substitute

If you're a U.S. citizen capable of any political action, your first duty is to end this war.

We are the only people who can do this. We can vote, we can spend on candidates and organizations who change votes, we can demonstrate. No one else can.

The subject line of this post kept popping up in my head today. Just today I saw long articles, discussions, and arguments in blogs and publications about Mr. Obama's pastor and his big mouth, about Tibet and the Chinese Olympics, about the sexualization of a 15-year-old girl as a television star, about the introduction of video into the Flickr photo site, about the virtues and vices of demonstrations in which large numbers of people ride around on bicycles... it goes on.

When the torch for the god-damned Olympics came through San Francisco, the local supporters of the Dalai Lama organized a dramatic, well-organized, and clearly expensive attack on the event and made international headlines. The arguments I mention above were not little squibs like this post, either; they stretched into yards-deep webspace over days, burrowing into tiny whorls of forum thread.

Imagine if you will, an alternate version of the last month, in which the creative energy, free time, technology, expertise, and most of all the money, money, money, money, money implied by all that crap above had been thrown at one big anti-war punch. A demonstration, a television ad, a get out the vote for an important legislator, a front page ad on every newspaper. And imagine if that happened every day. Because it could. We're a wealthy nation with a crapload of free time. Those who can, do. Those who can't, write. Those who can't write, write checks. (Personally I write and write checks. I'm not very good at throwing bricks.)

If you think the war should continue, I'm not talking to you. If you agree that the war must be stopped, could we all maybe spend less effort, time, thought, and ESPECIALLY MONEY on other issues?

Don't ya know there's a war on?

The "health" "plan" from my last job has still not paid any of the claims from February to March of this year.

Today I got a bill from a collection agency for an $800+ charge, now with added interest.

A month ago I spoke to a "rapid resolution expert" at the health plan who was shocked, shocked at the lack of payment and pressed lots of buttons and told me it would be resolved in 30 days.

Nothing was done.

Today I spoke to another "rapid resolution expert" who was even more shocked and promised me a written response in 48 hours and resolution within ten business days. He gave me a magic string of digits which supposedly will make the collection agency back off.

Once again let me observe that I am at the very top of the privilege ladder here, and I'm getting reamed really hard.

CDC: Artesunate Available to Treat Severe Malaria in the US

I knew they were working on this but I didn't know it was this close to use here. Good news!

I heard a carnival barker-style bellowing ad on the car radio yesterday while listening to the all-news AM station. It was the usual mortgage broker appeal to refinance, this time with the added warning that rates were going up. The ad concluded:

"It's the biggest no-brainer in the history of Mankind!

http://news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/article2766040.ece

We godless liberals have been wasting time on media efforts. Clearly we need submarines.

via la_lisa, an appeal to save the integrity of chocolate from adulterous chocobusiness scheming.

I'm not a huge fan of cocoa butter myself (hurf white chocolate bleah) but it's PART OF CHOCOLATE. You can't replace it with partially hydrogenated neat's foot oil or something and call it chocolate. It Would Be Wrong.

I BOLGED about it over at buzznet: http://ignatz.buzznet.com/user/journal/191271/ to get the TEENS involved.

Yes, this is weak stupid bourgeois activism. I'm a suburban white kid who likes to cook. Go stuff it.

I had a mission. It seemed simple. My task was to acquire and ship a pair of shoes to mendel.

Acquisition was easy; about five clicks of ecommerce.

Then I discovered that shipping a pair of shoes to a friend in Canada is... fraught. It's not expensive. Nor is it physically difficult. However, the bureaucracy involved is nearly Slavic.

First I tried to do this via FedEx. They had a reasonably priced shipping option, and their website promised a step-by-step process for getting the customs declarations and shipping labels right.

The actual process resembled a "choose your own adventure" script in which failure might result in international arrest warrants for fraud, smuggling, failure to comply, cavalier attitude towards generally accepted procedures of international commerce, and yeggery. Deep in the middle of Adventure #3 I found myself faced with a screen in which I had to choose whether the shoes were "ornamental" in some way or "shoes, leather sole, fabric upper, pointed, ballet, en pointe, intended for legitimate artistic purposes." I imagined a bad click resulting in poor mendel forced to pirouette on a pair of city walking boots under pain of permanent fugitive status on an Interpol warrant.

I gave up on FedEx. Their process "concluded" without any ability to schedule a pickup. Apparently I hadn't finished, but there was no clue why.

The United States Postal Service was more promising. In fact, their procedure was honestly step-by-step, and the rates again very reasonable! I happily clicked through a few screens, entered my information, and was presented with a PDF which I printed. No joy. The PDF printed without addresses and strangely truncated. I had mistakenly clicked "okay!" and charged my credit card before I saw that the printout was very much not okay. Oh God! What to do now? Once you've printed out the damned thing you can't do so again without doubling the charge, which then becomes less than reasonable.

Fortunately the EZ-Print-O-Matic system had dropped a turd on my desktop which turned out to be the PDF itself. I opened it with Adobe Reader instead of the Mac's "Preview" program and it printed out just fine. Whew! I now had the five required copies of the label/customs declaration, prepaid postage, the package itself, and a false sense of confidence.

eyeteeth and I arrived at the post office today and found it nearly empty! no line, friendly staff. Hopes were high. Unfortunately, I had failed to throw out the first, bad printout of the label and had brought it with me instead of the second, good printout. The postal lady couldn't do a thing with the first printout because it was so badly truncated that there wasn't enough information for her to fill out a real one. She sadly told me I'd have to bring the real one or she couldn't ship.

Ordinarily I would have cursed God and died, rushed home, found the proper paperwork, and gone back to the Post Office. But I had to feed the eyeteeth and myself, and had to get her to the airport. This was no time to admit defeat. Off we went to Cafe Zinc to eat well, and from there to the airport.

Problem: the mailing date on the forms was fixed at today. What will happen? Tomorrow I will try to contact "customer" "service" at the USPS and find out if I have completely failed and missed my "window" in which case I'll start over. With luck this will be no problem. Then I will be able to mail the package.

As Art Spiegelman titled his story of Maus after the war, and now my troubles began. Or rather mendel's troubles. If or when I ship the package, will he receive it? Will the broker (Canadian for "bandito") give him the shoes? Will the shoes arrive? Will they be approved by Canadian Customs, or rejected as somehow dangerous or economically rapacious or otherwise un-Canadian? Will mendel be forced to dance a sequence from Swan Lake for Mounties to avoid transportation to the Baffin Bay Correctional Work Institute?

You my readers will be the first to know. Pray for us.

And on the left side of the plane if you'll look out you can see a sick man, a beggar, and a corpse...

via cruel.com:

Blogs - And God's Youth.

Just don't, kids. It's not good to "want a voice," and you shouldn't be tempted by quizzes about flirtation. Plus, idle words are evil. Fortunately I am a professional and a specialist so I get to have one if I want.

About a third of what this guy says is dead on, of course. Blogs are blather, the "current mood" is ridiculous, and posting quizzes and babbling about nothing is in fact a huge waste of time. Point taken. He allows email and instant messaging, though. You'd think that recent events would have given him pause especially about IMing. My favorite paragraph:

Then there is the language itself. Here is a mild example: “If your a hater then whateva i dont have time 4 your negativity in my positive world.” Phrases such as “screwed up,” “I dunno,” and every type of swear word are commonly used. One blog by a young twentysomething in a splinter used the acronym “OMG,” which is a shorthand way to take God’s name in vain.

Wasn't Tyre incinerated because they kept saying "I dunno"?