The Blog with No Name

Traffic on Mondays is typically superb. By superb I mean the traffic lights switch to green when I arrive, other drivers thoughtfully merge onto the highway with fluidity and adroitness, and, for some unknown reason, Highways 5 and 90 stay wide open, allowing me to zip to work in around 20 minutes. Mondays are good traffic days.

Traffic on Tuesdays is typically abysmal. By abysmal I mean the traffic lights are never green ever, other drivers mindlessly poke along onramps and stumble onto the highways, and, as it too often occurs, Highways 5 and 90 are backed up to New Jersey, forcing me to spend 40 vexing minutes in traffic. Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays — especially Fridays! — are bad traffic days.

I put this time in traffic to good use. Some probably think low of me, believing that I use this time to construct creative ways to condemn the circumstances. This is incorrect. I spend 50% of my commute listening to music, 50% listening to the radio, and the other 50% devising rational explanations for variations of traffic. Today my project was to come up with reasons why Mondays almost always have the best traffic. I have come up with a few reasons, but none I think offer a complete explanation:

1. Most firings take place on Fridays. This means come Monday, there are fewer people who have jobs to go to. Fortunately, our economy is strong and they all have jobs again by Tuesday.
2. Mondays are the days many people are recovering from weekend benders. Therefore, they call in sick, go to work late, or just continue to sleep.
3. Since Mondays are the first work day of the week, some people start the week off slow, thus getting on the road late and thereby spreading out the commute load over several hours instead of one mad hour of crawling to work.
4. Tying into #3, since many people got to work late on Mondays, they make extra sure they get to work on time the rest of the week. Thus, these people all crowd onto the highways at precisely the same moment.
5. People hate Mondays so it is natural for people on vacation to take Mondays off. Seriously, if you had to take one day off of work, you’d pick Monday, right? Nobody wants to take casual Friday off.

Though these explanations seem compelling at first, I hold they do not offer sufficient explanation for why traffic on Tuesdays is twice as bad as traffic on Mondays. And, I would emphasize, as a dilligent student of traffic patterns, this behavior holds across weather conditions. A Tuesday with the same weather as the Monday will still have considerably poorer traffic than a Monday.

Traffic patterns continue to puzzle me. I spend roughly an hour a day in the midst of it, yet I cannot explain it. Explanations I have seen may account for some parts of it but clearly not all of it. If traffic ever makes me go crazy it won’t be because of a lost temper, a stupid driver, or the slow pace. I will go crazy because I cannot figure why it happens the way it does.

As long as I’m bringing up war issues, I might as well continue. Newly released documents clarify Saddam’s links to terrorist networks and to Al-Qaeda. Read about it here, and here.

From the first link:

A newly released prewar Iraqi document indicates that an official representative of Saddam Hussein’s government met with Osama bin Laden in Sudan on February 19, 1995, after receiving approval from Saddam Hussein. Bin Laden asked that Iraq broadcast the lectures of Suleiman al Ouda, a radical Saudi preacher, and suggested “carrying out joint operations against foreign forces” in Saudi Arabia. According to the document, Saddam’s presidency was informed of the details of the meeting on March 4, 1995, and Saddam agreed to dedicate a program for them on the radio. The document states that further “development of the relationship and cooperation between the two parties to be left according to what’s open [in the future] based on dialogue and agreement on other ways of cooperation.” The Sudanese were informed about the agreement to dedicate the program on the radio.

I have a feeling we’ll be seeing a lot more of this stuff as the tens of thousands of pages of Saddam regime documents get translated and analyzed.

An interesting video of Jon Stewart interviewing Georges Sada, former advisor to Saddam Hussein. Currently the video is in the 2nd row on the page. Sada claims to have actually seen Saddam’s WMDs, and they were smuggled out of the country into Syria via plane and truck just before the coalition rocked Saddam’s world. He is also confident that the Bush administration, once it has mustered all the facts and evidence will confirm what Sada believes.

Of course, this can’t be true. Everybody knows there were never WMDs. Bush made that stuff up, right? This Sada guy is probably another Rove puppet.

I’ve blogged about fleeing WMDs before.

I really wish I didn’t get these dry spells. It seems every so often my creative spirit shrivels up, rendering me incapable of generating any creative output. These past couple of weeks I’ve felt my mind was not operating at it’s usual 110%. My brain feels muddled, my thoughts do not have their customary clarity, and forget about any real writing. Though, right now, I’m going to try to kick myself out of this little funk. There are too many things that cannot be ignored.

I saw V for Vendetta last night. I’ve spent some time mulling over how exactly I should write a review for this movie, and only one sentence kept springing to mind. This review will have to remain short lest I get worked into a fury again. I spilt too much bile last night, probably to my friends’s embarrassment. I’ve chosen my words, and I realize the import of these words. Sometimes we need to call a spade a spade. Sometimes punches really shouldn’t be pulled and all the batteries of a verbal broadside should be brought to bear. Such a time is now: V for Vendetta is a steaming pile of cinematic shit. I abhorred this movie like no other movie in my life. This is the only movie I walked out on. I was physically sick to my stomach and tembling with rage as I waited for my friends to finish watching the film. The movie is a disgusting vision of the future. It’s perversion and paranoia is only matched by it’s lack of perspective. If one were to take my moral compass and switch the N with the S, then my moral compass would match the movie’s moral compass. My only comfort that as long as these fools rely on comic book stories to push their shit, there’s not much to worry about.

What I’ve said should be considered in light of how I react to things and what my nature is. First, I’m a guy who focuses on ideas. If a movie seriously tries to pitch an idea, I will focus on that to a degree that I will ignore all other attributes of the film. Second, I have a character flaw in that my temper has a flash fuse when it comes to certain things, and this movie happened to ignite that fuse during the climax. Third and finally, 9/11 is still very fresh in my mind, and I think I was affected by it more strongly than most. The climax of V for Vendetta is a terrorist event that drew too close a parallel to 9/11. I found it abhorrent and beyond the pale.

The only point at which I agreed with the movie was when the hero reminded the heroine, “People should not be afraid of their governments. Governments should be afraid of their people.” So, for roughly 5 seconds, it was a movie after my own heart.

I’m not sure if I should say that this movie should be watched. A shrewd man will know both his beliefs and his adversary’s beliefs, and sometimes the contours of one’s own beliefs are brought into high relief after being exposed to adversarial beliefs. Indeed, we should not walk through this world with blinders or with eyes squinted shut. Even with that said, I can’t bring myself to recommend this movie for such philosophically pragmatic reasons.

Normally, legalese can be characterized in a variety of ways: unnecessary, confusing, bloviated, muddled, thick, self-referential, small-printish, and stupid. “Funny” is not a usual descriptor of legalese. However, in this footnote, I think it is funny:

A certain four-letter verb for “copulate,” of possible Scandinavian origin (see Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary (1977) p. 463, col. 2) appears frequently in the record along with its gerundive and a related noun involving the maternal parent.

Well put.

Good grief. My parents practically had a panic attack earlier this week because — gasp! — I hadn’t posted in over a week and I missed them once on IM. This spawned another spat of IM chatter and a phone call cut short by my stupid cell phone (I can turn the volume down but not up). This evening I had not one but two friends whine that I haven’t given them anything interesting to read when they’re “really bored.” Two things here: (1) yes, I do have two friends, and (2) yes, they only care about me when they’re really bored. In truth, I love this sort of attention, and even though it puts a small burden on me to have some type of output here on my blog, I consider it an easy and light burden because people care. So, this post is dedicated to my friends and family who demand some kind of blog productivity. Unfortunately, nothing has changed, and I don’t have much to write about. I guess I could talk briefly about part of my evening tonight.

Thursday nights are special nights for me. Thursday nights are precious to me. It wouldn’t be a stretch to say that Thursday nights are probably the dearest nights to me out of the whole week. I might even go so far to say that I live for Thursday nights. Thursday nights are the nights I go out with The Guys, and we do our Guy Thing. I’ve managed through a remarkable display of charisma, charm, persuasion, and bribery to extricate most of my friends from the merciless yet wonderful clutches of their significant others for one night a week. These nights are almost invariably marked by cheer, laughter, camaraderie, beer (Guinness), and compelling conversation. These are the nights when I shirk my nerdiness, forget my loneliness and general boredom, and remember how good it is to be in the company of 3D people who have voices, faces, and smells. Normally, on these nights we go to McCormick’s and Schmick’s. We’re regulars there. Yes, they know my name. And even more creepily, I know their names. Tonight was no different . . . until we got there.

Tonight the McCormick’s B-Team was definitely being fielded. None of the regulars were there, which was disappointing and disorienting. Our favorite bartender was not there. Our favorite server was not there. Even the new — and cute! — server was not there. Maybe at some later point I’ll go into detail about how good it is for us that the regular employees are working at McCormick’s, but I’ll just sum it up in one word for now: mad-hook-ups. Anyway, it was not a deal breaker for us that the A-Team wasn’t working tonight, so we sat down and waited to be served. And we waited. And waited. And waited. Now, when you go to a bar, and 20 minutes go by and your drink order has not been taken, something is wrong. That’s a failure to provide good service. Nearly 20 minutes go by, and our server had not approached us since she cleared off our table. She started passing out happy hour menus to tables. By this time, I was watching her closely because I wanted a Guinness. I watched her hand out menus to the right of us. I watched her hand out menus to the left of us. I watched her walk out with menus away from us. Even tables that had nobody at them got menus. We got nothing. She didn’t even try to make eye contact. That’s when I gave up. In no uncertain terms, I made it clear to my buddies that I was fed up and we were to leave. So, we left in a huff.

I guess this story doesn’t have much significance to anybody besides my buddies and myself, but maybe I can help other readers to identify with this. Imagine Cheers, the bar where everybody knows your name. Now, imagine walking into Cheers and finding that not only does nobody know your name but also they don’t even treat you like a person who’s ready to drop a nice wad of cash into their pockets. It’s not a pleasant experience, and if too many of these experiences are experienced, then it will go a long ways towards destroying that special bond we had formed. I like McCormick’s, and I’m a loyal customer. However, my friends and I, as regular customers who tip heavily if treated well, deserved better.

Anyway, the moral of this story is that I don’t want this humble blog to treat my readers like how my friends and I were treated tonight. My posts are my service, and your comments and attention are your tips. By all of my own measurements, I’m tipped heavily. If there is ever a lapse in service it is because I suck, and you deserve better.

Today is St. Patty’s day. Steevak.com will be closed for business until sometime mid-afternoon on Saturday. Remember to punch pinch anybody who isn’t wearing green. Drink a Guinness. Pretend you’re Irish. Thank the Lord you’re alive and can enjoy life.

I haven’t posted in a while. I’ll admit I’ve hit quite a dry spell of creativity/caring/circumstance. As can be seen by recent previous entries, I’ve been really stretching things to make them more interesting and/or dramatic. I can only do that so much before it becomes ridiculous and/or annoying. The other thing that may have sucked the posts out of me is a combination of 2 long weekends in a row that were more exhausting than relaxing, a slightly out of whack sleeping schedule, and WoW. This leaves me a little too drained each day after work to really work up the creativity and energy to whip out a good post, and I usually end up just vegging out playing WoW. But that doesn’t mean I can’t be friendly:

I do have a question I’ve been rolling around in my head lately, but I’m trying to figure out how to ask it without sounding stupid or generating lots of obvious answers. I thought I would get it written out tonight, but that didn’t work out. When I went to the coffee shop to actually get it written, the Interwebs didn’t work. I could have written it offline, but that would have just made too much sense. I read instead.

Yesterday, T-Mobile USA celebrated it’s 10th birthday. Part of the festivities was a pinata of that perennially annoying can-you-hear-me-now punk from those Verizon commercials. Anyway, he had the crap beat out of him, and then I used his head for a party hat:

Somebody in the office was tooting an air horn at various times during the afternoon. It was pretty loud.

Apple has posted fixes for the Safari security flaws I mentioned earlier. Turn around time: 8 days. Not too bad. It’ll be interesting to keep track of how fast Apple posts fixes as they become more popular and therefore a bigger target for t3h l33t h4×0rz.