All, San Francisco, Climate Change, Environment

Life is Beautiful; I do nothing to Stop the Blaze

We go into the city to celebrate my fantastic new job, bar hopping in the Mission with Jeremy and Jenifer.

Jeremy and Jenifer are a bit older than my sweetie and I and they have the kind of financial stability we are striving for and the suburbanism we are trying to avoid.

The bars close at two and we go up to their hotel. It occurs to me that my visits to hotels have mostly been connected to conferences and road trip stopovers. The very idea that my friends are paying to spend the night in the city is exemplary of the kind of luxury that makes me bashful.

At the room, we spend a lot of time bitching about the motion sensor refrigerators. They have fridges in every room but they are already fully stocked with drinks. If you take one, the sensor records it on your bill. This is a good way to take advantage of wasted partiers and it also means that every room has a refrigerator that can’t be used. If one wants to use it, they charge a twenty dollar fee to have its contents removed. This resonates with me as a symbol of what’s fundamentally wrong with this society: the hotel pays for every room to have an unusable fridge while so many people in the world still don’t have refrigeration. It is the same as the empty houses in a city with so many homeless, the same as the wasted, unpurchased food that rots in the trash while so many people starve.
The only word to justify such logic is profit.

I have been reading Derrick Jensen and he is caught up in the idea that the dominant culture is insane. The only way to choose sushi and freeways over birds and tuna and the preservation of the climate, he argues, is to be crazy. It is crazy to destroy one’s landbase for any reason, much less so we can all pay for minibars in our hotel rooms. But I don’t think the dominant culture is crazy. It does not have, as Jensen puts it, a death wish. I believe we are merely short-sighted.

Leaving the hotel room I couldn’t help but see how easy it is to fall into this luxury, how very second-nature it is to me.

Standing in the big glass elevator, I hear its mechanical WOOSH and we are swept past eight floors, each one arranged precisely to be sterile and beautiful and non-offensive. Everywhere I look I am surrounded by artifice. There was no elevator muzak, but in such a moment there should have been. Sean was saying something about how all these hotels are designed the same way, like a formula. Briefly I feel science fiction, like this can’t be real, these smooth and perfect elevators in this smooth and perfect structure. Some day people will look back in awe, trying to imagine living in a world so pristine, in the same way impoverished Cubans wonder at the splendor of Batista’s muraled and gilded palace. Some day this same building will be dark and dirty and people will try to imagine how beautiful it must have been to ride in those glass elevators (It’s the same hotel featured in the 1977 Mel Brooks movie, High Anxiety).

Yet this kind of luxury has been omnipresent my entire life. Even as someone that has tried to take a step back and evaluate where my culture has come from, where it is going, the electric glow of the hotel lobby is expected, commonplace. Nature is what’s alien.

Humans are not good at connecting the dots. Even if I can see the connection between eating sushi and the “clear-cutting” of the oceans, it doesn’t touch my life. I have my own dreams, things I’ve been aspiring to as long as I can remember. Everyone does. Rarely does the trajectory of our lives come unhinged by the things we read about in the news. I know the polar bears are dying but there are so many things I want to do with my life that have nothing to do with polar bears. These few who say, “this is more important than my life, more important than anything I have ever wanted for myself,” are far out-numbered by those who are following their dreams in the system that perpetuates the destruction. Not sinister desires: musicians and writers, lawyers and firemen, chefs and film makers all rely on the continuation of the current system. And how could they not? Their dreams are born in it, they have never known anything else.

I am consumed by these thought as we drive home over the bay bridge. Sean is talking about how much he enjoys the ride. It is all downhill and easy turns. The cars speed at 80. The bridge has two levels and we are on the lower. In the distance there is a column of smoke. It goes higher than the concrete ceiling that limits our view. The smoke is so black it stands out against the navy of the night sky. It is four a.m.

As we leave the covered part of the bridge, the traffic slows to gaze at the biggest fire I have ever seen. Flames are easily shooting seventy feet into the air (later figures are 250 feet). The onramp we are passing is on fire. People are pulled over to look and take pictures. A firetruck is arriving at the scene and even the fireman is using his camera phone to take pictures. The fire is on the “maze,” a cluster of ramps that go onto the bridge. It has entirely consumed whatever started it. The lower ramp is broken in two and, as we drive by, the people gawking gasp: there is a crack as the flames consume the higher overpass like so much kindling in a giant campfire.

This awakens me from my daze. Through the glass and steel encasing of the car, the fire beckons, a bright bold reminder of nature, powerful and awesome. It is enormous. The firetrucks are powerless to stop it, at most they can only hope to contain it.

Tomorrow, I will hear radio recordings of of penguins making distress calls because their ice is melting. I will learn that the bluebell flowers are dying and thus so are the orange tipped butterflies and the birds that eat those butterflies (and so on). Just as every day I hear of the disappearance of some frog or the bleaching of the coral reefs. And I will go on singing and blogging and drawing.

But on this night my animal instincts are touched, the blaze attacking my artificial world like a giant pillaging the village. Still, I am civilized. I know there are firemen whose job it is to confront this giant. My job is to stay in my car. This is my place, our place, to sit by and watch as the whole world burns.

Environment

The Graduate Was Right

This Sunday is Earth Day and I have an idea for something low-key that folks can do to celebrate.

Choose one day to be obsessed with plastic. Why plastic? Because you can’t make it without oil. Since we’ve used up half the earths supply and are rapidly increasing the rate at which we use it (as other countries industrialize), it is likely that in our lifetimes it will run out. This will impact our lives in many ways besides the fuel to commute from the suburbs, and plastic is one of them.

Take some time to really notice just how much plastic is part of the American life. How much of the food you eat comes shrink-wrapped or in resealable bags? What about the cables and cords that electrify our world? Hospital equipment is often plastic. My printer. My monitor. My stereo.

Whether you see it or not, most things arrive shipped in plastic. Even at the hat shop, every hat we sell comes wrapped in a plastic bag. These don’t get reused or recycled. We fill a trash bag every day. When you buy something new, it probably arrived in a plastic bag and will go home in a different plastic bag.

Take a moment to look around the room and see how many things you can see that are made at least partly of plastic, or used plastic as part of their shipping process. Because that’s something we may not have when oil is finished.

What generally strikes me about this little exercise is not how much I will miss these items. My usual thought is, what a waste. The world is running out of oil and we are wrapping rubber and plastic Barbie’s in paper and plastic boxes. The world is running out of oil and we are eating off of disposable plastic forks. How will we explain to our
children that we used our most precious resource for disposable toothbrushes? When there is no oil, how will we justify glossy magazines with plastic-infused pages?

Politics, Feminism

Bush’s Supreme Court Picks Pay Off

For the first time since Roe V. Wade, the federal government is upholding a ban on a woman’s right to terminate a pregnancy. This ruling by the Supreme Court is described as a ban on “Partial-birth abortion” and reproductive freedom advocates point out that the wording of the ban is ambiguous. It can be used to prevent women seeking abortions as early as thirteen weeks into a pregnancy.

Keep in mind that the time-table on pregnancy is deceptive. A woman’s period is hardly like clockwork and many women will not test for pregnancy until after the first or second week. Then it sometimes takes several
weeks for her to come up with the money as abortions aren’t cheap. This is particularly true in the case of teenagers who are afraid to tell their parents that they are having intercourse. Scared teens in denial represent a significant portion of abortions.

The other issue that NARAL and the ACLU seem most upset about is that the stating of the law says nothing about exceptions to protect the health of the mother.

While I think these are both important points, the pro-choicers have already lost this debate by accepting the premise of their opponents.

I have worked in an abortion clinic so I like to think I know a little bit about this subject. If you take only one thing away from this post to pass onto others, let it be this: “partial-birth abortion” is not a real description of a medical procedure but a media strategy of the fundamentalist movement.

The average American has this idea that partial-birth abortion is when a woman goes into labor and then instead of having the baby the doctor kills it. It is logical for people to assume this, what else would such a word describe? And this is exactly what the right wants you to think. But we already have a word for that: infanticide. And no one likes infanticide.

The procedure that is described as partial-birth is when the fetus is pulled through the birth canal. It is in no way part of the process of giving birth nor is it any indication of the amount of time since conception.

Moreover, just to settle this issue, I want to explain exactly how it is determined at which point it is no longer acceptable in this country to terminate a pregnancy. A pregnancy is considered past that point of no return when it can be kept alive outside of the womb with all of the benefits of medical science. If it wouldn’t be possible for us to keep it alive should it come into the world, it is not considered a viable being and may be terminated.

I think this is fair. And clearly infanticide, or what average Joe thinks of “partial-birth abortion,” does not fall into this category.

We are facing world-wide population problems and though Americans don’t reproduce as rapidly as other countries we do consume more. We cannot blithely continue to pretend that humans should be having as many babies as possible, despite what the Bible says.

Otherwise, where does one draw the line? Dear readers, is there a better way to determine that a fetus is a living thing, other than this ridiculous Catholic notion that every sperm is sacred?

The fact of the matter is that abortion isn’t going anywhere. Women have been independent for too long to let other people tell them what they can do with their own bodies. Whether future abortions will be performed in a sixteen-year old’s bathroom with an unbent wire coat hanger is another issue.

Gotta Hear This Music

A Closer Look At: Of Montreal — the Sunlandic Twins

Unlike your average one-download wonders, Sunlandic Twins is a well-produced album with nifty tie-ins that shift the album smoothly from one track to the next. This is an album to listen to from beginning to end, preferably in the space right before dreams start. While some of the songs feel like transition pieces to the better numbers, most of them have an interesting progression and climax. Their sweet sounding harmonious voices are just harsh enough to be rock n’ roll when necessary. Sunlandic Twins is heavy on light keyboards, giving the work that happy sound reminiscent of the best the eighties had to offer.

The album kicks off with “Requiem for OMM2,” which sounds like a leftover from the British Invasion. “I Was A Landscape In Your Dream” is what a brain massage might feel like while “Wraith Pinned to the Mist and Other Games” is bouncy and bass-y. “Forecast Fascist Future” continues the fantasy with a well-constructed song that is somewhere between Dr. Seuss and Sci-Fi. The lyrics to this track are telling of the band’s narrative style:

The language of the frost lobs dead balloons over ruins today/
In view of wan wordless crowds that chase waifs to spires with fiery plumes./

There’s enough poetry hear to keep the listening interesting beyond the first two or three rotations.

The real gems on the Sunlandic Twins are “So Begins Our Alabee, ” and “The Party’s Crashing Us.” The latter is one for singing and dancing. If these indie-rockers had a club anthem, this would be it. A double-clap beat gives way to an electronic swell. It also features some of the most memorable lyrics I’ve heard in a long time:

Oh well, we made love/ like a pair of black wizards/
you freed me from the past/ you fucked the suburbs out of me./

“So Begins Our Alabee,” has a heavier sound. Like most of the tracks, the bass guitar and keyboard drives the song. This track is so furiously good that hearing it makes my heart beat a little faster.

Give this album a listen. Though the lyrics are at times inexplicable, the riffs are not. I could use your help interpreting their mad genius.

Class

“Some of Those That Work Forces Are the Same That Burn Crosses”

for Chris.

A while back a friend of my asked me (on myspace) what my thoughts are on law enforcement officers. I thought there is a whole blog in that answer but I wasn’t in a hurry to write it. That was until I found out yesterday that he is on his way to becoming a cop.

It should be noted that the blog where this question was raised I had mentioned that the men in blue had beaten my mother in the intake room. When they left her she was catatonic.

I was raised with a prejudice against L.E.O.s. My parents are hippies and they see cops as the people who send non-violent drug offenders to prison. They are also the people who did nothing to intervene when when I was eight and watching my mother’s boyfriend beat her in our front yard. Another childhood memory is my neighbors being busted for coke. I remember how the police tore up the house for five hours. They ripped open her furniture and confiscated her jewelry while detaining them by putting my neighbors on the ground with their boots on my neighbor’s backs.

So finding out that my friend is becoming a cop is about like telling someone in the KKK that one is converting to Judiaism.

My prejudice against L.E.O.s didn’t decrease with the wisdom of higher education. As an adult, I have seen officers beat non-violent protestors. I have seen them arrest hundreds of people under false pretense. I have stood for hours in front of riot police explaining the reasons for civil disobedience. They stand like statues.

police fire into crowd at FTAA in Miami. All pictures below are from the FTAA protest in Miami, though they are commonplace at large-scale American protests. Think of these as just one example.

I have seen a paddy-wagon accelerate towards street blockades. If anything has radicalized me, it is the memories of my friends with bruises bigger than fists from rubber bullets shot into crowds. If anything has radicalized me, it was seeing tanks riding through Savannah at the G8. Or hearing stories of officers confiscating film or medical equipment. Or talking to locals who were told by the cops that it was Okay to mug the protestors because they are bad people who don’t deserve protection.

The day after this ocurred, police were arresting puppeteers by the hundred at SOA in Fort Benning, GA, just so their protest numbers would be lower for the day of the march.

I have thought a lot about police officers because I believe that all people are essentially good. I believe that humans are compelled to do what they think is right, even if they must lie to themselves to do those things. There is no such thing as evil but misinformation and ignorance are to blame for what is thought of as evil in the world.

So when I see humans behaving like this, it really makes me question how they thought this is the right course of action. And I do have a theory.

protestor overcome by teargas.

Let’s face it, cops have a dangerous job (not the most dangerous government job, which goes to garbage collectors. When is Will Smith going to make a movie about them?). They don’t actually put their lives on the line every day, but the potential is there (when I think about it, this is similar to the daily fear women have of being raped.). When a cop approaches someone, they have to decide right away if this is going to be one of those moments where their life is in danger. In other words, is this person a good guy or a bad guy? If it is a helpless old lady crossing the street, they are going to see this as a moment to protect and serve, with emphasis on the later. Most of the time I approach a police officer they are eager to serve me. I am a white, middle-class educated woman. They are going to be relaxed and not worried I will shoot them in the face.

On the other hand, if I am at a protest I become one of the people that the nice old ladies must be proteced from. I am the bad guy. If they have to be prepared to shoot me if necessary then they must begin by dehumanizing me. Not after I have committed a crime but from moment one.

If it seems like brown people and the poor, especially men, don’t like cops who can blame them? All of their interactions with L.E.O.s begin with dehumanization and at best are viewed suspiciously as criminals. I know very few minorities that haven’t experienced this at least once in their lives.

Yet if I put myself in the position of a police person, I can hardly imagine behaving any other way. One cannot live their entire life in fear of every work-place interaction. But there must be an element of caution when approaching situations where criminal behavior is happening and it is your job to stop it.

Not to mention the fact that the people who are doing the real killing, the polluters and corporate thieves, aren’t likely to ever wind up in a gun fight with a cop. Sure, they may be slowly giving them cancer but all interactions can be civil throughout.

Thus, I do not think cops are bad people simply because bad people don’t exist. But I do believe that the law enforcement field encourages folks to see things in black and white; I believe it is an inevitable by-product of the job.

So, yeah, Officer Chris, I still love ya’. But I’ll be saying agnostic prayers at night that every man who reaches for his wallet doesn’t become the next Amadu Dialo. And that you remain stead-fast in your suspicion of old white ladies crossing the street.

San Francisco, Class

A Beautiful Day To Be A Homeless Man Who Thinks the Girls All Resemble Starlets

We can hear Omar coming from a block away, shouting to someone in the street or to the owner of other shops. I wonder what he says to them. To us, he always says the same thing. That is, if he gets inside. Some days we close the door. He stands outside shouting and we shake our heads and say, “Omar, go away,” or “Omar, go home.”

This is silly because Omar is home. I wonder what part of Telegraph Ave. he sleeps on, if he has blankets. The owners of the hat shop are his neighbors and his daily routine is to walk down Telegraph, sharing the natural exuberance and extraversion that would have served him well in the working world.

Omar is not too drunk today. He walks into the hat shop, gap-toothed and smiling with a Miller High Life. It is a shamelessly beautiful afternoon and Ed, the owner, is eager to be combative. So Omar is allowed to stay, if only for a minute.

Omar says: “Jess’ca!” not talking to me, but talking to Jessica, “you know who you look like?” He turns to me, “She looks like Fae Dunaway!”

Jessica rolls her eyes. “I know, I know, me with my beautiful blonde hair. Good-bye Omar.” Jessica has simple, brown hair.

He insists that I look like someone too. I tell him to come back when he thinks of it.

He does leave but comes back minutes later to tell me that I look like “A YOUNG ELIZABETH TAYLOR! THAT’S JUST WHO YOU LOOK LIKE! ELIZABETH TAYLOR WAS BEAUTIFUL. But not as pretty as Fae Dunaway.”

It is not too hard to get Omar to leave unless Ed is around. I thought today would be the day that there was a break in our ritual conversation, we might discuss how much hat shop girls look like old movie stars. But then Ed sees Omar and smiles, eager to have someone to josh on. It doesn’t matter what Ed says, no matter how hateful, cruel or dismissive, Omar’s response is always the same.

He doesn’t speak to Ed, he speaks to everyone in sight, all the people in the shop and on the street. He says, “THIS MAN SAVED MY LIFE! I MEAN IT! I love this man, I mean, HE REALLY SAVED MY LIFE!”

“What ‘ya got there, Omar?” Ed asks, pointing at the Champaign of beers, “Got one for me?”
“You don’t want none of this!” Omar protests.
“Come on! Saved your life can’t even give a guy a beer?”
“Carol will kill me for sure if she ever found out!” Carol is the other owner and Ed’s wife.
“Come on, can’t even give me a beer?”
“No! HELP! SOMEONE SAVE ME! THIS MAN IS TRYING TO ROB ME!”
But no one looks because who would believe for the shop owner is going to rob a drunk and they’re all smiles anyway.

It makes me happy to see Omar smile. I think how sad it must be to wake up every day and get drunk and set out to find the shop owner so that he can really understand that he saved your life. I wonder how he became this man, what trials changed him from an innocent boy, someone with hope. And how young, and was it a million small injustices or does he strive to blot out a particular memory that haunts him?

But today Amoeba Records has a band playing and the street vendors are happy just sitting in the sun and the punks are selling jokes for change and in short, it is a stunning Spring day. Even a man without a literal or proverbial pot to piss in grinning from ear to ear and relishing the sunshine.

Culture, Racism, Class

Frank Talk About Racism and Classism

I was sitting on a bench during my ten-minute break from work when I was approached by a young black man with dreds. His clothes were shabby and his eyes were damaged and baggy from the level of exhaustion that usually only comes with the assistance of drugs.

He offered me a quarter to use my cell phone. This reminded me of my boyfriend, who looks a little like a “terrorist.” We had an argument once because he walked a mile home to use the phone rather than asking a person on the street to use theirs. He told me that it never works and people usually get scared or annoyed. He would rather walk the mile than ask.

So it ocurred to me that it wasn’t easy for this man to approach me.

I also thought of all of the things my racist and classist culture has taught me: that he must be desparate and willing to do anything, that he is jealous of my luxury and riches and will not hesitate to hurt me in any way if it is to his benefit.

That I am willing to admit this thought even entered my head is only through years of analyzing class systems. I truly believe that most middle and upper class people only think, “he might steal my phone.” And then they make up a white lie (so aptly named!) to cover their racism (really, more classism, few are intimidated by a black man in an expensive suit.) that everyone else can see right through.

This angered me. What is more likely, that this guy needs to use a phone or that he
is part of some con to score a bunch of crappy, beat-up cell phones and resell them for a fraction of what they are worth? I have loaned my phone out to many people on the street, in retrospect all of them black women at the bus stop. This is less of a coincidence and more owing to 1) most black men wouldn’t bother to ask me for reasons stated above and 2) most white women have cell phones.
Additionally, I have borrowed many cell phones from random people. I never hesitate to ask because I am a white woman which equals harmless and demure.

I have never loaned my phone to a man, much less one that looked like a drug addict (now there’s another stereotype: so many drug addicts look as wealthy as they are. Cocaine, alcohol, pills, weed — desparate housewives live in fear of the crackheads and meth-heads sport these addictions of their own.). I admit I hesitated long enough to think all of these things before I handed it to him, which really only took a few seconds.

Ultimately it ocurred to me that I would rather my cell phone be stolen (which is unlikely, and besides I can outrun this guy) then contribute to the cycle of fear that racism and classism neccessitate, and this was the deciding factor. I gave him my phone and went back to reading my book. He was done in less than three minutes. A car showed up — I suppose he was giving them directions. He made sure to look in to my eyes when he gave the phone back.

He told me that it meant a lot to him that I wasn’t afraid.

He returned minutes later on a bicycle that is much too small for him. Then he told me that this bike may not look like much but it saves him from having to walk three hours to work. I told him that I also ride my bike to work but I don’t even look at jobs that aren’t in biking distance. He responded that with “the dreds and the skin color” jobs aren’t so easy to find. I admitted that things are tough; I have a bachelor’s degree and I work in retail. He took a moment to appreciate that as a sign for how fucked up the economy truly is: even a white girl with a diploma works in a shop and hasn’t had health insurance for years.

I know that our little exchange meant a lot to him and truthfully it meant a lot to me too. We each had to take a risk. Such a small risk, something so inconsequential, at least among people of the same race/class, becomes powerful and imbued with meaning simply because we come from different upbringings. We exchanged names and he promised to spit some poetry when next we meet.

I am truly looking forward to it.

Culture

Fashion Designers Have a Sense of Irony

I was in denial for a long time but it is time to admit the eighties are truly back in fashion. The teenagers that come into the hat shop wear flourescent colors and big plastic bracelets. None of their clothes match They sport bright polka dot leggings with black and pink striped shirts with yellow shoes.

Speaking of shoes, I actually saw someone wearing jellies the other day. Jellies! Where did they find them?

I’m not happy about this. While I am nostalgic about the movies and music of my childhood the clothing choices of the time are regrettable. It doesn’t help that the guys are still pants that hang to their knees and the girls are wearing poufy dresses from the fifties. And here I thought raver fashion couldn’t get any sillier (there are still ravers here. Don’t tell anyone, the closer it is to undergound the better).

I wonder what made fashion designers decide to go this route. Every shop window has something that looks like what I wore to P.E. before we had uniforms or a hideous pink dress from the Donna Reed Show. Is it a coincidence that the retro movements sweeping the nation (the 50’s and 80’s) are from the most conservative periods in recent history?

I like to think that designers are artists and they are drawing their ideas from their take on the movement of history. If we are going to act like neo-cons, then they will dress us like them.

This is totally unrelated to my dislike for the look, I swear. I feel so old. I never thought this would happen. But I just have to say, I just don’t understand the kids these days.

All, Culture, San Francisco

I Blame Starbucks

After living in the Bay Area for more than half a year, I finally found something to complain about. Sure, California has mountains and sunsets on the ocean and a temperate climate but–

BUT

the coffee is terrible. It is Texas terrible, which is my way of saying it is not only bad but the people there think it is good which makes it so much worse. If you walk into a random San Francisco coffeehouse, the coffees of the day will be dark roast, dark roast and french roast. No sensible medium roasts or light roasts. No. They want their coffee burnt. If it was good enough for Alan Ginsberg,..they..think, it is good enough for me.

I seriously doubt Ginsberg drank dark roast. The popularity of dark roast was spread by Starbuck$ which, thankfully, did not have a hold on American coffeedrinkers when the beats were sipping at the Vesuvio in the sixties.

I’m sure many readers are skeptical already, they say, “but Karma, you are not a connoseuir.” No, I’m not a coffee snob* but I lived with two of them, one of whom worked as a barista in an upscale coffeebar for five years. I still willingly drink all kinds of sludge but I have been carefully lectured in the ways of good coffee. Coffee should not cause a physical reaction like cheap scotch. It should be pleasurable. French roast is seldom the latter.

Now my skeptical readers, the history of french roast, the darkest of dark, ze cafe zat makes le merde run like ze Rhine Rhevher.

French roast coffee was born out of wartime rationing. French citizens had to make do with a little bit less of everything. In order to stretch their coffee quantity to the next far away ration, they would burn the coffee beans. You get a bit more coffee that way. They grew accustomed to drinking their brew burnt. French roast is nothing more than nostalgic masochism, the way some like to listen to noisy, crackling vinyl**.

The big coffee chains would have you believe that burnt coffee is more exotic, as if it is peppered with Bridget Bardot’s bikini bits. If it is too difficult to drink, it is because you are not man enough to digest Mediterranean beauties.

And it is difficult to digest. I drink two cups daily and french roast can still make my tummy flip flop. It also has less caffeine then a lighter roast (now who’s hard core?).

Lovers of the more pungent brew believe that there’s more coffee in their coffee, as if those who can’t stomach singed beans aren’t real java drinkers. But the truth is the opposite. One can appreciate a medium roast in the same way they can taste wine: weather and soil conditions give it a flavor that is distinctive to that region. This is why some of the more famous coffee-producing regions brew light roast (Kona, Jamaican Blue Mountain, Kenya). As the beans become darker and more oily, that origin flavor is lost. At the the point of french roast, the coffee tastes primarily of the roasting process. Medium roast has complexity. All french roast tastes the same.

I imagine it is a bit like trying to distinguish between sourdough and rye when you have toasted the bread til it is black. But, oh, that burnt sourdough is so much tougher to eat. Doesn’t it taste rugged and sexy?

The reality is that coffeeshops can make their coffee last longer by roasting the beans longer. This means more money for them. And all these west coast french roast fanatics are the same suckers that smoke Philip Morris and drink crappy scotch.

*You can call yourself a coffee snob if you insist on grinding it yourself. Those who buy their coffee in a can or a bag labeled with the name of your supermarket need not apply.

** I appreciate vinyl as much as the next gal, but some take nicely produced music and digitally add the pops and scratches to make it sound old. Now that’s just silly.

Tech

Doing My Part to Villainize Microsoft

“The state can’t give you freedom, and the state can’t take it away. Freedom is something you’re born with, and then one day someone tries to deny it. The extent to which you resist is the extent to which you are free.”

-Utah Phillips

Those new Vista ads are so alluring aren’t they? The new Microsoft operating system is going to be just like seeing a deer walk by your window! It will be just like that rocket ship to the moon! Dear God it is state of the art. It is so state of the art, most video games won’t be designed to run on it until mid-2008 . Vista is so ahead of it’s time that more than half of the computers in the U.S. can’t even run it! If you want to run the Vista operating system, you had better get a new computer because a study conducted by SoftChoice Corporation stated that 50% of the current breed of personal computers are “below Windows Vista’s basic system requirements” while 94% are not equipped to run on Windows Vista Premium edition Which is fine because computers are disposable, right? It is not as though there are landfills filled with computer junk.

Well, not in this country, anyway. We just send it all to the Phillipines, Thailand, and other places an ocean away from the stench of the dumpsite. I sure hope the next Microsoft operating system is more backwards compatible than Vista because it is supposedly due out in 2009. Fortunately, Vista was six years late because it took so long to fix all of the glitches in Windows XP. Perhaps that will give some of the people in Manila a chance to sort through the wreckage this new software will bring.

Microsoft is not thinking about this. Who can blame them; they are too busy with lawsuits. Anti-virus software makers Symantec and another company named “Vista”. One of the selling points of Vista is that it comes with its own anti-virus software built in. Symantec is claiming that software is theirs, and patented. Just by bundling security products with Windows folks will talk of Monopoly. That is all it took for Internet Explorer to squash the business of far-superior Netscape. But this case is different.

First, an inside source told me that Microsoft didn’t bother to insure that competitors software will actually work on Vista. This could be incompetence: many things don’t yet work on Vista. But it also looks sinister. People that don’t know much about computers will just assume that Vista’s competitors’ anti-virus software doesn’t work at all. They will not assume that the beautiful, (Wow! Look at it!) Vista goddess is the problem.

Second, it is getting much harder to buy computers that don’t come with Vista. I have a friend that was shopping for a laptop at a large, west coast computer store. All of their computers that had WindowsXP were on clearance. The salesperson told her they weren’t supposed to be selling them at all because their contract with Microsoft says they will only sell computers with Vista (if you were considering buying a computer and not building it yourself, best go now while you can still get one with XP). I can’t think of anything more monopolistic than such a contract that forces you to only sell one product. But hey, I’m sure Bill is just thinking off all of those poor unemployed Filipinos that could be staffing dumpsites to hold the brand-new XP computers no one is allowed to sell.

BUT DON’T I ALWAYS SAVE THE BEST FOR LAST?

This whole blog is a sham, a set-up. It is nothing compared to what truly makes Vista an evil abomination. The real reason to give Vista the boot is DRM: Digital Rights Management. DRM is the technology that decides whether you have the right to access things on your own computer. You want to watch a movie? Vista will make sure you have a legit version of it or it won’t play.

Presumably, Microsoft has implemented this at the nagging of Hollywood and the record industry. But that’s a bunch of hooey. From the security blog on Forbes.com:

“And while it may have started as a partnership, in the end Microsoft is going to end up locking the movie companies into selling content in its proprietary formats.

We saw this trick before; Apple pulled it on the recording industry. First iTunes worked in partnership with the major record labels to distribute content, but soon Warner Music’s CEO Edgar Bronfman Jr. found that he wasn’t able to dictate a pricing model to Steve Jobs. The same thing will happen here; after Vista is firmly entrenched in the marketplace, Sony’s Howard Stringer won’t be able to dictate pricing or terms to Bill Gates. This is a war for 21st-century movie distribution and, when the dust settles, Hollywood won’t know what hit them.”
This is not only about mp3s and bootleg videos. DRM can be used on any part of your system. Before Windows even starts, it can ask the computer if this user has permission to use the computer. If not, Windows won’t boot at all.

Few outside of the tech world are worried about this, mostly because they don’t know about it. And many of the law-abiding citizens that don’t have a multi-gig collection of contraband will say DRM makes the internet a safe and legal place to download. These are the same people that smiled and nodded as their civil liberties were Patriot-Acted away. Make no mistake, this is about freedom. If it is not recognized as such, it is only because our computers are one of the only spaces left where people are accustomed to having absolute liberty. It is only because we have never had that freedom taken away.

“I want to resist!” I hear you saying, “But what am I to do? You are suggesting problems with no solutions, like a typical liberal democrat!”

Fear not, gentle reader, there is a solution. Take a look at that slick interface at the top of the screen. You might have thought a transparent 3-D desktop and windows that burst into flames are the hallmarks of Vista. But this “WOW!” factor belongs to Linux. The computer shown here is running Ubuntu Linux. It is free and it is fully supported for free (Microsoft has raised the price of support for their products to $59 per incident). It is easier to install and easy to use. It comes with hundreds of free programs. It is more secure and stable than windows will ever be. And it leaves your desktop with that minty-fresh, non-corporate smell.