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Stuck In Traffic #7
by Calvin Stacy Powers �
=================
Darwin Award 1995
Earlier this year, the Arizona Highway Patrol discovered a pile of
smouldering metal smashed into the side of a mountain at the apex
of a curve in a highway. At first they thought it was the
wreckage of a small airplane, but later decided it was a car,
though they couldn't determine what sort of car it was because the
car was mangled so badly.
But during their investigation the story began to come out. It
seems that a man had somehow managed to get his hands on a
solid-fuel rocket used to give heavy military transport planes an
extra boost during take-off. This fellow had driven his Chevy
Impala out into the middle of the desert on a long straight road,
attached the rocket to the roof of his car, ignited the rocket,
and literally taken off.
Investigators estimate that the Chevy Impala reached a speed of
about 250-300 miles per hour. Now that's a joy ride!
Unfortunately, these solid-fuel rockets don't turn off once you
ignite them; and straight roads don't run on forever. You can
just imagine this man's range of emotions during his escapade.
First the exhilaration, then the slight worry once he realized
that he hadn't planned on how to turn off the rocket,. Next,
panic when the brakes burned up followed by sheer terror when he
saw the curve up ahead.
According to news circulating on the Internet, this man has been
nominated for this year's Darwin Award. This award is an annual
honor given to the person who did the gene pool the biggest
service by killing himself in the most spectacular way. (Last
year's award was given to a man who killed himself when he tipped
a Coke machine over on himself while trying to steal himself a
free soda.)
But ya know, I kinda gotta admire the guy for going after the
thrill.
===================
Bold New Initiative
As the deadline for The Junto #29 approaches, the President has
just announced a bold new initiative to transform the world as we
know it, or it least score himself some cheap ratings points for
the next election. He has announced that smoking is bad and the
FDA should have authority to regulate the sale and distribution of
tobacco just like any other drug. And in a brilliant campaign
strategy move, he chose to announce this bold new initiative in
the heart of tobacco country, North Carolina. Our Democratic
Governor was not amused.
How insightful our President is. How in tune he is with the
times. Congress is bothering with mundane issues like how the
heck we are ever going to balance the budget and what we can do to
keep the Medicare system from going bankrupt. Those
head-in-the-clouds politicians in Washington are holding hearings
on the Waco massacre, which could arguably be the worst abuse of
government power in recent history. Those out of touch rascals we
call representatives are wasting their time figuring out what to
do about the Bosnian civil war. What are these folks thinking? I
suppose the President will expect them all to set these issue
aside and join him in a united, bipartisan war against tobacco.
I guess after trying to sell the nation on gays in the military,
Nationalizing the health care industry, the invasion of Haiti that
wasn't called an invasion, establishing diplomatic relations with
Viet Nam, the 50 billion dollar Bailout of the Mexican government,
the Bosnian arms embargo, the President felt like he had to do
Something. Anything. Anything at all to show that he is worthy
of leading the nation.
And yet, somehow, I think the President missed the boat on this
one. Despite his tobacco proposal being overwhelmingly popular, I
think he has proven just how ineffective and out of touch he is.
I mean, is this the best he can do?
=================================================
Hit `em Again! Hit `em Again! Har-der! Har-der!
The AP News service reports that a long time fugitive by the name
of Nick George Montos, who has the distinction of being the first
man to ever be on the FBI's 10 most wanted list twice and who has
been running from the law for nine years, has been apprehended by
a 73 year old antique shop owner by the name of Sonia Paine.
It seems that Mr. Montos had tied up Ms. Paine and was robbing
her store. But she was able to break free and the two got into a
fighting match. Mr. Montos had managed to hit Ms. Paine with a
baseball bat and spray her with mace before she really got mad and
wrestled the bat away from him and returned the slugs. "I don't
take any crap from anybody," Ms. Paine said, "I beat the hell out
of him."
And a good thing, too.
======================================
The Politicization Of Medical Research
Once again, Senator Jesse Helms has managed to offend the
sensibilities of many citizens by merely stating the obvious. One
might wonder if he is running for reelection. In a recent
interview with the New York
Times, Helms called for a reduction in federal research money
earmarked for AIDS research for two reasons. First, he cites
figures that indicate that AIDS is only the ninth leading cause of
death in the United States, yet more federal money is spent on
AIDS research than other research programs for more deadly
illnesses. Second, he calls for a reduction in federal research
money because the disease is primarily spread by homosexuals
engaging in "deliberate, disgusting, revolting conduct."
There's little doubt that Senator Helms can back up his claims of
disproportionate AIDS research funding with accurate government
figures. Others have made similar claims in the past. And yet
critics of Senator Helms can almost certainly cite different
government figures that show fair and equitable funding with equal
accuracy, thanks to the myriad of government programs involved and
the labyrinthine ways that the government does its bookkeeping.
Besides, many people will be quick to point out that, ideally,
federal research money should not be a "quota" program in which
money is doled out to various fields of research in proportion to
their "importance." Each area of research should receive the
funds it needs to do through, prudent, yet efficient research.
It's sad and unsettling to think of various fields of medical
research being pitted against each other in a morbid battle for
funds.
But that's the way it is. When one strips away the emotional
rhetoric, Helms is correct in pointing out that federal research
money is doled according to the political weights exercised by
various lobbying efforts and special interest groups rather than
any sort of noble evaluation of need or merit. Even setting up a
panel of scientists to set spending priorities on research
programs rather than by politicians, as some have suggested,
simply shifts the politicization to the selection of the panel.
He who gets to choose who's on the panel more or less gets to
determine how the funding will be doled out. Distribution of
federal money will always be politicized. It's always been that
way. Everyone knows it. Welcome to the world of politics.
And while lamenting about the politicization of AIDS research
funding, Helms is also engaging in political pandering of his own
by trying to imply that funding AIDS research is a tacit approval
of "deliberate, disgusting, revolting conduct." Such rhetoric
plays well with some of Senator Helms' constituents but one can
use the same reasoning to justify cutting just about any other
federal research one cares to.
For example, there are millions of people in the country, many of
whom live in Senator Helms own district, who regard smoking as
``deliberate, disgusting, revolting conduct'', yet we don't hear
Senator Helms calling for an end to lung cancer research. Nor do
we hear him advocating the abolition of federal price support
programs for tobacco. Indeed, he is among the staunchest
defenders of federal tobacco programs.
Compassion for a human being's suffering is sometimes independent
of one's approval or disapproval of that person. One may feel
compassion for someone suffering with AIDS while disapproving of
his homosexual life-style that put him at risk. One may feel
compassion for a lung cancer patient while disapproving of the
fact that he smokes. So why is Helms campaigning for reductions
in AIDS research but not lung cancer research? Politics. Pure
and simple.
One would like to imagine a world in which medical research was
de-politicized, a world in which scientists did not have their
agendas set by politicians pandering to their home constituency.
The first step toward de-politicized medical research is to phase
out federal funding entirely and to create tax incentives that
favor and encourage medical research through independent,
non-governmental institutions. Medical research will only become
de-politicized when it is funded by charitable organizations and
compassionate individuals and politicians like Senator Helms are
bypassed entirely.
===================
The Net: The Movie
It seems that cyberspace is the hip place to make a movie these
days. There is Johnny Mnemonic, Virtuosity, the not yet released
Strange Days, and The Net.
So last weekend I trouped off to the local mid-night movie house
to watch The Net. I figured that if nothing else, it had Sandra
Bullock in it. As it turns out, Sandra Bullock is just about the
only thing in the movie worthwhile. She's currently enjoying her
15 minutes of fame as the sexiest woman in American pop culture,
and deservedly so. It's been too long since the
girl-next-door-whose-femininity-shines-through-despite-no
-attempts-to-emphasize-it brand of sexy has been fashionable and I
for one am glad to see its return. But I still think Daisy
Fuentes is the highest embodiment of that style, but I like Sandra
Bullock also.
But I digress. The Net has a thoroughly unremarkable plot.
Typical summer chase thriller. Some chase scenes in visually
interesting places. A hint of sex, though not flagrant or
gratuitous. Some good beat up on the bad guy shots complete with
a fire extinguisher across the jaw scene. But there is nothing
you haven't seen a jillion times before.
Almost. There are a couple of redeeming things about this movie.
First, it has Sandra Bullock in it and she does a good job playing
a computer geek. She had all the mannerisms down pretty well.
The crossed arms, not looking at people in the eye, the nervous,
stuttering manner of speaking. Of course all the computer geeks I
know are slovenly, pasty guys and Sandra Bullock is trim,
good-looking and very female. Dennis Miller also has a small role
as Sandra Bullock's obnoxious, self-centered,
ex-lover/psyichiatrist (oh these complicated `90s). He does a
good job at it, but then such a role comes naturally for Dennis
Miller.
But the other redeeming quality in this movie is that the
techno-babble is amazingly accurate, for a movie. It appears that
the screen writers paid a lot of attention to detail when dealing
with the Net itself.
They did have to invoke poetic license in a number of areas. For
one thing, The Net even during the best of times under the best of
circumstances is not nearly as fast as was prtrayed in the movie.
Also, they showed a lot of things visually that weren't
necessarily visualized. For example when a virus trashes your
computer, the screen doesn't necessarily melt away into garbage.
It is more likely to just go blank.
But those are minor transgressions. From what I understand about
how the Internet is set up and how it's underlying protocols,
TCP/ip, work, the movie showed Sandra Bullock's sleuthing on the
net pretty darn accurately. There's one scene where she's trying
to access a site on the internet but trying to hide where she's
dialing in from and it shows how she does that using the same
technique that that East German spy ring was using to get into
military computers a couple of years ago. Also there's a scene in
which she's trying to track down someone else's location on the
internet and it appeared she was doing all the steps a person
would have to go through to really do this on the internet. Also
the online chats seemed realistic, even down to the slang. (Many
techno movies put _too_much_ slang into characters'
conversations).
I also liked the way the bad guys operated in this movie. The bad
guys are the Praetorians and the are wreaking havoc all over the
globe in order to get people to use a software security package
that their front company sells. The security package, called
GateKeeper supposedly protects computers on the Internet from
unauthorized intrusions, but it secretly has a way to let the
Praetorians into the computer. This giving the bad guys access to
hundreds of Very Important Computers all over the world. But they
have to get people to install the GateKeeper software in the first
place so they create panics in whihc, of course, the only
computers unaffected are the ones guarded by the GateKeeper
software.
There were several other unrealistic bits in the movie, all of
which can be explained away by poetic license. For example, the
movie's premise is based on the notion that all these Very
Important Computers, like the New York Stock Exchange and the
Federal Reserve are on the Internet. But of course in real life
they aren't, for the obvious security reasons. But the only
glaring inaccuracy that I couldn't excuse was in the movie's
climatic scene in which Sandra Bullock destroys all of the
Praetorian's work by running a PC virus on a mainframe computer.
This just doesn't work. `Mainframe' is a vague, over used, over
generalized term that can mean just about anything. But usually
the term mainframe refers to computers built according to IBM's
system 360 or System 390 architecture. These beasts are the work
horses of big business and are the best there is at efficiently
slogging through all the junk that companies have to get done on a
computer. But they do not, can not run PC software. So there was
no way Sandra Bullock could have brought down the mainframe with
her PC virus program.
Still, I'd say it was worth seeing, though you might wait for it
to come out at the $1 movies.
=================================
A Sentence or Two About Paragraph
I subscribe to quite a few small magazines and if one were to
judge magazines strictly in terms of how much they cost per word,
Paragraph magazine would easily be the worst magazine I get. But
it's actually one of the best and one of my favorites.
Paragraph magazine is, surprise, a magazine of paragraphs. That
is to say, there are no essays, stories, poems, or pictures in
this publications. The whole zine is a 4 inch square booklet
consisting of 30 or 40 pages. On each page is a single paragraph
written by a different author. They're sort of like short stories
on steroids. I'm constantly amazed at how much whallop a good
author can pack into a single paragraph.
Single issues are $4.00, but you can get a three issue
subscription for $10.00. The magazine comes out once per quarter
I believe. Paragraph Magazine can be ordered by writing to
editors Walker Rumble and Karen Donovan at 18 Beach Point Drive,
East Providence, RI 02915.
===============
My First Record
I can't exactly remember explicitly the first record I ever
bought. I can however remember the first record I ever owned.
This was in 1977 or 1978. I was living with my family in Corpus
Christi Texas at the time. I was in 7th grade, if I remember
right. Now at the junior high school I went to that year, you
were allowed to like one of three bands. AC/DC, KISS, or
Aerosmith. Why? I don't know. That's just the way it was back
then. It's like there was an unwritten law that had been passed
someplace.
But I had begun listening to the radio before I went to sleep at
night, secretly. Why did I have to do it secretly? Were my
parents monsters or something? No not at all. I'm sure they
wouldn't have minded. So I don't know why I felt the need to keep
it a secret. Anyway, I had this little pocket AM/FM radio, it was
about the size of a large deck of card. And I would tune it into
the local rock'n'roll radio station put it under my pillow. And
I'd lay very quietly and listen to the songs. I had to be very
still be cause if moved my head too much, it would turn the tuning
dial on the radio and lose the station.
One of the big deals in Corpus Christi is that they have a Naval
Air Station there, a big one. And as I understand it, it is used
to do a lot of the Navy's pilot training. All I know is that
almost every night, there was a steady stream of planes flying
over the area. It seemed like they were flying right over our
house. And if I held my head just right, I could see out the
window in my bedroom and watch the planes fly across the sky while
I listened to the radio.
Imagine the perfect music to go with that scenario. Late night,
dark, dreamy, flying music.
One night I heard it. It was the Steve Miller Band. The song was
"Fly Like An Eagle" off the album by the same name. I don't know
if the album had just come out or if it was just the first time I
ever heard it. But at the time I thought it was the coolest song
I had ever heard in my life. So somehow I got it. It was
probably a birthday present, but I can't remember. I do remember
playing it for the first time and discovering that the whole album
is like some sort of cosmic trip on a spaceship and the various
songs are like new worlds being discovered on the way.
Of course I carefully concealed this musical aberration of mine
from my friends since it wasn't one of the approved listening
choices in our junior high. But I still own that album and every
now and then I haul it out and play it. And yes, I still think
it's one of the coolest albums I've ever heard.
==================================================================
Stuck In Traffic is a bi-monthly e-zine edited by, and mostly
written by Calvin Stacy Powers. Copyrights of individual articles
are held by their respective authors. All unsigned work is
authored by Calvin Stacy Powers, who holds all copyrights.
Permission is granted to redistribute Stuck In Traffic provided
that it is redistributed in its entirety (including this copyright
notice), and that no fee is charged. For commercial
redistribution rights, or for permission to reprint/redistribute
individual articles contact Calvin Stacy Powers at
powers@rdu007.pdial.interpath.net.
If you would like to receive Stuck In Traffic free by e-mail
subscription send e-mail to the address listed above.