Clutter Wars - Bozone (n.): The substance surrounding stupid people . . .

I can see why I kept this, but it's time to put it in the recycle bin.  But I can put it up here to show you why decluttering takes so long.  This printout is dated 12/17/2004 4:51pm.  I don't even know the person who sent it or how I got it.  

Looking this up I found that it is posted all over the internet.  Twilight Cafe includes another contest which asked readers to change an existing word by one letter and give a definition.  These may be even better.

1. Bozone (n.): The substance surrounding stupid people that stops
bright ideas from penetrating. The bozone layer, unfortunately, shows
little sign of breaking down in the near future.

2. Foreploy (v): Any misrepresentation about yourself for the purpose
of getting laid.

3. Cashtration (n.): The act of buying a house, which renders the
subject financially impotent for an indefinite period.

4. Giraffiti (n): Vandalism spray-painted very, very high.

5. Sarchasm (n): The gulf between the author of sarcastic wit and the
person who doesn't get it.

6. Inoculatte (v): To take coffee intravenously when you are running
late.

7. Hipatitis (n): Terminal coolness.

8. Osteopornosis (n): A degenerate disease. (This one got extra
credit.)

9. Karmageddon (n): It's like, when everybody is sending off all these
really bad vibes, right? And then, like, the Earth explodes and it's
like, a serious bummer.

10. Decafalon (n.): The grueling event of getting through the day
consuming only things that are good for you.

11. Glibido (v): All talk and no action.

12. Dopeler effect (n): The tendency of stupid ideas to seem smarter
when they come at you rapidly

13. Arachnoleptic fit (n.): The frantic dance performed just after
you've accidentally walked through a spider web.

14. Beelzebug (n.): Satan in the form of a mosquito that gets into
your bedroom at three in the morning and cannot be cast out.

15. Caterpallor (n.): The color you turn after finding half a grub in
the fruit you're eating.

And the pick of the literature:

16. Ignoranus (n): A person who's both stupid and an asshole.

"The Story of Electronics" Latest "The Story of Stuff" Video

On my recent post about recycling an old computer, M left a link to a new "Story of Stuff" video, this one focused on electronic equipment called "The Story of Electronics." It came out November 9.  My post is just an illustration of the point being made in the video.   Again, Annie Leonard clearly and succinctly outlines the problem of our designed to throw away culture.  This is definitely worth watching.



It helps to understand the economics concept of externalities -  or as Annie calls it - "externalizing costs."  It's one of the failures of the market system identified even by proponents of the market as a failure.  Milton Friedman, in his Capitalism and Freedom, called them 'neighborhood effects."  Basically, capitalism is supposed to work better than government by doing things more efficiently.  By being more efficient, companies can make items cheaper and sell more products.  But this only works if the price of the item reflects the cost of making the item.  But if some of the costs of the items are not borne by the company making them, then this efficiency doesn't work.  So, if the company doesn't have to pay for the air pollution it creates, then this cost won't be reflected in the price.  But society as a whole, which is affected by the pollution, still has to pay for extra health care and other costs that are 'externalized' by the company.  Thus, the efficiency of the market fails when these costs of production are externalized to the society as a whole and the company doesn't have to pay for them and they aren't reflected in the price of the items. 

The costs of landfills and the health costs resulting from the toxic chemicals in electronic equipment are key externalities discussed in the video.

The video's solutions are summed up as
Make 'Em Safe, Make 'Em Last, Take 'Em Back


I'd note that the original Story of Stuff video has resulted in one of my most viewed posts - my reaction to a quote by Victor Lebow in the video. 

"he died by muffing the trick of catching a bullet in his teeth. "

The ADN had a NY Times obituary Saturday about Charles Reynolds who they called "Magicians' magician."  What caught my eye was at the end of this short paragraph:

He lived in a little house in Greenwich Village crammed with magic books, mummy cases and antique posters, including a dozen of the American magician who went under the Chinese name Chung Ling Soo and who became an instant legend in 1918 when he died by muffing the trick of catching a bullet in his teeth. (emphasis added)

Did they shoot the bullet or toss it to him?  

Chung Ling Soo was an American who took on his Chinese persona after being slighted by a real Chinese magician and successfully toured the world, speaking only through an interpreter in public.

Wikipedia explans:

The muzzle-loaded guns were rigged so that the bullet in fact never left the gun. The guns were loaded with substitute bullets, but the flash from the pan was channelled [sic] to a second blank charge in the ramrod tube below the actual barrel of the gun. The ramrods were never replaced after loading. The guns were aimed at Chung, the assistants pulled the triggers, there was a loud bang and a cloud of gunpowder smoke filled the stage. Chung pretended to catch the bullets in his hand before they hit him. Sometimes he pretended to catch them in his mouth.

The trick went tragically wrong when Chung was performing in the Wood Green Empire, London, on March 23, 1918. Chung never unloaded the gun properly. To avoid expending powder and bullets, he had the breeches of the guns dismantled after each performance in order to remove the bullet, rather than firing them off or drawing the bullets with a screw-rod as was normal practice. Over time, the channel that allowed the flash to bypass the barrel and ignite the charge in the ramrod tube slowly built up a residue of unburned gunpowder. On the fateful night of the accident, the flash from the pan ignited the charge behind the bullet in the barrel of one of the guns. The bullet was fired in the normal way, hitting Chung in the chest. His last words were spoken on stage that moment, "Oh my God. Something's happened. Lower the curtain." It was the first and last time since adopting the persona that William "Chung Ling Soo" Robinson had spoken English in public.

Magic, The Science of Illusion, gives more information on his life and his feud with Ching Ling Foo but, strangely, makes no mention of his last performance.   It also has pictures. 

Boris Karloff gives us another version, demonstrating yet again we need to recognize that different people claim to possess different truths about the same situation. 




Travelanche offers the story with yet new variations. A notable observation and worth bearing in mind today (substitute the word politics for vaudeville):

In vaudeville, phony tended to play better than authentic. Chung made his entrance from the ceiling suspended by his Manchurian pigtail. Ching would never do any such thing for the simple reason that his pigtail was real! 

Finally, here's a video that appears to be of the actual William Robinson before he became Chung Ling Soo.  It says 1900 and it's very short, but he does the trick described by Travelanche that he was supposed to have copied from Ching Ling Foo.

Clutter Wars - The Old Computer Stuff is Gone!

Friday I put recycle old computer on the top of my Saturday todo list.  [It's not like I have a daily todo list.  That was the only thing on my list.]  But embedded in my brain cells are warnings about people stealing your information from the old hard drive.  It's now pretty old and probably doesn't matter.  But a quick look online to figure out what to do anyway.  There are various things like erasing the disk, but I hadn't plugged this computer in for years.  So  skipped down to this part:

Physically Destroying a Hard Drive

Physically destroying a hard drive is by far the most effective method for the average person to ensure the safety of their data. However, please wear protective glasses and other gear if you decide to physically destroy a drive yourself. It can be a dangerous activity that I don't recommend to everyone. Also, as a precaution, wrap the hard drive in a towel so the parts don't fly off and do more damage.

Whether its smashing the hard drive with a sledgehammer, drilling holes into the drive, tearing the drive apart and destroying the platters, shredding the drive, or other methods your sensitive data will be safe.

For the most security, I recommend doing as many of the above procedures (wiping the drive, degaussing it, and destroying it) as you can. If a drive is wiped, degaussed, and destroyed the chances of recovering the data is almost nil.

So I was going to have to open it up and find the hard drive.

I noticed on the back where my son had labeled (or had gotten me to) all the key connections so we could plug things back in right if they came out.  Thanks J1!





It wasn't much to unscrew the case and slide it off.




I'd always been a little intimidated about going inside here.  I did find a bit of dust, so there probably is a reason to go in - just to clean it.  It was really easy, and knowing I didn't have to put it together right meant I could fiddle around.  Pull out connection ribbons,  twist off this, and that. Thanks M for that suggestion.

And I found the hard drive.  I looked online for images of hard drives to be sure this was the right thing.




They're really sneaky.  See that silver label with the green "Quality Control Accepted"?
The smaller print says, "Do Not Remove."

So I removed it.

When you pull it off it leaves the silver on the case with those VOID stencils.  Sneaky!

Then I went to the garage and smashed it with my little hatchet.  Lots of fun. 

So, there really wasn't anything of interest on there anyway, but this should keep whatever there was a mystery forever.  Then my son sent me a link to this video of disk destruction.
[I'm trying out two YouTube opitons here - one is a privacy option that restricts their cookie monster a bit, and the other uses iFrame and uses HTML5 sometimes which will eventually then be viewable on iPhones. I'm not promoting these, just experimenting AND letting you know.]


Then today I called a friend to see if he had any electronic stuff to recycle, since the carload was $25 including up to two monitors for today.  He had lots and we took it to Total Reclaim where we filled almost a whole box - mostly with his stuff. That's the guy who worked there in the picture.  All this stuff gets shipped to Seattle he said.

[UPDATE: See also the new Annie Leonard video "The Story of Electronics."]

November Breakup*

Clouds, rain, even sun

 40(F).  Tires throw muddy 

water everywhere.

*breakup [′brāk‚əp]

(hydrology)

The spring melting of snow, ice, 

and frozen ground; specifically, 

the destruction of the ice cover 

on rivers during the spring thaw. 

[From Freedictionary]

Six Dead Bodies Duct-Taped to a Merry-Go-Round

So, this guy was on leave from the service and his wife was supposed to pick him up, but she wasn't there and this guy in a truck offers him a ride and eventually that leads to the bodies and the merry-go-round. 

That was one of the four plays in Anchorage Community Theater's (ACT) FourPlay which was extend to this weekend.  We went two weeks ago.  They're headquartered in an industrial area on 70th near the Old Seward Highway.

[UPDATE Nov 13:  Even though I revised this a couple of times before I posted it, it doesn't convey what is important here.  But we had to leave, so I posted it.  Later I realized what I really wanted to say was this: 

Imagine having 30 minutes or so to communicate anything you want the world to know.  Your tools are several actors, a stage, lighting, props, costumes and make-up, and sound.  What would you want to say?  How would you convey it?  That's sort of what these folks faced.  The first piece - A Wee Rembrandt -  had two museum guards tied to posts after being robbed.  This one was interesting, and perhaps reflected what might have happened in such a situation, but barely touched the many issues that could have come up. 

Thanksgiving Dinner with the Last Whore in Calhoun County was more successful in touching universal issues about family, identity, shame, and others. (This is two weeks after seeing it and it still has an impact on me.)  All in this very short time period.  That was what was so neat about these pieces.

So what made this a good evening at the theater was the challenge of the format first, and then seeing how well they were carried through.  We have some outstanding actors in this town.  And thinking how I wouldn't know where to start if I had 30 minutes to fill on stage.]

Before the Show

All four short (@ 30 minutes each) plays were created by local playwrights and they played off somewhat strange premises (like Six Dead Bodies) but pulled it off.  Partly because the acting was good enough that I believed in the characters and didn't see them as actors. 

My only real objection was that so much of the action was on the far right side and we were sitting on the left side, so my neck was starting to hurt from being turned.  It just seemed to me in a long skinny theater like that, they need to move the action along the whole stage so that the audience isn't forced to crane their necks in one direction for long periods.  With four plays, they could have moved the action around.  Only the last play really used the whole stage.  And we were never sure what the kitchen was all about.


In the last piece, The Bodice Ripper, two women are sitting on the porch writing their first Romance novel and they have a caped pirate like character to try the lines out with.  Truly imaginative in the story and the portrayal.   When they wrote and rewrote a fight scene, we saw it as they wrote it.  And when it went into the slow motion, I was going, "Wow."  The actor's face slowly contorted as it was hit eerily mimicking a slow motion movie shot.  

After the show

Good stuff and only $10.  Less that a movie for live theater.  No wonder it was sold out and they extended for two more weeks.  But if you want to go Saturday, be sure to call in advance and reserve a seat or buy it online. 

It's mostly street parking but be careful not to park in the towaway zones.  Read the signs
 



As acronyms go, Anchorage Community Theater's is one of the best - it spells out what they do, and do well, ACT.

Becoming a War Reporter in the Home Clutter Wars

There's been a war going on for at least seven years over possession of what was once my daughter's room.   We've been fighting an uphill battle since the year we rented out the house while we were on sabbatical.  The room became our storage unit while the tenant had access to the rest of the house.  

We've fought the boxes now and then, successfully unhooking emotional claws long enough to donate, recycle, or trash.  And for periods of time we've managed to confine the boxes to the overcrowded refugee camp in the closet.   But somehow, when we aren't looking, troublemakers manage to sneak out and set up cardboard shanty towns on the floor.

I posted before and after pictures of this room last summer when we had temporarily reclaimed the floor. Things have again gotten out of hand. 

So I commissioned a report from a prestigious think tank on whether this war is even winnable and if so, what is the best strategy.  Here are the findings and recommendations.

Causes

• Rampant consumerism is NOT the issue- with the exception of books, there are relatively few impulse items.
• Both rational and emotional needs to remember, document, and stay connected.
• There's an array of photos, slides, old letters, kids' art, mementos, tapes, gifts, and old documents
• Relentlessly changing technology has left its detritus of old computer, telephone, and camera debris.
• Retirement brought old work materials home that haven't been properly triaged.
• Way station - the room is the way stay station for things being eliminated from other parts of the house.  So things may look worse than they really are. As new stuff is added old stuff does move out. 

Obstacles to winning the war

• Emotional Attachment - "But these letters are from my grandfather who I never met." "This is M's favorite stuffed animal." "But this is Cocoa's collar."
• Exaggerated Sense of Future Need - "But we might need these telephone bills from 1985 one day." "I could use this cracked mug to plant something in."
• Distorted Sense of History - "But these old checkbooks are archeological data of how people really lived."
• Distorted Sense of the Future - "But surely our (unborn) grandchildren will want to see these."
• Distorted sense of Economics - "But these Dungeons and Dragons magazines will be valuable one day."
• Lack of Will -"What's playing at the Bear Tooth?"
• Lack of Clear Goals and Deadline - "I'm gonna start on it when it gets cold outside."

And one more that is relevant to this post:

• Blogging - takes too much time and gives excuses to do other things

Strategies

• Blog about the war.  This will give me incentive to get more done. Consider yourselves warned. But it should be fun. I have a post on great meals coming up.
  
• Deadline.  There will be people coming this summer, so the room (and other parts of the house) not not only must be liberated, but also transformed into an inviting livable space with no traces of its former war zone status.

Immediate Steps

• Write this post.√
• Take old computer. monitor, and keyboard to Total Reclaim Saturday

RECYCLING COLLECTION EVENT:
Saturday November 13, 8 AM - 5 PM

In celebration of America Recycles Day, Total Reclaim will accept electronics for recycling at the discounted rate of $25 per carload.

Animal, Vegetable, Mineral? Turns Out Simon and Garfunkle Were Right

[Audio from 4Shared]

A winter's day
In a deep and dark December
I am alone
Gazing from my window
To the streets below
On a freshly fallen silent shroud of snow
I am a rock
I am an island
[from Piratebay]

This blog's utopian goal is to get people to see things from different perspectives, to get people to question what they know. For me, this morning's interview with Neil Krulwich on NPR's Morning Edition did that.

Rocks aren't alive. Life is.

So think of them as separate. Rocks over here; life over there.

Then along come Robert Hazen and his colleagues with their study, "Mineral Evolution," published in the American Mineralogist and all of a sudden categories shatter. I'm amazed. I hadn't thought of this, even remotely. . .

But life is a great sculptor. One very early form of pond scum figured out how to exhale oxygen into the air, and soon (well, not THAT soon, but soon enough) our atmosphere had enough oxygen to create rust, to combine with organic chemicals to make creatures with shells and bones and those creatures died and became rocks. What is coral but a clump of dead skeletons? Look at the White Cliffs of Dover — that's a heap of dead plankton.  

You can read the whole piece at NPR.  It's mind-blowing as the 20 Questions "Animal, Vegetable, or Mineral?" categories are obliterated.  And it should remind us that all of our categories are human constructions, our best attempts to make sense of the world we live in.  But hardly "reality."  Just our temporary realities until we find a better way of conceptualizing that aspect of the universe.

We all know that living things need minerals. When you eat a raisin, you are putting iron in your blood. We drink milk to put calcium in our bones. So we need minerals. What I didn't know is that minerals, in some sense, need us. The presence of life on Earth nearly tripled the rock population.

Don't just read it, listen to the Krulwich piece here. He tells it very entertainingly.

Fe NU me eye

If you've been reading the name Gail Fenumiai in the newspaper and wondering how to pronounce it, it's

Gay with an L.  Sorry, I couldn't resist.

It's Fe NU me eye - emphasis on the NU (the same rhythm as Tomato juice - toe MA toe juice.)

[UPDATE:  Kathy in Kentucky in a comment below asked who Gail Fenumiai is.  Somehow that slipped out as I was editing.  She's in charge of the Division of Elections in Alaska and running the count of the absentee and write-in votes in the US Senate race.  While she is the face the public sees, I have no doubt that higher-ups are participating in the decisions.]

I also have this picture of the person in charge of the Division of Elections,

The photo (she's talking after the meeting to Reps Seaton and Buch) is from a March 10 State Affairs Committee hearing which covered a bill to allow permanent absentee registration.

There is discussion of absentee ballots in a March 30 post where the State Affairs committee was getting an overview of the Division of  Elections from Fenumiai.  I don't think there is anything particularly relevant to the current write-in count, but it gives you a little more sense of Fenumiai and how the Division of Elections works.  Below is  my summary from the post.  The March 30 post has more details in my rough (very rough) notes of the exchange at the time.

The first item on the agenda was a presentation from Director of Division of Elections Gail Fenumiai (Fe (e as in let) Nú-Me-Eye).  The basic issues discussed were (see notes below for more details):
1.  Preventing Double Voting:  Fenumiai [discusses] procedures for making sure voters don't vote absentee and in person. 
2.  Rural and urban vote counting time differential.  People voting absentee in-person in regional centers - Anchorage, Fairbanks, Juneau, and Nome - have their votes counted on election day.  Other absentee votes are not counted until 7-10 days after the election.  Rep. Seaton was concerned that since the parties often organize before all the votes are counted, rural legislators may be at a disadvantage in getting committee assignments, chair positions, etc. and wanted to know if there was a way to get the rural and urban area counts more balanced.
Rep. Johnson said he was concerned that they were involving the election board in party organization.  Seaton agreed that wasn't proper, and that the Division of Elections was doing its job as assigned by the legislature to be sure there was no voter fraud, and he wasn't asking about vote outcome, but was asking if the legislature's instructions to the Division of Elections had this unintended consequence of differential vote counting time in the rural and urban areas and if there was a way to correct this. 

3.  Voting Rights Act Compliance in Aftermath of Nick Case 
Rep. Gruenberg wanted to know whether the State was now fully compliant throughout the State after the settlement of the Nick case, which he said cost the State a million dollars just to pay the legal fees of the party that brought suit.  Fenumiai said she was confident the state was now in compliance and gave examples of things the Division has done. 

Juneau, Nov. 10, 1939 - "My Last Hanging"

I'm not sure why this page popped up yesterday (Nov. 9) because it doesn't seem to be at all related to what I was googling.  But there it was.  And just in time to post it on the 71st anniversary of the grim event.  This is originally from an Anchorage Daily News story.  The man hanged  was Nelson Charles of Ketchikan.  (Weird English idiosyncrasies - the past tense of "to hang," meaning to kill someone by hanging him with a rope is 'hanged.'  The past tense of "to hang" meaning to hang something (like a picture) is 'hung.')
 
Here's an excerpt from the University of Alaska Justice Center website:  [It turns out the Justice Center post was put together by local blogger Mel Green.]

My Last Hanging—Thoughts on an Execution (Juneau, Nov. 10, 1939)  by John L. Gaffney

. . ."What did he say?" someone asked, leaning forward.
     "No talking after he comes out," I answered, and at least two others answered with me. Then we all fell silent. We looked at our watches; I put my wrist to my ear to hear the ticking. It was 17 minutes before 9 o'clock.
     I looked first at the trap, then at the pit. It looked a long way to the bottom, and so damp and dark, like a dungeon. He would fall four feet, they'd said. That was a long way, too.
     Now there was another sound outside the door. Two clergymen appeared and took their places on the platform, just a foot behind the trap.
     There were more sounds at the doorway. This would be it. First the marshal appeared, his arm holding someone else's arm, his body half-hiding another man. Then, slowly, ever so slowly, three of them were there: the marshal, a deputy, and between them a man — a Native — I had never seen before. He was the man.
     Then I learned I had been wrong about one thing: I'd decided he would not face us, but stand sideways; but it was not that way. He stood there, not more than 15 feet away, looking at us. He looked as we had expected, like the full-blooded Native he was. He wore blue serge trousers, black shoes, a white shirt, and a dark tie, well-knotted and in place. His hands and arms were bound tightly to his sides with canvas bands.
     Seconds ticked away. A few inches behind me, at my right side, water dripped and struck the boards. Like drops from a faucet: steadily, just so fast, no faster. The marshal shook out another long canvas strap and stooped to adjust it about the man's legs. As he finished his task, he stepped back a little.
     "Is there anything you'd like to say, Nelson?" he asked.
     We expected a brief negative nod of the dark head, but he spoke — his voice a half-sob — whispering, barely more: "I am innocent of killing my mother-in-law," he murmured. "I don't want to hang. I still say I am innocent."
     His head was bowed forward. You could feel if not see the hot tears in his eyes. You could feel his trembling in your own body.
     Had I any thought of a criminal about to pay for his crime? Any thought of a disreputable and dangerous killer about to give his life for the one he had taken? No — nothing like that. Only that a man was about to die. That there — almost within reach — was a man like ourselves. A young man. Who somewhere had a wife, had once slept an untroubled sleep, had only the day before laughed and hoped for life.
     I was aware as I sat there of some unusual feeling that was strange to me. It was vague then, with no time to fathom it. But now I know: It was the certainty, the sureness of it. I knew for the only time in my life that within minutes this man who now lived as I lived would be dead. A stone. Lifeless, cold and stiff. . . [emphasis added]  [for the whole piece go to the Justice Center link.]

From a different  UAA Justice Center page:

Nelson Charles was a 37-year-old Native fisherman and World War I veteran, married with a daughter. Newspaper accounts indicate that Charles was probably not an Alaska Native, but a Native American from the Puget Sound area. He was arrested and convicted for the September 4, 1938 murder of his mother-in-law, Cecilia Johnson, in Ketchikan. Both Charles and Johnson had been drinking heavily at the time of the murder. The Alaska Native Brotherhood petitioned President Franklin Roosevelt for a commutation of Charles' sentence to life imprisonment, but Roosevelt did not respond. Charles was hanged in Juneau on November 10, 1939 (Lerman 1994, 1998. For a full account of Charles' trial and hanging, see Lerman 1996; see also Gaffney 1995, which provides an eyewitness account of Charles' execution.)

Persons Executed under Civil Authority in Alaska, 1900-present
Year		City		Name		Race
1902 1903 1921 1921 1929 1939 1948 1950		Nome Sitka Fairbanks Fairbanks Fairbanks Juneau Juneau Juneau		Fred Hardy Homer Bird Mailo Segura "John Doe" Hamilton Constantine Beaver Nelson Charles Austin Nelson Eugene LaMoore		White White Unknown Native Native Native Black Black
1957 1959		Death penalty abolished in Alaska Alaska statehood

We know that there were a lot more murders in that time in Alaska.  The chart and what follows are from the same Justice Center webpage:

After prolonged debate, the Alaska Territorial Legislature abolished capital punishment in 1957 in a briefly worded measure stating, "The death penalty is and shall hereafter be abolished as punishment in Alaska for the commission of any crime" (Lerman 1994). The abolition measure was sponsored by Warren Taylor and Vic Fischer. According to Vic Fischer, one factor motivating abolition was apparent racial bias in the application of the death penalty (Lerman 1994). A number of attempts have been made to reintroduce capital punishment to Alaska since 1957, but all so far have failed.

 So, back in 1957 Alaskans already understood that non-whites were more likely to get a death sentence than whites.  The rest of the country has only just been figuring that out.