Memoriam

I'm old enough to remember Bhutto's rise to power in the 80s, and was old enough at the time to wonder why what we called "Third World" nations back-in-the-day managed to have female leaders when the good ol' USA hadn't. (It was, after all, the groundbreaking decade of Indira Ghandi, Maggie Thatcher, Cory Aquino, Jeanne Kirkpatrick, Sandra Day O'Connor, et. al.) How interesting--and significant--that the places (I'm looking at America, France and Canada in particular) that claim to be the mailing addresses of freedom and equality and human rights somehow seem to keep putting white, straight Christian guys in charge.

I'm not a fan of Hillary Clinton, and think that her Presidency would be DOA due to the hysterical anti-Clinton ravings of the right infecting the middle. But I'm starting to think that it would be worth the price of the blue team going four-and-out to smash that glass ceiling for once and all. I'd be happy to do it myself, but for some crazy reason the world hasn't yet made me its Benevolent Dictator For Life. Maybe it's related to the crazy reason that I never win the lottery (for which I've never bought a single ticket).

Across two scripts, Shakespeare's Henry V laments the weight of the crown, "subject to the breath of every fool,"--the burden and nuisance, in a nutshell that keeps me at arm's length from active involvement in politics. Mercifully, I've only ever experienced that (up close) on a very local level. "Local" as in the kind of politics where Letters to the Editor and cranky old people with nothing better to do than attend board/council meetings are the hazards of the trade.

Bhutto took her shot, and I salute her pure nerve, playing with higher risk (i.e. wearing a bigger bulls-eye) than her male counterparts. The deluded soul who gave her (and nearly two dozen other people) what passes for martyrdom has, I fear, signed in blood the death-warrant of Pakistan. Musharraf has been living on borrowed days for years already. It's a matter of time before the long-dodged bomb or bullet or blast finds its mark. Time that may well have been shortened by today's assassination. Then an already-corrupt dictatorship will give way to corrupt anarchy and thence to corrupt theocracy. The first theocracy to have nuclear weapons at their fingertips.

Somebody stop my feet from dancing...

To me, the saddest part is that the deaths are even more wasted than any loss of life. Pakistan will certainly not be shocked into collective tolerance and cooperation.

And here in 'merica, the lesson will not be absorbed because, quite bluntly, we expect "those brown people" to slaughter each other with aplomb. The notion that our own waxing dictatorship, fueled by the blatant anti-intellectualism and jack-booted arrogance of the Christian Right might just be pulling us down the same road would never, EVER occur to most Americans.

The right kind of bias

I'm stuck with an El Cheapo hosting company for the pro bono coding I do for one of my quirky hobbies. The problem with that--other than the comotose tech. service that will have us switching providers in February, if not before--is the fact that I'm stuck with the sorry excuse for a scripting language known as PHP.

If I were foolhardy enough to allow hecklers for this, my little soapbox, I could count on language Jihadist rebuttals in 5...4...3...2...1...

But I don't. So there.

I fell in love with Java at the tail-end of the dot-com era for one reason: Documentation. Both for internal error messages as well as APIs. Sun's slipped on that recently, and I am not happy about it. But their more slovenly attempts to document an increasingly Byzantine welter of packages, classes and functions is still head-and-shoulders above what's offered by PHP.

Case in point: I fat-fingered the name of the database to which I was connecting. Any rational programmer would expect the code to fail at the line that attempted to connect to the database. But no--never mind I was even a good little geek and had a fail-statement ready in case it didn't connect. PHP didn't even fail when I attempted to execute the query. No, it actually failed when I tried to retrieve the contents of the recordset.

And that, folks, in unacceptable. Bad enough that PHP tries to enforce a half-@$$ attempt at typing--meaning that you don't declare the type up front--the data type is actually set on first use, after which point the type is apparently set in proverbial stone. So, in a sense, the programmer gets the worst of both worlds: All the ambiguity of VBScript/JavaScript, without the trade-off of on-the-fly mutability (convenient for building things like SQL strings without having to cast all numeric values to strings).

Sloppy, sloppy, sloppy. I'd just as soon go back to classic Visual Basic or even C++, were Java not available. I frankly Just. Do. Not. Grok. what anyone sees in this language, much less why it's so ubiquitous on LAMP servers. I have a more than healthy respect for the handiwork of the open source community. Surely there's something better.

Another reason to diet

So I scratched soda nearly 100% from the menu--I think I've had two cans in six months, maybe even longer than that. Now corn oil and corn syrup products will be drastically cut back. (Fortunately, I wasn't looking at corn-based alternative fuels because they just aren't efficient.) Here's why: http://www.thestar.com/News/article/286357

Biologically, your senses of smell and taste are supposed to diminish as you age. But I'm instead finding that my palate is turning into a right snob. So I'm having a hard time feeling particularly virtuous about ditching the dumbed-down, hyper-hydrogenated, cloying concoctions that pass for nourishment in our franchised food wasteland. But if I arrive at the office door and my body is surprised that it's already climbed three floors of stairs, that's All Good.

Not that I expect to be down to my college weight anytime soon. Dearest and I are far too fond of wine with dinner, real butter, sour cream, red meat, etc. for me to be in much danger of that. But hacking back the calories that are as tasteless as they are useless (and, apparently, environmentally devastating) isn't the worst thing I could do for my body--or the world at large.

I can just see the billboard...

"Ask your doctor about honey."

Granted, I'm a fan of the scientific method (as opposed to incumbent folk wisdom), but it still warms the cockles of my heart to see Grandmother Nature get one over on Big Pharma: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20071204/ap_on_he_me/honey_for_cough

Not that, I'm...umm...biased or anything... (Touchdown for the black and gold team!) [dorky grin]