Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

Perrine has her front legs on the back of my chair, her hind legs on my shoulder, and her tail across my chest. She is purring in my ear. This is a good thing, which would be even better if she had not just farted.

"It's never a smart move to break the military's toys." -- from the background story behind the answer to a trivia question at techrepublic.com. (The question: "What company do we credit with sending the first-known unsolicited commercial e-mail, thereby 'inventing' the most pervasive form of contemporary electronic spam?" (which I saw in xpioti's journal, 2004-08-04))

Migraine has diminished. Mild pain and threat of dizziness, but at the moment I'm feeling functional. Thankful for this unseasonable weather. (This is the hot sticky season, but for the past couple of nights we've had an autumnal time warp, five Kelvins below normal temperatures and low humitidy. Certain rooms of my house still get warm, but nothing like it was up until a couple of days ago.) But the sound of someone attempting to grind a car up for mulch a few minutes after I woke was still a tad uncomfortable. (What sort of plant do you put metal mulch around?) I looked out the window and it turned out to be a new pickup-truck-shaped musical instrument, with the bed as the sounding board, the area under the truck as the resonating cavity, and the vibration source being an electric drill applied to a boat-trailer that was lying across the bed. I should have gone out and offered to tune the damned thing, but it only had about a two note range anyhow. Either the fellow playing it wasn't very good or it was some sort of ultra-modern achronal piece. I didn't get a look at the score.

Plan for the day: pull myself together, pull equipment together, pull garb together, visit Mom, go to the wedding HCB is playing from there. Backup plan if that fails: go straight to the gig, and visit Mom tomorrow.

There was something else I wanted to mention when I woke up, but now I can't remember it. But I do remember something I meant to mention yesterday: kumquats dipped in chocolate don't work too well, because the exPLoSIve burst of tartness so completely overwhelms even a dark chocolate dip that the chocolate flavour get completely lost. It's really quite impressive -- in the absence of something like the chocolate to compare it to, it's easy to sort of re-calibrate one's mouth so the kumquat burst is just "Wow, intense," but realizing that it doesn't just overpower the chocolate but completely obliterates the chocolate, demonstrates just how powerful and sudden that effect really is.

It sucks that kumquats are so expensive (these were a gift) and the season is so short. I wonder whether anybody makes kumquat marmalade. And isn't "kumquat" a fun word to say?

I posted this as a comment to an entry in vvalkyri's journal, and she suggested I make it its own entry. So here 'tis. Note that voltbang disagrees with me, so there's already at least one comment to check out over there in response to this. (Or if you want to check out the context...) If I am in fact completely off base, at least one lawyer reads my journal, so perhaps the most glaring errors will get pointed out...

Actually, though we may be a pretty small step away, we don't have universal ID.

First, we don't have national ID, which I mention just to get that out of the way (acknowledging that it's not quite what you said).

More significantly, none of the state IDs are universal within a state. Non-drivers may get a state-issued ID for their convenience, but are not required to if they're willing to put up with certain hassles at banks and such. And equally importantly, although nearly all drivers carry their driver's licenses with them all the time, even someone who has one isn't required to carry it unless he or she is driving at the time. (In fact, while I may be wrong about this, I had assumed that the reason the police waited until I started to drive off to stop me and detain me for taking photographs of the tourist part of Baltimore in the fog instead of approaching me while I had the tripod out, was so that I would be driving and thus required to show them my license. But I may be crediting them with too much thought, I dunno.)

Note that in the absence of a state-issued ID (driver's license or "non-driver's ID"), there are various other documents that can be used as identification in certain situations. Sometimes a copy of one's birth certificate will work (for example, when applying for a driver's license), but most of the time folks will say, "that only proves someone with that name was born, not that you are that person," so a birth certificate can't be called a universal ID.

As far as I know the only ID required to be universally accepted within the US is a US passport. (Note that I could be mistaken as to whether it must be accepted as ID by places requiring ID.) But citizens are not required to carry them and most people don't have them. So it's not a universal ID.

Even a driver's license is not universally accepted -- I don't know whether the FF&C clause means that other states (and the feds) have to accept a state-issued license, but I'm pretty sure the liquor store on the corner isn't legally required to accept an out-of-state license when deciding whether to accept your check. And if we did have "universal ID", we wouldn't have places asking for "two forms of ID" (or three).

Most significant point: even if it's difficult for American's to wind up not having any ID, we are not required to carry it unless we're doing certain things. What he have is ubiquitous ID, not universal, and a culture that assumes one has ID because of that and gets cranky when one doesn't, but we're not quite to universal ID.

At least not yet.

And yeah, I'm one of the people a little spooked by the idea of national/universal ID.