Just like old times

I just finished croc-wrestling a friend’s server for a few hours as a side gig. It was so dot-com! There I was editing configs on the live box and restarting services all over the place. I think I did him some good and very little harm, anyway.

I always feel very Ghostbusters signing on to someone’s computer that’s sad and finding problems and fixing them. It’s partly just an ego boost but mostly the excitement of a new problem to solve that makes me happy.

Speaking of film, I had the opportunity to see Master of the Flying Guillotine again last night. Now that is some kung fu movie. It has everything: deadly flying hatbox, evil old man with tremendously long eyebrows, racial stereotypes, bad music, impossible anatomical feats, people flying, and comic eating scenes. do_not_lick pointed out that kung fu movies all seem to have at least one comical noodle or soup eating scene, which I hadn’t noticed before.

I drove 100 miles today for a meeting that didn’t happen. Existential agony is alive and well in the #1 lane of a freeway near you.

PRESS THE EJECT AND GIVE ME HEAD

IS THIS THE ROSEGARDEN FUNERAL OF WHORES OR DID I PRESS THE WRONG

War is cruelty, and you cannot refine it.

The latest technical foul caught by cameras in Iraq is all over the news. Nasty business; a Marine appears to have shot a wounded enemy. And there are pictures of dismembered toddlers, accounts of starvation and disease, descriptions of the use of dreadful weapons. If you’re a person of any empathy these things make you choke. Here’s the odd part. The news media covers these as shocking aberrations. My politically liberal anti-war friends cite all of these as evidence of the brutal inhumanity of the current administration and the wickedness of the current war.

What did any of you think a war was like? Have you ever even read a good book about one? The strangest ones are the people who back the war but say “we have to do this by the book” or “these abuses can’t go on”. Well of course they can go on. That’s what a war is. The “rules” are a polite Victorian fiction.

Real wars consist of the following: pants-filling terror, rage, uncontrollable killing rampages, rape, the slaughter of prisoners, the deliberate burning to death of other humans, torture, dead babies, useless mass death, the destruction of every useful thing within reach, theft, and insanity. When you agree to send soldiers into battle you sign off on all of the above and more.

Every time this foolishness comes up I’m reminded of the first Gulf War and the attempt by that sad madman Ramsey Clark to prove that the U.S. forces were war criminals for using combat bulldozers against earthworks, thereby burying enemy soldiers alive. One general’s response was basically: “It is indeed horrible. Most of what happens here is horrible. You might think from watching war movies that dying from a gunshot or a grenade blast is a relatively quick and clean death; I can assure you otherwise.”

The “boys” over there shooting dying prisoners or mortaring infants are doing exactly what you asked them to. Just admit it already.

The professionals in the office are independent practitioners and are not associated with any group

I am full of stories. Pick one.

[Poll #385868]

Adventures in Publishing: Playgirls of Dr. Sherlock Bone

In college I had a great enthusiasm for journalism. I did achieve some success in the field and got a good job later on, but my first few attempts are notable for humor value only.

As a freshman in college I was seeking a paid internship. One of my father’s former students, a novelist friend of the family, was working in publishing and she tried to give me an in, so I went on an interview at her job. At the time she was working for Playgirl magazine, which was conveniently close to me. The same office put out at least one other magazine (some women’s fitness and health thing) and she said they were very busy and could definitely use a part-timer intern.

At the interview, my father’s friend introduced me to my potential boss and then left us to chat. The woman I talked to had that prissy, intense falseness that a lot of people get in business situations, but she was kind enough to tell me in code how jacked up the place was. They were going through their second Chapter 11, things were “in transition and there’s a lot of flux”, and it would be a “challenging environment”. They ended up not hiring me and I forgot about the whole thing. It was an interesting situation, though. Playgirl couldn’t make money because not enough women wanted to see pictures of naked men to make it worth their while, and almost all of their subscribers were actually gay men. However, they could only keep those customers if they kept up the fiction that it was a magazine for women, so gay-themed advertising was out. Therefore, without being able to sell their nonexistent female audience or their closeted gay audience to advertisers they were horribly screwed. But anyway.

Years later, at a different newspaper, I met the woman who’d got that internship. The place was far, far worse than I had thought. Not only was a skeleton staff cranking out three monthlies under tremendous pressure, but the bankruptcy and ownership changes had made pay a very chancy thing, and people kept flipping out at the office and quitting in a storm of tears, etc. To make things worse, the head lady was the kind of deliriously power-mad creature who only succeeds in publishing, an absolute monarch of an obsesso-compulsocracy.

The denouement of my friend’s career there came when the boss lost her dog.

It’s a terrible thing to lose a loved animal, and everyone was sympathetic. But boss lady went far beyond that. All activity in this overworked office ground to a halt. Employees were summoned to a conference room. They were told that their new job was to find the dog, at whatever cost. Each employee was given a map grid of part of West L.A. as their search zone with instructions to go through it with thorough attention to detail. And an expert was brought in: Dr. Sherlock Bones, celebrity dog detective.

My friend left apparently as the art director was making dog loss flyers for the staff to distribute over the entire Westside. I think Playgirl went through three or four more bankruptcies. My dad’s friend moved out of state and raised horses. And I got an internship at a music magazine.

Never did find that dog.