[from 8/4/10]
Ordinarily I don’t like to talk about my personal life in this column. I try to think of something that concerns everyone. Then I start to talk about it, and realize that in order to squeeze 666 words about that subject, I’d need to make up too many facts and examples. So I give in and write what I know about. Me.
This time it’s different. The Personal and the Universal collide, as it were. They get close and sweat all over each other, as it were. Then, 13 years later, they get hitched, as it were.
Anitra “On Whose Kitchen Floor I Have Sometimes Slept, She Of Many Associations, She Who Erotically Stimulates Tomato Plants, She Who Needs No Last Name” Freeman, and I, will be getting “more married” this week.
We are expecting to be married, or mix-married, by 8 or more officiators, representing 6 or more faiths, depending on how you cut them.
“How is that Universal, Wes?” -- you might well ask. Not everyone is marrying my Ducky. My Ducky! Not your Ducky!
True, but other people marry. And, more to the point, still other people mess with other people’s marriages and mess with other people on the basis of their marital statuses and non-statuses, and they mess with other peoples’ statusability even, through support and/or lack thereof of public policies concerning such, through their lawfully elected public officials.
For instance, I was looking forward to Anitra or I being able to collect the other’s Social Security after I or Anitra, respectively, were dead. I was just now horrified to learn that to do that, Anitra or I would have to wait a whole ten years to kick the bucket. No fair, we’re both 61! That law discriminates in favor of whippersnappers! Goddamn whippersnappers! Get off my lawn!
Where was I? Oh, yeah, and get this: Anitra just told me I can’t collect even if she lasts ten years and then I push her off a cliff. This totally flies in the face of reason. I mean, dead’s dead, right? Shouldn’t that be all that matters? But no, it’s against the rules.
Here’s another example of irrational rules regarding married people. I wasn’t thinking of applying for Food Stamps for us, but I decided to look up the rules anyway, just to find something stupid there to write about now, and as usual I wasn’t disappointed!
A single person making $400.15 per week or less can get food stamps. For every additional person in your household, starting with the spouse, the cut-off income goes up not $400 a week per person, but only $138.46 a week per person, give or take a penny.
So the law assumes that there are no additional living costs at all except the additional cost in food. You wouldn’t need maybe a larger apartment to put all those bodies. What about the live-in mother-in-law? The new kids from the previous marriage? What if I don’t have enough closets to stuff them all in?
Fortunately, Anitra and I won’t have a live-in mother-in-law, as they’re both already dead, but I worry for others who aren’t as fortunate as we are.
Likewise, Anitra and I are of almost the opposite sexes. (I cook and do the dishes.) I wish everybody could be of the opposite sexes, but alas, that would require nearly 7 billion sexes, all of which would have to be totally opposite.
Were it always so, internet porn could never have come into being, and, as a result, the tools that made Facebook and all other life as we know it today would not have been possible.
Indeed, God, in Her infinite Wisdom, made us two sexes in order to enable the marketing of porn, and so stimulate media innovation.
Therefore we have only approximately two opposite sexes, and so there are not enough to go around, and some people are caught without.
That isn’t right. Let’s make marriage more Universal than ever, now!
Showing posts with label porn. Show all posts
Showing posts with label porn. Show all posts
Sunday, January 16, 2011
Wednesday, September 27, 2006
Mend It Like Beckham
As of this Monday morning, Sept. 24, the Homeless World (Soccer) Cup has gotten under way in Cape Town, South Africa. It will continue through Sunday. If you have a fast connection and the right plug-in you can watch it live at http://www.homelessworldcup.org.
For those of you that don’t have a fast connection, I’ll describe it for you now. There are people on a field kicking a ball from one end to the other. Some of the people are trying to kick it to the right side into a kind of netted-enclosure like thing guarded by somebody. The others are trying to kick the same ball (hence the contest!) the other way, to where there is another person guarding another netted-enclosure like thing. There’s also the voice of a guy telling you about it while it’s happening. Some scores so far: two, zero, ten, one. Yes, ten! Blame the Hong Kong defense.
How can a World Cup be Homeless? The answer is that homelessness is a part of the eligibility requirements for this particular annual event. The rules state precisely that players in the Homeless World Cup must be a) male or female and at least 16 years of age at the time of the tournament and b) have been homeless at some point after the previous year's World Cup OR make their main living income as a streetpaper vendor OR be asylum seekers (who have neither positive asylum status nor working permit.) No, I don’t know why they have the restriction to male or female. It’s not my fault; I’m just the messenger here.
The first Homeless World Cup was held in 2003 in Graz, Austria, near Arnold Schwarzenegger’s boyhood home. The idea for it sprang into the heads of a couple of directors of street papers meeting in a bar during a conference of the International Network of Street Papers. Meeting in bars can result in that sort of thing. Usually the next day it’s all forgotten though. This time they actually went through with it. This year there are teams representing 48 countries scheduled to play, and it’s been reported by the Associated Press that there are nearly 500 players in attendance, presumably including substitutes.
The actual quote from the Associated Press article speaks of “nearly 500 drug addicts, alcoholics, orphans and vagrants” kicking the event off. This is where I really got interested.
I mean, as I have said often enough before, my interest in spectator sport is pretty much limited to watching women’s singles figure skating when my internet porn connection is down. So I wouldn’t care about the Homeless World Cup except for the fact that it might in some way have a positive impact on homelessness.
It’s just fascinating to me that when some people see a person kick a ball around as part of an organized sports match, they feel differently about that person. I ascribe it to trust.
Trust is a quality that you don’t hear enough about these days. It’s the thing homeless people need next most, after decent sleep and physical safety. If people so don’t trust you that they don’t let you interact with them at all, not even to say hello, it’s impossible to even start to earn any trust from them. The Homeless World Cup is a sustained interaction that can enable the participants to earn some trust.
Most of the news stories about the Homeless World Cup focus on the benefit to the players in “getting their lives together.” The Associated Press story I mentioned gushes about how 94 percent of last year’s players report “a new motivation in life,” whatever that means, and then says that 38 percent now have regular jobs. That’s great, but it misses the story.
The real story isn’t the players; it’s the relationship between the players and the spectators; it’s the trust. Let’s see how the same AP reporter describes the current players a week from now. If there’s a change, that would be the news.
For those of you that don’t have a fast connection, I’ll describe it for you now. There are people on a field kicking a ball from one end to the other. Some of the people are trying to kick it to the right side into a kind of netted-enclosure like thing guarded by somebody. The others are trying to kick the same ball (hence the contest!) the other way, to where there is another person guarding another netted-enclosure like thing. There’s also the voice of a guy telling you about it while it’s happening. Some scores so far: two, zero, ten, one. Yes, ten! Blame the Hong Kong defense.
How can a World Cup be Homeless? The answer is that homelessness is a part of the eligibility requirements for this particular annual event. The rules state precisely that players in the Homeless World Cup must be a) male or female and at least 16 years of age at the time of the tournament and b) have been homeless at some point after the previous year's World Cup OR make their main living income as a streetpaper vendor OR be asylum seekers (who have neither positive asylum status nor working permit.) No, I don’t know why they have the restriction to male or female. It’s not my fault; I’m just the messenger here.
The first Homeless World Cup was held in 2003 in Graz, Austria, near Arnold Schwarzenegger’s boyhood home. The idea for it sprang into the heads of a couple of directors of street papers meeting in a bar during a conference of the International Network of Street Papers. Meeting in bars can result in that sort of thing. Usually the next day it’s all forgotten though. This time they actually went through with it. This year there are teams representing 48 countries scheduled to play, and it’s been reported by the Associated Press that there are nearly 500 players in attendance, presumably including substitutes.
The actual quote from the Associated Press article speaks of “nearly 500 drug addicts, alcoholics, orphans and vagrants” kicking the event off. This is where I really got interested.
I mean, as I have said often enough before, my interest in spectator sport is pretty much limited to watching women’s singles figure skating when my internet porn connection is down. So I wouldn’t care about the Homeless World Cup except for the fact that it might in some way have a positive impact on homelessness.
It’s just fascinating to me that when some people see a person kick a ball around as part of an organized sports match, they feel differently about that person. I ascribe it to trust.
Trust is a quality that you don’t hear enough about these days. It’s the thing homeless people need next most, after decent sleep and physical safety. If people so don’t trust you that they don’t let you interact with them at all, not even to say hello, it’s impossible to even start to earn any trust from them. The Homeless World Cup is a sustained interaction that can enable the participants to earn some trust.
Most of the news stories about the Homeless World Cup focus on the benefit to the players in “getting their lives together.” The Associated Press story I mentioned gushes about how 94 percent of last year’s players report “a new motivation in life,” whatever that means, and then says that 38 percent now have regular jobs. That’s great, but it misses the story.
The real story isn’t the players; it’s the relationship between the players and the spectators; it’s the trust. Let’s see how the same AP reporter describes the current players a week from now. If there’s a change, that would be the news.
Wednesday, December 21, 2005
Suspected Drug Use
George Bush has just admitted that he’s authorized eavesdropping of Americans without search warrants at least thirty times since September 11, 2001, each time for 45 days. Now Democrats want an investigation.
OK, let’s see if this makes a stitch of sense!
Let’s say once upon a time there was a country, we’ll call it Democratia, where it was against the law for people to eavesdrop on citizens but the country’s leaders wanted to know what the people were saying all the time anyway. So what they did was something very very clever. It was so clever that if Stalin were alive to see it, he would say, in Russian, “Damn, these guys are good!”
First, they arranged for the wiretapping of all their citizens’ phone calls, or at least all of their phones that in any way involved international transmissions. Those included not only phone calls meant to be received in other countries, but also phone calls that use satellites, because “space is international territory.” How did they arrange to do this, since routine wiretapping was illegal in Democratia? Easy! They asked their friends to do it for them, in return for them doing it for their friends. By “friends” I mean “other allied countries.” “We aren’t wiretapping our own citizens,” they said. “Our friends are!” “We’re just wiretapping our friends’ citizens. What’s wrong with that?”
To be even safer from criticism the leaders of Democratia made sure their friends didn’t actually listen in to their own citizens’ conversations – that would be wrong. Instead they had their friends use super computers to do the listening.
The super computers had voice recognition capabilities far in advance of anything you can get for a PC, and they could record all the millions of calls being made at any instant and transcribe them to computer text-files in real-time, 24/7. Then the computers could scan the texts for keywords that would indicate whether or not people were saying things that the Democratian leaders might want to know about, and all those calls could be flagged for later listening.
Computers would do the transcriptions and scanning, not people. So the Democratia leaders could honestly say that “no one,” “not anybody,” was eavesdropping on their citizens, not even their foreign friends.
Of course, if the computers flagged a call as having suspicious content, like say, if it was made by a member of Greenpeace, or mentioned the president of Democratia, or if the words “drug” and “buy” were used in the same sentence, as in “I have to go out to the DRUGstore to BUY deodorant for my smelly Dad, so I’ll call you back later,” then the proper authorities could be notified. And then actual legal warrants could be obtained from on-call, easy, slutty, judges. Often this could be done within minutes, even before the calls in question had ended.
It’s like this. Suppose the police come to your door and say, “We’d like to search your house, but we don’t have a search warrant.” So you, fearing they’d find your stash of politically incorrect midget-on-stuffed-animal porn, say, “No.” So they say, “OK, then, step aside while this robot here rolls through your front door and through your entire house, and transmits images of everything in digitized form to a remote super computer which could spot the real Spock at a Star Trek convention. Then if the computer reports back that any white powder is visible anywhere in your house, like flour, or talcum, we can have a warrant faxed by satellite to our van waiting at the curb over here, and THEN we will search you.”
Would that seem like a fair way to sidestep your Constitutional rights? Well, that’s essentially what the ECHELON system, set up by Democratia (these United States, duh!) has done routinely with your phone calls at least since the Clinton administration, and the Democrats knew it at the time.
We should impeach everybody in both parties, simultaneously.
OK, let’s see if this makes a stitch of sense!
Let’s say once upon a time there was a country, we’ll call it Democratia, where it was against the law for people to eavesdrop on citizens but the country’s leaders wanted to know what the people were saying all the time anyway. So what they did was something very very clever. It was so clever that if Stalin were alive to see it, he would say, in Russian, “Damn, these guys are good!”
First, they arranged for the wiretapping of all their citizens’ phone calls, or at least all of their phones that in any way involved international transmissions. Those included not only phone calls meant to be received in other countries, but also phone calls that use satellites, because “space is international territory.” How did they arrange to do this, since routine wiretapping was illegal in Democratia? Easy! They asked their friends to do it for them, in return for them doing it for their friends. By “friends” I mean “other allied countries.” “We aren’t wiretapping our own citizens,” they said. “Our friends are!” “We’re just wiretapping our friends’ citizens. What’s wrong with that?”
To be even safer from criticism the leaders of Democratia made sure their friends didn’t actually listen in to their own citizens’ conversations – that would be wrong. Instead they had their friends use super computers to do the listening.
The super computers had voice recognition capabilities far in advance of anything you can get for a PC, and they could record all the millions of calls being made at any instant and transcribe them to computer text-files in real-time, 24/7. Then the computers could scan the texts for keywords that would indicate whether or not people were saying things that the Democratian leaders might want to know about, and all those calls could be flagged for later listening.
Computers would do the transcriptions and scanning, not people. So the Democratia leaders could honestly say that “no one,” “not anybody,” was eavesdropping on their citizens, not even their foreign friends.
Of course, if the computers flagged a call as having suspicious content, like say, if it was made by a member of Greenpeace, or mentioned the president of Democratia, or if the words “drug” and “buy” were used in the same sentence, as in “I have to go out to the DRUGstore to BUY deodorant for my smelly Dad, so I’ll call you back later,” then the proper authorities could be notified. And then actual legal warrants could be obtained from on-call, easy, slutty, judges. Often this could be done within minutes, even before the calls in question had ended.
It’s like this. Suppose the police come to your door and say, “We’d like to search your house, but we don’t have a search warrant.” So you, fearing they’d find your stash of politically incorrect midget-on-stuffed-animal porn, say, “No.” So they say, “OK, then, step aside while this robot here rolls through your front door and through your entire house, and transmits images of everything in digitized form to a remote super computer which could spot the real Spock at a Star Trek convention. Then if the computer reports back that any white powder is visible anywhere in your house, like flour, or talcum, we can have a warrant faxed by satellite to our van waiting at the curb over here, and THEN we will search you.”
Would that seem like a fair way to sidestep your Constitutional rights? Well, that’s essentially what the ECHELON system, set up by Democratia (these United States, duh!) has done routinely with your phone calls at least since the Clinton administration, and the Democrats knew it at the time.
We should impeach everybody in both parties, simultaneously.
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