mcgees.org

Passed on to me by my brother: Time of day calling it quits at AT&T - Los Angeles Times

The service traditionally provided by telephone companies, the free reading of time-of-day, which figures humorously into a Douglas Adams novel, is ending in California.

I remember calling 853-XXXX for the time at many times.  Back when we referred to a phone service.

Another pop culture reference was found in the 1993 Wolfgang Petersen film In the Line of Fire (if you haven’t seen it, add it to your queue.)  While in Southern California, a driver tells Frank Horrigan (Clint Eastwood) that he remembers a phone number as being U-K-E-L-E-L-E.  Call that number in Southern California, and you used to get the time of day — a safe use of a number in a film.

Years ago I asked the author of 555-LIST (”Mind-numbingly comprehensive”, according to Entertainment Weekly, and frequently the object of much scorn) that he should add this as an honorable mention.  I emailed him more recently and asked if he was planning on doing anything with the site (there have been no updates since 2002.)  I think I’d like to take over the job from him.

Jenn was visiting family yesterday.  I always sleep a bit strangely in her absence.  A bit strangely.

Last night, I retired at midnight and set my alarm for 7 a.m.  Now, post-Chiari, I can actually sleep when I want!  This time, though, I awoke at 5.  I was naked, on top of all the sheets and blankets, perpendicular to the bed, with my legs hanging off one side.  I was having a bizarre dream that involved lying on something smooth, hard, cool, and undulating while drinking a one liter screwdriver made of Absolut® Vodka and Sunny Delight®.  It also involved a shovel or something.

This (the undulating screwdriver thing) is not something I would normally do, partially because I no longer drink alcohol, and partially because it’s just plain weird.  In any case, Jenn will be home tonight, and would severely punish any attempt to “go perpendicular on [the bed’s] ass”.  How welcome.

I need.  I need.

I’m working on a new hypothesis.  My hypothesis is that philosopher Peter Singer is actually attempting to achieve flight by waving his hands so frantically in his arguments.  I’m reading Practical Ethics (maybe for not much longer).  He’ll plod, at a fifth-grade reading level, through obvious facts.  Occasionally, he will try to shoehorn in some extremely counterintuitive arguments, apparently hoping the reader doesn’t notice.  Then he will skip a couple steps in his argument and make grand pronouncement.  The Far Side is recalled.  “Then a miracle occurs.”

From the Cambridge press Second Edition:

[The] most important human interests [include] avoiding pain, … developing one’s abilities, … satisfying basic needs for food and shelter, … enjoying warm personal relationships, … being free to pursue one’s projects without interference.  p. 31

Let’s stop here a moment and divide these into three columns.  Food, pain avoidance, and shelter we’ll put in Column 1.  These are basic animal drives.  Warm personal relationships we’ll put in Column 2.  This is a social animal drive, probably requiring a complex nervous system.  The drive to develop one’s abilities and being free to pursue one’s projects without interference we’ll put way over in Column 3.  These are highly complex and abstract, probably requiring a cerebral cortex and a whole host of supporting drives.  A lyre bird cares not to develop its singing skills for the skill’s own sake.  It does so as a programmed behavior that predisposes it to having more grandchildren.  And pursuing one’s projects without interference?  He’s using a word with multiple meanings.  Who has projects, narrowly construed, but Homo?  I suppose one could call nest-building or mound-digging a project, and bless it into the Column 1, but that seems not to be what he is getting at, as he discusses drive, initiative, challenge, and what we would traditionally call calling.  So he has, rather haphazardly, combined three strata of “interests” into one paragraph.  Which is fine, so far as it goes, when we’re just talking about humanity.  But then:

Interests are interests, and ought to be given equal consideration whether they are the interests of human or non-human animals, self-conscious or non—self-conscious animals.  p. 74

Of course this is what he was aiming for all along, as he is the author of Animal Liberation.  But not only does he not get there, he’s not even aiming correctly.  Human interests admit all three Columns.  But a male lion does not yearn for warm personal relationships.  It does not study mycology for the sake of bettering itself.  It does not build an abode.  It may have a project, widely construed, to chase, subdue, kill, and devour an antelope, and may in fact be rather miffed if there is interference in this process.  But it is patently false that “Interests are interests”.  Human interests are not lion interests, and when there is non-conformity, we need to investigate.

It may be thoroughly unethical to use a nonhuman animal as a means to an end.  It may be thoroughly ethical to do so.  The question might not even have a truth value.  I’m putting that aside.  I’ve struggled with personal vegetarianism and veganism in relation to personal ethics since I was nine years old, but that’s not the point.  Interests are not interests.  Interests differ.  And basing an entire ethos upon a Benthamesque desire to decrease suffering, while it may be admirable, is not accomplishing one’s mission if one has axiomatically declared “developing abilities” and “pursuing projects” as core interests.  You need more.

Or, perhaps, you need less.  You identify human interests entirely with Column 1.  My guess is Singer probably started here, then was pressured by discussion with colleagues and editors to admit Columns 2 and 3.  But once those latter Columns are axiomatic, the barn door’s open and the horse has escaped.

This has, possibly, had beneficial effects on the horse’s interests.  But the interests of an airtight logical argument?  Not so much.

Pretzelfont.com.  Render text in letterforms rescued from within a bag of pretzels.  And if you are familiar with non-Latin character sets, contribute your own pretzel letters!

The US Department of Homeland Security is mandating the introduction of a federal ID, issued by the states, at a cost of $14 billion.  If you live in a non-compliant state, your driver’s license or state ID will not meet federal standards, and a US passport will have to be used for all “federal purposes”, including visits to national parks.

Bad, bad, bad.  But slightly offset by the very pretty girl in the ad CNN chose to run next to the story (”Pay no attention to the privacy issues!  Look!  Someone pretty!”)

You know Google can do unit conversion, right?

Before discarding your used Sonicare toothbrush heads in favor of fresh ones, be sure to salvage the small, powerful, presumably neodymium magnets at the interior base of the head.  They are black, sometimes are epoxied in, and sometimes are floating.  These are strong, valuable, and presumably add significantly to the Sonicare head fabrication costs.

To order new heads, you can use the following links.

Regular reader or new reader, you might be thinking, “Hey, I’d like to subscribe to the comments on a couple of posts on this site.”

Well, probably not.  But in case you are, two active posts to try are Passing the torch, consisting of an ever-growing list of hot film and television actresses younger than I (some contributed by me, some by others), and, bewilderingly, My hamster died, to which well over sixty people have contributed, generally with their own dead hamster stories.  Click through to the pages, be bewildered, then either go through the “Subscribe to comments” option at the bottom or add the RSS feed for the post to your feed reader.