Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

Grumpy. ... The good thing was that I did make it to Arlington this week to see anniemal, and I did make it to rehearsal last night. The grumpificator: feeling too wobbly to make it to the concert I wanted to go to tonight, which also would have been a chance to meet a person on my friendslist. Feh. Grumpy. Annoyed at body. Yeah, yeah, good to rest up to maximize ease of getting to my gig on Saturday anyhow; still annoyed by limitations. :-P

Also feeling oppressed by my to-do list, and annoyed that while I've had the inclination to work a bit on those compositions I mentioned before, I haven't had the energy or attention span to get very far with them. New ideas for how to get past a roadblock; not enough spoons to implement the ideas. Argh. (Also a bit of annoyance at MIDI documentation inconsistent with MIDI implementation again.)

So to distract myself, memeage.

Ha! Toldja'! It's the rest of the freakin' world that's odd. Pbbbbbt!

(Though there were a couple of questions where my answer was "both of those equally" or "it depends on my mood/the situation". I wonder whether flipping my answers on those would have produced a different result. Maybe not though, thinking about it. I may get around to checking that later, or not.)

"And if al Qaeda comes in here and blows you up, we're not going to do anything about it. We're going to say, look, every other place in America is off limits to you except San Francisco. You want to blow up the Coit Tower? Go ahead." -- Bill O'Reilly, 2005-11-08, upset about a vote there opposing military recruiting in schools.

Politically, I am a nobody. Neither am I a celebrity. But it turns out that I am at most five contacts away from Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein.

Each of them has, according to the first hit I found on Google, a Bacon number of three. I have a Bacon number of two[1]. So connecting only through appearances in IMDB-listed films, I am no more than five relationships away from ObL.

Who knows how few personal relationships[2] link any of us to some lesser-known (but still known) terrorist?

Casting a really wide net in the search for terrorists based on associate-of-an-associate-of links[3] is going to gather so many false positives that it will be entirely useless.[4]

And of course, lest anyone think to question my patriotic bona-fides or smear what they perceive as my liberal politics[5] based on my being five contacts from Hussein and ObL, I must point out that this means the least connected and most conservative person who has ever exchanged flamage with me on a mailing list or LiveJournal is at most six contacts away from Osama bin Laden himself! And that's exactly my point: that this number tells us nothing about the people.

[0] I was looking up Osama bin Laden; finding out that I am the same distance from Saddam Hussein was a side effect. The title of this post does not mean that I'm one of the folks the Bush administration tricked into believing that Hussein was connected to al Queda. Though obviously ObL and Hussein are only five degrees apart based on this same measurement...

[1] I was an extra in Forrest Gump.

[2] As in actually having conversed with, exchanged correspondence with, or conducted commerce with -- my being an extra does not mean I have a personal relationship with Tom Hanks, and I'm assumimg that the FBI and the NSA aren't actually interested in the Bacon numbers of extras.

[3] I'm not sure just how wide a net they are casting, but I've heard of folks being listed as persons of interest by virtue of having rented a room from a terrorist's unsuspecting in-laws, so there's some suspicion-by-contagion. Still, unless it turns out[6] they really are sweeping everyone with any detectable relationship a few contacts away into the web of surveillance -- plausible given what has been said so far about the extent of the illegal wiretaps and the data mining -- consider this entry a musing about hypotheticals.

[4] Unless, of course, the use to which you really hope to put such data is the smearing of your political opponents or finding excuses to arrest gadflies, instead of foiling and capturing terrorists.

[5] I do look liberal. Measured against most yardsticks, I'm probably somewhere that side of center. But I look a lot more liberal in contrast to the current crop of neo-conartists than I do standing next to traditional (American) conservatives with whom I have a fair amount in common. I'm a little unclear over exactly where to label myself, other than knowing I'm not a perfect match for the conventional ideologies and a certainly not a 'winger' (left or right). The two different two-axis political-identification quizzes provide useful information, but I still don't feel I quite represent the spots on the graph where either of those places me. So I'll only go so far (for now) as to say, "It's probably not too misleading to call me a liberal." Then again, these days it seems the only other people willing to use the word "liberal" at all are the ones who use it as synonymous with "liberal extremist", which makes labelling a bit bizarre ...

[6] I'm a bit behind on my LJ and other reading.

[Edit @ 2009-06-11 04:40: A more intelligent search (and possibly the effects of movie/television appearences occurring in the last 41 months) reduces the easily-discoverable degrees of separation to ... three steps between myself and bin Laden, two steps between myself and George W. Bush. That's using The Oracle of Bacon with all genres checked and all media other than video games, and referencing everyone to Tom Hanks (because of the Forrest Gump connection) instead of forcing all linkages to go through Kevin Bacon.]

anniemal just commented that Pat Robertson seems to be doing a great job of distracting the media from more important issues. Waitaminute -- wasn't his last "I can't believe he said that" outburst also a fortunately timed distraction for the Bush administration also?

[ETA:] Whoops, anniemal just reminded me that the other boneheaded-blurting-distraction I was thinking of was from Bennett, not Robertson. My bad. Though I do think I'd better go trawl Google later to see whether there really is a convenient timing to such things. If someone with greater Google-fu than I've got beats me to it, so much the better.