Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

I just heard something on the television news referring to a study that showed alcohol is "the substance most frequently used by Maryland high-school students".

Excuse me? "Substance"? Most frequently used substance? More frequently than air, water, paper, or cotton?

Oh, right, they mean "consumed" ... leave air and water on the list and add sugar ...

No, as everybody getting annoyed at my refusal to get the point by now knows, they mean the most frequently used drug. But they can't say the word "drug" to refer to alcohol. So, ah, what's another way to say "drug"? "Illegal substance", right? (Of course that itself is a bit of verbal gymnastics that forgets about prescription drugs and properly used OTC medications on one side, and weapons-grade radioactive materials on the other.) And since alchohol isn't illegal, it's just a "substance". But by that point "substance" has become a shorthand for "drug", so paper, water, cotton, steel, and chocolate are not substances any more.

Dammit, I wish they'd just say what they mean, call it what it is, and say that alcohol is the drug used most often by students in Maryland. The fact that it's legal does not make it any less of a drug (at least not when it's being used as one). It's only the strange connection of "drug" and "illegal" in so many people's minds, and the more understandable (especially in light of various propogpublic relations campaigns) connection between "drug" and "bad" that make it dangerous to refer to alcohol as a drug in any medium that accepts advertising money from brewers.

It ought to be simple: not all drugs are illegal, not all drugs are bad, even legal drugs can be misused, some things have both drug and non-drug uses (solvents, textiles, propellants, ...), some drugs are used recreationally, and alcohol is a drug. But as a culture, we've invested so much in this "Drugs Are BAD" message that we can no longer safely use the word "drug" for many things that are drugs without sticking a qualifier ("legal", "prescription", "OTC") in front, and other drugs we can't call drugs at all.

And now alcohol is the "substance" kids use most, and I suppose that means books, pencils, clothes, television sets, dishes, cars, food, and sporting equipment have now become insubstantial.

I've got Sheepie's Win98 box as good as it's going to get for a while. I never got it to talk properly to my LAN, which will be a problem ifwhen she ever wants to network the computers in her house; the printer thinks it's printing in colour but only black gets printed (maybe it's as simple as a colour cartridge that dried up -- we can hope); the screen can now be set to different resolutions and colour depths, and I think I managed not to break anything that wasn't already broken.

And I've got a headache of immense scale, other plans for the week are now several days behind, I've got a new set of gripes about Microsoft with which to fill lulls in dinner table conversation, and I remember why I was so glad I didn't have to install Win95 or WinNT myself on those two machines (and why I don't upgrade or change a running installation of Windows unless something breaks first). I'll install MacOS or Linux from scratch, and I'll muck about with upgrades and tweaks, but as far as I'm concerned, as useful as Windows can be, it's most useful when somebody else deals with keeping it in shape. Unfortunately, this time I got to be somebody's "somebody else". Whoops. I'm seeing what a good decision it was to punt when a different friend asked me to solve a more complicated Windows problem a while back.

Okay, one gripe that can't wait for a lull: If I click a "download" button and wait an hour and a half for the target to download, I expect the downloaded file to be the thing I want to install, not an install program that then has to reach out to the web for the thing I wanted to install. If it's just an install script, shouldn't it be smaller? If it took an hour and a half to download, why weren't the components I actually needed included in that mess?

#include <gripes/windows-telnet>
#include <gripes/broken-download-links>

I think I mis-diagnosed the recently-donated Win98 machine (which, unlike Sheepie's box, appears to have no trouble talking to my LAN (though I'll have to crib the syntax for mapping network drives off of one of the other Windows machines)). It's not the screen resolution that's incompatible with my monitor, I think it's the refresh rate. When this headache goes away, I'll try it on the monitor upstairs from the Win95 machine and see whether that'll cope better than the monitor that's usually attached to one of: a) the file server, b) the PPP gateway, or c) whatever machine is temporarily on the test bench. Now that I'm done with Sheepie's machine, I'll be needing to return her monitor.

I have not yet begun to sort out why my Win95 box stopped booting a couple of weeks ago. And I've gotten thoroughly sidetracked from finishing installation/configuration of Linux on the other recently-donated machine. (Both the new computers are in the 350 MHz range, which makes them not quite twice as fast as my current "fast Linux box" and more than three times the speed of nearly everything else in the house. That's going to have to wait a while; I've got someplace to go that I've been wanting to get to for a while now. (More importantly, someone to see.)

"I fail to see the point of these online quizzes. I already know who I am" -- errorist, in a cut-tag, 2003-12-28

Throbbing headache; helped only slightly by having had a nap. Described it elsewhere as a pounding headache, but that was before I realized that the pounding was coming from a car stereo around the f'ing corner on Fulton Ave that was apparently parked there for twenty or thirty minutes. I didn't know CDs "skipped" the way LPs do, but it was the same two-measure thump-pattern with the same two-measure hi-hat riff on top of it (I could hear the bronze when I went onto my back porch to figure out where the sound was coming from) for the entire time. And as far as I can tell, the woofer was torn. Idiots.

I had such big plans for the day. Unfortunately, they involved my feeling well enough to load up the car and drive.