System Preferences

“'Miss Shorthorn,' I said, with a sort of innocent emphasis, 'you will excuse my friend's loud jocularity. It is rather late, I know, for his feelings to adopt such a strain, but really the subject on which we were discussing was so hideously risible that I can well understand his lengthy laugh.' "

 - Donald Dudley, exhibiting the glib felicity of language that is the hallmark of the literary critic.

I was recently discussing Hewlett Packard printers with myself. Very loudly.

It has recently come to my attention that I’m a negative whiney bitch. I honestly knew about the last part, and strongly suspected the first part. But, I now accept that I sometimes  whine. Fortunately, in my house, nobody but the cats can hear me scream on the subject of the HP printers. And, of course, Yosemite, which up until now has done nothing more ominous than steal half of my iTunes library, make me re-establish alibis for every app I want on my desktop and generally make the file finder function futile. Thank you and goodbye, iTunes. Hello Spotify.

I actually had one printer that printed most of the time. It even scanned some of the time there for a while when I used a third-party VuScan app. Then, thinking to fix it so it worked consistently, I downloaded drivers from HP. Nothing has worked since. At all. Despite hours of troubleshooting, whining, cursing, and faith healing. Admittedly, I have the faith of somebody in the Fifth Circle of Hell. Still, nothing has worked, and it is rather late to expect anything other than inappropriately loud jocularity.

So: I’m done whining about HP printers. I am no longer hideously risible wrt/HP. I’ve adjusted my attitude and my medications to reduce the strain on my feelings caused by all this technology. I’m so over Apple and HP. My biggest problem now is that the HP Officejet Pro 8600 is too big to use as a doorstop; and frankly, I don’t need no tech support to solve this problem. I have a large mallet and plenty of bourbon. 

My system preferences have now been reset. 

The Whole World is Spinning

“As long as the world is turning and spinning, we're gonna be dizzy and we're gonna make mistakes.” ~ Mel Brooks

I’ve always been very happy to admit to my mistakes. I’ve been known to admit my mistakes, even when I’m right. I’ve found it’s often easier to admit to a mistake I didn’t make than to try to explain to the hypothetically unmistaken person that it wasn’t my fault. Hell, I was expelled from high school a month before graduation based on somebody else’s mistake. That, and lack of due process. It’s a wonder I’m not bitter.

My professional career as a bureaucrat at Research-O-Rama University was based on accepting blame for mistakes made by people who outranked me but who were dumber than a nutless nougat bar when it came to using their words, their heads, or their mad CPA/MBA skilz. I generally used my bureaucratic superpowers only for good. Besides, I could run rhetorical circles around them and confuse them with big words like mesmerize, treacle, and ipso factoid. 

Even so, it was usually easier to apologize and get back to work than to cite a reference in a volume of the Policy and Procedure Manual (at last count about a dozen large light-blue loose leaf binders) and say “These are not the mistakes you are looking for.”

But humility is my greatest character trait - at the top of a long list of great character traits, granted. As an example of humbly admitting I am fallible, here’s a mistake I made once. I bought a pencil with an eraser on it.

As for actually making mistakes, I’m of two minds:

One mind says with age should come wisdom and my quest should be to attain perfection, aka, don’t make no more mistakes. Or at least maybe make fewer mistakes. As Nick once said to Nancy, if the world wasn’t spinning, the people in China would fall off. So accept that we’re all going to be a little dizzy; but try to hang on, you know?

The other mind says go fuck yourself.

The Bonkers Institute for Nearly Genuine Research

“There are [...] large sums of money spent annually at our Observatories throughout England on astronomy based upon Astronomers' opinion and enormous distances given by them, such as the distance of the earth to the pole star and sun of millions of miles, whereas ordinary mathematics as taught at schools daily, absolutely prove the distance in both cases to be less than 10,000 miles.”

 - William Westfield, Does the Earth Rotate? NO!

Let’s get something settled at the outset of this post. Everything on The Internets is True. And Wikipedia is always the final authority. I know, I know. Some people say that there are bad things out here. I’m not talking porn, people. I’m just saying that people might not always be honest. Or right. Or, some people on the internets might be a few composes short of a mentis. End disclaimer.

Stranger danger aside, I do love that no-man’s-land between real crazy and funny crazy. 

As any fool knows, Science tells us that if you can have extremes – really good and really bad, for example – then you’ve got yourself a continuum. And that means there’s a bunch of stuff in between the pure good and pure evil. Or pure science and pure wackjob. Otherwise, ordinary math would be good enough for all of us regular people and those snob scientific people with their fancy “theories” wouldn’t make us feel so afraid.

To illustrate my point about that continuum, here’s a website so exquisitely perched on the bleeding edge of that dividing line between genius and madness that a whiff of exhaled weed would tip it over to one side. Which side, I’m not saying. And that’s honestly the best part of The Internets.

The BI website has a photo of a postmodern office park best characterized as Late 00s Nouveau Extortionally-priced-$/sq’ Upscale. These days, such buildings not occupied by surreptitious meth labs often have faded corporate signage covered with canvas posters advertising space for lease. These office parks (spread by murder suicide economic deals and hubris) invaded So Cal in the pre-apocalyptic days when "The Economy" was booming - the way a flesh-eating bacteria occupies a former appendage to the ultimate death of both host and parasite. The website picture of the Bonkers Institute is captioned: “Located in Traverse City, Michigan, the Bonkers Institute hardly resembles the building pictured above.”

Honest, transparent, scientifically verifiable. These guys aren’t going to lie to us. What is their italicized mission statement, you are (almost afraid) to ask? Advancing in the direction of bona fide medical science since last Tuesday. So I’m in. Science.

And yet… And yet, something seems uncomfortable. A subliminal sense - possibly caused by the combination of too many fonts and too many hyperlinks - that some tiny spore of crazy may have infected this otherwise corporate marketing firm focus-grouped webpage that seems so genuine it’s like it’s printed on shiny paper.

I particularly like his pharmaceutical advertisement for “Risperdol:because mania wrecks lives.”

“Convinced she’s a siren, Tricia entices total strangers back from taxi queues   and from the park for sex. To date, she’s had two terminations and one divorce.”

As anyone who have ever had too many drinks with me (or who has had my blood tested) knows, Big Pharma holds a special place in my heart, liver and kidneys. Being a firm believer in the miracles of modern chemistry, I think it’s a great idea to advertise prescription drugs on TV shows my demographic appears to favor. I love these commercials: if only for entertainment value of side effects listings. But more importantly, they remind aging boomers that when we can no longer dispose of our childrens' inheritence on Viking River Cruises or PBS, we can still get better legal drugs than our sick uninsured kids. 

Meanwhile, Big Government, aka the FDA, recently, magically, turned hydrocodone into a Schedule II drug when it still works exactly like it did when it was a Schedule III drug a few months back. But for Big Pharma, the terrorists would be going to have won.

Seriously. Why are still reading this post instead of clicking over to the Bonkers Institute trying to find out what the hell they mean by Tricia’s “two terminations”?