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By
anders pearson
01 Oct 2001
got back from my weeklong trip to maine yesterday. it was good to get out of the city for a while. nothing exciting happened but here are some random notes and observations from it:
<p>cj and i made each leg of the trip from alexandria, virginia to dexter, maine (roughly 670 miles) and back in roughly 10.5 hours each way. no speeding tickets. i’m impressed.</p>
<p>my sister just bought a house in dexter. it’s old and needs a lot of fixing up but it’s a fairly nice two-story house with lots of big rooms, a garage, and some land. her mortgage payments are less than a quarter of what i pay for rent for my little one bedroom apartment in manhattan. and she gets to keep hers when all is said and done.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.dextershoe.com/">dexter shoe</a>, the company that originated in dexter and employs about 500 people from there and surrounding towns (ie, a <em>huge</em> percentage of the local population) announced last week that they’re closing the dexter factory and moving operations overseas to save on labor costs (i believe they’re planning china this time). the company <a href="http://www.dextershoe.com/custserv/company_behind_shoes.asp">prides itself</a> on the fine new england craftsmanship. a while back, dexter shoe was bought by <a href="http://www.berkshirehathaway.com/">berkshire hathaway, inc</a>, a big investment company run by <a href="http://www.salon.com/people/bc/1999/08/31/buffett/">warren buffet</a>, who has never even set foot in dexter. they’ve started factories in puerto rico and mexico before and discovered that the workers they’re paying 12 cents an hour don’t produce high enough quality shoes and they’ve had to send huge shipments back to dexter to get repaired at an overall loss for the company. so it looks like the end result will be that dexter shoe will probably have a better bottom line and happier shareholders at the cost of producing lower quality shoes and decimating the small town that supported and nurtured it for over 40 years. way to go warren.</p>
<p>after not studying any chinese for two years, i can only still recognize about 200 characters (it was about 1500 or so at my peak). </p>
<p>i think i’ve become allergic to cats and/or dogs. we always had pets when i was growing up and it never bothered me but going home this time, i found myself sneezing up a storm whenever i was in a house with pets.</p>
<p>interesting graffiti seen in the men’s room at the vince lombardi rest area on the garden state parkway: “rednecks are gay and suck dick”</p>
<p>my dad tells me that <a href="http://www.hgd.com/alison/">alison arngrim</a>, the actress who played the mean character nellie olsen on the little house on the prairie tv series made an appearance in the rosebowl parade during the time the series was running (and she was about 13). she was booed, spit on and had things thrown at her for the entire route because people are too stupid to realize that there is a difference between a fictional character that isn’t likeable and the little girl who plays her on tv. my dad had heard that she later went on to a career in porn but this doesn’t appear to be true (on her website it mentions that she’s now a comedian and does aids awareness education but i can’t find anything about porn). </p>
<p>lani met me at the train station in virginia with a bag lunch that included a note and stickers. thus reinforcing her sainthood in my book.</p>
<p>a week is too short.</p>
By
anders pearson
21 Sep 2001
my friend cj, who drives a zamboni for a living, just bought a new mustang. we’re driving it from virginia to maine tonight. i’ll be in maine for the next week. probably without any net access to speak of.
By
anders pearson
17 Sep 2001
i find myself wanting to copy and paste phone numbers into the url field of my web browser.
By
anders pearson
16 Sep 2001
my god, i actually find myself agreeing with the pope.
Pope John Paul II has offered prayers to America and urged those affected by the terrorist attacks to show restraint and commit themselves to peace.
<p>after this week, the only thing i’m left feeling is deep sorrow. i’m sad that so many innocent people were killed in the attacks. i am even more deeply saddened by what i’ve seen of this country’s reaction. </p>
<p>this tragedy has triggered a nationalistic bloodlust that makes me want to go crawl under a rock until the world smartens up. the opinions of <a href="http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/ucac/20010912/cm/this_is_war_1.html">bigoted raving lunatics</a> unfortunately seems to be shared by the <a href="http://us.news2.yimg.com/f/42/31/7m/dailynews.yahoo.com/h/ap/20010913/us/attacks_congress_14.html">current leadership</a> of our country, <a href="http://us.news2.yimg.com/f/42/31/7m/dailynews.yahoo.com/h/ap/20010912/us/attacks_editorial_rdp_5.html">the media</a>, and a surprisingly large percentage of the population.</p>
<p>i don’t understand how anyone could even briefly consider (let alone how it has become the publicly acceptable belief) that the murdering of many innocent people is an appropriate response to <em>anything</em>.</p>
<p>lately i’ve been having flashbacks to may of 1999 when tuck and i were in china and <span class="caps">NATO</span> bombed the chinese embassy in belgrade. the nationalistic frenzy that the chinese media whipped the people into involved numerous attacks on american citizens (just as we’re seeing here now with hate crimes against middle eastern and muslim people) and a public cry for retaliation and war. americans love to consider themselves more free and free thinking than the chinese who live under a government which doesn’t even pretend to be democratic. i think a re-evaluation may be in order.</p>
<p>as Joe <a href="http://goatee.net/2001/09#_11tu">says on goatee.net</a>: “The desperation of these actions speak of fear and impotency. And I hope America doesn’t respond in kind.”</p>
<p>and don’t even get me started on <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A28620-2001Sep14.html">Falwell</a>.</p>
By
anders pearson
14 Sep 2001
lani mentioned something interesting to me on the phone the other night. she said that her mother had learned during her airline training about terrorism that terrorists tended to (consciously or unconsciously) go after airlines whose names included the name of the country they were targeting. eg, American Airlines or United would be more likely targets than Delta or Northwestern. this makes a certain kind of sense. however, i haven’t been able to find any comprehensive statistics about terrorist attacks as broken down by airline online to verify it for myself.
<p>so far, i’ve only found this <a href="http://www.state.gov/www/global/terrorism/1999report/1999index.html">1999 report on global terrorism</a> and this <a href="http://www.pyramid.ch/airsafety_fatalairl.htm">collection of statistics on air safety</a> which breaks things down per airline but includes accidental crashes with bombings and doesn’t include hijackings.</p>
<p>if anyone knows where i can find some good data, i would appreciate a link.</p>
By
anders pearson
11 Sep 2001
well, now the US has to directly face a problem that the rest of the world has had to deal with for a while: how do you protect your people from unknown attackers?
<p>dealing with another government who is openly threatening you is one thing; you know where they live. they know that you can take the fight back to them and kill their people too. it keeps them from doing anything <em>too</em> stupid. </p>
<p>but what the fuck are you supposed to do when things just start blowing up and there’s no one to blame? or when those who are responsible are a tiny extremist group who don’t really have anything to lose. no country to bomb. if you do bomb someone in retaliation, you’ll just make more people angry and increase the likelihood of more terrorist attacks.</p>
<p>well, the obvious strategy is to just keep it from happening in the first place. so how do you do that? apparently a multi-billion dollar global intelligence network can’t predict or prevent even the largest operations, so that strategy is out. increase airport security? stop people from bringing their swiss army knives on the plane? lock up anyone who might possibly harbor ill will towards your country? enter into a total police state? </p>
<p>i’m not too excited at the idea of living in a police state. i don’t think even that would work. the whole point of terrorism is that it strikes where you’re weakest. if airport security were stronger, they’d have found a different way to cause the same amount of damage. you will always have a weakness. i don’t think there’s any way around that.</p>
<p>i’m seriously asking now. what do you do to protect the innocent people in the world from being blown to bits because of something their leaders did or just because someone with a chemical imbalance happened to have a few bags of fertilizer out back?</p>
By
anders pearson
11 Sep 2001
New York, Washington Rocked by Apparent Terrorist Attacks; World Trade Center Tower Collapses.
<p>damn. i just saw the pentagon for the first time a few weeks ago. </p>
<p>for anyone who is worried, no, i wasn’t downtown this morning. the phones are pretty much all tied up.</p>
By
anders pearson
07 Sep 2001
this article (found on lgf) in the russion based english language paper eXile is one of the most beautiful things i’ve ever seen. it brings a tear to my eye.
<p>some enterprising folks in moscow (pretty much out of the reach of the pesky american legal system) took it upon themselves to demonstrate in excruciating detail how easy it is to make someone’s life a living hell through any and all possible legal and illegal means. </p>
<p>and they chose such a worthy target…</p>
By
anders pearson
07 Sep 2001
the internal clock in unix which counts off the seconds since 00:00:00, Jan 1, 1970 will reach one billion (and thus 10 digits) at 21:46:40 on saturday night.
<p>if you have nothing better to do (i know i don’t) and want to have your own little countdown, just find your nearest unix box and run this from the command prompt:</p>
<p><tt>perl -le ‘sleep 1 while print 1e9-time’</tt></p>
By
anders pearson
02 Sep 2001
went out for dinner last night at a chinese restaurant. opened the fortune cookie. instead of a fortune and/or “learn chinese”, there was an add for time-warner cable. a fucking add in my fortune cookie.