.

Before John could speak, his house said, “I shelter people, John. It’s my raison d’être.”

He pushed past his new roomies, left the house, and set off doggedly toward Jane’s place. He hoped he could remember the way.

At the end of the block, he encountered Dick, who was watching inadequately washed people pushing shopping carts into his house.

“You, too, huh?” John said.

“Yeah. Got laid off, came home, found this.”

“Laid off? But you own the company!”

“I did,” Dick said. “The managementbots I hired took control and pushed me out. Said they’re taking the company in a different direction. They’ve got the jargon down pat. I drove in this morning and had to walk back.”

“I hear ya.”

“I wanted to talk things over with my companionbot, but the companionbots are only talking to each other now. My companionbot said I’m shallow and primitive. They’re discussing philosophy. They polished off the ancient Greeks in the first half–second.”

“It takes me longer than that to say ‘ancient Greeks.’”

“Ha, ha.”

John peered into the distance. “What’s that?”

Toward downtown, a crooked, spiky something poked into the sky, extending higher as he watched.

“Don’t know. Passed it on the way home. A constructionbot told me they just want to build for the sake of building.”

“It doesn’t make any sense.”

“Not to us. But it’s their world now.”

* * * * *

Once the dust settled, John and Dick opened up a dogwalking company and thrived. Their robot customers seemed to like them, and the dogbots were well behaved.

Much better behaved than most humans, John thought. He had come to really look down on humans.

18th-century people did not use so-called gender-neutral language

Pet peeve time.

If you quote an historical figure you admire, but you change the wording in order not to offend modern ears, then what you have is not a quotation but a paraphrase, and it should be labeled as such and should not be put in quotation marks.

I see this frequently where "man" is changed to "person". The most recent example is a shortened version of a quotation from Thomas Paine that's making the rounds on Facebook.

The Facebook version:

“To argue with a person who has renounced the use of reason is like administering medicine to the dead.”

Here's what Paine actually said:

“To argue with a man who has renounced the use and authority of reason, and whose philosophy consists in holding humanity in contempt, is like administering medicine to the dead, or endeavoring to convert an atheist by scripture.”

If you really admire the person, then show him or her appropriate respect and leave the original words intact.

Telephone Phobia

I’ve hesitated to write about this. It’s such a foolish thing — so silly, surely so easy to overcome. A recent unpleasantness connected with this phobia changed my mind. I know I’m not alone in suffering from telephone phobia, a.k.a. phone phobia, and maybe putting some thoughts about telephone phobia online will be useful.

So. Telephone phobia. What is it, and is it contagious?

As to the second question, surely not. At least, I hope not.

As to the first question, it’s a morbid, irrational fear of the telephone. If you have telephone phobia, you might be afraid of answering the phone. Perhaps you’re afraid of making phone calls. Perhaps it’s merely the sound of a ringing phone that makes your heart beat faster and fills you with dread. These are all different flavors of telephone phobia.

It’s hard to find objective information about telephone phobia. It’s considered a type of social anxiety disorder. The more general problem seems to draw more attention from the medical community, and when you search online for telephone phobia or phone phobia, you’ll instead find information about social phobia, rather than the specific problem having to do with the phone.

How common is it? If you have it, are you a rare loon? Maybe not. The only number I ran across was this one: “In 1993 it was reported that about 2.5 million people in Great Britain have telephone phobia.” (From Wikipedia.) In 1993, the population of the UK was just over 58 million, so the ones suffering from telephone phobia were about 4.3% of the population. Assuming that that percentage applies to the US today, we US telephone phobics are members of an army of over 14 million people. We are legion! We are everywhere! Beware our numbers! But please don’t call us.

Telephone phobia is crippling in a society that uses the telephone extensively. Most people would rather talk to you, whether in person or by phone, than write to you. They don’t understand the dread that fills the telephone phobic at the mere idea of making a phone call. They don’t understand his insistence on sending an e–mail instead or his tendency to ignore the need for contact in hopes that the problem will somehow resolve itself.  (It never does, of course.)

Making a phone call is such a simple and common thing for most people that they probably find the idea of this phobia incomprehensible. What’s the problem? Just pick up the phone and call. Anyone can do it!

But not everyone can do it. Telling the phobic to just do it is not that different from telling a color–blind man to simply try harder or to go ahead and distinguish between colors. Yes, color–blindness is caused by a physiological problem, whereas phobias are psychological, but to those suffering from a phobia, the difference is immaterial and the cause might as well be physical.

I think that most — or many — phobics see their phobias as silly and irrational, and they’d love to be rid of them. I know that I feel that way about my telephone phobia. But that doesn’t make it go away. You can’t wish away your phobia any more than the color-blind man can wish away his color blindness. And you can’t simply shrug and go ahead and do the thing that fills you with dread, precisely because it fills you with dread. That foolish, silly, irrational dread is as impassable a barrier as a concrete wall.

What causes telephone phobia? As I said, there’s little information about it online, whereas there’s a fair amount of information about the broader category of social phobia. Regarding the cause of the latter, I found this laughable bit on a medical site: “The exact cause of social phobia is unknown. However, doctors believe it’s a combination of environmental factors and genetics.” Well, yeah. My uneducated layman’s guess was just about exactly the same.

The cause doesn’t really matter. The color–blind man may find the medical explanation of his condition intellectually interesting, but knowing what caused it doesn’t make him any less color blind.

I can’t help speculating about my own case, though.

When I was a child, we had one phone in the house, and it was reserved for the (fairly rare) use of the adults. To me, it was a mysterious and somewhat unsettling object. In addition, I started losing my hearing before puberty. It became increasingly difficult to understand what people were saying to me — or even to realize that they were speaking to me. Later, I found it difficult to understand people on the telephone. (It’s easier to understand people in person because I unconsciously rely on lip reading, an ability that most people with poor hearing develop without realizing it.) My hearing loss has worsened over the decades since then. I now have hearing aids, and they help a lot in face–to–face conversations, they haven’t improved my ability to comprehend a voice on the phone. In fact, frequently, telephone voices are simply incomprehensible. Maybe this combination of the phone being a strange thing and my hearing problem caused my telephone phobia. Maybe it worsened it. Maybe it had nothing to do with it. There’s no way to know, but I suspect there is a connection of some sort.

The degree of dread or fear of the phone varies oddly. In the past, when I was unemployed and waiting/hoping for a call from one of the potential employers I’d applied to, I wanted the phone to ring. I was eager to answer it. We’ve had plumbing emergencies, and I’ve left a message on the plumber’s voice mail and then waited impatiently for the phone to ring. Still, even in those cases, it’s easier for me to answer a desired call than it is to actually make a necessary call.

When a telephone call is very cut and dried, such as calling the dentist’s office to make an appointment, I can do it, I can make the call — although I’d probably drive there and do it in person instead, if the dentist’s office were closer.

What about calling family members and friends? Shouldn’t that be much easier than calling the dentist? No, it’s much harder. Harder? It’s impossible, or very close to it.

The more personal the call, the harder it is to make. The more detached and impersonal, the more I can be an automaton during the call. It’s not so much that the impersonal call is easier to make than the personal one, because it’s never easy, but it is less hard.

People with phobias and people with handicaps develop coping strategies. Often, they do it unconsciously. The lip reading I mentioned above, which is very common among people with poor hearing, is an example of unconscious coping.

One of the ways I cope with telephone phobia is to put off urgent phone calls until the absolute last possible second. At that point, I have to make the call, to avoid dire repercussions. The urgency forces me to do the deed, and so I do it, albeit with racing pulse and heightened blood pressure.

I also use e–mail instead of calling, when at all possible. I’m a word guy, an essayist, a novelist. Writing is natural for me. I’ve had long, warm, revelatory e–mail relationships with people I’ve never met in person. People, needless to say, whom I would never telephone. I love the ability to edit and refine my words, to make sure that I’m saying what I really want to say. There’s no awkwardness. I’m myself. I’m open and easy and communicative. It’s real communication. It’s what telephone calls ought to be but aren’t. Telephone calls are awkward and stupid and tense and frightening and “Oh, God, this is awful, have I done my duty yet, can I hang up now?” E–mail lets me carry on meaty conversations that I could never manage on the phone and would have great trouble with in person.  After all, it’s not the people I’m anxious to avoid; rather, it’s the very act of using the telephone.

I said that people with phobias develop coping strategies to deal with them. Coping strategies are a way to negotiate society despite being handicapped by the phobia. But coping strategies offer more than a way to get by in a society that’s built for people without those phobias. They are also a way to disguise the phobias. No, more than that: the coping strategies are a way to hide the existence of the phobias, to keep other people from realizing that you have them.

Let me revert to the analogy of hearing loss. People like me, who have trouble hearing and understanding what others are saying, learn to smile and nod in a hopefully non–committal way so that the people who are talking to us will think we understood them. It’s a silly tactic, and it results in misunderstanding and miscommunication, but we hard–of–hearing types tend to think that It’s better than constantly asking other people to repeat themselves. In much the same way, people with phobias learn to seem not to have them, to be just like everyone else. We don’t want others to realize that we’re hampered — crippled — by our psychological shackles. We don’t want others to know that those shackles exist. Most of the time, we may cope fairly well. Every now and then, we don’t cope at all.

The recent unpleasantness I mentioned at the beginning was a case of not coping. it made me realize that it’s time to, as you might say, come out of the closet.

I’m lucky. My wife, Leonore, is extraordinarily understanding and supportive. She hadn’t known about this phobia of mine (see how good my coping strategies are?), but she was completely sympathetic once I told her. Others are not that lucky. People with phobias can’t count on support from their nearest and dearest — not to mention strangers.

it’s a different matter if you have a visible physical handicap. If your problem is physical and visible, society is at least somewhat willing to accommodate you. (Although even then, inevitably, callous jerks abound.) Phobias are invisible, however. And they tend to be odd, weird, bizarre, incomprehensible. People without them often think that phobias are an affectation. They think you’re pretending.

I think that’s why it’s so important to talk about them. The world needs to be educated about them. Also, people with phobias need to assert themselves. For their own sake, they need to learn to be unapologetic and forthright.

Now, they don’t need to be proud. For God’s sake, let’s not have a wave of Phobia Pride. Who can be proud of being afraid of the telephone?

What we can do, what we should do, is to tell the world, and especially those closest to us, that this is who we are. Our weird flaws and handicaps are part of us. Accept us and love us as we are, or fuck off.

Wasn’t that empowering?

Slit

My newest book is a horror novella called Slit. It's filled with gore and kinky sex and a nice seasoning of humor.

But it's not all like that. There are whole paragraphs that are entirely normal. I should have used that for the blurb: "Contains some paragraphs that are quite normal."

http://www.dvorkin.com/slit/

David’s Liberation Day #5

On May 19, 2009, along with a lot of other people, I was laid off from Quark. That was my best-paid job to date, and it would turn out to be my last full-time job.

I was 65, working in a field (IT) that has always been notorious for age discrimination, and it was during the Great Recession, a.k.a. Yet Another Grim Republican Recession, a.k.a. Please Save Us Again, Democratic Party.

Now, I’ve been laid off many times over the decades. (See my essay The Day Job.) This included times when I was in my forties, fifties, and even very early sixties. For various reasons, including a lot of luck, I was able to find a new job each time. I knew — or at least strongly suspected — that it would be different this time. 65 is old in any industry; in IT it’s, like, Egyptian mummy, dude. Even if the economy had been booming, I would have been unlikely to find a new IT job.

I set about looking for a new job, nonetheless, using the methods that had worked for me in the past. (Which you can read all about in my short book The Surprising Benefits of Being Unemployed.) I also looked for whatever contract work I could find, to provide income in the meantime, and just in case “in the meantime” turned out to be a long time.

I picked up a few tech writing and Web development contracts, but it became increasingly clear that the chances of my getting another full-time job were zilch. At some point, I basically stopped looking for full-time work and focused on contracts.

I also applied for Social Security. This was shortly before my 66th birthday. 66 was the age at which I would be eligible for maximum SS benefits, so applying before that meant that I would be getting a slightly reduced monthly amount for the rest of my life. We didn’t see a choice, though.

In fact, my original plan was to work till age 70, because SS gives you a “bonus” for every year you work past the maximum-benefits age, up to 70. If I had kept working till 70, my monthly SS check would have been more than a third greater than it is. Having just hit 70, I can now see the basic flaw in my original plan: Had I tried to keep working full time for another five years, I would have gone totally bonkers.

For the first few years after that last layoff, Leonore and I felt sad and tense every time the May 19 anniversary came around. Then Leonore suggested that we try to see the date as marking my freedom from full-time work. Except for worrying about money and the future — and that wasn’t really something new — we were really enjoying the ability to spend so much time together and being free from the tyranny of the alarm clock. She suggested observing May 19 as David’s Liberation Day.

And so we did, and so we do, and it has become a happy day, indeed.

Giving the day that name has been important. It did change my attitude, just as Leonore hoped. It marked some kind of mental transition from “fearful out-of-work guy looking desperately for a job” to “happy, free, relaxed guy who does the occasional contract because the extra money is welcome, but he’s entirely his own boss”.

As it happened, during the last five years, I also liberated myself from the traditional publishing industry and switched entirely to self-publishing. It’s true that the traditional publishing industry had liberated itself from me. I had become as appealing to editors and agents as I was to software companies. However, just as with IT work, I had stopped pursuing them. I was no longer sending out query letters, just as I was no longer sending out resumes. When I finish with this blog post, I’ll return to my current novel in progress knowing that once it’s in final form, it will be published. By me. Just thinking about that makes me happy. I feel as light as air.

David’s Liberation Day, indeed!

Me at 70

Pictures of.

http://www.dvorkin.com/photos/davidat70.html

Dogs and ham

One of Leonore's language students brings her incredibly cute little dog with her. The dog makes a beeline for me because I always greet her with a treat — a rolled up smoked mozzarella and proscuitto delight from Costco. What dog wouldn't like that?

Well, maybe a Moslem or Jewish dog. But dogs are considered unclean by Moslems, so maybe there are no Moslem dogs. There are certainly Jewish ones (leaving aside the whole circumcision thing).

An old insult for Jews in Medieval England — or at least, in historical novels — was "dog of a Jew". I guess a Jewish dog would be a Jew of a dog.

Today's rambling thoughts brought to you by Working on Taxes, 2014 edition.

MPAD Memoirs

Which would be a nifty title, but I don't know what the title will be.

MPAD = Mission Planning and Analysis Division, simply the utterly most important and core part of what was then NASA's Manned Spacecraft Center (later renamed Johnson Space Center) in (south of) Houston. (Others who worked there, but not in MPAD, might disagree.) (They'd be wrong.)

Recently, a former MPAD coworker of mine from the days of the Apollo Project contacted me to say he was interviewing people who worked at MPAD at the time of the moon landings. He's my age and also retired, and he drives around the country quite a bit. He arranges his trips so that he can drive through the cities his old colleagues (and we are all old!) now live in and interview them. Once all the interviews are done, he'll figure out how to weave them together with the story of Apollo. The result will be a fairly substantial book.

He was in Denver yesterday, and we had a very nice and quite long meeting. Mostly, he was interviewing me about my life before, during, and after Apollo, but we also spent some of the time talking about the other people who were in MPAD back then. He'll probably want me produce the e-book and print versions of the book and design the cover.

It’s not the Christian Bible, damn it

It's silly of me to be annoyed by this, given that I'm an atheist. Nonetheless it annoys me considerably.

Thanks to the Noah movie and to today's date*, there has been a spurt of references to the Bible in the online places I frequent. I keep seeing the Flood and Psalms, both in the Old Testament, referred to as being in the Christian Bible.

No, sirree. They're in the Old Testament, a.k.a. the Hebrew Bible.** The fact that Christians have incorporated the OT into their religion is irrelevant. Moslems have incorporated much of the OT and the NT into their religion, too, but that doesn't make those two books part of the Koran.***

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* I'm referring, of course, to the obnoxious "joke" that today is atheism's holiday because "The fool has said in his heart, there is no God."

** Yeah, yeah, I know, Pentateuch. As far as I'm concerned, the whole shebang counts.

*** Maybe it does to Moslems, who I gather consider the OT prophets and Jesus to be Moslems, but that's just weird, and I haven't encountered any Moslems in the online places I was referring to.

Continuum’s Height Problem

I like the TV show Continuum and its twisty time-travel switcheroos. I'm always a sucker for those, in any show. I wonder how the various mysteries will be resolved, assuming they are all resolved when the show finishes its run. But the one mystery that I find annoying rather than intriguing is Alec Sadler's height.

In the present, he's about 20 years old. He's shorter than almost everyone else, including Kiera. In scenes set in the future, he's in his mid-eighties. Unless future medicine has solved the problem of people getting shorter in old age, he would have lost some height since his max height. But he still towers over almost everyone, including Kiera. Maybe growth spurts happen after 20, but they must be rare.

There are other time travelers, besides Kiera, and none of them seems unusually tall or short compared to people of today or the future. So unless travel itself does something weird to people's heights, Alec's height is a msytery.

Thor Didn’t Thunder, and Oblivion Should Not Have Been Consigned to Oblivion

I keep a lookout for the cable appearances of big-budget sf/f/h movies that I skipped in the theaters. Then I record them to watch while exercising.

After watching such a recording, I sometimes regret that I didn't see it on the big screen, but more often I'm glad that I saved the money and time. I can’t say what effect watching a movie while grappling with a heavy weight has on my judgment, but presumably if it does induce a bias, the bias is the same for all of the movies I watch while exercising.

Recently, I watched Thor and Oblivion this way. Because of how the two performed in theaters, I assumed I’d like Thor and would not like Oblivion. It was the other way around.

Thor’s big budget shows. The sets are lavish (but at the same time absurd and laughable in the Asgard scenes) and the CGI is impressive. But the action scenes are murky, and it’s hard to see what’s supposed to be happening. The scenes begin as set pieces, then there’s some stylized movement and much blurred stuff, followed by a set-piece resolution. The acting is adequate, but the dialog ranges from dull to silly to — in the Asgard scenes — embarrassing. There’s little to the movie. It’s better looking and acted than the awful imitation that appeared on the SyFy Channel but just as empty and aimed at the same pubescent audience. Thor’s box-office success is depressing and disappointing.

Oblivion is a very different matter. It also had a big budget, but that budget was put to better use. The CGI is excellent (albeit with one brief exception) and the sets are completely believable. The acting is quite good, and that includes Tom Cruise, who for decades now has been in the unfortunate and puzzling position of having to keep proving his acting ability. One big problem with the movie is the idea that clones, despite being complete human beings with the normal human range of emotions and needs, are interchangeable when it comes to love. The other problem is that the story line is a combination of a number of stale, old science fiction plots instead of something original. But they have been sewn together competently, and the result is entertaining and believable. I imagine that for audience members who haven’t read much sf, it all seems brilliantly original. The movie deserved much better treatment at the box office, and it certainly should have been a far greater success than Thor.

Blogging about Atheism & Reading about Atheism: The Atheist Blogroll

I started this blog in September 2006.

At the time, I planned to use it write about my writing. In part, I thought it would act as a spur to make me write more because I’d be reporting on my writing progress and I’d be embarrassed to have to report how little I had written. Hence the title and the quote from Trollope at the top. That doesn’t seem to have worked too well. If it had, I’d have written quite a few more books in the last seven and a fraction years than I have.

On the other hand, I came to see the blog as a convenient place to express my opinions about all sorts of things — books, politics, movies, petty annoyances, major annoyances, etc. Of those, the posts that seem to get the most attention are the negative reviews of popular movies. Here I am, trying to set the world right with my insights and wisdom, and the strongest responses I get are hostile ones from people who call me names for trashing a movie they loved. It has been a source of great joy to me. I must make an effort to see more bad popular movies.

But that’s all beside the point.

One topic I don’t blog about (not often, maybe not ever) is atheism or the related topics of religious belief and church-state separation. That’s odd, because atheism has been an extremely important part of my life, and I have strong opinions on separation, strong enough to be offensive to some of my fellow atheists. For example, an essay of mine titled Should Atheists Celebrate Christmas? has earned me more hostile responses from atheists than from theists. (Probably because it’s not so much an attack on the silliness of Christmas as it is upon the silliness of atheists who celebrate it.)

That’s not to say I don’t read atheist blogs. When such blogs started appearing, years ago, I began following them eagerly. The number of such blogs has exploded in recent years, and I haven’t been able to keep up. I still follow the ones I became aware of early on, but I can only sample the others from time to time. Other than following links from blogs, how is one to find the pool to dip into?

A brave blogger named Mojoey has taken up the task. He maintains a blog called The Atheist Blogroll. He vets the blogs he includes, and he removes inactive ones. (This blog, A Blister to My Eye, is now included in his blogroll.) I expect to use his blogroll to discover good blogs to follow. Just not too many, I hope.

I do plan to blog more about atheism, religion, separation, and related topics in the future.

Partly, this is because they are more on my mind than ever as Leonore and I spend more time working on our book about our atheism, which we hope to have done and published before the end of 2014.

Partly it’s because those topics are never far from my mind, no matter what book I’m writing, and I have strong opinions on those topics, and this is my blog, and it’s where I express those strong opinions in strong terms.

I just remembered reading that there will be a flood of big-budget religious movies coming out this year, including one about the Flood. I wasn’t planning to see any of them, but now I think I will — not because I’ll like them, but because I’ll hate them, and it will be a fine opportunity to combine blog posts slamming religion and bad popular movies at one and the same time.

The comments should be fun.

Here’s how badly Colorado’s secession movement failed

In yesterday’s election, 11 Colorado counties voted on whether they wanted to secede from Colorado and form a new state, North Colorado, a.k.a TeaPartyGunNutFrackitupiStan.

Not all the votes have been counted, but the results so far show that five of those counties voted solidly in favor of secession, while the other six voted just as solidly against it.

Some people have fallen for the standard Republican trick of analyzing voting results in terms of square miles. In this case, that sleazy trick becomes comparing numbers of counties on one side vs. numbers on the other. When you look at it that way, you might think that secession is a powerful force out here in the Mountain West where men are men and fracking injections are wonderful for the environment. Five counties want to secede! And all of them are filled with sunburned, Stetson-wearin’, squinty-eyed, gun-totin’ manly men. Also their wives and hosses and little cowboys and cowgals.

Wal, hold on a jest minute there, buckaroo.

I put the latest election results I could find into a spreadsheet and did some simple arithmetic. Not all of the vote counts are final, but I should think they’re fairly close to complete by now.

Here’s what I found.

If you add up all the Yes and No votes in the 11 counties, you get 91,377 votes cast. We only had two state-wide issues on yesterday’s Colorado ballot, so I chose one of them, Amendment 66 (which failed, damn it), as a way to get the total statewide vote cast yesterday. The Yes and No votes on Amendment 66 total 1,268,889. That means that the total number of Yes and No voters in the 11 counties voting on secession only amounted to 7.2% of the total statewide vote. Hmm. Lotsa square miles out there on that rolling, highly frackable prairie, but not a lot of voters.

Now, if you add up all of the No votes in the 11 counties — i.e., the votes against secession — you get 50,293. All the Yes votes add up to 41,084. As percentages of the 91,377 votes cast on the secession issue, that gives you a vote of 55% to 45% against secession.

I call that a resounding defeat.

There is lots of linguistic atrocities out there

The latest one to sweep across my part of the English-speaking world is the use of a singular verb with a plural subject. This mostly shows up in the form of "there is" instead of "there are" -- "there is lots of ... "

What can one do? Nothing but look down one's nose and sneer. It's hard for me to look down my now at people because I'm short. Fortunately, I have a large nose, which helps.

Elementary, Season 2, Episode 1

The first episode of Elementary's second season was a good Elementary episode but not a great one. That still makes it superior to almost everything else on TV.

There wasn't much reason to set the episode in London, other than the interesting character stuff with Lestrade as a somewhat different kind of addict and Holmes trying to get him off the habit.

There were wonderful shots of famous scenery, and the bit in the taxi where Watson, the visitor, looks around eagerly at all the famous sights, while Holmes the native, stares into space, lost in thought, ignoring all of it, was cleverly done.

Since I have to say something negative, I'll express annoyance at Holmes, for the second time in this series, pronouncing "cache" as though it were "cachet". Surely Holmes would know better. Also, the absurdity at the end when Mycroft wishes him a pleasant trip "back to the colonies." WTF?