Barf!

Ah ha ha ha ha ha ha! Check this out, this is awesome. I'm going to forward this to Pepsico customer service:

All,
Due to the bad taste of the Aquafina water, please discard and do not drink it. This water will no longer be distributed to the water bins throughout the camp and will be replaced with another brand. Do not be alarmed as there are no safety concerns, only the foul taste.
Any questions you may have can be directed to N4 at xxx-xxxx.

Very respectfully,
CDR "Bob Roberts"
N-4 Camp Lemonier

N-4 is the supply division on base.

See, and you thought I was crazy, talking about water all the time.

Bad

The yucky Aquafina water is back. Eww. Fortunately, now that I have a sink, I get to keep a box or two of water right there in my clu at all times, and I'm still working off boxes of Oasis and Masafi I picked up last week. Good thing, too.

Pepsi, which produces Aquafina, is under fire in India for having outrageously high levels of pesticide contamination in its drinks. Presumably the main culprit is Pepsi-cola itself; whether other products from the company were tested or not I don't know, but bottling plants tend to handle multiple beverages at one time so we can assume if Pepsi will kill you, 7-Up will as well.

Yesterday I happened to examine one of the boxes of the Aquafina. And guess what it said:

Manufactured by Pepsico India Holdings Pvt Ltd, Roha, Dhavat, India

So is our water tainted? How would we know?

Thank goodness we have a choice, a choice to drink Oasis water from the Oasis Pure Drinking Water Factory LLC.

Today's Oasis thought of the day: Over the next twenty years, the supply of water per person is expected to drop by a third. Conserve now!

Right on, Oasis.

Burn

Well then. I present to you a picture of The World-Famous Chicken Teapot:

The World-Famous Chicken Teapot (hereinafter The Chicken) was a creation of mine in the early spring of 1999, during my last ceramics class at my dear alma mater, Clemson University (who's Tigers are ranked 18th this week, by the way, even if the special teams have turned out to be more the short-bus kind of special than we'd hoped).

The Chicken was a brainstorm for a teapot project. In fact, I produced several teapots for this project, one of which is a modified whiskey jug with a seven-inch spout that looks very much like an oil can you'd see on a steam locomotive (and remains one of my favorite of all my ceramic creations). I designed The Chicken so that you would put water in the back of the chicken, and then put the lid on, and heat the water for tea, and pour the tea out the chicken's beak. To this end the beak does in fact have a small opening. But for the fact that mysterious evildoers stole not one but three different tails I had created for The Chicken, it would work as intended. Instead, I stuck some silk autumn leaves in its butt; not terribly dignified, but it will do. (Observant readers may note that the teapot lacks a handle and would thus be hard to use. Really observant readers will recognize that of course it's art, so that doesn't matter.)

Although I find chickens terribly amusing, when I first decided to make a chicken-shaped teapot I could not say what, exactly, a chicken looked like. I mean, I could draw you a chicken you'd recognize as such, but what about those little chin dangles and that cockscomb on top? Should I put that in? What does a proper chicken actually look like?

I could have gone over to the agriculture department and asked to see some of their chickens, and I wish I'd thought of that at the time because it would have been terribly amusing. Imagine: there you are, working at your desk in the P&A building, and some possibly-deranged person walks up and says, "I would like to see a chicken, please."

Anyway, so much the better that I instead turned to the more obvious resource, the computer lab upstairs from the ceramics studio and the internet. (I did not google "chicken;" there was no Google yet. At the time, the search engine of choice for wise surfers was Dogpile. Remember Dogpile? You couldn't verb that word, at least not while remaining G-rated; that's why Dogpile failed.)

One of the first sites I came across had pictures of a rubber chicken with a notebook tied around its neck. This was too bizarre to pass up, so I entered into the domain of The Playa Chicken. The Playa Chicken had wandered around the crowd for several days at a wonderful festival I'd never heard of called Burning Man. I looked at the Playa Chicken's pictures, and remembered the web site so I could go back that evening from my own computer and learn more.

Burning Man has changed since 1998 (it was the 1998 festival that I read about on Playa Chicken that year). That year there were 10,000 participants; the 2006 festival was four times as large. It's anyone's guess how long the festival will remain viable given the pace of growth. This year, a city the size of Burlington, Vermont, was built and dismantled on the unforgiving terrain of Nevada's Black Rock Desert in the space of 10 days. The citizens there packed everything in and everything out; they engaged in no commercial activity apart from purchasing ice (profits from which are donated to the local school system). They did not drive cars. They produced art, and music, had parades, ate and slept and lived and experienced an event utterly unlike any other on Earth.

And yes, they did other things. Of course, they burned The Man, from which the festival gets its name. The festival has a bit of a reputation for promiscuity and drug use, too, and certainly many of its participants engaged in both activities, though the festival is not designed to encourage such behavior, only not to discourage it. Burning Man is much bigger than a chance for immature people to sleep around and get high, and charges that it is nothing more are just silly; after all, the same charges could easily be leveled at any American high school and most colleges.

I've wanted to go to Burning Man since I first stumbled across the Playa Chicken and his website. The Chicken sits placidly on its end table under the picture window in my living room, and reminds me of that. I don't think about it often, but the desire is there, just as The Chicken is there.

It's a cliché that there's a first time for everything. I believe, though, that there is also a last chance for first times, that there is a window during which you may do something for the first time, but as life marches on that window slowly closes and eventually you reach a point where, no matter how much you desire it, you will never do that thing. I believe the window is closing on my first time to go to Burning Man.

Next year I'll be 29. For the second time. I'll be a civilian, also for the second time, sometime in the spring. I hope to take some time off from work; one reason why I volunteered to deploy to Djibouti (see, I told you it's fun to say that word) was to save up some money to live off of for a few months so that I am not immediately forced to start looking for work as soon as I separate. But that situation cannot last; I'll be working again by the end of the year, probably by the end of the summer, and I don't really expect I'll have found a job that I especially like. I hope to find one I dislike less than my current one. Burning Man 2007 will run for a week starting August 29th, thus ending about the time I expect to start a new job.

I suspect that if I don't go to Burning Man in 2007, I will never go. That would be a shame. This is something I feel I need to see—and not just see, but actually do. Participate in. One of Burning Man's key tenets is "No Spectators." You must participate. How do you do that? You can volunteer at the ice tent. You can help set up and tear down a theme camp. You can produce art, wear costumes, play music, tell stories; you can do all sorts of things, anything, in fact—that's the point. You can do anything.

I have never felt like I could do "anything." My internal governor has always told me when not to do things I want to do, to save myself embarrassment or, worse, failure. In some sense, it's that governor I'm hoping to leave behind when I get to the playa. I want to know what that's like.

Many Burners work every day for The Man, punch a clock like the rest of us, and look forward all year to the festival as their one chance to leave it all behind and experience a few glorious hours of liberty, true liberty. But others have managed to find a way to survive in this country without punching a clock or working for The Man. I like to think they work for The Chicken.

I want to work for The Chicken. I may never be so lucky, and sometimes I feel that as my life rolls on along my chance to find such a job grows ever more remote. As I said, windows close. There's a first time for everything, but we won't all get to see it. If I'm ever going to experience Burning Man, it's going to be next year. So I'm going.

Who wants to join me?

Business

I read two different books, very different, having nothing whatsoever to do with one another and concerning entirely different topics. I'm going to try to relate them here because it amuses me to do so. The first was The Alchemist, by Paulo Coelho. This book showed up in the library and it had a pretty picture on the cover and was fairly thin, and those were both important at the time so I took it home. I've been reading it for some time, though it is not only thin but has huge margins and double spaced text. The cover gush says that this is the sort of book that "changes the lives of its readers forever."

Of course right now I'd accept the small change of being able to sleep through the night. But that's beside the point.

Incidentally, for those who feel they might like to read The Alchemist at some point, this post is laden with spoilers and gives away the ending, so you should skip it.

This is a nice little tale, magical realism and all that, about prophetic dreams, fulfilling your destiny, and finding the fullness of your life along the way. It's all well and good. Listen to your dreams. Believe in omens. Follow your path and you'll be satisfied in life.

Who sets the path, though? Is there but one path for each of us? If the only way to find satisfaction is to do precisely what fate has laid out for you, then why bother living? Fatalism makes life into little more than a board game; what point is living each day if you have only to follow the signs to happiness? Why not just condense life down into a simple choice, presented to your soul the day you are born: will you live the life of fate, or not?

I don't think this was Coelho's point, but talk of fate and destiny always raises in me these questions. What point is free will if every choice but one is wrong, every path but one a dead end road to failure? This reduces all of creation to a grand experiment, the Earth to an infinitely complex maze with us as rats. Navigate each turn correctly and you get the cheese; otherwise you're damned. How does Grace enter into such an experiment? Why should it?

I'm not much for fate or destiny. God may have a plan for us, but I don't believe He damns us for failing to get it right. If so, well, I'll be… you know.

The Art of Headless Chicken Management, by Elly Brewer, was intended to be a funny look at inept managers, at how some people escape the peter principle and rise far above the level of their incompetence. It was amusing, of course. All who've worked in the business world—and make no mistake, the AF is the business world in nearly every respect, save the need for profit—will recognize the Headless Chicken Manager and can surely point to at least one example thereof. So it goes.

Are the Headless Chicken Managers (HCM) following their destiny? Are incompetent boobs who succeed in spite of themselves while making life more miserable for their colleagues and subordinates really doing the right thing? They seem to be happy. They seem to be quite full of themselves, in fact. So they must be following their destiny to be so happy.

That, or all us underlings are not in our correct path and need to listen harder to the omens. This seems a bit of a stretch; there are far more underlings in the world than managers, Headless Chicken or otherwise.

Thinking on this I considered that I've no desire whatever to be the sort of person, ten years from know, who would understand the jokes in The Art of Headless Chicken Management. I'd rather have left that world far, far behind, a distant memory of a dark period. I don't honestly care how I manage this.

Oh, I know. Every field has its HCMs. Every job has a boss and every boss, being just as dumb as you are, seems even dumber (the peter principle again). This sounds to me suspiciously like fate: you can't escape this horrible plight, so why bother trying? In fact, this sounds worse than fate. At least with fate, you get one correct path to happiness, one slim source of hope; the "it's like that everywhere" mantra offers none. I reject that notion, too.

Given the choice between destiny and hopeless misery, I, like the hero in The Alchemist, would choose destiny. In following said destiny our hero undergoes terrible hardship. When he seems to be just at the end of his journey, he is set upon, robbed, and beaten. The robber leaves him with naught but a few sentences to chew on: Don't be so stupid. I had a prophetic dream once, but I wasn't dumb enough to follow it across deserts and oceans. Look where it got you. And in that sentence the robber tells our hero about his prophetic dream, and the hero realizes that his fortune, his destiny, all along lay right where he came from, under the very tree he'd been sleeping at when he had his own dream.

So. I may not buy into the fate thing, but sometimes there's meaning in the words of others that they didn't intend. Life is hard. It isn't fair, and sometimes you get robbed blind and beaten up just trying to make your way. But if you keep your head on, you may find something valuable even in the beating. Strength and wisdom come through hardship, not a life of ease (a life of ease may grant you bullheaded stupidity, which can look like strength or wisdom and is enough to get you elected, but it's a pyrrhic victory). And strength and wisdom are what help you to make wise choices and good decisions. Wise choices and good decisions will get you far enough in life to have the opportunity to think about fate, and destiny, and God's chosen path. And once you have the capacity to do that, what does fate matter?

Business

I read two different books, very different, having nothing whatsoever to do with one another and concerning entirely different topics. I'm going to try to relate them here because it amuses me to do so. The first was The Alchemist, by Paulo Coelho. This book showed up in the library and it had a pretty picture on the cover and was fairly thin, and those were both important at the time so I took it home. I've been reading it for some time, though it is not only thin but has huge margins and double spaced text. The cover gush says that this is the sort of book that "changes the lives of its readers forever."

Of course right now I'd accept the small change of being able to sleep through the night. But that's beside the point.

Incidentally, for those who feel they might like to read The Alchemist at some point, this post is laden with spoilers and gives away the ending, so you should skip it.

This is a nice little tale, magical realism and all that, about prophetic dreams, fulfilling your destiny, and finding the fullness of your life along the way. It's all well and good. Listen to your dreams. Believe in omens. Follow your path and you'll be satisfied in life.

Who sets the path, though? Is there but one path for each of us? If the only way to find satisfaction is to do precisely what fate has laid out for you, then why bother living? Fatalism makes life into little more than a board game; what point is living each day if you have only to follow the signs to happiness? Why not just condense life down into a simple choice, presented to your soul the day you are born: will you live the life of fate, or not?

I don't think this was Coelho's point, but talk of fate and destiny always raises in me these questions. What point is free will if every choice but one is wrong, every path but one a dead end road to failure? This reduces all of creation to a grand experiment, the Earth to an infinitely complex maze with us as rats. Navigate each turn correctly and you get the cheese; otherwise you're damned. How does Grace enter into such an experiment? Why should it?

I'm not much for fate or destiny. God may have a plan for us, but I don't believe He damns us for failing to get it right. If so, well, I'll be… you know.

The Art of Headless Chicken Management, by Elly Brewer, was intended to be a funny look at inept managers, at how some people escape the peter principle and rise far above the level of their incompetence. It was amusing, of course. All who've worked in the business world—and make no mistake, the AF is the business world in nearly every respect, save the need for profit—will recognize the Headless Chicken Manager and can surely point to at least one example thereof. So it goes.

Are the Headless Chicken Managers (HCM) following their destiny? Are incompetent boobs who succeed in spite of themselves while making life more miserable for their colleagues and subordinates really doing the right thing? They seem to be happy. They seem to be quite full of themselves, in fact. So they must be following their destiny to be so happy.

That, or all us underlings are not in our correct path and need to listen harder to the omens. This seems a bit of a stretch; there are far more underlings in the world than managers, Headless Chicken or otherwise.

Thinking on this I considered that I've no desire whatever to be the sort of person, ten years from know, who would understand the jokes in The Art of Headless Chicken Management. I'd rather have left that world far, far behind, a distant memory of a dark period. I don't honestly care how I manage this.

Oh, I know. Every field has its HCMs. Every job has a boss and every boss, being just as dumb as you are, seems even dumber (the peter principle again). This sounds to me suspiciously like fate: you can't escape this horrible plight, so why bother trying? In fact, this sounds worse than fate. At least with fate, you get one correct path to happiness, one slim source of hope; the "it's like that everywhere" mantra offers none. I reject that notion, too.

Given the choice between destiny and hopeless misery, I, like the hero in The Alchemist, would choose destiny. In following said destiny our hero undergoes terrible hardship. When he seems to be just at the end of his journey, he is set upon, robbed, and beaten. The robber leaves him with naught but a few sentences to chew on: Don't be so stupid. I had a prophetic dream once, but I wasn't dumb enough to follow it across deserts and oceans. Look where it got you. And in that sentence the robber tells our hero about his prophetic dream, and the hero realizes that his fortune, his destiny, all along lay right where he came from, under the very tree he'd been sleeping at when he had his own dream.

So. I may not buy into the fate thing, but sometimes there's meaning in the words of others that they didn't intend. Life is hard. It isn't fair, and sometimes you get robbed blind and beaten up just trying to make your way. But if you keep your head on, you may find something valuable even in the beating. Strength and wisdom come through hardship, not a life of ease (a life of ease may grant you bullheaded stupidity, which can look like strength or wisdom and is enough to get you elected, but it's a pyrrhic victory). And strength and wisdom are what help you to make wise choices and good decisions. Wise choices and good decisions will get you far enough in life to have the opportunity to think about fate, and destiny, and God's chosen path. And once you have the capacity to do that, what does fate matter?

Boom

This post was going to have a picture.

Friday night during my midnight foray to the gym, we experienced An Event. The gym is a great place at midnight, since there are usually only two or three other people there, plus one or two staff members (locals. Actually, they're Djiboutians. No need to continue this ridiculous farce of hiding the identity of my location; I've already said I'm in Africa several times and, if you look at a map, the U.S. doesn't have any military bases of any size outside Djibouti. Besides, it's a fun word to say.) Despite the limited number of people, the televisions are all turned all the way up.

So I'm in there, not really making a concerted effort at working out, just doing things to ease my insomnia-induced frustration, and I hear something over the Giant Voice. Giant Voice is an amusing name for the basewide speaker system. It's really only Giant if the person using it bothers to speak clearly and at a reasonable volume, neither of which the fellow at the microphone was doing.

The other guy who was working out and I stuck our heads out the doors. "All personnel move to the bunkers immediately," is what we heard. So I grabbed a bottle of water and made my way to the nearest bunker post haste. This bunker happened to be right next to a cluster of female tents, and, it being midnight, all the women were just waking up and heading for the bunker. I lost track of the other guy, and I was the only male in the bunker with about twenty women. This was mildly awkward. We sat in there for a few minutes, until the Giant Voice came back and made more specific instructions--namely, that we were in a bunker that was right near whatever it was that was bad and had to leave immediately! And get north of Michaud Blvd!
Michaud Blvd. was the road immediately west of the bunker we were in. I walked out of the bunker, took five steps, and, theoretically, I was safe.

I went back to the gym. I was the only one in there. The Djiboutian staffer had walkd up the hill and had no intention of coming back. No one else came in. I turned all the tvs to a baseball game. I tried all the exercises I'd seen in the magazines that I'd never tried because they looked silly. Turns out, they were pretty silly. I used the elliptical trainer for about thirty seconds and decided I didn't like it. Then I heard an explosion.

It wasn't much of one, just a little boom, not apparently very far away. I stuck my head out the door. People were wandering around on the main street, by the gym, so clearly the area hadn't been evacuated. I decided to go out and see what was up, so I walked over to my clu. The clus had been evacuated. Dozens of people were standing around looking at their clus with the expression you see on people's faces watching their homes go up in flames on the evening news. I went back to the gym.

After another half hour, the Giant Voice announced all clear, so I left and went back to my clu. And that's when I saw It.

The Robot.

The Robot that Blows Things Up.

It was right there, with Its handlers and mobile oppression unit. It was absolutely the coolest thing I've seen since the cheetahs. I ran upstairs and grabbed my camera, and ran back downstairs before they could load The Robot into Its van. One of the handlers saw me approaching.

"You can't take a picture of The Robot," he said. He had an M-16; he was about 19 and looked a little jumpy. I decided not to inquire further.

Saturday night, while I was asleep, the entire scene played out again. They evacuated the clus. I didn't notice. I may not have slept much, but I slept hard. I missed my chance to catch The Robot in action. Sunday night, I saw a man leaving his clu, waiting for a van to pick him up and take him to the airport. He had luggage. He left the luggage alone and went to a restroom.

Unaccompanied baggage is, of course, a Suspicious Package, and thus must be blown up by The Robot. I considered calling the explosive ordinance disposal unit, just so I could see them come back out for the third consecutive night and maybe surreptitiously snap a photo of The Robot blowing up luggage. But then I thought, I'd be pretty annoyed if they blew up my luggage. So I went and stood by it until the man came back.

Still. I know The Robot is here. I will get a picture eventually. The Robot demands it.

Broken

The headache is not gone, but it is much reduced. The last day or two it's only come about at work, usually around hour three, and then is gone after lunch. I can handle this. I get up and take a walk and stare down the hallway every few minutes, and that seems to help. I know not whence it came, I care less where it goes.

The insomnia is still a problem. Thursday night, for the first time, I lay down at 7 in the evening and actually fell asleep in short order (not having slept a wink the night before). I only slept until midnight, but still, this was five hours, the longest stretch of uninterrupted sleep in at least two weeks. Then Friday I tried to pull off the same trick and could not fall asleep. Finally I got out of bed, around midnight, after tossing and turning for a few hours. I got dressed to go to the gym, but some tiny little snag occurred--I think the string on my combat wallet got stuck on the stem of a banana and I couldn't extricate it--and I flew into a rage. I tore the sheets off the bed, threw the pillows against the walls, swept all the books and papers off my desk, pulled downt the clothesline, and threw the mattress against the wall.

Obviously I was a little troubled.

But I went to the gym anyway, and then there was some excitement, and I finally got back to my clu around two. I played on the computer for a bit, felt tied around four, and went to bed. For an hour. I was dead tired when my alarm went off at five.

Saturday night I finally managed to fall asleep around ten or ten-thirty, after tossing and turning for a few hours. Then I woke up again around two and couldn't get back to sleep.

Sunday night I didn't sleep. Interestingly, I've been much more awake and felt better today than I have any of those nights when I got a couple hours' sleep. But I'm also feeling a little loopy; I didn't know the date (I though it was the 26th today, all day, to the point that I argued with one of our missions that they'd put the wrong dates on their confirmation form and needed to redo it), misspelled my name on a form, forgot whether I sign my name in all caps or not (not anymore, but it took me a while to remember that and I had to cross out my first attempt), and so forth. Somehow I remembered to shave this morning, though.

I went to the doctor. I went yesterday, but there was a line out the door at sick call and I decided not to wait. Today I was the only one in there. The med tech offered Ambien, but, after consulting with the doctor, decided against it as it's very addictive and I might need it for a while. Then they offered diphenhydramine, Benadryl, which has never had any effect on me. Then they decided that maybe the mefloquine I'm taking as a malaria prophylaxis (exactly what it sounds like) was the problem. Given that the drug worksheet for mefloquine makes several remarks that people with my medical history ought to avoid the drug, I'm glad they arrived at that conclusion. When I first brought that up in August, after learning that mefloquine was bad for people with histories of depression or anxiety and has been known to cause serious emotional trauma even in healthy people, I was told that there was really nothing to worry about. This time, a different doctor actually came in to talk to me.
You said you have been depressed in the last year?
Yes.
And you have been diagnosed with anxiety?
Yes.
Who prescribed you mefloquine?
The doctors at my home station.
Did you know you shouldn't take mefloquine?
Not until I was already out here.
I'm taking you off the mefloquine. That should help you sleep. It may take a week, so here's some ambien to get yourself adjusted.

Ah. It feels good to know that not all the doctors are insane and like to prescribe inappropriate medications at incorrect dosages.

Okay. Enough navel-gazing. I don't want this to turn into one of those blogs where the writer just whines all the time. Still, if anyone has any cheese...

Breathe

The headache hasn't gone away, but it's not as bad right now. My sleep schedule is starting to get back to normal and that may help matters; we'll see. I do like the idea of consecutive one-word post titles that start with B. Maybe I can extend the streak.

No, the breathing I'm thinking of is the kind that comes with a bit of relief. I've edited Lauderdale, I've read it and edited it again. Now it's other peoples' turn to read it, while I sit back and... well... actually, I have a few other ideas I'm working on. But I'm also taking a bit of a break, which I need. And trying to do some other reading as well.

I have nothing else to report. I just like talking about the book. It's like a baby; once you have one you talk about it a lot. Nothing wrong with that.

Blind

Last Thursday I developed a little headache. It was nothing major, just a little pressure behind the eyes, the sort of headache I get once in a while and treat with Excedrin. Which is what I did.

Friday the headache was still there. And Saturday. And so on and so forth. It's not a migraine, not the worst headache I've had, but it won't go away. It's at the top of my head, and behind my eyes. It's especially bad at work, because I sit around staring at computer screens all day. I have to take frequent breaks. I can't make it go away, not with Excedrin, not with ibuprofen, not with Tylenol.

Tuesday I went to the clinic. I've had a headache for five days, I said. They checked my blood pressure. They asked if I was experiencing any symptoms that might indicate a sinus infection, but the headache is the only thing I have. The doctor came in and gave me a neurological exam and shone a light into my eyes.

I was prescribed a migraine medication, Imitrex. (Not to be confused with Initech.) Take four now, I was told, and four more in two hours, and the tomorrow morning if you feel the headache coming back take four more.

I went back to my clu. Because I was prescribed a malaria medication that is specifically discouraged for people with my medical history, I've taken to reading the little booklet that comes with any drug I'm prescribed before I take it.

The booklet says, take one pill. If, two hours later, you still have headache symptoms, take a second pill. Do not take a second pill until at least two hours have elapsed. Under no circumstances should you take more than eight pills within 24 hours.

If I had followed the doctor's directions, I'd have taken twelve pills within 24 hours, and four within two hours. I decided I'd rather follow the instructions.

The pills didn't do anything. It turns out that Imitrex works mainly by regulatin serotonin levels in the brain; erratic serotonin release seems to be a major contributing factor in migraine headaches. But I don't have a migraine. My serotonin levels are not likely to be erratic at present, which means Imitrex is probably not doing much of anything. I could take more of them, I suppose, and see what happens, but this seems profoundly idiotic.

I'd take a day off if I could, but with recent personnel changes we have just enough people on staff to prevent anyone working a 12-hour day—and this job is boring enough for 8 hours. Besides, having recently changed shifts (on Tuesday I started working mornings), my sleep schedule is all messed up and I don't know whether I'd be able to sleep or do anything meaningful if I did take a day off.

So, I have a headache. I wish I knew what to do.

Avast!

Ahoy, me hearties! 'Tis Talk Like A Pirate Day!
Mad James Read wishes ye all a day full o' sailin', pillagin' and drinkin' rum! Arr!

An extremely long post of no interest to non-Floridians

Property taxes are on the rise in Florida. No surprise there. It's election season, and all the politicians are proposing solutions. No surprise there, either. None of the solutions being proposed are anything other than giveaways to certain blocks of voters. Again, no surprise. Are we starting to see a theme?

The Crist solution is, like Crist, simple and appealing yet likely to cause significant problems down the road. Crist wants to offer counties and cities the opportunity to let voters choose whether to expand the homestead exemption from $25,000 to $50,000. Most voters would probably approve this, but most counties would not wish to give them the option.

If enacted, the expanded homestead exemption would reduce the total tax burden on homeowners; some homeowners would in fact drop off the tax rolls entirely, especially older homeowners in south Florida's vast trailer parks. Of course, when you reduce tax receipts, you must do one of two things: 1) eliminate or reduce government services, or 2) raise taxes on somebody else.


Team Crist says that "local governments need to live within their means." State government apparently needn't bother.

Actually, there is ample waste at all levels of government to absorb a loss of tax revenues. Trouble is, governments don't usually cut waste first, because they don't believe there is any. So services suffer. Property taxes, in Florida, fund most of the local budgets for county governments and schools. Reducing property taxes means less money for roads, sewers, schools, and the like. People like roads and sewers and schools. In fact most people in Florida complain primarily about roads and schools. So Crist's plan is to reduce the available tax revenue for improving the roads and schools.

Of course, Team Davis has determined that the best thing to do is convene a large committee of people to sit around and talk about the property tax crunch and see what might be done about it. This is the idea put forth by the current governor, who once created a Task Force on Long-Term Solutions for Florida’s Hurricane Insurance Market that he then stocked with a supermajority of insurance company spokesmen, lobbyists, and executives. It is not surprising that said commission failed to find any long-term solutions for Florida's hurricane insurance market that didn't involve homeowners and businesses paying lots of money in insurance premiums. I can imagine the governor's Task Force on Long-Term Solutions To Florida's Property Tax Nightmare achieving a similar result. That said, if we put all the politicians in a room somewhere to talk about property taxes, at least they can't do anything else to screw us while they're in there. And there's always the chance that a giant sinkhole could open up and swallow the room and politicians whole.

The problem is that the state's voters decided in 1992 to give themselves a tax break by enacting a constitutional amendment that allowed us (I didn't vote but I am a homeowner, so I'm guilty, too) to pay taxes on an artificial appraised value of our property that could be no more than 3% higher than the previous year. Thus over the past five years while the real value of taxable property in Florida has risen by over 100%, the taxable value of said property has risen by only 15% for all Floridians lucky enough to have owned their homes and not moved in that span of time. But for those Floridians who've moved in, or moved from one part of the state to another, the 3% rule has not applied. In some cases next-door neighbors may have tax bills that vary by a few thousand dollars. Businesses, two, are feeling the pinch of rising property values.

What to do, what to do. Convene a committee? Give the people who are already not carrying their weight an even bigger tax break? Does anybody seriously think either of these ideas are the solution?

Eliminating the 3% "Save Our Homes" giveaway would allow municipalities and counties to reduce the overall tax rate. Homeowners currently under the plan would face a fairly sharp rise in taxes, but the overall property tax rate would come down, reducing the burden which currently falls disproportionately on new residents (some of whom are lifelong Floridians who've moved recently). The change could be phased in gradually to avoid shocking the budgets of long-term homeowners, say over three years. At the end of that time overall tax rates would be lower and all homeowners and businesses would share the burden of property taxation equally. Only once we're all in this together can we actually expect any kind of reasonable discussion about how to drive down tax rates overall.

Team Crist claims growth can be made to pay for itself. I dispute this notion, but this is already a long enough rant and I'll save that one for later. But let's keep it on the table as an idea. If the idea works, then as counties and cities grow, they should be able to meet all demands of the growing population without raising taxes to pay for expanded services. But if we don't eliminate "Save Our Homes," property taxes on newcomers will remain significantly higher than on their established counterparts. This could serve to reduce growth pressures, but this is Florida and I don't think that's a realistic outcome. However, because municipal property tax rates are capped by the state, growth will have to be sufficiently high in all areas across the state to allow counties and municipalities to pay for all necessary services solely by charging newcomers the full legal tax rate at the full appraisal of their homes. This means home values will have to continue to increase--and of course each newcomer immediately enters the Save Our Homes program, so even if property values increase 15% per year (July home prices were only .9% higher than in July 2005), each new home's taxable value will be only 3% higher next year.

Several counties statewide, largely the smaller and rural counties with lower growth and property value growth rates, are already at the state cap for property taxes. Take away another $25k from every appraised property in these counties, which have cheaper property values than more urban, higher-growth counties, and they will no longer be able to meet their minimum requirements for basic services. So Team Crist's proposal might sound great to those of us who live in big counties or out in the 'burbs, but it's actually a death sentence for smaller and rural counties--unless, of course, they encourage vast new housing subdivisions and eliminate agricultural land. I don't think this is Team Crist's secret plan, but it could be an unintended consequence.

Florida has chosen to fund all government services without an income tax, which I think is terrific. This places a large burden on property owners and consumers who must pay higher than average property tax and sales tax rates (we also have bed taxes and other taxes that take advantage of tourists, as well we should). If we assume that government must have money to function, then it stands to reason that we ought all to pay into the pot fairly. Property should be taxed at its real value. If we tax all property at real value, the overall tax rate can be lowered without the spectacle we've seen in the last week of angry citizens converging on city halls demanding lower tax rates--always without cutting services, or at least not the services the angry citizens themselves make use of.

Until we tax all property at its real value and all taxpayers are facing the same relative burden, we can't talk seriously about how to reform the tax system. Once tax rates have a chance to stabilize, we'll know whether they're still too high. Then we have to start the real discussion about what services we wish to eliminate to reduce taxes. It's all well and good to say that local governments should live within their means, but that's just a way of saying you don't wish to make the hard decisions about what programs to cut and what to keep.

People who want low taxes have to learn to live with less government. I think less government is great and we should have a long public dialogue about what services the government should provide and what we should handle ourselves. What we can't continue to do is this "big-government conservative" notion that we can cut taxes and raise spending and somehow everything will be all right. Unlike the federal government, Florida and its counties and municipalities are required to balance their budgets every year, so wanton deficit spending is not an option. It is irresponsible for politicians to campaign on claims that we can reduce our taxes without also describing where and how government expenditures will be cut. It's very easy to decry government waste, but have you noticed how rarely the politicians complaining about it manage to find specific examples of it, and then eliminate them? I'd have a lot more respect for Team Crist if they could tell me what they really meant by "live within your means."

Vatic Vacillations

I love the letter V.
But it has nothing to do with this post.

So, Pope Benedict XVI has apologized for his remarks in Regensburg last week in which he quoted a 14th Century Byzantine emperor who said not nice things about Islam and the Prophet Muhammad. During the speech, twice before the quote and once after, the Pope indicated that he was merely quoting a historical figure, and not advocating said historical figure's positions.

Predictable outrage ensued, although on a smaller scale than that following the recent publication of some stupid cartoons. Now, the Pope has apologized by saying exactly what he said in the speech in the first place, namely, that he was quoting Emperor Manuel II Paleologos (great name, by the way) and not speaking from his own opinions.

Unsurprisingly this apology has been cited by some sources as not nearly enough to satisfy all Muslims (some of whom will not be satisfied until the Pope converts to Islam). To prove the Emperor's point about Islam and violence, an Italian nun was shot in the streets of (the Islamic Courts Union ruled city of) Mogadishu, while some Iranian chap announced the Pope and George Bush were united in an attempt to bring back the Crusades. (In fairness, the Iranian chap is only doing what politicians worldwide do every day, namely creating false bogeymen to frighten the populace and make them forget about their real problems, all of which are caused by politicians. I should not blame Islam for the general curse of politics.)

Of course, Christianity is hardly a religion historically known for peace and love, at least in a geopolitical sense. The mass collectivization of Native Americans, African colonialism, the Crusades, all these wonderful aspects of world history and more were borne on the shoulders of our pathetic inability to grasp the true meaning of Christ's injunction to love our neighbors as ourselves. Perhaps the Pope could start a dialogue among Christians about whether we have truly atoned for these historical blemishes on our own record. We're all quick to announce that we can catch more flies with honey than vinegar, yet world history before and after Christ's appearance has been little more than vinegar. That said, of course, the Crusades were over six hundred years ago and it's time to bury the damn hatchet. I frequently hear the refrain that "memories are long" in this part of the world. What this really means is that people in this part of the world are stuck in the past. It's time to start moving forward, not looking over our shoulders hoping somebody will turn into salt.

Not to let the Islamic leadership off the hook, either. Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf has said that "efforts to link Islam and terrorism should be clearly opposed." He is, of course, correct, but I wonder whether he couldn't start matters at home. Musharraf is, after all, the fellow whose country happens to be harboring Osama bin Ladn. Perhaps, if the good General/President is really concerned about the link between Islam and violence in the minds of Westerners and Christians, he could start by condemning the 9/11 attacks, the Madrid bombing, the London metro bombings, etc. etc. etc., and encouraging his fellow rulers of Muslim countries to do the same in absolutely unequivocal terms. This would be far too much to ask, of course. It's much easier to complain and riot and force the Westerners and Christians to apologize for every perceived slight to you, while continuing to foment anti-Western sentiment among your own people in order to cling to power.

I'm slowly coming to realization that all world leaders everywhere at petty, cloying little assholes not worthy of the leadership positions thrust upon them by a confused and bitter public. We don't need a revolution in one country. We need a revolution in every country.

A Picture For Elm Street

Okay Elm Streeters. Look hearty. This picture appears on the Playa Chicken. I'll have more discussion about the Playa Chicken and other related items here in the future, but this picture that I'm going to link to, you have to go see this picture.

When you go see this picture, think back about eight years or so from this December. Ah, the weather was fine. We had brought a few amusing items out into the woods with us. But we later decided... um... well... we were going to burn them, you see, but then, um, we thought better of it. Yeah. That's the ticket. And if I recall there were some metal rings there that I waled on with a stick. Ah, good times.

Anyway, think back to that night. And then think about the scale involved, and then click on this link. And think about what WE could do with this kind of scale...

Smitty Gets A Clu!

Well, the love affair with tent living is over. Actually, it never really started.
This morning I moved into my very own Containerized Living Unit (CLU). It's a lot like living in a U-Stor-It. I have a bed, a desk (with chair!), wooden shelves, two (count them!) lockable cabinets, and a sink with mirror. Plus there's electricity! And I'm only steps away from a shower and toilet, which I have to share with a neighbor (much better than sharing with 100 neighbors).

My clu is on the second floor (of two), which is not at all like living at home but is at least off the ground. I've grown used to altitude and it's nice to have some back, even if only 15 feet of it. From my porch I can actually see… um… some haze in the distance. And hills! There are hills! I have morning sun, too, so I'm going to plant some watermelon seeds in a sandbag and see if they grow.

I'll take a couple pictures soon so you can all see my wonderful new metal home.

The Holy Duckfire

This is sort of a disturbing article--Two Men Charged In Duck Beating--on a couple of levels (one of which is, it's illegal to beat a duck to death with a stick but not illegal to go bowhunting for a buck that can't be brought down with a single arrow; how do we determine where cruelty starts and stops?). But the most disturbing level is this one:

Murcia-Rosa told investigators that he and two friends were fishing in a lake at Parrots Landing Apartments in the 1100 block of Sussex Drive when several ducks swam to the pieces of bread they used as bait.

Parrot's Landing is the apartment complex that Hank Lauderdale lives at in Lauderdale. The ducks in the canal there feature prominently in one of the episodes in the story. One of the minor characters sacrifices a duck in a Santeria ritual. But he isn't cruel about it.

Still. The whole thing's a little weird.

The Holy Duckfire

This is sort of a disturbing article--Two Men Charged In Duck Beating--on a couple of levels (one of which is, it's illegal to beat a duck to death with a stick but not illegal to go bowhunting for a buck that can't be brought down with a single arrow; how do we determine where cruelty starts and stops?). But the most disturbing level is this one:

Murcia-Rosa told investigators that he and two friends were fishing in a lake at Parrots Landing Apartments in the 1100 block of Sussex Drive when several ducks swam to the pieces of bread they used as bait.

Parrot's Landing is the apartment complex that Hank Lauderdale lives at in Lauderdale. The ducks in the canal there feature prominently in one of the episodes in the story. One of the minor characters sacrifices a duck in a Santeria ritual. But he isn't cruel about it.

Still. The whole thing's a little weird.

Congo

This week's reading them was The Congo. I wrote a very--very very--long review of these two books, which I've shelved as being about a great many topics apart from the books, and I'll post pieces of it as time goes on. So here's a much quicker
review.
The first book was The Congo from Leopold to Kabila: A People's History, by Congolese academic Georges Nzongola-Ntalaja. The book was more academic than I'd expected and as such I wouldn't call it a fun read. But it was certainly informative. Nzongola is a true believer in the power of democracy, truer I think than most American politicians. That bias (if you can call it that) is evident throughout the book, and Nzongola clearly believes that if real democracy can be brought to the Congo the place will settle down. But the country's history is rapine followed by more rapine; the place has never known a government that didn't consist of wealthy thugs stealing money from the treasury while ignoring the needs of the population--never. Not once since it was created in the 1880s. And it does not know that now. Having searched around on the internet for recent writings from Nzongola (the book was published in 2003, after Laurent Kabila's assassination but before this summer's election was on the calendar), it is clear he does not believe Joseph Kabila, or the elections as constituted this year, will bring democracy to the country. It is hard for me to see much hope for the place, but Nzongola does, and closes the book by reaffirming his belief that it is possible for democracy to come to Congo, and when it does it will bring peace to the country. We can only hope.

Facing the Congo by Jeffrey Tayler was a somewhat different book, a travelogue. Mr. Tayler, finding himself (as I do) bored and dissatisfied with life, decides he has a need for adventure, and that he will find himself somewhere on the Congo River. He determines to fly to Zaire (this was in 1994, while Mobutu was still in power and before the name had changed), take a barge upriver to Kisangani, the highest navigable point on the Congo, and from there purchase a pirogue (a Congolese dugout canoe), and a hire a guide, and pirogue down the river alone all the way to Kinshasa. Suffice to say he has not even made to Kinshasa and he is already wondering whether this is a good idea. It isn't, of course, it's absolutely a dreadful idea, but Tayler proceeds apace and survives to write about his trip. Of the two books, though Nzongola's is an outstanding work and very thought-provoking, this is of course far away the more readable and more interesting. More than that, as travel writing goes, Tayler's trip makes all other so-called "adventure travel" look like a Sunday drive with Miss Daisy. I highly recommend it.

Congo

This week's reading them was The Congo. I wrote a very--very very--long review of these two books, which I've shelved as being about a great many topics apart from the books, and I'll post pieces of it as time goes on. So here's a much quicker
review.
The first book was The Congo from Leopold to Kabila: A People's History, by Congolese academic Georges Nzongola-Ntalaja. The book was more academic than I'd expected and as such I wouldn't call it a fun read. But it was certainly informative. Nzongola is a true believer in the power of democracy, truer I think than most American politicians. That bias (if you can call it that) is evident throughout the book, and Nzongola clearly believes that if real democracy can be brought to the Congo the place will settle down. But the country's history is rapine followed by more rapine; the place has never known a government that didn't consist of wealthy thugs stealing money from the treasury while ignoring the needs of the population--never. Not once since it was created in the 1880s. And it does not know that now. Having searched around on the internet for recent writings from Nzongola (the book was published in 2003, after Laurent Kabila's assassination but before this summer's election was on the calendar), it is clear he does not believe Joseph Kabila, or the elections as constituted this year, will bring democracy to the country. It is hard for me to see much hope for the place, but Nzongola does, and closes the book by reaffirming his belief that it is possible for democracy to come to Congo, and when it does it will bring peace to the country. We can only hope.

Facing the Congo by Jeffrey Tayler was a somewhat different book, a travelogue. Mr. Tayler, finding himself (as I do) bored and dissatisfied with life, decides he has a need for adventure, and that he will find himself somewhere on the Congo River. He determines to fly to Zaire (this was in 1994, while Mobutu was still in power and before the name had changed), take a barge upriver to Kisangani, the highest navigable point on the Congo, and from there purchase a pirogue (a Congolese dugout canoe), and a hire a guide, and pirogue down the river alone all the way to Kinshasa. Suffice to say he has not even made to Kinshasa and he is already wondering whether this is a good idea. It isn't, of course, it's absolutely a dreadful idea, but Tayler proceeds apace and survives to write about his trip. Of the two books, though Nzongola's is an outstanding work and very thought-provoking, this is of course far away the more readable and more interesting. More than that, as travel writing goes, Tayler's trip makes all other so-called "adventure travel" look like a Sunday drive with Miss Daisy. I highly recommend it.

Lauderdale Progress

I have completed the second draft of Lauderdale.

Ahem. Excuse me.

I finished the second draft!!!!

I haven't actually read it, yet. The first draft, that was the big part. Then I sat down and thought of all the things I knew offhand were deficient in the first draft--names that needed changing, parts that needed beefing up or reducing (or eliminating in one case), subplots that needed to be expanded or deleted, and little picky technical things like whether or not the Porsche Cayenne was being sold yet in 1999-2000. (It wasn't. Foo. I had to go with the BMW X5, a lesser vehicle. If you know of a really strange or unusual SUV that was available in the 2000 model year and was large, please tell me.)

Making all those changes constituted the second draft. I figured that would take most of a month but, once I started, I finished it in seven days. Now I have to sit down and read the thing, which I've never actually done. I'll make notes while I do that, so I know what needs to be fixed in the third draft.

It's this third draft that I'll be sending to any interested readers. If you're interested, shoot me an email (M&D and Ayzair, you're already tagged).

I won't start reading it, though, until I finish the books I'm reading now. I don't want to be distracted. But I should finish these books fairly soon, probably in about a week, so I think I'm still very much on track to have the third draft prepared by October.

Lauderdale Progress

I have completed the second draft of Lauderdale.

Ahem. Excuse me.

I finished the second draft!!!!

I haven't actually read it, yet. The first draft, that was the big part. Then I sat down and thought of all the things I knew offhand were deficient in the first draft--names that needed changing, parts that needed beefing up or reducing (or eliminating in one case), subplots that needed to be expanded or deleted, and little picky technical things like whether or not the Porsche Cayenne was being sold yet in 1999-2000. (It wasn't. Foo. I had to go with the BMW X5, a lesser vehicle. If you know of a really strange or unusual SUV that was available in the 2000 model year and was large, please tell me.)

Making all those changes constituted the second draft. I figured that would take most of a month but, once I started, I finished it in seven days. Now I have to sit down and read the thing, which I've never actually done. I'll make notes while I do that, so I know what needs to be fixed in the third draft.

It's this third draft that I'll be sending to any interested readers. If you're interested, shoot me an email (M&D and Ayzair, you're already tagged).

I won't start reading it, though, until I finish the books I'm reading now. I don't want to be distracted. But I should finish these books fairly soon, probably in about a week, so I think I'm still very much on track to have the third draft prepared by October.

Oh yeah, the other crazy guys

I express frustration on this blog from time to time with the bizarre and offensive positions taken by some of my fellow Christians. And I maintain that those positions are still bizarre and offensive, still beneath organized Christianity, and still rather more damaging to the cause of evangelism than not.

But let me for a moment point out the following. We do have some crazies. But we do not by any means have a monopoly on religious insanity, nor do we even have the worst offenders.

We do NOT have people taking hostages, and demanding the hostages convert to Christianity at gunpoint. (At least, not anymore. I make no excuses whatsoever for the Conquistadors presently rotting in hell or for the 19th Century African missionaries who thought the Africans could only find God at the end of a chicotte.)

Nonetheless, neither can excuses be made for the so-called Holy Jihad Brigade who kidnapped journalists Steve Centanni and Olaf Wiig, then released a video showing them converting to Islam--a conversion obtained by pointing pistols at their heads and ordering them to do so.

Yes, you can suggest that they might have martyred themselves for Christ in that instance, but let's not miss the point here: namely, a conversion obtained under threat of death, like a confession obtained through torture, is meaningless garbage and insulting to both faiths involved.

The same (decidedly un)Holy Jihad Brigade initially argued that they'd kill the two journalists unless America released all Muslims held in its prisons. Another attempt to force non-genuine conversions, because if we had decided to go utterly insane and wantonly release all "Muslim" prisoners in the jails how many new converts would we suddenly have? Hmm... Would they be genuine converts? I doubt it.

What the hell are they thinking? Does it matter if they win a convert by threatening him with death or freedom from legal trouble? Suppose for a moment Islam is the one true faith. Does God want converts to His one true faith made by the sword, by threats and intimidation, or by empty gifts? No. I may not be the strongest Christian and I certainly don't have all, or even very many, of the answers. But I'm fairly confident in my belief that such conversions offend God more than they please Him.

Then, al-Qaeda, after causing thousands of deaths in this country and demonstrating nothing but a desire to kill innocent Americans, has the gall, the unrepentant nerve, to put some fat-faced fuckwad in a turban on video and encourage all of us to convert.

And we're at war in Iraq. We're committing billions of dollars and thousands of lives to an imperialist experiment, when we should be committing the same and more to rooting out these people and destroying them with all the dedication they have to destroying us. That's what this whole Iraq war should-we-stay-or-should-we-go-now thing comes down to. Are we really defeating the people we're meant to be at war with? The terrorists are scary people--the notion that they might find a way to park a bomb in the U.S. and then threaten to blow it up unless everyone in the city converts. I am not now and have never been convinced that the war in Iraq has done anything whatsoever to defeat those people.