bogen.org

Seen in a manual for a clustered file system:

When you install as directed on new machines, you will rarely encounter the need for troubleshooting.

Seen scrawled on a sign outside a restaurant on Madison’s Capitol Square and directly opposite the state Capitol:

Soup of the day:
Crem of Brockly

Wouldn’t it be great if the people who work inside the Capitol were inspired by that sign to spend their time improving education in Wisconsin instead of working to pass a concealed carry law?

Mr. President:

We have never had the pleasure of meeting, nor would you likely recognize my name should it come up in conversation, casual or otherwise. Our politics could not be more different. In short, we have little in common, except one unfortunate fact.

We both like peanut butter and honey sandwiches.Ever since I found out that the gooey, nutty, and sweet concoction that is a peanut butter and honey sandwich is one of your favorite sandwiches, I think about you every time I make one for myself.

This morning, for instance, as I smeared the peanut butter on a slice of sourdough bread, I wondered if you had enjoyed a similar sandwich in the recent past. As I drizzled the honey on another slice of bread, I pondered whether you were planning on having a similar sandwich after some sort of formal state dinner. Do you get the White House kitchen to whip up a plate of the sandwiches for Cabinet meetings? Is that what you spent the month of August eating while you were at your ranch?

Ordinarily, it wouldn’t bother me to learn that someone in the media spotlight liked one of the same foods as I do. In fact, chances are good that the information wouldn’t even stick around in my head very long.

However, because you and I have so little in common, that little tidbit really stuck with me. We have almost nothing in common beyond the fact that we are both Americans and male. I cannot advocate or tolerate most of your policies. You probably could not tolerate or advocate most of my policies were our positions reversed. And yet, we both like PB and H sandwiches.

Quite frankly, I’m tired of thinking about you every time I cobble together a sandwich.

There are so many foods I don’t like in the world. Why couldn’t you like one of them? Ever thought of taking up rabid pickle consumption? I really don’t like pickles so it wouldn’t bother me if you developed a real jonesing for them. How about a difficult and time-consuming food? You’re much richer than I am, and currently you have the White House kitchen at your disposal, so choosing a food that required extensive lists of ingredients and lots of preparation time shouldn’t be problem for you. If I woke up tomorrow and decided that Peking Duck was my new favorite food, I’d be in trouble. If you woke up tomorrow and decided the same thing, a simple phone call to any one of your numerous attendants would solve your problem.

While I can’t exactlly ask you to change your favorite food, I can ask that you keep your food preferences out of the media from now on. That should keep everyone happy and avoid similar situations from arising.

Sincerely,

Davd Bogen

The Underdog: How I Survived The World’s Most Outlandish Competitions is one of the few books I’ve read in the last few years that made me laugh out loud.Joshua Davis’ book is both a metaphysical examination of his life, and a retelling of his experiences entering some of the world’s most unique sporting events. Unlike many books that delve deeply into the author’s musty mental attic, The Underdog doesn’t get bogged down in “Woe is me” whining and a misplaced desire to change the past.

Instead, Davis leaps fully into each challenge he accepts with a firm idea in his head that while he can’t change the past and the things he doesn’t like about his life, he can change the future. Fortunately for us, he chooses to charge bravely into the unknown by methods a bit less tried and true.

In the book, Davis claims that his great strength is his curiousity, his ability to ask questions. In reality, his great strength is his lack of inhibitions and his ability to ask the right questions. Most of us, when presented with the opportunity to enter a two-mile road race that is run backwards by its participants, would demure the invitation in public, and then scoff loudly behind closed doors about what a stupid idea a backwards race is. Not Davis. Instead of simply closing off his mind, he gathers himself and leaps completely into the challenge.

Join a national arm wrestling competition without any training or any real chance of winning? No problem. Wrestle sumo at 132 pounds against wrestlers who weigh 300 pounds or more? Where does he sign up? Travel to India to run backwards across a beach covered in human feces? When does that plane leave? A sauna contest where the ambient air temperature is so hot it hurts to breathe? Does the sign-up form have a space ffor a credit card number?

It isn’t so much that the events themselves are wacky; it is Davis’ retelling of his own involvement in the events that had me busting a gut several times. His recounting of his family’s preparations for, and participation in, the sauna contest just about had me falling out of my chair with laughter. It has been a long time since a book left me laughing that hard.

While The Underdog is not likely to win any awards for in-depth personal psychoanalysis, it is engaging and well-written. If you need a couple hundred pages of laughter and entertainment to fight the pre-winter blahs, few items short of plane tickets to Rio will fit the bill like this book.

Today’s lesson: It could be much worse
By: Garrison Keillor
It could be worse. The Pharaoh keeps piling mud on your desk to be made into bricks, and you work late, and you head onto the freeway, which is packed with Huns and Visigoths, and your mere presence infuriates them. They shriek at you and make vile gestures. Meanwhile, you’re listening to the teeth-grinders on the radio blaming the president’s troubles on the Democrats.

Downtown, you run into a covey of evil teenagers, the girls with black lipstick and chopped black hair and black clothes, the boys with graffiti tattoos and their belts down around their femurs, and they look at you with such extravagant loathing, you want to tell them, ”I am not worthy of so much contempt. Please, I am only a pedestrian like yourselves; save some of that for Hitler and Stalin.”

You go into the restaurant, Les Espensif, to meet your wife to celebrate your marriage and view its remains. The joint is way hoity-toity and attended by attitudinous waiters with fake accents serving half-ounce medallions of pork on a white plate two and a half feet in diameter with swirls of green foam on it and a spoonful of caramelized rice for $28, which you eat in 45 seconds as your spouse tries to sucker you into an argument about home maintenance, and you think, ”What happened to that old joie de vivre that I was known for back in my salad days?” Well, it could be worse.

It would be worse if you didn’t have a shed. A man needs a shed. A shed with a woodstove, a workbench and an old couch, coffee cans of bolts and screws, a pile of old Playboys, a bottle of Old Overcoat, a tin of snoose, a deck of cards. The Pharaoh can’t touch you here: You are safe in the bulrushes.

A den isn’t as good, or an attached garage. You need to put some distance between you and the Main House, which, as we all know, is the domain of women. A woman is likely to pick up your Ventril-O-Disc from the kitchen counter as if she’d found a cockroach and demand to know what it is.

A shed is a place where you can practice ventriloquism and do the exercises described in the book on Dynamic Tension that you obtained from Charles Atlas, the World’s Most Perfectly Developed Man. You need a place where you can sing your song and not hear her say, ”Would you mind?”

There is almost nothing so good for you as singing old songs, whether you sing praise to the Lord God or sing about the gin-soaked barroom queen in Memphis and your friends Long Tall Sally and Bony Maroney and Jenny Jenny. You’ve got trouble in mind and the water tastes like turpentine but you know you belong to the land and it’s a grand old flag and the sunny side of the street is where you should direct your feet.

Ben Hecht said, ”Old songs are more than tunes. They are little houses in which our hearts once lived.” In other words, they are sheds.

Winter is coming, which simplifies everything and shows you that the essentials of life are heat, food, shelter, plumbing. The rest is decorative. The life that your wife writes about in the Christmas letter, the life of steady accomplishment and upward movement on life’s graph, is mostly fiction. The reality is that we are all in over our heads. I am and you are. God help us. And so far He has. It could be worse.

Whatever bonehead things we’ve done, we have not yet put our tongue on the pump handle and let it freeze there, and this is a fact not to be overlooked. There are pump handles around, and in freezing weather they become lethal. You walk past them and they exert a powerful force on your body, particularly on your tongue.

Imagine the misery of standing, tongue frozen to the iron, waiting for the firemen to come and pry you loose. In my darker hours, ever since I was 6 and went trotting off to Benson School, I have imagined that the pump handle would be my fate, but so far I have avoided it, and you, too, my friend.

Together, once again we hope to come through the cold season with our tongues intact, and if we do, then winter has no grip on us. It could be worse.

Sarah has been in Louisiana for several days now. She worked her first full-time shift on Sunday.When she arrived in Louisiana on Friday, she spent a night in a gym at a school in New Orleans. The Red Cross HQ was closed by the time she and other recently arrived volunteers arrived in the city from the airport, so they were deposited at that Red Cross staff shelter and told how to report to HQ in the morning for in-processing. The staff shelter had a hundred cots in a gym and a kitchen facility. She spent the first night there after helping in the kitchen to prepare meals for the volunteers.

Early the next morning, she caught the first bus to Red Cross HQ where she was assigned to a group that worked in New Orleans but stayed in a town outside of New Orleans proper named Harvey, LA. In addition, she was given a bed in a hotel room with one other lady. So, Saturday, she spent most of the day going through in-processing and getting some sort of transportation to her new digs. The hotel was an upgrade over the shelter since she had a bed to herself, a bathroom shared with just one other person, a place to plug-in her cell phone, and the like.

Sunday, Sarah worked her first day on an ERV. An ERV is a Red Cross acronym for an Emergency Response Vehicle. ERVs in New Orleans are primarily used to distribute meals and water to people living and working in the city. She said they spent most of the day distributing roughly four hundred meals to people in middle-class neighborhoods. Many of the people who recieved meals were spending their first weekends back in New Orleans. Most people seemed extremely grateful for the food.

New Orleans itself is still an ungodly mess. There is trash everywhere, including an army of silent monoliths: discarded refrigerators at the curb in front of nearly every house. Sarah said that when front doors are open, mold is almost always visible from the street inside a house. Imagine the size of a mold infestation inside a house that is visible from the street! Now imagine that mold colony replicated thousands upon thousands of times. That is the state of housing in New Orleans. People who have second floors are living there; others are living with the mold on the first floor.

There are quite a few Hispanic workers working there who are doing many of the hot, backbreaking jobs. Her Spanish language skills have already come in handy as she can tell these workers just what sort of food the Red Cross is distributing.

Apparently, most of the food is prepared by the Southern Baptists, and the Red Cross is the distribution end of the chain. While the Red Cross has a few kitchens operating in the area, her ERV picks up its food from a Southern Baptist kitchen.

Saturday night, the owner of the hotel where she is staying cooked the Red Cross volunteers at the hotel a Cajun dinner complete with red beans and rice; shrimp etouffee; shrimp gumbo; and other cajun specialties.

Monday night, she has the option of going to the Navy base for dinner with other Red Cross volunteers, or eating again at the hotel (where they were promised crawfish pie). Apparently she has already tried the crawfish pie and it is good enough serve as an enticement away from Navy food.

She said that the work she did distributing food on Sunday was hot, hard work, but rewarding.

For the fourth straight year, the NRA’s running dogs in Wisconsin have proposed a concealed carry law. For the fourth straight year, the NRA and its water carriers in the Legislature cannot understand why 60% of Wisconsin men and 80% of Wisconsin women oppose concealed carry.In general, the arguments proposed by the NRA’s lackeys are unchanging, designed to create fear, and generally without any sort of foundation in facts or statistics.

Argument Number One: Wisconsin is one of just four states that currently does not allow concealed carry. Yes, and? Maybe we like it that way. Wisconsin is one of 49 states that does not allow gay marriage. It is one of just six states that does not have any of the vowels ‘a’, ‘e’, or ‘u’ in the spelling of its name. Could I throw out any more meaningless numbers? Apparently, concealed carry proponents never had anyone ask them, “If all your friends jumped off a cliff would you jump too?”

Argument Number Two: Congress may pass a nationwide concealed carry law so the state should do so first to beat them to the punch. If Congress were to pass a concealed carry law, and if said law were able to pass constitutional muster before the Supreme Court, Wisconsin’s law would likely be superceded. In which case, it wouldn’t matter if we passed a law or not.

Argument Number Three: Many of the “good guys” are already carrying weapons illegally. Concealed carry will let these so-called good guys carry weapons legally. This has to be among the dumbest arguments I’ve seen. The basic theory behind that argument is that it is somehow OK to break the law if you are otherwise a good person and if you break the law with some sort of good-natured purpose in mind. Of course, the logical extension of this argument shows just how ridiculous this train of thought can be. If I robbed a bank and gave all my misgotten gains to an orphange, would I be one of the so-called good guys? After all, I broke the law with the best of intentions. Of course, we can all see how this argument breaks down. If I rob a bank, then I’ve committed a crime, regardless of where the money ends up. If you carry a concealed weapon today in Wisconsin, you are breaking the law, regardless of why you are carrying the weapon. That, by definition, does not make you a “good guy.” Does it make sense to say that we should grant concealed carry permits to, and legitimize the practices of, people who have already shown a healthy disregard for the law?

Argument Number Four: If citizens can carry concealed weapons, then they can help stop crime. Right. As a nation, we once tried a massive experiment where normal citizens carried weapons around all the time to protect themselves. It was called the Wild West.

The Reverand Sue Moline, director of the Lutheran Office for Public Policy, recently penned an op-ed in one of the local newspapers decrying the push for concealed carry. Amongst the usual facts and figures was this unusual argument:

Martin Luther recognized that every person is both saintly and sinful, capable of the most exalted acts of goodness and the most depraved acts of criminality. Good people may have more disciplined control of their impules, but good people can drink too much and become threatening and belligerent, fall into depression and lash out in anger and despair, or have frightening experiences that trigger hasty and harmful behaviors.

Unfortunately, the concealed carry law is likely to pass the Legislature again this year. The bill will then end up on the Governor’s desk, again. I can only hope that the Legislature fails to override his veto, again.

By this time tomorrow, Sarah will be on her way to the Gulf Coast to volunteer for three weeks with the American Red Cross.So far, all we know is that she is going to “New Orleans.” Of course, she could get there and immediately get shipped off to Baton Rouge, Texas, or some other location where the Red Cross needs help. Apparently, most of the Red Cross work at this point revolves around feeding people displaced by the hurricanes and what they call “bulk distribution.” According to Sarah, bulk distribution means driving a truck full of donated food, water, pots, pans, or anything else donated to the Red Cross in large numbers. Once the truck reaches a designated location, volunteers unload the truck and its contents are distributed to the needy.

She doesn’t know yet if she’ll have a cot in a gymnasium, a hotel room, or something in between. Apparently, Red Cross accomodations for volunteers run the gamut.

Generally, people have been supportive of Sarah. Her co-workers, teachers, and fellow students have all accomodated her sudden departure in gracious, helpful ways.

Others, however, have been full of doom and gloom towards some mysterious end. They insist that crime is rampant on the Gulf Coast and that she’ll be going to a location only slightly safer than downtown Baghdad. They remind and badger her about constantly minding her safety, traveling in groups, and trusting no one. In short, they treat her like she’s a naive 15 year-old off to the Big City for the first time, rather than a mature woman who has been all over the US and the world. They seem to forget that the Red Cross isn’t necessarily in the business of sending its volunteers into dangerous locations. In addition, what is the point of telling her that she’ll be walking into an urban Vietnam? To make the ones sitting safely at home feel better about themselves? “Well, we’re not going, but we did our part by telling her unsubstantiated horror stories.”

Nice. Real nice.

It’s good to know that you can always count on some people for deconstructive moral support.

While she’s gone, Dalla, Ira, and I will hold down the fort in Madison. I’m sure that the two of us who aren’t reptiles will miss her. The house will certainly be quieter as a result.

The Registered Traveler program about to be expanded by the TSA only further exposes the joke is airline security in the US.The theory behind the Registered Traveler program is that certain individuals can be pre-approved for an expedited security screening at the airport. People who want to participate in the program provide an array of information about themselves to TSA. TSA then screens applicants based on that information, and if the agency approves of an applicant, TSA issues them an ID card that includes some sort of biometric information.

People who are approved can take their fancy-schmancy ID card to the airport and move through lightly screened, expedited security lines.

This whole program is really pushed by the airlines because their best customers (business travelers) are really peeved about waiting in long security lines. So, while the airlines don’t want the liability of running the security checkpoints, they do want to push their best customers through the lines faster. Enter Registered Traveler.

Of course, the program will do nothing to enhance the security of air travel. If anything, it will further erode the already negligible benefits of the current airline screening program. The working theory appears to be that only legitimate business travelers will pony up $80 per year, in addition to some information about themselves. Nothing could be further from the truth.

The 9/11 hijackers, for instance, flew cross-country several times in first class to scout the airlines and plan their attacks. It isn’t like they flew from Boston to Nashville a couple of times on Southwest to save a few bucks. Clearly, the terrorists we are fighting in the so-called War on Terror are well funded and are unlikely to be deterred by a lousy $80 fee.

In addition, the 9/11 terrorists had done enough to establish legitimate identites in this country to avoid the kind of screening that Registered Traveler would provide. Remember that some of the 9/11 terrorists even had gone so far as to acquire drivers licenses. Is the cursor screening provided by Registered Traveler really going to dig deep enough to penetrate the shell erected by a determined covert cell?

No, Registered Traveler is just another way for airlines to seperate Us (coach, low fare, low profit travelers) from Them (business and first class travelers). Of course, the whole idea is sold to us as a security measure in the hopes that we’ll just shut-up and take it, like we do so often in this country.

Pietra Rivoli’s latest book The Travels of a T-Shirt in a Global Economy: An Economist Examines the Markets, Power, and Politics of World Trade should be required reading for anyone interested in poltics, trade, and free markets (or the lack of the same).Rivoli is an economics professor at Georgetown University, but don’t let that frighten you away from this book. Rather than a dry, academic economics text, this book is written for the rest of us. In fact, as the book so aptly points out, there is little in the way of free markets and the like in the global economy today.

Rivoli deftly points out that the cotten, yarn, and apparel industries have gone to great lengths to essentially remove all market risks from their businesses. This allows them to survive in a global economy because their businesses are essentially written into the law. Instead of competing in various industries on a level playing field, it’s like they’re guaranteed sixty points before they even step on to the field.

In addition to examining how those industries avoid markets or rig them via politics to their benefit, Rivoli examines how US trade policy (or lack thereof) affects people in other countries. She shows how export quotas applied to one country affect life in another; she examines how so-called free trade pacts (NAFTA, CAFTA, and the like) are really anything but. In addition, she explores just how accurate charges leveled by anti-globalization activists are.

In the end, her book isn’t an in-depth examination of one specific industry or product; it is a book focused on how modern industry operates as seen through the lens of one specific product. Rivoli’s goal isn’t to enlighten the world about the T-shirt market. Her goal is to get people thinking about national and global trade policies.

When was the light time that a legislative body in this country honestly did something to benefit the little guy?Recent history is replete with examples of Congress and state legislatures speaking out of both sides of their mouths. They routinely pass legislation that benefits only industry and the rich, while claiming that the rest of us will benefit as a result.

The Wisconsin Legislature is now considering a bill that would require beer brewers to sell their products to distributors, who would then be the only ones allowed to sell to retailers. How, exactly, does that benefit me? Why is it in my best interest to make beer more expensive by writing the middleman into the law? We don’t make Nike sell their shoes first to a distributor, who then turns around and sells them to Wal-Mart. We don’t make it illegal for farmers to sell directory to retailers, so why should brewers be punished? Is there really that much of a threat posed to society if New Glarus Brewery or Lake Louie Brewing sells a few thousand barrels of beer directly to retailers?

Of course, that’s all driven by the distribution industry. They gave thousands of dollars in campaign contributions to the beer distribution industry last year and now they want what they purchased; they want their business written in to law.

The Wisconsin Legislature has dutifully bowed down by rushing the bill through a hearing, taking a vote less than twenty-four hours later in the Assembly, and scheduling a Senate hearing less than twenty-four hours later. Apparently, the threat posed by the sale of Tailwagger Barley Wine directly to retailers is one that brooks no delay.

In addition, the Wisconsin legislature seeks to make a photo ID mandatory for voting. For years, and years, and years, Wisconsin has had remarkably open and transparent voting procedures. All of those are made to work by hard working poll workers. Now, the Republican controlled Legislature has decided that too many low-income Democrats in Milwaukee are voting and the easiest way to prevent them from doing so is to impose strict voting regulations that increase the burden of proof on those voters.

This is a complete paradigm reversal. Before, all voters were given the benefit of the doubt. You were allowed to vote, and your vote was counted on the day of the race. Your vote could be challenged, but you couldn’t be prevented from voting. If it was later determined that you voted fraudulently, the matter would be referred to the District Attorney’s office.

Republicans want to rig the system so that you can’t vote unless you jump through a large number of hoops beforehand. Essentially, the burden will be on the voter to prove that they should be allowed to vote, rather than on the city, county, or state to prove that the vote cast by the voter shouldn’t count.

Congress has been no better. I’d challenge anyone of any political stripe to show me how the recent change in bankruptcy filing will help anyone but the credit card companies. There is no little guy alive, anywhere, who benefits from a law that discourages people to take a chance forming a business. I’ve worked for people who started their business by financing it on a couple of credit cards. Does the new law encourage that sort of risk-taking? Of course not. Given the documented difficulty of minority Americans to benefit from the so-called traditional banking system, those folks are often left financing their businesses with credit cards. They are now doubly at risk because the barriers into the traditional banking system haven’t been removed, and the safety net of bankruptcy has been torn asunder. How does the law help those people?

How does it benefit the little guy to lose his bankruptcy protection if he suffers from sudden medical maladies? Given the lack of universal health coverage in this country many people are stuck paying their expensive medical bills with their credit cards. One refrain thrown out again and again by the talking heads and the Republicans paid by the credit card companies is that this law will only hurt those living above their means. So if you get cancer or need emergency surgery and have to pay for treatment with credit cards are you living above your means?

The Medicare drug “benefit” generally showers benefits on drug companies and does little to help the elderly. It does nothing to help the rest of us.

In short, I’m tired of legislative bodies telling me that they represent the rest of us. They are bought and paid for by companies and special interests all across the nation. The least they could do is tell us the truth.

Chelsea Handler’s book, My Horizontal Life: A Collection of One-Night Stands is one woman’s memoir of her various bedroom encounters over the years.Supposedly, this book is a hilarious recounting of one woman’s sexual escapades through the years. She sleeps with a well-endowed midget in Mexico, a teenage gymnast on a five-day cruise, doesn’t sleep with various men for a variety of reasons, and single-handedly keeps the nation’s various liquor wholesalers in the black.

Quite frankly, the book is so repetitive that I couldn’t even finish it. How many times can you read about how a woman decides to sleep with someone for her own (generally selfish) reasons, and then dumps on that same someone in a variety of heartless ways. Are we supposed to be impressed at her casual and uncaring treatment of others? Since when is getting drunk a wildly hilarious act in and of itself? Is the mere mention of dildos and vibrators supposed to send us into paroxysms of laughter?

Sorry, Chelsea. You’ve got to work harder than that; as a comedian, I’m surprised you don’t realize it. Your opening bit is funny, but it’s all downhill from there. Unlike a twenty minute stand-up slot in a club, you can’t afford to save some of your best material for the end of the act. Books allow the reader to walk away at any point and if you save all your best material for the final twenty pages, chances are good that few readers will discover the gold at the end of the rainbow.

For the past few years, the Madison Curling Club has hosted a Halloween Bonspiel for interested teams. It is a reasonably good sized event with 48 teams of four filling out the field. This year, for the first time, I joined the competition.The team on which I played had a woman from the Madison club as a skip, a man from the Wausau club as the third, myself at second, and a woman from Stevens Point at lead. None of were new curlers, but we had never curled together as a team before.

The spiel had a three game minimum, which meant that we were guaranteed to play in at least three games. If we won a game, then we would play at least one more game for each game we won.

We lost our first game on Friday night by a fairly substantial margin. Of course, it was the first time all year the third and I had stepped on the ice, which certainly didn’t help matters. That game finished up around 22:15, and by the time we were done with the obligatory drinking and chatting after the match, it was nearly 23:30 before I got home.

Our next draw was at 07:00 the next morning which guaranteed that no one was going to get much sleep. We arrived at the clubhouse, played nine ends, and lost by, literally, one half an inch. That was a tough way to lose, but it certainly beat getting blown out.

Our third match was Saturday night. We played a team from the Wausau club and again were forced to play nine ends to decide the game. We lost that match by a single point in the extra end, which ended our spiel.

If nothing else, it was entertaining to see all the costumes the people wore to the club for the Spiel. It certainly brings another dimension to choosing a costume if one of the requirements is that you must be able to deliver a curling stone in costume.

Saturday, between matches, Sarah, Dalla, and I traveled to our community garden plot. We harvested all the remaining produce, pulled out all the remaining plants, and generally put the plot to bed for the winter. We brought home a fairly good size bundle of kale, some tomatoes, and five or more pounds of hot peppers. Now we just need to get rid of all those hot peppers somehow.

Sunday, we washed the windows, pulled off the screens, and continued getting the house and yard ready for winter. While Sarah went to school to meet with a group for one of her classes, Dalla and I watched the Vikings lose to the Carolina Panthers (no surprise, really). After that, we went hiking in the rain for a while so Dalla could run for a while before Sarah and I left to see “Chicago, The Musical.”