Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

"Indeed, this solemn regard for the employer as untouchable and beyond the realm of persuasion unless in violation of the law permeates the culture of American antipoverty efforts, with only a few exceptions. The most socially minded physicians and psychologists who treat malnourished children, for example, will advocate vigorously with government agencies to provide food stamps, health insurance, housing and the like. But when they are asked if they ever urge the parents' employers to raise wages enough to pay for nutritious food, the doctors express surprise at the notion. First, it has never occurred to them, and second, it seems hopeless. Wages and hours are set by the marketplace, and you cannot expect magnanimity from the marketplace. It is the final arbiter from which there is no appeal." -- David K. Shipler, "A Poor Cousin of the Middle Class", NY Times Magazine, 2004-01-18. (The quote is from page 6 of 7.)

Also, from the next page of the same article: "Money may not always cure, but it can often insulate one problem from another."

Sometime last night, the default action of the mail filter at my ISP was changed to screen the beagle virus. Unfortunately a small error introduced in the global configuration file causes most of my mail to not be delivered correctly. As far as I can tell I'm not actually losing mail, because of the idiosyncratic way I've got my forward/filter/download scripts set up (there's a backup copy as a side effect, eating disk space but coming in handy now), but seeing it in a timely manner and having access to it on a machine from which I can send replies are both affected. I've written to the helpdesk with clues, and if the error is in the line I think it's in, it should be an easy fix. But in the meantime expect me to be much less aware of what's being sent to me (and more likely to postpone responding when I do see it because of the extra steps required).

And if anyone knows how to tell Procmail not to read /etc/procmailrc (I didn't see a flag for that on the man page), please let me know.

[Edit @ 12:05 -- About 11:30 I started noticing mailing being delivered normally again, and took a little while to investigate and make sure that was in fact the case. The timestamp on the global rc file is 9:22, which would explain the few doubled messages I got before I noticed mail getting delivered without the new script I hacked up this morning. No answer to the message I sent to the support desk -- mine probably wasn't the first complaint and they might not have read it yet. *shrug* No matter; it appears to be repaired. **whew**]

Copied from angelovernh:

I was rather tempted by the prehensile hair, the large wad of plasticine, T-bone, and the mirrored room.

I really want the kisses.

Huh ... I saw this somewhere this morning, read a bunch of LJ entries, tried this, and have already forgotten where I found it in the first place: Peter Schmies's Word Classification Test is a lot harder than I expected.

The fact that I'm disappointed and a little embarrassed not to have scored higher than I did probably says a lot more about me than my actual score does. (It's not that my score doesn't say I'm "smart enough" -- I can't complain about my percentile ranking according to the blurb at the top of the test. It's more that I'm not supposed to find that many words I don't know in one place. I'm dissatisfied with my raw score (171 out of 200).)

Then again, I remember that I wasn't really happy with my SAT scores either, because they weren't quite as good as my PSAT, and was tempted to take it again. I guess I'm still me.

We just had a brief thunderstorm roll through. I took advantage of the "well as long as it's already noisy" thought and the dramatic mood it put me in, to play the piano a bit louder (and with more dynamic range) than I usually do. Risking the amplifier if there was a lightning strike on my power line, but none of the parts of the piano I touch are conductive so I figured I was personally safe. It felt nice. Even though I notice the unevenness of my timing more when I can really hear myself.

Now the late afternoon sun is shining brilliantly, and the world is all sparkly. The air between here and downtown looks like it's been scrubbed clean, and there's still a nice continuous backdrop of darkish cloud on the far side of town, so the buildings down by the harbour are brilliantly lit by the sun and have the dark background to throw them into stunning contrast. It's like Baltimore has been not only washed, but waxed and buffed. It's quite pretty.

Now the storm's effects on me have worn off, and so have the drugs I took this morning. I have to decide whether to take more drugs and try to get more accomplished (I've made some progress on my to-do list today) or to go crawl into bed for a spell and hope I can get more done whenever I wake up again.

Yesterday my to-do list grew a bit when UPS rang my doorbell and handed me three boxes. Now I have to clear off the table by the sink in the basement, build a shelf that'll fit in the sink, and block off the basement windows more completely. This is going to be exciting. But first I've got these time-sensitive things on my to-do list that I have to slog through.

Revisiting some entries that I have more information on than when I posted them...

That pretty thunderstorm I wrote about this afternoon turns out to have been lethal. I just went to program the VCR and there was an on-the-scene press conference going on regarding a capsized water-taxi near Fort McHenry. Two dead, two in critical condition (I think), a few still missing (presumed dead because of the water temperature), and twenty or so rescued. I kept looking at the text at the bottom of the screen saying how many dead, injured, and missing, and wondering, "Yeah, but tell me how many are okay," until they finally did so. I'm not sure why I needed to hear that, nor why they didn't include it in the on-screen text. Something to ponder.

A couple of people wondered how the heterosexual couple in Ohio not allowed to wed because one is a transsexual ever wound up in court when most people do not have to show birth certificates to obtain a marriage license. I did some further reading on some of the earlier stages of this case, and it turns out that the magistrate who took their license application recognized Mr. Nash because that same magistrate had been involved in his name change. "Through their testimony, Smith also established that if Nash had not completed his name change in Trumbull County, the court would have had no knowledge he is transsexual, and the license probably would have been issued." Whoops.

The really, really big fire that I wrote about, which I couldn't quite pinpoint the location of and wondered whether the television news would bother to report since it was in the part of town it was in, did get reported on television. It went on long enough (and so did the cleanup and investigation) that it affected the morning rush hour -- but it was probably huge enough to get covered anyhow. I think they said it was a five-alarm blaze. It was in, IIRC, an ice-making facility and warehouse, and the presence of large tanks of ammonia made it especially dangerous for the firefighters. The bits of reportage I heard mentioned a complex of several buildings, and I think they said more than one was burning, which might explain why I couldn't narrow the location smaller than a couple of blocks. They also mentioned that the firefighters had serious problems with lack of water pressure in the area, which explains the extremely long hose runs.

The Ukranian ISP where the comment-spam I complained about originated has not answered my email. I may try writing to them in Russian (with the help of a translator, of course). I've gotten reasonable and satisfactory responses from the LJ admins on the matter.

And I think that gets me caught up on recent I left hanging and meant to get back to. But I've still got a lot of comments I've been meaning to reply to.