PAgent’s Progress

When Dante Alighieri wrote Inferno, the first cantica in his Divine Comedy, he gave himself the most egotistical privilege ever, and allowed himself to decide who to put in Hell for all eternity. Who’s to say I can’t do the same thing? Only, where Dante concerned himself with the petty sins of sloth, gluttony, wrath, hypocrisy, fraud and treachery, MY hell will concern itself with more serious sins.

When I am omnipotent ruler of the Universe, this is what you will have in store for you in Hell:

First Circle. Here reside the people who greet each other with “air kisses”. They will spend eternity looking for someone to give them a sincere and honest greeting.

Second Circle. Here reside restaurateurs who commit crimes against iced tea. This includes serving it lukewarm, with only two ice cubes, or so rancid it makes your teeth ache. Also, those who advertise ‘iced tea’ but actually serve some herbal concoction, or tea that tastes like nectarines or mangos. They are given only the most tepid, spoiled, and tannic tea to quench their eternal thirst.

Third Circle. Here reside the people that treat their children like pets. And those that treat their pets like children. They deserve each other.

Fourth Circle. Here reside the people that created, marketed, and sold all those slutty outfits to prepubescent girls. They get to spend eternity as an eight-year-old girl in a miniskirt, stiletto heels, and a skimpy top, being pursued by a mob of pedophiles.

Fifth Circle. Here reside the trolls. The folks that populate online communities and take advantage of their anonymity by being abusive, insulting, and obscene. They get to spend eternity compulsively confessing every tiny little embarrassing detail of their lives to everyone they encounter.

Sixth Circle. Here reside the religious hypocrites. For example, the pastor that publically espoused a strict moral code, but then privately snorted coke off a male prostitute’s stomach. They spend eternity being treated they way that they encouraged their followers to treat gays, fornicators, and drug-users.

Seventh Circle. Here reside chronic tailgators. They are eternally pursued around the Seventh Circle by black full-size 4 X 4 pickup trucks that follow right on their heels, revving their deafening engines.

Eighth Circle. Here reside loud cellphone talkers. Forced to scream at their phones for all eternity, because they have been inserted deeply up their rectums.

Ninth Circle. Here reside direct marketers of all types. Telephone telemarketers sit at a banquet table, but every time they reach for a morsel of food, the phone rings. Email spammers and blog comment spammers occupy the central portion of the Ninth Circle, and eternally and laboriously sand and polish giant blocks of stone to remove deeply carved messages like “V14gr4!! C1aL1S!! SATISFY UR GURL AL NITE!!” However, as fast as they can remove any of the markings, they reappear behind them.

I’m tough, but I’m fair.

So, you know what happens when your nifty high-tech prolactin agonist gets linked to heart valve disease?

You get put on a previous generation drug. Now, there are generally reasons that previous generation drugs become previous generation drugs, and not all of them have to do with going off patent. In this case I will be going from half a pill twice a week, to two pills a day. And I will also be going from little likelihood of side effects to a substantial chance of dizziness, headache, vomiting, and diarrhea.

This sounds awful, of course. Until you weigh it against a chance of developing heart valve disease. Specifically where your heart valves thicken and no longer close properly, resulting in a ‘whoosh-whoosh’ sound instead of a ‘lub-dup’ sound, and, eventually, installation of a nifty new pig heart valve.

Dizziness, headache, vomiting, and diarrhea doesn’t sound so bad now, does it?

I don’t appear to have any symptoms of heart disease right now, and frankly it’s unlikely I ever would have them at the very low doses of cabergoline I was taking. Nevertheless, I will be scheduling an echocardiogram in a couple of weeks to double-check.

Which adds yet another procedure to my lab test life-list. If I was playing diagnostic test bingo, I would have won by now.

I’m going to go out on a limb and predict that it won’t be nearly as exciting as the testicular ultrasound I had a couple of years ago.

I had a bad day yesterday.

For one thing, it is a distinct possibility that I may have to travel to Japan this summer, on business. This has filled me with irrational dread. For one thing, I hate to fly. For another, I’m deeply insecure about not knowing the language. For yet a third, the responsibility of representing my employer in this capacity makes me break out in a cold sweat. So, I have that possibility in the back of my mind.

Then, I get a letter from my endocrinologist informing me that the dopamine agonist I take to control a tumor on my pituitary gland has been implicated as a risk factor in developing valvular heart disease. Frankly, I don’t even like to read the phrase ‘mitral regurgitation’, much less contemplate suffering from it. So there’s that.

And then suffusing everything else, we had a bona fide racist commenting on Portland Metblogs yesterday. No, I’m not going to link to it. He’s already had more of an audience than he deserves, and he says things that are unpleasant enough that I don’t need to inflict them on you. The thing is, it really bothers me.

I’ve always been uncomfortable with the kind of hate that fills some people’s hearts. The hate felt by white supremacists for blacks. The hate some ‘Christians’ feel for homosexuals. Heck, the hate between some Protestants and some Catholics. I’m not talking about disapproval, or disagreement. I’m talking about hate.

I tend to have a kneejerk reaction to such folks. It’s hard for me to just ignore them. But then I’m afraid that any reaction I give will just be perceived as another white liberal, doing the politically correct thing. And isn’t that exactly what I’m doing?

After all, I don’t have a lot of experience with people of color. I grew up in one of the whitest parts of the country. No one was talking about ‘diversity’ in my home town. I think we had two black students in my high school, a brother and sister. Even after graduation, I had damn few in my college.

The University where I attended graduate school had a large number of blacks from Chicago, but grad students didn’t exactly mix with undergraduates, unless they were in a class you were teaching. But when it came to diversity, I still dealt with far more Asian students, in the US to get their PhDs, than black undergraduates.

So from whence comes this reaction? Why do I feel the need to come out on the side of a group that, in all honesty, I probably don’t understand in the slightest?

Well, it’s that hate thing. It terrifies me. Because once you really hate someone that much, once you’ve convinced yourself that they are somehow less than you are, somehow subhuman, you can justify doing anything to them. That’s how people get lynched. Or ethnically cleansed. Or herded into “showers”. Or firebombed. And I believe every civilized person has an obligation to prevent those kinds of atrocities from occurring. At the very least, you have an obligation to make it clear that you will not tolerate this kind of ignorance and hatred around you, and to teach your children to live the same way.

At the heart of many cliches is a kernal of wisdom. They tend to be repeated so often that the value of that kernal becomes ignored. So let me encourage you to look at this quote attributed to Edmund Burke, British Statesman, with fresh eyes:

“The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.”

Be good.

When you’re driving home from work, and you see a patch of ivy growing on a highway overpass, and you think to yourself “I wonder if there’s a treasure chest up there?”

By which I mean, of course, things that I think are cool.

Thing One:

“The Yakuza” is now available on DVD.

A Man Never Forgets. A Man Pays His Debts.

For reasons I have trouble articulating, I love this movie. If you can get past the freaking WIDE lapels and overall groovy ’70s sensibilities, you get a pretty entertaining movie. Robert Mitchum plays Harry Kilmer, a WWII vet who was stationed in Japan during the post-war occupation. He fell in love with a local girl, but when her brother came back from the south Pacific, he had to give her up. Now, he’s come back to Japan to do a favor for an old friend, but in addition to the entanglements of the heart, he gets mixed up with the Yakuza, and has to work with the man that cost him his true love.

No one, and I mean NO ONE, could play world-weary like Robert Mitchum. There’s plenty of action, but in between we find some beautifully quiet moments as well. Part of the appeal of this film is that, in a time before everyone knew what anime was and played with Tamigotchi, it tried to explain Japanese culture to the American audience.

Harry Kilmer: Everywhere I look, I can’t recognize a thing.

Oliver Wheat: It’s still there. Farmers in the countryside may watch TV from their tatami mats and you can’t see Fuji through the smog, but don’t let it fool you. It’s still Japan and the Japanese are still Japanese.

I’ve never understood why this movie didn’t show up on late night TV more often than it did. However, now that it’s available on DVD, in widescreen, it’s going onto my Netflix queue.

Thing Two:

The World Sunlight Map is also pretty cool. I have a small version as a widget on my Google Personal Homepage, but you can see more detail in the larger version. What’s nifty here, as opposed to other similar maps, is that the image of the Earth includes a representation of current cloud cover based on satellite imagery for that day. So, you are really getting a glimpse of what’s going across the planet.

At the website you can also view the map in various other projections, as well as viewing dawn and dusk from far above the Earth. There’s also a realistic view of the current phase of the moon. Nifty!

We are happy with our home entertainment setup. We have a Ginormous HD Television, 5.1 stereo surround sound, a decent DVD player, a Digital Video Recorder, a decent VCR, and a couple of game consoles. Watching movies on our TV is a better experience than going out to a theater, in almost every sense. Certainly in combination with our Netflix account, we’ve been happy as clams with the whole thing.

Except for the remotes.

There’s one for the TV, one for the PVR, one for the Receiver, one for the DVD player, and somewhere, one for the VCR. Although I tried to make the Receiver remote function as a ‘universal’ remote, it doesn’t really do the job. At most, it can run the DVD player. But it’s still awkward to do everything else without the appropriate remote in hand. Which means we usually have four remotes floating around the family room, getting wedged under cushions, carried off, and otherwise abused.

I had seen a Logitech ‘Universal Remote’ at Costco for a Whole Lot of Money, and mentioned it to my wife. She in turn mentioned it to the cable tech who was at our house, who said in his opinion Logitech made the ‘best’ universal remotes.

So, on Saturday when I was at Costco without my wife (always a dangerous and unpredictable situation). I picked up a Logitech Harmony 720.

OK, this remote claimed that it could run an entire roomful of components, effortlessly and easily. It was not cheap, so I had high expectations, and a willingness to take it straight back if I ran into any hitches whatsoever. I plugged in the charging harness (it’s rechargable), juiced it up, and then tried to install the appropriate software on the iMac to program it.

There I ran into a little hitch. I think the software that came with the remote itself didn’t play nicely with Intel Macs, but I was quickly able to download a version that worked from the Logitech website, and then launched into setting up the remote.

The programming runs from the Logitech website. What you do is, first, define each of your components by make and model number. Then, you define how they are all connected. In my case that included defining what was hooked up via the receiver, what ran directly into the back of the television, and which inputs were used in each case. In the case of the cable box/PVR, I had to actually beam a couple of selected remote commands into the detector on the remote itself, so it could ‘learn’ them. However, the instructions were clear at each step of the way.

When all was said and done, the Logitech site downloaded the programming into the remote via USB. And then we tried it.

Let me explain that this remote has a little color display on it, with associated softkeys. When I push the ‘Activities’ button, I get the choices “Watch a DVD”, “Watch a Tape”, “Play a Game”, and “Watch the PVR”. All you do is press the appropriate softkey and keep the remote pointed at the components for a few seconds. For example, starting with everything turned off, if I press “Play a Game”, it powers up the TV, powers up the receiver, sets the TV’s video input to input four, and sets the receiver input to DVR/VCR2 (which is what the Wii is plugged in to). All I have to do is turn the Wii on and I’m good to go.

When I’m done, I press “Watch the PVR” to get to the cablebox. With that one button press, the video input on the TV is set back to input three, the receiver input switches to “DVR/VCR”, and the cable box turns on. The channel selector works on the cable box. All the ’stop’, ’start’, FForward, etc. buttons now run the PVR, while the volume and mute still controls the receiver.

I. Love. This. Thing. The whole complicated tutorial I have to give people on how to watch what they want to watch has been replaced by a single button. However, I may never get it out of my wife’s hands ever again.

This is a very cool, and very smart product.