runs his magazine like his life, golden heart & iron fist, fortified by glasses of whiskey & cold plates of mercury- laden fish in the small hours when magazine & life are most like finding yourself in a graveyard.

the darkness itself is out of context there & those names carefully graven into the heavy stones— they bear no relation to the bones beneath them becoming mud like poems lost in a frenzy of border crossings & sweat-stained t-shirts.

their widows, orphans & friends slog on some way, pausing to call with diminishing faith upon the undifferentiated stars for news of the the lamented, the loved one, the one who owes them money, whose songs, it’s possible, brought brief illuminations to the benighted dinner tables of winter.

from this angle it’s easy to think that the dead have no relation to the living— they are as gone as an eternity of yesterdays forgotten in the pages of a dusty bible, they never will speak the word that will return them to dance with beautiful girls, never will they enter a lover’s room under cover of night nor laugh with joyful malice at a wicked joke.

in the eastern widow a tomato ripens at its own pace; outside an old retriever waits panting for his human who approaches humming, swinging a bag of fresh beignets from the end of his murdering arm, whose soul is betrothed to the laughing spirit of eternity which glistens with young girls’ sweat, who then steals her chaste kisses in the back of a borrowed car confounded by hooks & straps, elbows & knees as the wordless moon, reflected in the river, skims across an oblique sky.

Todd Weissenberger, ©1995

Dear __________,

Did you know that going long enough with interrupted sleep every night (exempli gratia: 3 kids, 2 of them getting a parent up at least 2 times a night, sometimes 8 or 9 times) will actually start to make you a little clinically insane.

Don’t take that as a threat. Or tell anyone else I said it.

5 Factors Help Predict Psychosis in Children

The two most common psychotic symptoms are delusions and hallucinations, according to AACAP. Delusions are false but firmly held beliefs. HealthDay

They don’t identify the age range which qualifies their definition of children. They don’t really have to.

Proposal would ban cussing in bars

The township of Saint Charles, Missourah is considering making it illegal to cuss, out-drink someone, and get some tail wagged in your face for a $10 or two.

The hidden benefit of the measure is that Missouri has dropped from 45th to 48th in the order of states Americans would voluntarily choose to live in. Arkansas enjoyed the boost to 47th.

Edmund Hillary, first atop Everest, dies

I was gonna say something denigrating about Mrs Clinton over this but I see Michelle Malkin and every member of her Venn is already on it like pit bulls on a baby. In my defense—I don’t play sides—earlier I was working on a diatribe against Mrs Linguistics himself. Oh… come to think of it they are on the same side. Um… Bush sucks!

Army major blogged about his death

Andy Olmstead, forever 37 years of age, wrote a “post this if I die in Iraq” piece for his blog, AndrewOlmsted.com. It was posted.

My life isn’t a chit to be used to bludgeon people to silence on either side. I have my own opinions about what we should do about Iraq, but since I’m not around to expound on them I’d prefer others not try and use me as some kind of moral capital to support a position I probably didn’t support.

When you join the service you make yourself a chit to be moved around the battlefield. There is no such thing as a wrongful death suit in regular combat operations because sometimes it’s a soldier’s job to die. Your death is a form of moral capital. Once you’re dead, you don’t get fuck all to say about it.

Anyone interested in having your say, try a little harder not to die before you get half a chance.

GM envisions driverless cars on horizon

Sedition·com envisions employeeless GM on the 2011 Summer news cycle.

And now for some foreshortening… shhhhhh… If you miss the news, look at old ones.

I don’t think we’ve ever clipped a whole piece from someone before. We have long linked and recommended the IOZzer, though, and in the interests of not relying on you to click through and read it we present in full–

My cheiromancer, Newtonian M. Scruggs, has shuttered his virtual doors. I am sad. I will soldier on forever in his top-level domain memory! Something from the archives for his last visit of our lifetimes ever: An excerpt from my latest romance novel.

While I was driving to pick up a larva, a man crossed my path. A man who—if you substituted Booker’s, 70% cocoa chocolate, and espresso for Steel Reserve, Marlboros, and Methamphetamines—could be my stunt double. Same hair, same beard, same skin, same eyes. He looked me right in the face. Had a shit eating, ear-connecting grin. A look of total ridicule. A look obviously sparked by the mini-van under me.

The look stung. I knew where it was from though so it only hurt for a moment. He saw my slow, wrong smile in recognition. His smile shrank to a smirk and then disappeared. I do believe that in a moment of actual telepathy he read my mind as I had read his. He saw in my mind his own rather remarkable changes in expression when I gut shot him with my .357.

It is truly mysterious how I forget about PostSecret for a year at a time.

Read Rails Is a Ghetto. You’ll love it. It’s Guilty Pleasure of the Year for web devs.

This is the kind of post that gets latched onto for many reasons. Some are cheering, “Yeah, fuck yeah! Tell those motherfuckers off! Down with Rails! Ruby is the sux0r!” Some pass it around with, “Whoah! Check out this guy harshing on Rails.” And there’s still, “I always knew that dipshit was a rat. When he left, Rails lost its major defect. Good riddance.”

No one likes the f-word more than I [well, except for Matt Trout but my hair is longer; take that, subspace]; and I didn’t invent the ad hominem but I get a free license for consistently promoting it. When you write an ostensibly professional essay—in this case implicitly so because it’s entirely concerned with paid software development—the f-word doesn’t really belong. Zed clearly identifies it as a rant. In Internet parlance the term rant has steadily been losing its foaming-at-the-mouth, put-a-bullet-in-that-mongrel connotations. It’s being replaced with self-righteousness. It’s also the kind of bullshit qualifier that lets people do things they know to be wrong. “This is a rant, okay? So I don’t have to be held to any standard. No tag backs.”

Let’s start with what he basically started with–

Remember that I’ve studied enough martial arts to be deadly even though I’m old, and I don’t give a fuck if I kick your mother fucking ass or you kick mine.

There are few studios, dojos, or dojangs where that sentence would get you anything but asked not to return to study. Maybe for a week, maybe forever. I’d like to call it profoundly moronic, but as you know, regarding online life, it’s entirely trite. Nothing screams loser—or 15 year-old, or wife beater, or gonna bring a gun to work someday, or…—like opening an essay with the threat of physical violence.¹

Zed progresses to discuss what every SDE with half a kilo of gray matter already knows: the tech world is full of half-assed pseudo-hackers who can get away with selling awful services and worse code because the CEOs who hire the managers think MBA is short for Must Be Awesome!

Zed does hit many high, clear notes.

Where I work the company is willing to blow huge amounts of money on a consulting firm or hardware, but ends up firing people when times get tight. It’s a universal mass hysteria that paying $100 – $200 per hour for a group of consultants is preferable to simply hiring good employees. At the rates companies pay these consultants they could hire 4 full time employees.

Stuff like this makes me want to cheer because I saw Amazon do the same thing and it hurt like hell. So, he gets an olé or two out of me. The rest, innards of Rails kind of stuff, is interesting from a nerd-view, which I take. Several Perl hackers I really respect more or less left Perl for Ruby. I considered following.

Whatever you think, or don’t,² about this site, I wrote the code, and in 2007 it served well over 2 million human session pages plus, and this is just a guess from past ratios, another 10-15 million or more pages to robots. A few bugs now and then but it just served a 50,000 page day a couple weeks ago with barely a groan. It’s written in Perl and run on a budget host. It’s the third version of the site software. The first two were custom and a lot like Blosxom before (the first, just barely) there was a Blosxom. The last was in Catalyst. Ain’t never going back.

I didn’t start rewriting it in Perl and Catalyst. I started with Ruby and Rails. Why? Almost an even split between these: the hackers I admire who love Ruby; the hype behind Rails was enormous; I like learning brand new stuff.

A few downloads and installation builds later I was following the QuickTime movie tutorial for starting a new Rails application. And failing. It wouldn’t work right. I had Ruby in correctly. I had all the code. My plain old Ruby test scripts were running. I started over repeatedly to make sure I was following the demo correctly. All of the sudden I started to remember things like the fact that Perl is much faster than Ruby and it has native utf-8 and Ruby doesn’t. Perl has the CPAN and while Ruby has gems, I can think of a dozen little packages, at least two I wrote, gems doesn’t cover and I don’t have time to learn to rewrite.

I didn’t want an app out of the box doing autocompletes with a huge JS library, I just wanted to see “Hello World!” feel some satisfaction and dig in. I wanted to have fun. Which is what Perl hacking almost always is. I found Catalyst after some searching. It was brand new. I had it completely installed in 2 minutes³ and I was running a demo application 30 seconds later.

Not to bag on Rails. I’m not. I’ve never written a stick with it and its hype is still strong; though so is Java’s but that’s another horse of color. Just to put Catalyst out there. It is a lovely framework and I’m grateful I found it which led to being paid really quite a lot of money to hack with it today. But still… I’m curious about Ruby and Rails. So…

…back to the rant. We learn that Zed wrote some nice software and tried to stop some dicks from foisting some obviously bad software on others. Great. We learn that he was barred from employment via the bureaucratic machinations of the tech world. Mmmmm. Yeah, maybe.

The problem with this style—in spite of some obviously adroit points and insider info—is what comes across strongest is the wounds, not the injustice. You can admire someone who takes it like a man, as it were. Someone who starts swinging and squealing like an ADHD kid at a piñata, expecting it will burst open with the sweet candies of revenge, just ends up looking kinda sorry and finding out revenge gives you a bad stomach. It isn’t that it’s wrong to get even. Getting even is great. It’s wrong because pursuing it cripples you inside in ways that become more and more visible and harder to escape the deeper you get.

You want to root for him. You can’t. You want to seek him out for a beer and maybe discuss a coding project. You can’t. You can’t because you might say or do something wrong someday and end up immortalized online as a “pilsner fresh fat fuck who eats donut hamburgers and only gets exercise when he plays World of Warcraft on a DDR pad.” And while that might be an apt description of so-and-so, most of us don’t know Zed from Adam and I’d wager that fewer of us have any desire to get to now.⁴

They are luminarias. Only Santa Fe honkeys call them farolitos.

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